ABSTRACT
We are all consumers. Yet when social theorists look at consumption as an object of study, there tend to be two responses. Until the 1950s, on the whole consumption made sense only in relation to production, so studying consumption assumed that consumers were also producers or, at least, involved in the production of material goods. Marxists strongly criticised consumer capitalism for fostering desires rather than needs, and saw the way that consumers were driven increasingly towards false needs, including more, better, cheaper material goods, devices and experiences. This, they thought, was much to the detriment of true feelings of community and social relations, and meant that as consumers we were continually being manipulated and misled by advertisers, marketing, and the authorities that allow such things to take place. The thesis of liberal economist J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, written in 1958, solidified the equation, arguing that the promotion of false needs such as prestige goods is necessary to stimulate production, revitalise the economy, but also to equate affluence or wealth in terms of material goods. “The more wants that are satisfied, the more new ones are born”
(2000: 218), in other words. However, while critiques of consumer capitalism from a political-economic perspective retain their power, there is a strong turn within cultural studies and the social sciences towards examining consumption as something people simply do, without necessarily judging it inherently bad. Especially with newly experienced post-war affluence, young people in particular had more money to spend, and more things to buy with it. Marketing advanced in order to accelerate this process, and interesting and notable cultural phenomena started to become visible, such things as changes in gender relations, in perceived status, expressions of individual and group identities and subcultures; notions of belonging, of taste and style. Along with these sometimes highly visible phenomena, other less visible cultural effects arise out of consumption too. By examining consumption as one thing people ‘do’, therefore, we are also discovering a series of cultural effects, and these effects are the concern of the book.
