A large part of the work on retail is concerned with the structural change of the retail business in Eastern Germany and Europe. Another strand of research focuses on the development of the retail industry in the Rhein-Main region or on the dynamics of urban governance in the city centers. Work here altogether has a rather application-oriented objective.
The research concerned with the geographies of consumption is particularly inspired by the Cultural Turn. The Cultural Turn shifts the attention towards the constitutive force of symbolic concepts and thereby offers a different kind of thinking on the subject, culture and society. This rethinking of classical concepts enables the research projects to contextualize consumption as a determinative factor of everyday life and to identify its various symbolic meanings within contemporary consumer culture.
Pütz, R. und F. Schröder: Konsum und Konsumenten in der Geographie. In: Gebhardt, H., R. Glaser, U. Radtke und P. Reuber (Hg.): Geographie – ein Lehrbuch. Heidelberg (im Druck)
Einzelhandel im Transformationsprozess. Das Spannungsfeld von lokaler Regulierung und Internationalisierung am Beispiel Polen, Passau 1998 (= Geographische Handelsforschung 1), 278 S. abstract
