Roberta Sassatelli

Roberta Sassatelli
University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of History and Cultures DiSCi

1996 PhD, Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute, Florence ;1995 Master Econ (with distinction) in Applied Social Research, University of Manchester ; 1991 Laurea (cum laude) Scienze Politiche e Sociali, Università di Bologna

About

69
Publications
81,672
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,735
Citations
Introduction
Roberta Sassatelli is an Italian sociologist, with an interdisciplinary outlook. She was educated and has taught in Italy and the UK and writes in both languages. Her works are translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Greek, Check, Finnish, Korean and Chinese. Full Professor at the University of Bologna, she has been Visiting Scholar at Caltech (US), Birkbeck College (UK), Une (AU) and the University of Gastronomic Sciences (I). She is Co-Editor of the European Journal of Sociology.
Additional affiliations
November 2009 - March 2017
University of Milan
Position
  • Professor
Description
  • Teaching "Consumer Culture" for the MA in Corporate Communication, "Contemporary Sociological Theories" and "Visual Methods" for the PhD School in Sociology (NASP) and "Sociologia" for the BA Program in Political Sciences
January 2006 - December 2020
University of Milan
Position
  • Faculty Member
April 2017 - December 2020
University of Milan, Milano, Italy
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Description
  • Teaching "Consumer Culture" for the MA in Corporate Communication, "Contemporary Sociological Theories" and "Visual Methods" for the PhD School in Sociology (NASP) and "Sociologia" for the BA Program in Political Sciences.

