Lee, Martyn J.

The consumer society reader

Malden

Oxford

2003

9780631207986

0631207988

The Consumer Society Reader is the most substantial collection to date on contemporary and classic literature on consumption and consumer society. It introduces students and researchers to the topics, themes, and preoccupations of twentieth-century consumer culture. Part I introduces some of the important theoretical and conceptual material through which we have come to appreciate the dominant themes of our consumer society. Contributions from a range of thinkers - Pierre Bourdieu, Dick Hebdige, and Michel de Certeau, among others - give special attention to the nature of human needs, their satisfaction, and the broad implications of the provision of social and material goods by a capitalist means of production. Part II chronicles the evolution of the modern consumer society from its inception to the present day. Contemporary and popular writers, including John Kenneth Galbraith, Vance Packard, and Jean Baudrillard chart the dynamism of consumer society: its many changing social, cultural, economic, and political turns over time: and the spirited responses it has provoked from critics.

Preface

Introduction

Part I Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations

1 Estranged Labour
Karl Marx

2 The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret
Karl Marx

3 Beyond Use Value
Jean Baudrillard

4 Conspicuous Consumption
Thorstein Veblen

5 The Puzzle of Modern Consumerism
Colin Campbell

6 The Uses of Goods
Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood

7 Introduction to Distinction
Pierre Bourdieu

8 Lifestyle and Consumer Culture
Mike Featherstone

9 Object Domains, Ideology and Interests
Daniel Miller

10 Object as Image: The Italian Scooter Cycle
Dick Hebdige

11 ″Making Do": Uses and Tactics
Michel de Certeau

Part II The Character of the Consumer Society

12 Looking Backwards '
Don Slater

13 Assembling a New World of Facts
Stuart Ewen

14 Was There Love on the Dole?
Gary Cross

15 A Child's Cartography
Sharon Zukin

16 The Dependence Effect
John Kenneth Galbraith

17 "Growthmanship"
Vance Packard

18 Textiles: The Fabric of Life
Ernest Dichter

19 A New Language?
Jean Baudrillard

20 Aesthetic Abstraction of the Commodity: Surface - Package - Advertising Image
Wolfgang Fritz Haug

21 The Bonding of Media and Advertising
William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally

22 The Characteristic Mode of Consumption of Fordism
Michel Aglietta

23 Theorizing the Transition
David Harvey

24 The Politics of Consumption
Frank Mort

25 The Commodities of Culture
John Fiske

26 Dupes and Guerrillas: The Dialectics of Cultural Consumption
John Clarke

27 Sovereign Consumption
Jim McGuigan

28 The Promotional Condition of Contemporary Culture
Andrew Wernick

Name Index

Subject Index