Talk:Consumerism

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This article was preserved after a vote for its deletion. See its archived VfD entry for details. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:07, 25 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

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  • Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.
    • Author Unknown
  • "You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
    • Eric Hoffer
  • "After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world." - Pam Shaw
  • "You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need." - Vernon Howard
  • The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. - Mad Magazine
  • "Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. - Henry David Thoreau
  • "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
    • John Berger
  • To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year. - Elwyn Brooks White
  • I may be a pessimist, but the philosophy of anti-thrift just now coming into being seems to me the greatest danger to the peace of the world." - Adriano Tilgher
  • "There must be more to life than having everything!
    • Maurice Sendak
  • "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." - From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
  • "He who buys what he does not need steals from himself." - Author Unknown
  • "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
  • "The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more." - Kin Hubbard
  • "In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea." - Richard Bach
  • "The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one." - Paul Heyne
  • Forethought and temperance are the virtues which produced thrift, and with thrift the economic progress of society. And those are the virtues which today are gravely compromised." - Adriano Tilgher
  • Who covets more, is evermore a slave." - Robert Herrick
  • He who dies with the most toys, wins." - Anonymous
  • God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. Mahatma Gandhi


"Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion. Ambrose Bierce

  • The origins of the consumer society as we know it today can be traced back a few hundred years. According to McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb (1982) the birthplace can be found in eighteenth century England. However, as McCracken (1988) has pointed out, the consumer revolution as a whole needs to be seen as part of a larger transformation in Western societies, which began in the sixteenth century. The social changes brought about by that transformation resulted in the modification of Western concepts of time, space, society, the individual, the family and the state. This provided the base on which the consumer revolution could thrive and develop into a mass phenomenon.
  • McCracken (1988) was one of the first scholars offering a comprehensive review of the history of consumption. He approached the subject by dividing the course of events into three moments. The first moment falls within the last quarter of the sixteenth century in Elizabethan England where profound changes in consumption pattern occurred in a small section of the population. This was the moment where some of the established concepts, notably the concepts of space, the individual and the family began to falter. The circumstances bringing about these changes served as a primer for the consumer movement that would come a century later. McCracken describes this as the second moment. It was characterized by a heightened propensity to spend, by a greatly extended choice of goods, and an increased frequency of purchases. Fashion started to play an important role too, and, for the first time, the individual as a consumer became the target of manipulative attempts. The origins of modern marketing instruments can be traced back to this time. With the rise of the third moment, the consumer movement was already a structural feature of life (McCracken, 1988). However, the development was not yet completed. The 19th century added new qualities to the movement and turned it into a "dream world of consumption" (Williams, 1982). The new developments included the invention of the department store, the world exhibitions and the medium of film.
  • Considering the further developments that have happened since then, one needs to add a fourth and a fifth moment to McCracken's three. The fourth moment was induced by the event of Fordism at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States. By the 1950s Fordism had spread through the whole of Western Europe shifting the consumer revolution towards mass production and mass consumption and turning it from an elite to a mass phenomenon (Bocock, 1993; Gabriel and Lang, 1995). This allowed for a new type of consumer to emerge. This consumer is no longer classified nor constrained by social class. Instead, he emphasizes individuality, self-expression and stylistic self-consciousness and is recognized by the kind of lifestyle chosen (Featherstone, 1991).
  • Ibid, p.8
  • Mass production and consumption in the 20th century Mass consumption in the modern sense was first established in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Britain followed, and by the 1950s, the rest of Western Europe joined in.
  • Ibid, p.14
  • From the beginning of the 20th century onwards, more and more groups of consumers emerged being able to exercise choice in what they bought because the amount of money that they had left over after the necessary spending on subsistence (i.e., food, clothes and shelter) steadily increased. At the start of the 20th century, working class consumers in Britain spent 50 to 75% of their income on food. Surplus cash was spent on luxuries like drink and tobacco. Today consumers only need to spend 10 and 30% of their incomes on food. Therefore, much more money is left over to spend on services and entertainment, the various forms of savings and items of conspicuous consumption like dress, personal possession and decoration for the home (Gabriel and Lang, 1995).
  • Ibid, p.15
  • Taking Campbell's position, the answer he offers to the question of why there is an ongoing pursuit for novelty in modern consumer societies seems plausible. His theory explains how wanting is extinguished so quickly and why people discard goods as rapidly as they acquire them. The basic motivation underlying consumption thus is the desire to experience in reality the pleasures already enjoyed in one’s imagination, each new product presenting a possibility for realizing this ambition. Product attributes are of little importance in this world of consuming fantasies because it is possible to attach whatever properties one desires to the provided commodities. The only limit is one's ability to imagine it. Hence, according to Campbell, "the inexhaustibility of wants lies in the inevitable gap between the perfected pleasures of the dream and the imperfect joys of reality" (1987, p. 186).
