Consumer Society

Abstract

The notion of “consumer society” emerged after World War II and was made famous by authors such as Marcuse, Galbraith, Packard, and Baudrillard (cf. Baudrillard 1998). It was used to suggest that the society in which we live is a late variant of capitalism characterized by the primacy of consumption over production. At that time, the label “consumer society” constituted an attack on so‐called “consumerism”: a continuous and unremitting search for new, fashionable, superfluous things, which were branded as causing personal discontent and public disengagement. Such a moralistic connotation masks both important differences and substantial continuities between our society and other social formations (Sassatelli 2007). Even in so‐called “tribal” societies people use objects as an important source of identity and a means of social relations, to distinguish themselves or mark alliances; even in these societies one can find forms of conspicuous consumption which mostly serve to reinforce social hierarchies (Douglas & Isherwood 1979). Still, our societies seem to be different in that material culture has grown enormously: it has become ever more differentiated and is increasingly produced and consumed via market‐mediated social relationships. In subsistence economies, work, consumption, and exchange were strongly integrated with one another: people used history‐thick objects of closer provenance in ways which were taken for granted and had straightforward significance. Production and consumption were not specialized and separated spheres of action, held together by an equally specialized sphere of exchange: the fundamental cultural dichotomy on which social order rested was that of sacred/profane rather than of production/consumption. In contemporary societies, because of the disentanglement of production and consumption, we find ourselves confronted with objects whose meaning is beyond our everyday life and yet we are mobilized as “consumers” to use these objects in meaningful ways.