Consumer Culture (Sociology)

Introduction

Consumer culture is a form of material culture facilitated by the market, which thus created a particular relationship between the consumer and the goods or services he or she uses or consumes. Traditionally social science has tended to regard consumption as a trivial by-product of production. However, sociologists have increasingly come to recognize the value of studying consumer culture for its own sake. It could indeed be argued that consumer culture represents one of the primary arenas in which elements of social change are played out in everyday life. Consumer culture can be distinguished from consumption per se, insofar as it is more about the relationship between the material and the cultural rather than the status and inequalities implied by the ownership of consumer goods. In this sense consumer culture is not simply a process by which commercial products are “used up” by consumers. People’s relationship to consumer culture is meaningful and reflects, and potentially reproduces, particular values and forms of status. In this sense consumer culture arguably lies at the heart of the relationship between structure and agency in contemporary society. It demonstrates the power of capitalism to reproduce the parameters within which citizens of a consumer society live their everyday lives. Consumer culture gives us the tools to express who it is we are, but while doing so it simultaneously reinforces an economic system in which the individual’s ability to be free or to choose is, ironically, constrained. A number of texts have sought to understand the social significance of consumer culture and this ability to divide as well as to provide.

General Overviews and Key Works

Consumer culture came to sociological prominence in the 1990s and 2000s as scholars came to recognize that consumption was significant for its own sake. This reflected broader trends such as the “Cultural Turn” and the increased focus on the cultural dimensions of post-modernity. A range of books have sought to demonstrate the significance of consumption to social change. Featherstone 1990 examines the sociological significance of the accumulation of material culture, while Ritzer 1993 looks at the way in which rationalization functions in the context of consumer culture. By utilizing a range of well-chosen extracts from a diverse range of sources, Lee 2000 pinpoints the contemporary significance of consumer culture. Meanwhile, Slater 1997 designates consumer culture as an issue intimately bound up with that of modernity, while Gabriel and Lang 1995 explores the consumer from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Lury 1996 is particularly effective on the consumption of identity in a changing world, while Nava 1991 and Sassatelli 2007 highlight the political significance of consumption.

Featherstone, Mike. 1990. Perspectives on consumer culture. Sociology 24.1: 5–22.
DOI: 10.1177/0038038590024001003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A key contribution that emphasizes the sociological significance of the accumulation of material culture. Specifically, Featherstone highlights the emergence of postmodernity, which is effectively characterized by a situation in which individuals lives appear to be more controlled by structural processes and yet freer at one and the same time.
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Gabriel, Yiannis, and Tim Lang. 1995. The unmanageable consumer: Contemporary consumption and its fragmentations. London: SAGE.
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Gabriel and Lang argue that the key barrier to consumer choice is money. For them contemporary society is notable for its fragmented volatility. The book considers the consumer in various guises, including that of chooser, identity-seeker, and victim and the proposition is that the more social institutions, such as industry or politicians, try to control the consumer the more unmanageable he or she becomes.
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Lee, Martyn J., ed. 2000. The consumer society reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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This collection brings together a wide range of the key contributions to debates on the significance of consumer culture. It focuses on some of the key theoretical contributions to such debates from the work of Marx to that of Baudrillard, as well as key contributions to the discussion regarding the historical character of the consumer society from the work of Vance Packard to that of David Harvey.
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Lury, Celia. 1996. Consumer culture. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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In this volume Lury considers the ways in which an individual’s position in social groups structured by class, gender, race, and age affects the nature of his or her participation in consumer culture. Consumer culture is seen to provide new ways of creating social and political identities to the extent that consumer culture is actively redrawing questions of difference, struggle, and inequality.
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Nava, Mica. 1991. Consumerism reconsidered: Buying and power. Cultural Studies 5:157–173.
DOI: 10.1080/09502389100490141Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece critically considers the ability of consumerism to create new forms of economic, political, personal, and creative participation. Arguing that waters had previously been muddied by competing theoretical perspectives on consumerism, Nava suggests that a kind of “utopian collectivism” lies within the consumerist project, which may engender its own revolutionary seeds. Nava therefore illustrates the political complexities that are implied by the ability to consume.
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Ritzer, George. 1993. The McDonaldization of society: An investigation into the changing character of contemporary social life. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge.
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Ritzer is concerned with the way in which rationalization is played out in the context of consumer culture, namely, through the processes of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. As such, McDonalds is effectively a metaphor for a world that makes us consume in particular ways. However, Ritzer’s contribution has been criticized by some critics for underestimating the potential of consumers to construct their own meanings.
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Sassatelli, Roberta. 2007. Consumer culture: History, theory and politics. London: SAGE.
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In one of the most comprehensive of the key textbooks on consumer culture, Sassatelli presents a rich interpretation of the diverse range of theoretical approaches to consumer culture. One of the achievements of her contribution is to balance the needs of a range of disciplines, including sociology, history, geography, and economics.
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Slater, Don. 1997. Consumer culture and modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Slater’s work takes a thematic approach in considering some of the key points of tension around consumer culture, including needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, and culture. Slater argues that “consumer culture”—a culture of consumption—is unique and specific, and that it represents the dominant mode of cultural reproduction developed in the West over the course of modernity.
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Classic Works