  • Ibid, p.22
  • In support of Campbell's theory, it generally is reported that consumption dreams are experienced as pleasurable and that the greatest pleasures lies in letting the dream come true. Yet, after having allowed a dream to become true often negative feelings prevail. In a cross-cultural study, Belk, Ger and Askegard (1997) showed that young consumers in the US, in Turkey and in Denmark experience the moments of acquisition as joyful, exciting, positive, content and relaxed, often accompanied by feelings of accomplishment and pride. After the acquisition however negative feelings like a let down, regret, frustration, sadness and disinterest often arise. These findings reinforce Campbell's proposition that possession provides a brief happy state, but after acquiring goods people have to turn to new sources of desire. Hence, the thrill lies more in the desire than in its realization.
  • Ibid, p.23

Quotes requiring editorial work[edit]

These quotes exceed length guidelines, and need to be condensed to meet guidelines (Note: Previous unsigned edit by Peter1c. Several of the quotes removed for length or little more than a sentence, and as such I have returned them, in addition to editing the James/Szeman quote. At 256 words and with actual quotations and an intro that provides a time range, I'm restoring the Glickman quote at 256 as well. CensoredScribe (talk) 15:27, 3 September 2019 (UTC))[reply]
  • In thinking about modernity and modern capitalism, Max Weber spoke a century ago about an iron cage. Consumerism brings to mind a different cage. There is a fiendishly simple method of trapping monkeys in Africa that suggests the paradoxes which confront liberty in this era of consumerism. A small box containing a large nut is affixed to a well-anchored post. The nut can be accessed only through a single, small hole in the box designed to accommodate an outstretched monkey’s grasping paw. Easy to reach in, but when the monkey clasps the nut, impossible to get out. Of course, it is immediately evident to everyone (except the monkey) that all the monkey must do to free itself is let go of its prize. Clever hunters have discovered, however, that they can secure their prey hours or even days later because the monkey—driven by desire—will not release the nut, even until death. Is the monkey free or not?
    And what of the consumer? There is of course endless talk about giving people “what they want,” and how the market “empowers” consumers. The market, indeed, does not tell us what to do; it gives us what we want—once it gets through telling us what it is that we want. It promises liberty and happiness while, in truth, delivering neither. More to the point, consumerism encourages a kind of civic schizophrenia, a disorder that divides the citizen into opposing fragments and denies legitimacy to the part that we understand to be “civic” or “public.” The market treats choice as fundamentally private, a matter not of determining some deliberative “we should” but only of enumerating all the “wants” that we harbor as private consumers and creatures of personal desire. Yet private choices inevitably do have social consequences and public outcomes. When these derive from purely personal preferences, the results are often irrational and unintended, at wide variance with the kind of society we might choose through democratic deliberation. Such private choices, though technically “free,” are quite literally dysfunctional with respect to our values and norms. Privatization means the choices we make eventually determine the social outcomes we must suffer together, but which we never directly choose in common.
  • Even within states, where a diluted sovereignty still obtains, consumerism steadily degrades its meaning. The conflation of consumption and citizenship is poisonous to democracy’s survival: When prudent adults become grasping children, the concept of public interest forfeits all meaning. If there is hope, then, it must be in restoring a balance between consumers and citizens, between markets and democracy, and in finding innovative ways to establish that balance globally, where there exists little in the way of democratic oversight or regulation.
  • Benjamin R. Barber, (Spring 2008). "Shrunken Sovereign: Consumerism, Globalization, and American Emptiness". World Affairs. Retrieved 23 April 2013.
  • Although we like to think of ourselves as civilised thinkers, we’re subconsciously still driven by an impulse for survival, domination and expansion. This is an impulse which now finds expression in the idea that inexorable economic growth is the answer to everything, and, given time, will redress all the world’s existing inequalities.
    The problem with that, according to Rees and Hern, is that it fails to recognise that the physical resources to fuel this growth are finite. “We’re still driven by growing and expanding, so we will use up all the oil, we will use up all the coal, and we will keep going till we fill the Petri dish and pollute ourselves out of existence,” he says.
    But there’s another, more recent factor that’s making things even worse, and it’s an invention of human culture rather than an evolved trait. According to Rees, the change took place after the second world war in the US, when factories previously producing weapons lay idle, and soldiers were returning with no jobs to go to.
    American economists and the government of the day decided to revive economic activity by creating a culture in which people were encouraged to accumulate and show off material wealth, to the point where it defined their status in society and their self-image.