Publications

Publications (69)
Chapter
Sociology has questioned the epistemological status of the scientific study of the body, so opening up the space for exploring the political implications of bodily representations and practices. Although the body-power relation was marginal until the work of Foucault and feminist theorists, classical social theory also contributed to its emergence...
Chapter
Food is perceived as probably the most distinctive aspect of Italian identity both in Italy and abroad. Food culture is central both to the way Italians mark their national identity and to the consolidation of Italianicity in a global context. However, gastronomic identity, just like other aspects of identity, is a continuous construction that cons...
Chapter
This chapter addresses the aesthetical and ethical dimension of ordinary food consumption in contemporary Italy. It elaborates on a vast empirical research project, extracting from approximately 400 hours of interviews with middle-class families from the North of Italy. In particular, we consider how these families bestow value onto food by constru...
Chapter
Bologna—a Northern Italian city, renowned for its University and its food—and the marshalling of its cultural value to produce economic value in the food commodity chain, is the territory of our chapter. We shall, in fact, consider DegustiBo, a local seal of quality set up by the Bologna Province, and the way it organizes the local in an attempt to...
Book
This book is a novel and original collection of essays on Italians and food. Food culture is central both to the way Italians perceive their national identity and to the consolidation of Italianicity in global context. More broadly, being so heavily symbolically charged, Italian foodways are an excellent vantage point from which to explore consumpt...
Article
In contemporary western societies, the “fit body” has replaced body decoration as a potent symbol of status and character, both for men and women. Fitness gyms and health centers have become highly visible as the sites where such a body is produced. They are at the core of a much broader fitness culture, comprising a variety of commodities and are...
Article
Full-text available
I draw on my intellectual biography, including to consider the development of cultural studies in Italy and their relationship with sociology
Chapter
This chapter considers the work of Gary Alan Fine, probably the most prolific contemporary cultural ethnographer and one of the key contributors to the sociology of small groups. In the chapter, Fine’s intellectual journey is explored, from his earlier studies on the Baseball little league to his recent research on ‘futurework’ and the way forecast...
Article
Full-text available
This paper describes and reflects on a teaching experience developed as a complimentary workshops to MA class on history, theory and politics of consumption. We used Wikipedia as a tool to consider the circuit of knowledge production in the Web 2.0 era, where consumers are no longer passive audiences but producers and consumers at the same time. We...
Article
Broad cultural trends such as spectacularization and individualization as induced by consumer culture are transforming the global scene of sport practice with effects that may appear as socially reconciliatory. Commercialization has worked in two directions: while competitive, professional sport is becoming a global media phenomenon, with increasin...
Data
Full-text available
Book
Full-text available
http://www.gbip.gr/book/207221
Article
Full-text available
O consumo de alimentos é um aspecto importante, ainda que pouco lembrado, da consideração sobre a moral política da cultura e das práticas de consumo contemporâneos. De mais de uma forma, alimentos são de fato cruciais para a maneira como negociamos o consumo como um conjunto específico e significativo de atividades. Tal fato se deve tanto à posiçã...
Article
Full-text available
This article addresses the aestheticization of traditional foods and the use of territorialization as a brand value for the promotion of products and services. Economy of quality is studied through a focus on the role that political institutions may have in promoting quality chains. Through document analysis, questionnaires, interviews, and focus g...
Article
Full-text available
As urbanisation has come to characterise contemporary societies, large cities have become quite ambivalent places for the human species: they are removing the human body from its perceived natural condition, while increasingly attempting to provide a cure for the ills of a sedentary life. Fitness gyms are presented as the ‘natural’ solution to our...
Book
Full-text available
Per gli studiosi che si occupano di economia e mobilità sociale, consumi e cultura, stili di vita e gusti, l'osservazione dei comportamenti del ceto medio è la chiave per comprendere appieno l'impatto della crisi. Sulla scorta di un'ampia e articolata ricerca condotta tra le famiglie italiane, questo volume mette sotto la lente d'ingrandimento le s...
Article
Full-text available
The article considers sustainable consumption and alternative food networks in the context of global consumer capitalism as a locus where a new form of consumer sovereignty can be developed. It offers a theoretical overview aimed at charting the emergence and consolidation of a relational, responsible vision of consumer sovereignty. Potentially alt...
Article
Full-text available
When writing and thinking about «Studi Culturali», we have often been trapped in a Esher-like picture. The Italian language chosen to name the Journal somehow reflects, from the landscape of a disciplinarily various garden of studies about Italy, or from Italian scholars or else from international scholars for an Italian public, an infinite regress...
Book
Full-text available
With the help of a variety of qualitative data collected both in Italy and in England for over a decade - ranging from ethnographic fieldwork to formal and informal interviews with clients, trainers and managers to expert discourse on fitness in the specialist press and exercise manuals - this book aims to offer a bottom-up access to keep-fit cultu...
Article
Full-text available
This major collection of essays, a sequel to Modernity at Large (1996), is the product of ten years' research and writing, constituting an important contribution to globalization studies. Appadurai takes a broad analytical look at the genealogies of the present era of globalization through essays on violence, commodification, nationalism, terror an...
