ABSTRACT
The study of consumerism as a culture or as an ideology has long been an orthodox sociological interest (Veblen 1934; Baudrillard 1970; Warde 1992; Featherstone 1991). However, in South Korea, it was not until the early 1990s that social scientific (Kim 1987a, 1987b; Paik 1994, 1996) and lay public awareness and discussion of social ‘issues’ shifted from the subject of inequalities of income distribution, popular in the 1980s, to that of consumption patterns of various social groups and consumerism as a culture, an ideology or a lifestyle.1 By then, it had become obvious that consumerism, in all its diverse forms, has become part of South Korean’s daily reality. Indeed, before the Asian currency crisis and subsequent deep economic downturn which began in July 1997 and which severely affected South Korea, the refrain of South Korean media was, ‘The level of consumption is rapidly rising. Consumption expenditures in skiing, golf, and dining out are sharply increasing. The tendency to buy bigger size refrigerators or cars is growing explosively. Imported goods are dangerously penetrating into domestic markets’. The media warned against soaring levels of consumption and the environmental costs, as the huge amount of energy consumption and garbage disposal in South Korea were undeniable indications of a nationwide expansion of consumption (Jeong 1994; Paik 1994).