Consumer culture was very much tied up with a world founded upon a quest for progress in which human beings re-created the world in their own guise: a world personified perhaps in the guise of the flâneur, in the work of Benjamin 2002. Two key dimensions of this process deal with the role of the commodity in determining social relations, identified originally by Karl Marx (Marx 1976) and the role of consumption in conferring status, as highlighted so effectively by both Thorstein Veblen (Veblen 2007) and Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1984). These issues came to preoccupy theorists concerned with the nature of a rapidly changing world and the role that consumer culture played in that world, a world that Simmel 2011 recognizes as emerging more than a century ago. From a Marxist point of view consumption was best explored as an ideological entity (Marcuse 1972). Subsequent work also considers the contention that modernity failed and that what emerged in its wake, as Debord 1994 notes, is a depthless, fragmentary consumer culture.

Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The arcades project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
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Fragmentary in nature, this volume focuses on the arcades of 19th century in Paris and, in doing so, Benjamin locates the shift to modernity in the commodification of things. The experience of modernity is personified in the figure of the flâneur, who is the personification of the alienated modern city. A challenging read to say the least, but Benjamin’s work conveys the historical manifestations of consumer culture while bringing to mind the shopping malls of today.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge.
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Originally published in 1979. The influence of this book on sociological debates on consumer culture cannot be underestimated. Bourdieu presents a vastly impressive empirical examination of the consumption habits of the French bourgeoisie. This is a book about taste and how consumer culture reflects and reinforces the social world in which we live. Bourdieu’s work quite possibly represents the single most important and influential contribution to the field of the sociology of consumption.
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Debord, Guy. 1994. The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
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This book represents a condemnation of the image as the tool used by capital to alienate us from the reality of our everyday lives. Unashamedly Marxist in its approach the book is a revolutionary critique of commodity capitalism: consumption as collective consciousness. Originally published in 1967 as La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet Chastel).
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Marcuse, Herbert. 1972. One-dimensional man. London: Abacus.
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A damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, this staggering work is concerned with how the artificial production of false needs generates a false idea of freedom and liberation alongside new forms of social control. It demonstrates the manufacture of happiness and satisfaction through the production and consumption of needs and represents a key contribution by a leading member of the Frankfurt School while providing food for thought with regard to the ideological power of consumer culture.
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Marx, Karl. 1976. The fetishism of the commodity and its secret in capital. In Capital. Vol. 1, A critique of political economy. By Karl Marx, 163–177. New York: Penguin.
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Originally published in 1906 (New York: Modern Library). Marx is, of course, primarily known for his treatment of production rather than consumption, but in this passage he considers the “mysterious” qualities of the commodity and the process by which it becomes fetishized to the degree that the consumer is left none the wiser as to its status. This sets the groundwork for our understanding of consumption as more than a trivial by-product of consumption.
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Simmel, Georg. 2011. The philosophy of money. New York: Routledge.
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Simmel was interested in how a society predicated on a money-based economy transforms culture and determines people’s relationships with each other in particular instrumental ways. Simmel argues that money structures both our internal and our external lives. Money is liberating and yet at one and the same time it ties us to a highly rationalized world. Simmel’s contribution therefore highlights the way in which consumer culture intervenes in the construction of identity. Originally published in 1900 as Philosophie des Geldes (Leipzig: Duncker & Humbolt).
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Veblen, Thorstein. 2007. The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. New York: Cosimo.
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Originally published in 1899. Written at the close of the 19th century this is perhaps the original socioeconomic treatment of consumption and its insights are arguably as insightful today as they were at the time they were written. Veblen developed the notion of conspicuous consumption and, in so doing, recognized the role that consumption plays in the social display of status.
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Journals

Consumption has emerged as a key area for academic debate. The Journal of Consumer Culture is the primary social scientific home for such discussions, whereas the Journal of Consumer Research has more of a marketing focus, while the material conditions underpinning marketing are also a concern for CMC: Consumption, Markets & Culture.