Chapter
Full-text available
The debate about consumption, and its organisation, including its spatiality and temporality, is quite rich today in and beyond academic circles. Such debate is fuelled not only by polemical or celebratory writing but also by much, often good, empirical research which addresses some relevant theoretical issues (Lewis and Potter 2011). Still, on the...
Chapter
Full-text available
This article investigates the historical formation and specific configuration of a threefold relation crucial to contemporary society, that between the body, the self, and material culture, which, in contemporary, late modern (or post-industrial) societies, has become largely defined through consumer culture. Drawing on historiography, sociology, a...
Book
Full-text available
Muchas veces se ha afirmado, en tono de denuncia, que la nuestra es una sociedad signada por el consumo. Con este rótulo, surgido en la segunda posguerra y llevado a la notoriedad por autores como Marcuse, Galbraith, Packard y Baudrillard, se ha querido destacar el hecho de que la sociedad en que vivimos se connota como una particular variante del...
Article
Full-text available
This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a historical reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male gaze, film technology and visual culture. The conversation initially deals with the socio-cultural context in which the ‘Visual Pleasur...
Article
Full-text available
'Tamed Hedonism: Choice, Desires and Deviant Pleasures', in A. Warde and J. Gronow (eds), Ordinary Consumption, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 93-106. In this contribution I propose the notion of “tamed hedonism” to capture the hegemonic moral narrative of consumer capitalism in contemporary society, and in particular the flexible but essential compr...
Article
Full-text available
A growing field of research is documenting the political investment of the consumer. Yet, consumers are invested of political responsibilities in many different ways, which respond to different visions of politics and consumption, culture and the economy. In this article we critically explore the particular stance of an increasingly international a...
Chapter
“Fitness work out! You can save your heart, have better sex, improve your body and get back your good spirits” was proclaimed in 1995 on the April cover of Salve, one of the first Italian health and lifestyle magazines, echoing a global mantra that is repeated over and over again in countless fitness texts. Expert discourse, whether consolidated in...
Book
Full-text available
Introduced by an extended essay which positions the work of W. Sombart, the genesis of capitalism and luxury in the wider literature on the development of consumer capitalism, the book is the abridged translation of one of most relevant classics in economic sociology. Sassatelli discusses the essay in relation to contemporary history and theories o...
Article
Full-text available
This paper starts from Martin Hollis' framing of the problem of trust in Trust WithinReason and shows how his picture may be developed and challenged by shaping the agent of trust in the guise of a consumer. With the successful imperialism of neo-classical economics, the social actor is increasingly portrayed as a consumer. Sociological and anthrop...
Article
Full-text available
AB STR ACT: The public debate around food condence stimulated by food scares, the opening up of wider food markets and the introduction of GM foods provides an opportunity to analyse citizens' identication with their community sociologically, as it is reproduced through mundane practices. In order to do so, this article examines the GM food debate...
Article
Full-text available
Re-interpreting Simmel's work on money as an attempt to develop a critical sociology of consumption from a relativist theory of value, this paper illustrates the extent to which it may be seen as something more, and different than, sociological impressionism. The modern social space of valuation is chiefly defined by the development of money econom...
Book
Full-text available
Chapter 5 of "Studies in Ethnomethodology" is here translated into Italian with a detailed introduction by Roberta Sassatelli, discussing ethnomethodology perspective, Garfinkel's views of gender and sexuality, and a critical positioning of his work in contemporary gender studies
Article
One of the peculiarities of fitness gyms is the succession of people who try and follow a training programme and are not able to stick to it. Based on ethnographic research I try to account for this phenomenon. For regular participants, fitness training is not only important for the kind of body it will hopefully produce in the long run, but also f...
Article
Full-text available
This article addresses keep-fit culture not as a collection of commercial images or as the product of broader cultural values, but as a set of situated body practices, that is practices taking place within specific institutions where these images and values are reinterpreted in locally prescribed ways and, to some extent, filtered. Relying on field...
Article
Pier Paolo Giglioli, Sandra Cavicchioli and Giolo Fele, Rituali di degradazione. Anatomia del processo Cusani , Il Mulino, Bologna, 1997, 243 pp., ISBN 88–15–05713–7 pbk, 28,000 Lire. Recent developments in Italian politics, such as the emergence of Forza Italia , became possible only after a much deeper process had taken place, the delegitimation...
Article
Full-text available
Contrasting diagnoses on commercial modernity have been typically organ ized by a normative dichotomy between consumption and production that can be traced back to the emergence of a public discourse on commodity circulation in 18th-century Britain. Within this framework, I re-interpret Bernard Mandeville as a proto-sociologist. Mandeville may be c...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, I critically discuss theories of consumer culture, taking a Foucauldian perspective enriched by classical micro-sociological insights coming from Goffman's view of the self and Garfinkel's notions of practice. A practice theory of the consumer subjectivity complementary to Bourdieu's vision of habitus and capturing both interaction...

Questions

Questions (2)
Question
I have a large database on middle-class and consumer lifestyles on Italy, and are now mining the data to write on gender, class and food practices using an economy of quality approach

Network

Cited By