Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the basic meanings of consumption and consumer research and analyses the very term of consumption using research in cognitive linguistics. It examines the baton in arguing that the fundamental assumption of modern consumerism is an emphasis on feeling and emotion using a practice and ideology that is markedly individualistic. The book draws on the subdiscipline of postmodern consumer research in marketing departments by surveying its principal contours and probable programmatic progress. It discusses consumer culture and multiculturalism as elaborate multidimensional concepts of essential importance in consumer research. The book explains about crossing borders and studying the intersection of markets and cultures, also involving the complex interfaces between multiculturalism, capitalism and democracy. It also discusses consumption as a symbolic vocabulary and resource for identity construction and maintenance through communities of practice.