ABSTRACT

This chapter engages with a number of prominent social and cultural theorists to assess the state of late-modern consumer society—or, lifestyle-oriented and reflexive consumer society at the end of the twentieth century. Key thinkers discussed include Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Featherstone, Lash and Urry, Giddens, Campbell, Frank, Twitchell, and Foucault. The chapter then turns to theoretical debates about advertising more specifically, including long-standing criticisms (and defenses) of advertising’s economic consequences, but also an increasing late-twentieth-century interest in cultural criticisms of advertising—including issues of identity politics.