CMC: Consumption, Markets & Culture. 1997–.
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This journal focuses on consumerism and the markets as the site of social behavior and discourse. The journal is notable for its emphasis on marketing as “the ultimate social practice of postmodernity,” and, as such, it tries to understand the material conditions and meanings that underpin the relationship between consumption and production.
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Journal of Consumer Culture. 2001–.
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The Journal of Consumer Culture was founded by the American sociologist George Ritzer and it is the leading social scientific journal looking specifically at consumer culture. The journal has a broad cross-disciplinary remit and is more concerned with the cultural implications of consumer culture than it is with meeting any kind of a disciplinary agenda.
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Journal of Consumer Research. 1974–.
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The Journal of Consumer Research is the leading American journal in consumption and focuses primarily on marketing/consumer behavior. The quality of research in the journal is exceptional, but it could be said to reinforce a divide in American research between study of consumer behavior and the much less influential consumer culture theory (CCT), a branch of consumer behavior study that looks at consumption from a social and cultural point of view.
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History

The history of consumer culture is fraught with debate as to when the elusive “consumer revolution” began, if at all. Fine and Leopold 1993, for example, addresses this question from an economics perspective, while Lee 1993 is concerned with how the commodity form changes over time. Scholars have come to a wide range of conclusions locating the first signs of consumer culture variously in 17th-century French markets, 18th-century England, and even Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s. One of the key criticisms of much work around consumer culture is that it has a tendency to be ahistorical. Works such as McKendrick, et al. 1983 and Mort 1996 provide an important empirical counterweight to this approach, while Brewer and Porter 1993 put women firmly on the historical agenda. Nonetheless, no clear answer emerges as to where and when we can identify the origins of the consumer culture. What we do know is that consumer culture is far from a purely contemporary phenomenon.

Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. 1993. Consumption and the world of goods. London: Routledge.
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This book constitutes a real challenge to the nature of historical enquiry and it does so by seeking to put consumption on the historical map. The book demonstrates the particular significance this has for our understanding of the role of women in history, who, through the lens of consumption, become much more proactive contributors to social change, particularly as explored here in the 17th and 18th centuries.
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Fine, Ben, and Ellen Leopold. 1993. The world of consumption. London: Routledge.
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Arguing that the historical dimensions of the consumer culture have been under-explored, Fine and Leopold present a “systems of provision” approach to their subject matter. The book is notable for its critique of the relationship between economic imperialism and globalization and, as such, constitutes one of the most important contributions on consumer culture from an economics/consumer behavior perspective.
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Lee, Martyn J. 1993. Consumer culture reborn: The cultural politics of consumption. London: Routledge.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203359655Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book focuses on the relationship between the economy and culture in contemporary society. Lee is interested in the economic ramifications accompanying the rise of consumer culture. Lee argues that the commodity is the “primary index of the social relations of modern capitalist societies” and is thus concerned with the change in the commodity-form over time and what this tells us about the world in which we live.
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McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. 1983. The birth of a consumer society: The commercialization of eighteenth-century England. London: Hutchinson.
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In lamenting the historical neglect of consumption, McKendrick and colleagues argue that changes in fashion play a key role as both an indicator and a cause of social change. Among other things, the authors consider what it is that constitutes a consumer revolution, how a consumer market began to develop beyond the confines of the aristocracy, and the importance of the emergence of leisure.
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Mort, Frank. 1996. Cultures of consumption: Masculinities and social space in late twentieth-century Britain. London: Routledge.
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Mort presents an authoritative critique of the relationship between gender, commerce, and geography that adds up to an important contribution to a discussion of the cultural and historical antecedents of the consumer culture and an insightful analysis of the relationship between consumerism and identity. Mort discusses the emergence of a plurality of masculinities through consumer culture that has liberated men, but has not necessarily simultaneously led to a more progressive relationship with women.
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Theoretical Developments