    Rees quotes economist Victor Lebow as saying in 1955: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate”.
  • “Lebow and his cronies got together to ‘create’ the modern advertising industry, which plays to primitive beliefs,” says Rees. “It makes you feel insecure, because the advertising industry turned our sense of self-worth into a symbolic presentation of the possessions we have,” he told me. “We’ve turned consumption into a necessity, and how we define ourselves.”
    The result is a world in which rampant consumption in rich countries is rapidly outstripping the resources in the world needed to satisfy demand.
  • Another way of gauging interest in consumer politics is to examine the new significations of the word "consumerism" that emerged in the 1950s. Champions of "free enterprise" celebrated consumerism as the essence of American freedom in the 1950s and a bulwark in the Cold War. For these celebrants, the new stage of mass affluence - the hallmark of American freedom - was centrally dependent on consumption. As Robert Whitney, the president of the International Distribution Congress, said in 1955, "Without consumption, capitalism will crumble," and he offered "consumerism" as the proper name for this "new system." Later that year, a delegation of America's "top salesmen" visited the Soviet Union "to show Russia how American 'consumerism' really works." This group, the National Sales Executives, also proclaimed "consumerism" to be the appropriate name for the economy of the United States; the Russians will "hear about consumerism instead of communism<' declared one delegate. The following year, Robert J. Eggert, a marketing research manager for Ford, told a columnist for the Washington Post that consumerism was the perfect "word for America," since it denoted choice and a high standard of living, two key elements separating Americans from Russians. The "Kitchen Debate," in which Vice President Richard Nixon confronted the Russian premier, Nichkita Khruschev, about the superiority of U.S. domestic conveniences at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in July 1959, marked the culmination of this thinking.
  • Ibid, pp.264-265.
  • Other commentators took the existence of this form of consumerism as proof that the consumer movement was unncecessary or irrelevant. In a 1952 lecture, Charles Phillips, the president of Bates College, claimed that "the actions of consumers in recent years indicate that, in general, they are quite satisfied with the retailer's efforts to serve them - to treat them as king." His evidence: "If they were not, I think, we might find them rushing to join consumer's cooperatives or looking for aid in the Consumer Movement. In fact, they are doing neither. Consumers Union...has achieved a monthly circulation of but 500,000 copies." Like other champions of mass consumerism, as opposed to political consumerism, Phillips here paid backhanded tribute to the consumer movement, and although he prefaced the number with a "but," the membership figure he quoted represented a huge increase from the supposed high point of the 1930s and even the 1940s. In his book The Powerful Consumer, George Katona made the same point from the other side. Conceding that interest in testing agencies "has risen greatly during the last few years," he argued that this was so because such agencies assisted consumers' in their deliberations about what to buy rather than because of a broader concern about the fate of consumers in the public sphere.
  • Ibid, p. 265.
  • The central role played by consumerism in contemporary social life has led some scholars to suggest that it is in practices of consumption that we should now locate political, economic and cultural values and rationalities. One commons trategy has been to re-locate the critical functions of culture with respect to society – what for the historical avant-garde emerged from art’s separation from bourgeois life (Bürger 43 ) – to consumerism itself. Lauren Langman, for instance, articulates a not uncommon position within studies of contemporary culture: "‘In our global age, when consumerism is hegemonic, consumer culture provides spaces for transgression’. Political and normative objections to consumerism have to be measured against the empirical fact of consumption as a wide-spread, globalized,and defining practice of everyday life." The Argentinian anthropologist Nestor Garcia Canclini has perhaps gone the farthest in re-thinking the slide from citizens to consumers as something more than a sign of political or cultural loss that has tobe combated at all costs. He writes: "The relation between citizens and consumers has been altered throughout the world due to economic, technological, and cultural changes that have impeded the constitution of identities through national symbols. Now they are shaped by theprogramming of, say, Hollywood, Televisa, and MTV. For many men and women,especially youth, the questions specific to citizenship, such as how we inform ourselves and who represents our interests, are answered more often than not through private consumption of commodities and media offerings than through the abstract rules of democracy or through participation in discredited political organizations. This process could be understood as loss or depoliticization from the perspective of the ideals of liberal or enlightened democracy. But we may also posit,as do James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, that the political notion of citizenship is expanded by including rights to housing, health, education, and the access to other goods through consumption. It is in this sense that I propose reconceptualizing consumption, not as a mere setting for useless expenditures and irrational impulses,but as a site that is good for thinking, where a good part of economic, sociopolitical,and psychological rationality is organized in all societies.
  • Néstor García Canclini, "Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts", University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001, p. 5); as quoted in ibid,xxiv.
