ABSTRACT

Consumer Culture Reborn focuses on consumption as the point at which economy and culture combine. The book draws the often polarised discourses of political economy and cultural studies closer together in a historical context as a means of understanding our social situations as we approach the end of the millenium. Taking as its central theme the ability of the capitalist mode of production to transform the material and social world which sustains it, the book focuses on some of the ways in which this transformational impulse has altered the means by which ordinary people reproduce their life and their patterns of life. Neither a history book, nor simply a book of theory, Consumer Culture Reborn fuses elements of economic, social and cultural theory in an historical perspective.

part |2 pages

Part I Preliminaries: perspectives on capital, consumption and culture

chapter 1|20 pages

Capital, labour and the commodity-form

chapter 2|13 pages

Exploring the economy of symbolic goods

chapter 3|15 pages

Culture, consumption and commodities

part |2 pages

Part II The social transformations of capital

chapter 4|12 pages

Accumulation, regulation and growth

chapter 5|12 pages

The political economy of Fordism

chapter 6|13 pages

Easing the passage of modernity

chapter 7|16 pages

Decay and rejuvenation

chapter 8|17 pages

Time, space and the commodity-form

chapter 9|19 pages

The culture of deregulation

chapter 10|17 pages

Consumer culture reborn