Given the multidisciplinary nature of debates on consumer culture, a variety of theoretical schools and contributions that enhance our understanding of the field have emerged. It could be argued that two quite separate, though related, areas of debate on consumer culture exist: work that is associated with marketing/consumer research, as identified in Arnould and Thompson 2005, and work that is more social scientific in its perspective, such as Bauman 1998, Campbell 1989, and Sack 1992. Given the onus here on consumer culture, considerably more emphasis has been placed on the latter. Saunders 1986 demonstrates the benefits to be had from turning attention away from class conflicts centered on the relationship to the means of production toward a concern with differentials in access to consumption. As pointed out previously, theoretical developments in the study of consumer culture have been closely connected to discussions of social and cultural change, particularly those associated with post-modernity; thus, the work of the “high priest” of post-modernism, Baudrillard 1998. García Canclini 2001 is notable for how he considers the potential role that consumption might play as an arena of citizenship; similarly Jackson and Moores 1995 explore the gendered nature of consumption. Warde’s 2005, influential article, has led to practice theory coming to play an increasingly prominent role in the debate, while Maffesoli 1996 considers the tribal dimensions of the consumer society. One of the main criticisms, although this is not always the case, of research into consumer culture is that its theoretical developments are not always founded on empirical grounds.

Arnould, Eric J., and Craig J. Thompson. 2005. Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research 31.4: 868–882.
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This article represents an important moment in the history of the development of consumer research, and not least in the United States. It makes a case for the need for research that is not driven by the needs of consumer behavior or marketing but which focuses on the cultural context in which we consume.
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Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. The consumer society: Myths and structures. London: SAGE.
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Studies of consumption appeared together with the emergence of debates regarding the existence, or otherwise, of post-modernity. This fact is no more in evidence than in the work of Jean Baudrillard, who discusses the commercial sign as the organizing principle of contemporary capitalist society. Originally published in 1969 as La société de consummation: Sys mythes, ses structures (Paris: Calmann-Lévy).
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Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. Work, consumerism and the new poor. Buckingham, UK: Open Univ. Press.
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In this book Bauman develops the notion of the “flawed consumer” and points out that being poor in contemporary society is actually determined by our ability to consume or otherwise. This remains an important contribution because it highlights the fact that our inability to consume is just as important as our ability to consume when it comes to the construction of identities in a consumer culture.
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Campbell, Colin. 1989. The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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Campbell’s book represents a very significant intervention at a time when consumerism was beginning to emerge as a key topic for sociological debate. His thesis focuses on how the redefinition of pleasure in the 18th century created a world of “imaginative pleasure-seeking.” This work is remarkable for the way in which it explains that consumer culture is less about what it is we own and more about the ways in which we want and desire.
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García Canclini, Néstor. 2001. Consumers and citizens: Globalization and multicultural conflicts. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
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García argues that the arena of consumption contributes to the integrative and communicative rationality of society. From this point of view potential exists for a reimagining of consumption as a site of cognitive value that can provide an arena for meaningful ways of thinking in an increasingly atomized world. Originally published in 1995 as Consumidores y ciudadanos: Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización (Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo).
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Jackson, Stevi, and Shaun Moores. 1995. The politics of domestic consumption: Critical readings. London: Prentice Hall.
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A collection of critical work that looks at the everyday practices and power relations of domestic consumption. The work presented here is concerned with the relationships between material and symbolic aspects of consumption or on divisions of labor and leisure in households. This book is particularly effective in situating the gendered nature of consumer culture alongside the cultural construction of the home.
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Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The time of the tribes: The decline of individualism in mass society. London: SAGE.
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Arguing that human beings have evolved to live in a tribal as opposed to a mass society, Maffesoli contends that consumer culture plays an absolutely key role in providing the basis upon which fragmented tribal groupings are established. This book represents a major contribution to the craft of cultural sociology more generally, although it can and has been criticized for the somewhat inaccessible nature of its ideas.
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Sack, Robert D. 1992. Place, modernity, and the consumer’s world: A relational framework for geographical analysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
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This is one of the great underutilized tomes on the social science (in this case geography) of consumer culture. Sack considers how space and place define the world of the consumer. He considers place as both an empirical and a moral concept and is particularly effective on the emergence of human agency and its gradual expression through the geographical opportunities that consumer culture provides.
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Saunders, Peter. 1986. Social theory and the urban question. London: Routledge.
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Saunders recognizes that privatized forms of consumption were creating their own kinds of social divide. But for Saunders private ownership is primarily empowering in its effect, and he explores housing, for example, as a source of personal identity. For this reason many authors have criticized Saunders for adopting an overly rigid conception of consumption that underestimates the complex relationships consumers can have with goods and services.
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Warde, Alan. 2005. Consumption and theories of practice. Journal of Consumer Culture 5.2: 131–153.
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This much-cited article put practice theory firmly on the consumer culture agenda. Emphasizing the routine, collective, and conventional nature of consumption. Warde’s article focuses on the dynamic nature of practice. This contribution spawned a range of efforts to put practice theory into practice as a means of elucidating consumer culture.
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In the City

