ABSTRACT
The increasing preoccupation with consumption throughout the advanced capitalist countries during its postwar boom attracted the corresponding attention of the academic world. For consumption easily and positively places on the agenda those issues that have been an increasing focus of attention in the intellectual climate of postmodernist times. Consumption, par excellence, concerns the position and activity of the individual in capitalist society. It involves the interpretation of objects, ideologies, culture and identity. Yet consumption is also an immediate economic category. Commodities have to be designed, produced, distributed and marketed before they are sold, bought and, ultimately, consumed.
