Global Consumer Culture

2005

Reviewed by John F. Sherry, Jr. Freakonomics, meet brandthropology. In this concise volume (a companion to his watershed 1998 effort) of articulate introspection and insightful ethnographic essays, the author exhorts anthropologists to take back their culture. This reclamation requires more than merely wresting control from the pundits, critics, and celebrities of the contemporary cultural scene. It demands a plumbing of the ontological status of consumer culture before engaging in reflexive critique. Such a project should be close to the heart of every museologist and material culture specialist.[1] Grant McCracken, a former curator, active industry consultant, and peripatetic professor, is an unrivalled stylist. His conversational eloquence, self-deprecating humor (he is, he admits, Canadian), and incisive wit engage the reader throughout the book. He has structured the volume to rock the reader from the intensely personal to the analytically universal. He anticipates the themes of his elegant interpretations-many reprinted from other sources-in his autobiographical musings as an active participant in consumer culture. It is little wonder that Business Week has recommended his blog (cultureby.com) to anyone who would comprehend contemporary consumer behavior. While Culture and Consumption II is not as intellectually dense as its predecessor, it is a more immediately accessible work that will reinvigorate interest in the original.

ACR North American Advances, 2005

Annual Review of Sociology, 2004

Consumption is a social, cultural, and economic process of choosing goods, and this process reflects the opportunities and constraints of modernity. Viewing consumption as an “institutional field,” the review suggests how consumption bridges economic and cultural institutions, large-scale changes in social structure, and discourses of the self. New technologies, ideologies, and delivery systems create consumption spaces in an institutional framework shaped by key social groups, while individual men and women experience consumption as a project of forming, and expressing, identity. Studying the institutional field requires research on consumer products, industries, and sites; on the role of consumption in constructing both the consuming subject and collective identity; and on historical transitions to a consumer society. Ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis show a global consumer culture fostered by media and marketing professionals yet subject to different local interpre...

ADVANCES IN CONSUMER RESEARCH, 2005

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Oxford Handbook of Consumption (2018), eds. Frederick F. Wherry and Ian Woodward, Oxford University Press., 2017

In this chapter, we aim to describe some of the disciplinary fault lines—to use Alexander and Phillips’s (2001) metaphoric framing of disciplinary tensions—that have shaped the intellectual contours of CCT, profile the primary theoretical motifs that have defined this pluralistic research tradition, and discuss the intellectual trajectories that are being marked out by recent CCT research. We will conclude by reflecting on the dilemmas and opportunities posed by the fairly rapid institutionalization of CCT.

1969

The study of Jewish consumer culture has been steadily gaining momentum in the consumer behavior, tourism, and consumer culture theory literature of the past two decades. However, as Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni state in Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, very little has been written about Jewish consumption from the historical perspective. Roemer and Reuveni present a very compelling volume, comprised of ten chapters that examine a broad spectrum of specific contexts related to Jewish consumption. The chapters themselves are wide-ranging and take the reader through an array of venues, ranging from prewar Germany to the present-day United States. In this regard, the editors have shown the dynamic nature of Jewish consumer culture in the modern, globalized landscape.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2010

Postmodernism is a variety of meanings and definitions, is used to refer to many aspects of social life from musical forms and styles, literature and fine art through to philosophy, history and especially the mass media and consumer culture. Post modernism is a slippery term that is used by writers to refer to several different things. Featherstone (1991) points out the term has been used to refer to new developments in intellectual and cultural theory. The suggestion that our subjective experience of everyday life and our sense of identity has somehow changed significantly in recent years. The view that capitalist or industrial societies have reached new and important stages in their development, the shift from modernity to post-modernity. Consumer culture is also play a vital role in the society, consumer culture may be defined as a day to day change in the taste of consumer behaviour. The term "consumer culture" refers to cultures in which mass consumption and production both fuel the economy and shape perceptions, values, desires, and constructions of personal identity. Economic developments, demographic trends, and new technologies profoundly influence the scope and scale of consumer culture. Social class, gender, ethnicity, region, and age all affect definitions of consumer identity and attitudes about the legitimacy of consumer centred lifestyle.

How can we understand the theoretical discussion concerning global consumer culture? Is it possible to affirm that such culture exists as one global representation, central to our contemporary society? Or should we consider possible localizations of consumption practices as a result of cultural differences from different groups and individuals? Early in the modern social theory, consumption has been object of discussion and, with the advent of the post-modernist theory, its centrality has become a tonic in social analysis. Further on, contemporary studies presented mainly two different perspectives: the continual centrality of consumption in society or localizations of this practice according to cultural differences. In order to understand global consumer culture, this paper proposes this theoretical discussion between both perspectives: In the first perspective, there is a rationale that begins with modern social theorists, and their focus on production systems (Marx, Weber, Smith, Durkheim), and that moves to the study of consumption (Simmel, Veblen, De Certeau, Birmingham School), whether celebrating or demonizing this social practice. Post-modernists have detailed this critique in order to understand the structure of the consumer society (Baudrillard, Bauman, Lipovestky), with consumption as the central practice of contemporary life.

DECISION, 2015

Journal of Consumer Research, 2005

This article provides a synthesizing overview of the past 20 yr. of consumer research addressing the soclocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption. Our aim is to provide a viable disciplinary brand for this research tradition that we call consumer culture theory (CCT). We propose that CCT has fulfilled recurrent calls for developing a distinctive body of theoretical knowledge about consumption and marketplace behaviors. In developing this argument, we redress three enduring misconceptions about the nature and analytic orientation of CCT. We then assess how CCT has contributed to consumer research by illuminating the cultural dimensions of the consumption cycle and by developing novel theorizations concerning four thematic domains of research interest.