In many respects consumer culture is an urban phenomenon and this is reflected in its significance in the field of urban studies, as indicated in Miles and Paddison 1998. One of the key debates of interest to scholars of the city is how cities are reinvented and repackaged under postindustrial conditions, as Boyer 1992 and Broudehoux 2004 illustrate. The relationship between consumption and regeneration is particularly significant in this regard. However, an underlying concern is that the city, not least the early 21st century, is becoming commodified. A particular preoccupation here is the homogenization of the city and, specifically, the exploration of “non-place” in Augé 1995. The accusation is that consumer culture lies at the heart of this process and that, as result, the city effectively becomes a theme park (Hannigan 1998). Williams 2004 is particularly interested in the architectural implications of these processes, while for Hayward 2004 the primary impact of consumption on the city is criminological in nature. Zukin 1991 highlights the power relationships that underpin such processes.

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.
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Augé is concerned with the underlying logic of late capitalism or “supermodernity” and the reproduction of uniform “non-place” where no organic social life is possible. These places are often spaces of consumption: spaces that construct a particular kind of solitude. Augé’s work is a contemporary classic in highlighting the physical implications of a society that is so preoccupied with consumer culture.
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Boyer, M. Christine. 1992. Cities for sale: Merchandising history at South Street Seaport. In Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space. Edited by Michael Sorokin, 181–204. New York: Hill and Wang.
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Boyer’s article presents a useful example of the way in which the principles of consumption can be imposed in the name of regeneration to create places of pleasure, spectacle, and escape. Boyer describes a world of illusion and entertainment in which consumer culture becomes an economic weapon that stylizes history and apparently suspends the potential for critical judgment.
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Broudehoux, Anne-Marie. 2004. The making and selling of post-Mao Beijing. London: Routledge.
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Broudehoux is concerned with the way in which mental images of the city are constructed, notably through city marketing and the way in which the city is used as a means of reproducing preexisting power relationships. Broudehoux is thus concerned with the reinvention of Beijing as an economic super-city. This is in effect a process of commodification in which even national heritage is transformed into a kind of “Chinese Disneyworld” through the hegemony of a consumer culture.
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Hannigan, John. 1998. Fantasy city: Pleasure and profit in the postmodern metropolis. London: Routledge.
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Hannigan’s book traces the rise of urban entertainment from the beginning of the 20th century and, in particular, the pursuit on the part of the middle classes for risk-free entertainment. Hannigan is especially interested in the emergence of the “theme park city” and considers whether the city as a pre-packaged consumer-driven corporate entertainment center means the end of cultural diversity.
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Hayward, Keith J. 2004. City limits: Crime, consumer culture and the urban experience. London: Glasshouse.
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An insightful analysis of an issue largely unexplored by sociologists of consumption, namely, the relationship between consumer culture and crime. Emerging from the subdiscipline of cultural criminology, the book critically explores the way in which the world of consumption constructs deviance as a “marketing tool” as a result of a society that apparently force feeds us with forms of “hedonic consumption” that promote a degree of expectation of entitlement that is played out in the word of crime.
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Miles, Steven, and Ronan Paddison. 1998. Urban consumption: An historiographical note. Urban Studies 35.5–6: 815–824.
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A critical insight into the historical development of urban consumption. This piece expresses the role that cities play as the main loci of control and power in which symbolic forms of consumption play a prominent role. It is also important to remember the divisive role that cities play in this context.
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Williams, Richard. 2004. The anxious city: English urbanism in the late twentieth century. London: Routledge.
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The relationship between architecture and consumption is a fascinating one. In this book, Williams discusses the way in which the contemporary city has been constructed as a visual tableau to be consumed. He asks: is consumer culture nothing more than a symbolic solution to the problems of the post-industrial society? Can a revolution of “bourgeois taste” really produce the social and economic changes that we ask of it?
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Zukin, Sharon. 1991. Landscapes of power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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One of the most effective efforts to critique the global impact of consumer culture and their expression in contemporary urban forms, Zukin’s work focuses, in particular, on the relationship between the market and place. The book recognizes the significance of consumption to a post-industrial world and the price to be paid for a world that puts its eggs into consumerism’s basket.
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Advertising

