3 Consumption and Society • vol 1 • no 1 • 3–10 • © Authors 2022 Online ISSN 2752-8499 • https://doi.org/10.1332/YRTA1119 Accepted for publication 15 June 2022 • First published online 11 August 2022 EDITORIAL Consumption and society in the 21st century Daniel Welch, daniel.welch@manchester.ac.uk University of Manchester, UK Marlyne Sahakian, Marlyne.Sahakian@unige.ch University of Geneva, Switzerland Stefan Wahlen, stefan.wahlen@uni-giessen.de University of Giessen, Germany Key words consumer • consumption • society • studies To cite this article: Welch, D., Sahakian, M. and Wahlen, S. (2022) Consumption and society in the 21st century, Consumption and Society, 1(1): 3–10, DOI: 10.1332/YRTA1119 We are delighted to present the inaugural issue of Consumption and Society. Our ambition for the journal is to invigorate and innovate the feld of consumption studies and to renew the relevance of the study of consumption for the global social challenges of the 21st century. Consumption and Society will contribute to debates on contested aspects of consumption, such as environmental impacts, digitalisation, the shifting balance of collective versus private consumption, commodifcation and inequalities. Moreover, the journal aims to bring the distinctive lens of consumption studies to key contemporary debates, around issues such as the Anthropocene, care, decolonisation, surveillance capitalism, platform economies and political populism. This refects an understanding of consumption as embedded in wider socioeconomic, political and cultural confgurations, and intrinsically related to issues of social and environmental justice, as well as other normative notions such as prosperity, wellbeing and the good life. Journals are often launched in response to a particular historical moment and to scholarly refection on those new times. This was certainly true of the two major journals of our feld, Consumption, Markets and Culture, founded in 1997, and The Journal of Consumer Culture, founded in 2001. In the editorial introduction to the frst issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture, Fuat Firat (1997: 1) refected that the journal would address these three phenomena through which ‘understanding of the critical issues of the end of the twentieth century’ were commonly conceived. The title of The Journal of Consumer Culture is equally instructive of the core concerns of consumption scholarship at the time of its launch. The feld of consumption studies was an early touchstone for major debates on macro-social change, especially around the issues of globalisation, the rise of cultural pluralism, aestheticisation and the decline of traditional Unauthenticated | Downloaded 08/12/22 04:04 AM UTC