ABSTRACT

Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) addresses the rich mosaic of consumer culture and the ways it affects four behavioral clusters of theoretical and practical interest: personal identity; social roles; collectivities and affiliations; and belief systems and values in the framework of global market capitalism. Researchers examine how these interrelations are manifested across a wide range of consumption contexts and bring to light core commonalities, revealing points of distinction that help us better understand why consumers do what they do and why consumer culture takes the forms it does. The domain of consumption spans the acquisition, use, and disposition processes of things, experiences, services, images, and ideas. Not neglected is an examination of the various ideological currents through which consumers legitimate or alternatively contest consumer culture.

The basic CCT framework is a heuristic mapping of four clusters of theoretical and practical interests. These common structures of diverse theoretical interest systematically link together studies that manifest diversity in terms of methodological orientations (e.g., ethnography, phenomenology, multiple schools of textual analyses, historical methods, netnography and other web-based methods). They combine diverse theoretical traditions (variously drawing from sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, critical theory, and feminist studies to name a few). This chapter discusses and gives examples of these four structures of theoretical interest and provides a brief account of the origins of this school of inquiry.