In this paper we contribute to current debates concerning the relationship between identity and consumption. We use people's past consumption of music, embodied in their old records, as an archive of their identity projects. Using a narrative approach to data collection and drawing on an interpretive orientation influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we find that the structuring influences that enable and constrain the development of identity emerge in sharper relief. In particular, we suggest that narratives of socialization have an enduring effect on how people `make up' who they want to be. Implications for consumer research theory are discussed.

In this article, the authors argue that greater ecological enlightenment can be secured through capitalism by using the characteristics of commodity culture to further progress environmental goals. The authors reject both naive ecological romanticism and revolutionary idealism on the grounds that they fail to offer any pragmatic basis by which greater environmental responsibility can be achieved. Drawing on the now well-established theoretical tradition of post-Marxist cultural criticism, the authors offer a conceptual justification for the development and implementation of a green commodity discourse. For this to be achieved and implemented, prevailing paradigms regarding the structure, nature, and characteristics of capitalism must be revised. Marketing not only has the potential to contribute to the establishment of more sustainable forms of society but, as a principle agent in the operation and proliferation of commodity discourse, also has a considerable responsibility to do so.

In this article, marketing is considered a tool for performing the economy, a means by which a particular economic and political ideology has been reproduced and disseminated. Despite the early success of this project in improving and progressing the quality of peoples' lives, it is doubtful that this progress can be sustained in the 21st century. Marketing and its technologies are fundamental to sustaining economic growth, yet the provision of more goods and services into the marketplace -the provision of more choice -appears not to deliver on its theoretical promise of making people happier with their lives. The source of this discontent is examined from a psychoanalytical perspective.

The special issue of Marketing Theory (2013) on Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) updates and restates the main aims and controversies in CCT as well as offering a number of novel interpretations on the history and possible future direction of the movement. While the anchor paper from Thompson et al. (2013) is notable for the invocation of Bakhtin's concept of Heteroglossia, its main significance is as a reply to on-going critiques of the CCT project. In this commentary article we highlight the common tendency among critics to emphasise the paradigmatic and institutional basis for CCT as residing in the context of academic discourse.These accounts utilise what Coskuner-Balli (2013) discusses as the mobilization of cultural myths. One consequence of this process of retelling the CCT creation narrative is that it diverts and obscures other ideological readings of CCT. We highlight what we understand as the underlying neoliberal sentiment at the centre of the CCT project. A neoliberal perspective repositions some of the main criticisms of CCT, especially those regarding the overemphasis on consumer subjectivities.

Experiential consumption emphasizes emotional and hedonic qualities in the marketplace stressing the importance of experiences for ‘the good life’ and positioning consumption as a legitimate way to generate interesting and relevant experiences. The concept of emotional regimes (Reddy, 2001) is used to emphasize the dialectics between structural changes in the modern marketplace and the modern way of perceiving and practising hedonic behaviour. The article considers the main ideas that have furthered modern hedonism and the practices that have transformed the abstract longing for sensitivity into concrete experiential appetites. The development of a regime of experiences is outlined, consisting of a set of techniques to bring about sensual pleasure, a discourse to verbalize the methods of pleasure seeking, and an ideology that turns pleasure into a legitimate existential goal in life for the sake of self-actualization.