Consumer Culture and Modernity

by Don Slater

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context.
Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought.


With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Theory

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 1997

Reviews

[Malcolm]

This is an impressive critique of theories of consumerism, consumer culture and consumer society grounded in a broadly Marxist framework that argues that although we regularly rediscover consumers and consumption as a marker of the age these are not new but essential to and within capitalism; consumer culture is, for Slater, an element of modernity. There is a sense, in places, that the big picture is lost among the detailed critique of the various theoretical approaches he is exploring, but then the issues themselves are complex and demand close attention. The strength of the book is Slater's nuanced assessment of an eclectic but vital range of the thinking and writing since the late 18th century about consumption, his thoughtful but not tendentious structuring of the text around production, distribution, and use. Several sections will be required reading for my students, in part because it is so clear, in part because it will push them into looking at bigger pictures, in part, because as Slater notes, the book does not answer big questions but provides a framework to make sense of other work around the issues it explores.

[claudia ☆]

2.5; interesting but killed me

[Erin]

A good overview of all the major debates in consumer culture, filtered through the idea that consumer culture is not solely a product of the postmodern period, but has its beginnings in modernity.