  • In ‘Towards a New Politics of Consumption’, the sociologist Juliet Schorproposes a different way of addressing contemporary consumption. She focuses on an important, if under-theorized aspect of consumption. Schor believes that there is enormous discontent with consumerism; what is lacking is a way to conceptualize this discontent. Social well-being in a consumer society is linked to income levels and the ability to consume. What is lacking is a market for‘alternatives to status or positional goods’. There is a market for things, but not for public goods or more free time. In turn, since it is difficult to express one’s desires for these kinds of goods in a society where achievement is measured by monetary wealth, consumer society ‘under-produces’ goods that people find important: a clean environment (since environmental costs are not included in the price of goods), leisure (as it is harder to choose more free time over higher incomes in virtually every employment sector), and all manner of public goods(since mass transit is so poor, we are forced to use private cars, which in turn leads to a further decline in mass transit since it is under-utilized and in need of subsidy in virtually every urban space on the globe). A new politics of consumption would create a language and a political framework in which it is possible to create an economy of ‘less work and less stuff’. Schor believes that there is a strong demand for such an economy, even if it is difficult to see it because we can only participate in those forms of consumption presently on offer. She makes seven suggestions. First is the revival of discussions of the minimal social needs for every individual in society to be fully able to participate in it; second is a focus on quality of life rather than ‘quantity of stuff’, which in turn is related to the need for more ecologically sustainable forms of consumption. Addressing minimal social needs has to be accompanied by more democratic consumption practices, that is, a way of delegitimating the status of high-end products and changing the rules of the game of distinction. Fifth and sixth, a ‘vast consumer policy agenda’ has to put pressure on the development of government policy, including the creation of policy to control the cultural environment (ad-free zones, diversity in retailing, etc.) Finally, a point that is absolutely crucial to any politics of consumption: ‘everything we consume has been produced. So a new politics of consumption must take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards’.
  • Ibid, xxv
  • ...in Western developed societies culture is profoundly connected to and dependent upon consumption. Without consumer goods, modern, developed societies would use key instruments for the reproduction, representation, and manipulation of their culture...The meaning of consumer goods and the meaning creation accomplished by consumer processes are important parts of the scaffolding of our present realities. Without consumer goods, certain acts of self-definition and collective definition in this culture would be impossible. (McCracken, 1990: xi)
  • If we are therefore to accept the contention that consumption is more than a mere economic phenomenon, then its cultural dimensions cannot be addressed in isolation. Indeed, what is more interesting about consumption is that, 'as a set of social, cultural and economic practices, together with the associated ideology of consumerism, [it] has served to legitimate capitalism in the eyes of millions of ordinary people' (Bocock, 1993: 2). It is in this sense that the notion of consumerism can be said to be of more sociological interest than consumption per se. The study of consumerism is a broader and more reflexive enterprise than a concern for the relatively straightforward process of simply purchasing and consuming a particular good or service. I will suggest that a study of consumerism should actually attempt to come to terms with the complexities that lie behind the act of consumption. In effect, while consumption is an act, consumerism is a way of life. From this point of view, consumerism is the cultural expression and manifestation of the apparently ubiquitous act of consumption.
  • Ibid, p.4
  • Consumerism is an important topic for social scientists precisely because it appears, at a common-sense level, to be somewhat inconsequential. Because we accept the routine of the consuming experience as legitimate, powerful ideological elements of that experience go largely unnoticed. What I will go on to suggest is that consumerism should be considered as an issue that has a fundamental influence upon the everyday experience of social life in advanced capitalist societies.
  • Consumerism is quite possibly the key concern of contemporary social science inasmuch as it transcends everyday life and does so in such a way that consumers take it for granted.
  • Ibid, p.5
  • As far as sociology is concerned, consumption did not emerge as a serious subject of concern until the second half of the twentieth century, and most dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the general tendency to see consumption as ahistorical, as Gabriel and Lang (1995) note, commentators have increasingly come to acknowledge that the social significance of consumption began to emerge far earlier.
  • Ibid, p.8
  • It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that consumerism was proposed by the British and American governments of the 1980s as a prime focus of people's lives and, in Britain in particular, that this proposal was gratefully consumed by sections of the population keen to take advantage of the opportunity to purchase their own council houses and to take their annual holidays abroad.
  • Consumerism has come to be seen as essentially democratic and has been marketed to the population as such, despite the inevitable question marks over access to resources and the extent to which consumption can provide all players with a level playing field. As Ewen (1976) notes in his book Captains of Consciousness, democracy does not merely flow our of people's desires, but actively reflects their ability to participate in a value structure. Consumerism offers an apparently democratic value structure which parties from both ends of the political spectrum have sought to exploit for their own political gain.