In many respects advertising is the engine room of contemporary consumer culture, as Vance Packard recognized back in the 1950s (Packard 1957). Scholars have sought to understand the historical manifestations of the consumer culture as it has been promoted through the advertising industry. Historically, a number of important changes in the nature of advertising have occurred in the last one hundred years, as Ewen 2001 notes. Not the least significant of these has been the transition from the advertising of a product and its qualities toward a focus on more lifestyle-oriented elements, as explored in Leiss, et al. 2005 for example. Discussions of advertising are therefore much concerned with the symbolic power of advertising and the degree to which consumers are able to engage critically with the meanings that advertising constructs, the important point here being that meaning is not “natural” but is constructed by the advertising industry to create added value. Williams 1978 critically assesses the practical ways in which the language of advertising achieves this.

Ewen, Stuart. 2001. Captains of consciousness: Advertising and the social roots of the consumer culture. New York: Basic Books.
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Ewen presents a historical look at the origins of the advertising industry and consumer society at the turn of the 20th century. Ewen’s thesis focuses on marketing’s efforts to define American life based on the attributes of consumer culture around the 1920s. Advertising thus played a leading role in defining the good life through consumption, so that, for example, the family became, above all else, a unit of consumption.
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Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally. 2005. Social communication in advertising: Persons, products & images of well-being. 3d ed. London: Routledge.
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This is one of the most comprehensive and enlightening treatments of the key role that advertising plays in the maintenance of consumer culture. Interdisciplinary in its scope, this work demonstrates how advertising shapes the world we live in. For Leiss and colleagues advertising has become one of the, if not the sole, great vehicle of social communication. Originally published in 1985.
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Packard, Vance. 1957. The hidden persuaders. London: Penguin.
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Packard’s research claimed that behavioral scientists recruited by the American advertising industry were effectively manipulating consumers at a subconscious level and that, as a result, consumers were becoming creatures of conditioned reflex as opposed to rational thought. Although Packard’s contribution may at first appear old-fashioned it represents a significant intervention and an important social forecast.
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Williams, Judith. 1978. Decoding advertisements: Ideology and meaning in advertising. London: Marion Boyars.
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Williams’s work is probably the classic contribution on the ideological meaning of advertising. Recognizing that advertisements sell us more than consumer goods alone she explores the ability of advertising to underpin an economic condition. The book is concerned with the language of advertising and is particularly powerful in its depiction of the relationship between advertising and gender.
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Identity

The relationship between consumer culture and identity has long been a preoccupation of social scientists, in works such as Giddens 1991, as well as those writing from a background in critical marketing, as demonstrated in Belk 1988. The authors of many, such as Dittmar 1992, which adopts a social psychological approach, have considered how consumers use the opportunities consumer culture provides to construct and present a sense of themselves. This is perhaps best captured in the often underappreciated work of Christopher Lasch (Lasch 1985). A debate continues as to whether consumer culture is a resource that consumers can use to construct their identity or it simply reflects more significant dimensions of who it is consumers are, such as gender, class, and race. Lunt and Livingstone 1992 thus explore the “everydayness” of consumption. We arguably live in an increasingly fragmented world, in which our sense of identity is undermined, so that common biographies are not as important to us as they were in the past. From this perspective, many commentators have argued that consumer culture pays a prominent role as a resource through which we express ourselves and establish our status in social contexts.

