Consumer Culture - Defining, Origins of

Any spectator of the contemporary visual landscape readily recognizes the prominence of material goods and their consumption in the increasingly global culture. Some observers argue that the landscape is “littered” with consumption icons and that it is a product of a larger project to create and sustain consumer culture. Other, less conspiratorial perspectives at least acknowledge the role that the “dream worlds” of the media play in perpetuating consumerism.

Defining Consumer Culture

There are many definitions of consumer culture. To begin, consumer culture should not be confused with two of its attributes: consumerism and materialism.

According to Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang (1995), consumerism has at least five distinct connotations. It is a moral doctrine, a means for demarcating social status, a vehicle for economic development, a public policy, and a social movement. Consumerism is defined here as the collection of behaviors, attitudes, and values that are associated with the consumption of material goods.

Materialism is another perspective that is prevalent in consumer culture. The term “materialism” also has a rich etymology. However, as it relates here, Russell Belk (1985, p. 265) defines materialism as “the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions.” At the highest levels of materialism, possessions assume a central place in a person’s life and are believed to provide the greatest sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. While one might readily think that materialism is a good synonym for consumerism, materialism, at least as it is defined here, only covers a part of consumerism. Namely, materialism deals only with the social value of material goods.

Consumer culture, which subsumes both consumerism and materialism, has been studied from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, including communication, cultural studies, theology, sociology, psychology, marketing, anthropology, and philosophy. Regardless of the disciplinary approach, a central feature of consumer culture is the relationship between people and material goods. Generically, consumer culture is a social arrangement in which the buying and selling of goods and services is not only a predominant activity of everyday life but also an important arbiter of social organization, significance, and meaning.

Origins of Consumer Culture

In a review of historical accounts of consumption and culture, Grant McCracken (1988) remarks that there is little consensus as to the origins of consumer culture. According to the perspective of Neil McKendrick and his associates (1982), consumer culture began in eighteenth-century England with the commercialization of fashion precipitating a mass change in taste. According to these historians, the new predilection for style fueled a demand for clothing that was mass-produced through technical innovations in the textile industry and mass-marketed through innovations in printing technologies that afforded wide-scale advertising.

Another historian, Rosalind Williams (1982), claims that the consumer revolution began in late-nineteenth-century France, when the pioneering efforts of French retailers and advertisers transformed Paris into a “pilot plant of mass consumption” through the Paris expositions of 1889 and 1900. Williams argues that the expositions significantly contributed to the development of the department store and the trade show, key factors in the development of consumer culture.

Finally, McCracken (1988) suggests that it may be less useful to identify the specific points of origin for the consumer revolution than to note patterns of cultural change that foretold the radical restructuring of society. He identifies three moments in history that undergird the development of modern consumer culture. The first was Elizabethan politics in sixteenth-century England, where Queen Elizabeth I introduced the use of objects to her highly ceremonial court to communicate the legitimacy of her rule. The second was the increased participation of the masses in the marketplace in eighteenth-century Europe. As more members of the culture could participate in the marketplace because of the widespread prosperity of the industrial revolution, the marketplace expanded, creating an explosion of consumer choices. The gentry, the middle class, and the lower class perceived and adopted the social significance of goods and attempted to appropriate those significances for themselves. The third was the institutionalization of consumption through the emergence of the department store in the nineteenth century. The department store, McCracken argues, fundamentally changed the nature and the context of purchase activity as well as the nature of the information and influence to which the consumer was subjected.

Don Slater (1997) summarizes these thoughts by arguing that consumer culture began with a wide penetration of consumer goods into the everyday lives of people across social strata, that consumption was ignited through a new sense of fashion and taste, and finally that the culture was cemented through the development of infrastructures, organizations, and practices that took advantage of the new markets, namely, the rise of shopping, advertising, and marketing.