New Business Formats, Great Transformation of Urban Consumption

Author: Li Chenghua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-09-01
Features: The main body of this book consists of six chapters. Chapter examines the historical and contemporary context of urban social change, exploring the historical evolution of consumer behavior from agricultural marketplaces to industrial department stores and post-industrial "new business models," as well as the interactive relationship between commercial space transformation and the fulfillment of human consumption needs. One innovation of this chapter is its comprehensive examination of the interaction between commercial formats and consumer behavior from the perspectives of sociological theories of social change and functional theory, with a focus on the phenomenon of "Walmartization" in consumption space. This contributes to a deeper understanding of the extraordinary role of "new business models" in the operation of the entire social system. Chapter 2 employs a large amount of empirical survey data to describe people's perceptions of "new business models" from three levels—"complexes," "symbols," and "lifestyles"—and analyzes the "complex of new business models" in contemporary cities. Chapter 3 focuses on the issue of consumer "shaping" under "new business models" from a structural-functional perspective, analyzing the relationship between modern consumption behavior and modernity. Chapter 4 takes urban families—the primary consumption units in modern society—as the object of study, examining the integrative function of "new business models" on family consumption patterns. Chapter 5, based on theories of time geography and urban spatial hierarchy, argues that with the acceleration of urbanization, the relocation of commercial resources, and changes in urban form, "new business models" have rapidly formed their own commercial service circles in new urban spaces, creating a three-tiered consumption travel space for families—neighborhood-based, community-based, and urban regional-based. This reflects shopping efficiency, freedom, as well as leisure and experiential aspects, making consumption behavior lifestyle-oriented. Chapter 6, building on the empirical analyses of the preceding chapters, systematically applies theories of systemic function analysis, particularly "middle-level theory," to examine the "explicit functions," "implicit functions," and "negative functions" of "new business models" in the context of urban consumption behavior transformation in contemporary Chinese cities, along with their respective characteristics. Given the limited research by domestic and international sociologists on China's "consumption structure upgrading" and "consumption transformation" issues, attempts to explore the interactive relationship between consumption behavior and retail formats, as well as the meaning of consumption culture, through the functional manifestations of new business models and consumer behavior in these spaces, remain relatively weak. Therefore, this book conducts a systematic empirical study of Nanjing, a sample city, employing a variety of methods such as large-sample household surveys, random surveys, multi-level interviews, and comparative observations. The goal is to hope that the theoretical research framework and corresponding research methods constructed in this book can evolve into a paradigm for studying the development of commercial formats and consumption behavior in cities, regions, and even the entire country.