Belk, Russell W. 1988. Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research 15.2: 139–168.
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In this piece—one of his most influential—Belk establishes the relationship between self-concept and consumer brand choice. Belk establishes the fact that consumption is not purely associated with the process of exchange; that possessions play an important role at each stage of the life course and this work helped to establish the symbolic importance of consumer culture as an ongoing focus for the development of consumer behavior research while providing a counterweight to a more quantitative marketing approach.
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Dittmar, Helga. 1992. The social psychology of material possessions: To have is to be. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
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Dittmar’s approach is that of a social constructionist and she argues that possessions are conceptualized as symbols of identity, which can express and communicate an individual’s social position and personal qualities. As far as the bigger picture is concerned, it is perhaps a matter of regret that disciplinary boundaries have stood in the way of innovative work that crosses the boundaries between sociology and psychology.
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Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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Giddens discusses the emergence of late modernity and, in particular, the way in which day-to-day social life is increasingly affected by processes of globalization. Furthermore, the emergence of the self as a “reflexive project” highlights the role that consumer culture can potentially play in constructing who it is we are, or at least in giving us the feeling that we can construct who it is we are.
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Lasch, Christopher. 1985. The minimal self: Psychic survival in troubled times. London: Picador.
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Lasch succeeds perhaps more than any author in articulating the role that consumer culture plays in facilitating the relationship between the self and society. For Lasch contemporary social life is an exercise in survival, and consumer culture promotes a situation in which we, as consumers, become preoccupied with the superficiality of the image so that the self effectively becomes a product of surface impressions.
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Lunt, Peter K., and Sonia Livingstone. 1992. Mass consumption and personal identity: Everyday economic experience. Buckingham, UK: Open Univ. Press.
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Lunt and Livingstone are interested in the social nature of commodities and how this is played out through everyday economic experience, including how it is that consumers relate to the practical dimensions of credit. The authors thus adopt an empirical perspective in developing an argument that consumer culture plays a key role in maintaining and continuing social and, not least, class-based divisions.
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Fashion

Fashion is perhaps the most dramatic of all expressions of consumption and Simmel 1971 is notable for indicating that what we buy says less about our personal choices as consumers and more about how we fit into a world that deems consumption to be significant. Wilson 2013 puts this debate in a broader cultural context.

Simmel, Georg. 1971. Fashion. In On individuality and social forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine, 294–323. London: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226924694.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Originally published in 1904. This classic essay is a must read for those interested in the role that consumer culture plays in managing the relationship between structure and agency. Simmel ruminates on the pressures to consumer “ugly and repugnant things” as a means of both fitting in the social groups and yet simultaneously retaining a sense of self-identity.
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Wilson, Elizabeth. 2013. Adorned in dreams: Fashion and modernity. Rev. ed. London: I. B. Tauris.
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Originally published in 1985. Perhaps the single most significant book on the cultural history of fashion, Wilson’s work traces the social and cultural history of fashion and its complex relationship to modernity. Wilson sees fashion as an artistic and political means of expression and, as such, establishes it as a serious topic for sociological investigation. Her work is particularly effective in drawing out the gender implications of fashionable identities. See also Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (London: Virago).
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Cultural Consumption

The work of Pierre Bourdieu (see Bourdieu 1984, cited under Classic Works) fully established cultural forms of consumption as being a key dimension of debates on consumer culture, while Appadurai 1986 puts the social life of things equally on the social scientific agenda. Cultural consumption can, of course, take many forms, from subculture, as explored in Hebdige 1979, to class expressions of taste of the cultural omnivore. A long, critical tradition in the social sciences, as shown in the outspoken work Adorno and Horkheimer 1979, studies the relationship between culture and the meanings that lie beneath surface impressions. Clammer 1997, a work dealing with Japan, is useful in this context. A key question here is the extent to which such meanings represent an actual affront to dominant social structures or simply serve to reproduce them. Thus Urry 1990 considers tourism as a form of consumption, while Willis 1990 is interested in the creative ways in which young people engage with the politics of consumption.

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 1979. The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In Dialectic of enlightenment. Edited by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 94–136. London: Verso.
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Adorno and Horkheimer critically consider the industrialization of culture through which docile consumerism is established as a stabilizing force. Adorno and Horkheimer establish consumer culture as an arena of ideological domination. Although their work has been roundly criticized for its elitism, it remains one of the most important theoretical contributions to debates over consumer culture and is remarkable for its ability to fire up the sociological imagination. Originally published in 1944 as Dialektik der Aufklarung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
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Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This was one of the first volumes to establish consumer culture as a serious area of scholarly research. The contributors to this book explore the complex, but specific, social and political mechanisms that regulate taste, trade, and desire, and they demonstrate the significance that processes of circulation have played in past cultures as well as those of today.
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Clammer, J. R. 1997. Contemporary urban Japan: A sociology of consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Clammer’s work is one of the few attempts to apply the lens of consumption in a national context. It has much to say about the way in which particular crazes take hold of the consumer’s imagination and, indeed, in the imagination of the city.
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Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuen.
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Hebdige made a number of contributions to debates on consumer culture, and not least his book Hiding in the Light: On Image and Things (London: Comedia, 1987). Perhaps his most important contribution, this volume is concerned with the meanings behind the postwar fashions of working-class youth subcultures. By adopting a Marxist/structuralist/semiotic approach, Hebdige establishes how it is that young people used forms of consumption to reassert their historically base class position.
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Urry, John. 1990. The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London: SAGE.
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Urry’s volume represents the single most important contribution to the sociology of tourism over the past twenty-five years. But this is also a study of consumer culture. It constitutes an invaluable exploration of a particular mode of aestheticized consumption, namely, the consumption of spectacularized place, and, as such, Urry describes a world in which the experience of place is located in the pleasures that consumer culture provides for us.
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Willis, Paul E. 1990. Common culture: Symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. Milton Keynes, UK: Open Univ. Press.
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Willis presents the hypothesis that cultural commodities provide opportunities for cultural creativity that young people can use to construct their identity. He argues that young people are quite capable of transforming the politics of consumption for their own ends and hence of living consumer lifestyles in a reflexive critical fashion. Willis has been criticized for exaggerating the degree of agency that is allowed for in a consumer culture.
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Shopping