  • Ibid, p.10
  • One of the most significant classical contributions to a sociological understanding of consumption, bearing in mind the centrality given to the question of consumption in his analysis, is that of Thorstein Veblen, who saw consumer goods as markers of social prestige and status. In his analysis of the American nouvauz riches of the late nineteenth century, Veblen (1899) described a 'new leisure class' intent on mimicking the lifestyles of the upper classes in Europe. Veblen (1899) argued that higher social groupings continually updated their consumption habits in order to stay one step ahead of the nouveaux riches. As such, consumption was significant largely for its status-conferring qualities, in that what was emerging was a hierarchically organized social structure based upon the prestigious consumption patterns of the rich and in particular the gentleman of leisure who,
    In order to avoid stultification...must...cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent upon him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods...Closely related to the requirement that the gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement that he must know how to consume themin a seemly manner. (Veblen, 1994 edn: 47; orig. published 1899)
  • Ibid, p.18-19
  • Seeing consumption as a means of establishing, as opposed to merely expressing, variations between social groups, Bourdieu (1984) argues that human beings are motivated by the need to reproduce a collective pattern of preferences based on class demarcation. What Bourdieu describes as 'cultural capital' is crucial in this respect, in that different classes are educationally qualified to take advantage of different aspects of symbolic capital. The dominant classes therefore demonstrate their superiority through access to high culture and high consumption.
  • Ibid, p.21
  • Consumerism as a way of life incorporates social processes which are far beyond the direct control of specific social groups. Indeed, there could be some basis to the argument that, far from symbolic specialists becoming increasingly prevalent in a postmodern world, consumption provides everybody with a sense of control. The essence of consumerism therefore lies in the feeling that as consumers we are all gaining some semblance of authority over the everyday construction of our lives through consumption.
  • Ibid, p.25
  • One of the most well-known and extreme approaches to the influence of a mass-mediated consumer culture is that of Jean Baudrillard, the 'high priest' of postmodernism. Baudrillard (1988: 29) describes the role of consumerism in contemporary society as constituting 'a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species'. In this sense, 'Consumer society is...the society for the apprenticeship of consumption, for the social indoctrination of consumption. In other words, this is a new and specific mode of socialization related to the rise of new productive forces and the monopolistic reconstruction of a high output economic system' (Baudrillard, 1988: 49).
    Baudrillard (1988) points out that the idea that human beings have certain 'needs' which have to be satisfied through consumption is a myth inasmuch as human beings are never actually satisfied and thus such 'needs' are never actually fulfilled. In this sense, Baudrillard argues that the consumer good takes on the value of a sign. Discussing the example of the washing machine, Baudrillard argues that consumer objects are no longer tied to function or a defined need, but rather respond to what he describes as a 'logic of desire' (1988: 44). Consumer objects exist in a 'world of general hysteria' where goods become interchangeable (1988: 45). They all signify the potential to fulfill human desire, but can never actually do so. What therefore emerges is a constant fluidity of differential desires and meanings.
  • Ibid, pp.25-26.
  • Douglas and Isherwood therefore refer to consumer goods as an information system and as such famously argue that 'Consumption is the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape' (1996: 37). In effect, consumption acts as a non-verbal medium for human creativity. In this context, the two authors point out that, contrary to some of the over-romanticized visions of the past, social interaction actually improves with affluence. Consumption provides degrees of freedom to the rich which are simply not available to the poor. More importantly, that is crucial about the act of consumption is the meaning that is actually invested in it. When a person purchases a particular bar of chocolate he or she is not simply buying sustenance, but a range of symbolic meanings expressing membership of a social world. In this sense, consumer goods actively articulate existing social divisions and structures. But what is especially interesting about Douglas and Isherwood's work, as Lee (1993) notes, is that it provides an antidote to the structure-down model presented by authors such as Baudrillard. From this point of view, consumers are not seen to be the mere products of structural forces such as advertising and the media. Consumers are always subject to certain pre-established patterns of consumption and social convention, but symbolic goods are purposefully managed by consumers within the cultural rules and codes laid down for and by them.
  • Ibid, p.29
  • The consumer has become a god-like figure, before whom markets and politicians alike bow. Everywhere it seems, the consumer is triumphant...And yet the consumer is also seen as a weak and malleable creature, easily manipulated, dependent, passive and foolish. Immersed in illusions, addicted to joyless pursuits of ever-increasing living standards, the consumer, far from being a god, is a pawn, in games played in invisible boardrooms. (Gabriel and Lang, 1995: 1)
  • Ibid, p.31
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