Although retail has not been a topic of particular focus for sociologists of consumer culture, Bowlby 2000 is an example of how attempts to understand the experience of shopping have been particular enlightening. These efforts have again addressed the meanings that lie behind the act of shopping and have also sought to chart the history of shopping as a means of understanding how the way we shop serves to reinforce our relationship to the consumer society. Miller 1998 gives this strand of work an important empirical dimension.

Bowlby, Rachel. 2000. Carried away: The invention of modern shopping. London: Faber and Faber.
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In seeking to understand the relationship between shopping and the extent to which it allows us the degree of freedom that it appears to claim, Bowlby presents an insightful analysis of the development of 20th-century shopping and the emergence of objects of desire. It is especially insightful on the gender dimensions that underpin these changes.
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Chaney, David. 1983. The department store as a cultural form. Theory, Culture & Society 3:22–31.
DOI: 10.1177/026327648300100303Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Chaney discusses the emergence of the department store as a physical manifestation of the consumer’s sense of freedom. The focus here is on the late 19th century, but the real achievement of Chaney’s contribution lies in his understanding of the cultural significance of opportunities to create a personal lifestyle through apparently “impersonal” forms of consumption.
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Miller, Daniel. 1998. A theory of shopping. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Miller seeks to understand shopping as a ritual, and in doing so conceives of shopping as an act intimately linked to other social relations, and specifically love and care. Based on an empirical study of shopping on a street in North London, Miller argues that the ultimate goal of shopping is to constitute others as desiring subjects. Miller’s approach is thus anthropological in nature and takes the sociology of consumer culture into largely unexplored territories.
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Resistance and Sustainability

On the whole, sociologists of consumption have tended to be pessimistic as to how far they feel that genuine resistance against the consumer society is achievable given the complex ideological parameters within which consumer culture exists, as the work of Heath and Potter 2006 also illustrates. These contributions approach this question from a less disciplinary-bound position and, in doing so, challenge the reader into at least considering what alternatives might be found to the consumer society that appears to be so entrenched in our everyday lives. Jackson 2006 represents one of the few examples of work that seriously debates what a new form of sustainable consumption might look like. Klein 2000 has had a genuine popular impact, but whether it has had a real impact in holding back the reins of the consumer society is another question.

Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. 2006. The rebel sell: How the counter culture became consumer culture. Chichester, UK: Capstone.
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In an intriguing analysis Heath and Potter present the thesis that the idea that counter-cultural “jamming” will lead to the collapse of “the system” has simply served to prop up the very consumer society that radicals oppose. They are concerned with how an obsession with difference has made the so-called “counterculture” a commodity as much as any other constituent part of the consumer culture.
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Jackson, Tim. 2006. The Earthscan reader on sustainable consumption. London: Routledge.
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This book recognizes the considerable challenges involved in consuming in a more sustainable fashion. It explores the psychological, as well as the economic and sociological, dimensions of this debate and considers where environmental alternatives to a world dominated by consumerism might lie.
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Klein, Naomi. 2000. No logo: No space, no choice, no jobs. London: Flamingo.
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A popular manifesto of its times, Klein’s book considers the history of marketing and demonstrates the underlying ubiquity of brands. This book is a call to arms against the ideological dimensions of the consumer culture, and yet its popularity was such that it arguably and ironically became as much a brand as those its author sought to critique.