Consumer Culture. History, Theory, Politics

This book provides an historically grounded and theoretically informed analysis of contemporary consumer culture, examining its diversity, reach, and enduring ambivalence. Rather than treating consumption simply as the passive appropriation of commodities or as an expression of individual choice, it approaches it as an ordinary yet socially regulated practice through which people engage with, appropriate, and negotiate commercially produced goods, meanings, and identities. Consumer culture emerges as a field in which markets and cultures, commercial codes and everyday practices intersect, generating both possibilities for agency and forms of regulation. The book is organized around three central tensions: production and consumption, rationality and irrationality, and freedom and oppression. These oppositions have shaped both popular and social scientific understandings of consumption, yet consumer practices continually complicate them. Across historical, theoretical, and political-cultural perspectives, the book shows how consumers actively participate in the making of consumption, acquiring forms of consumer capital through practices and experiences while remaining embedded in social, cultural, and commercial relations. The historical analysis situates Western consumer culture within broader transformations of capitalism, including the colonial and imperial circulation of commodities. The theoretical discussion critically engages with and brings together approaches ranging from neoclassical economics and classical sociology to critical theory, communication approaches, and theories of practice and ritual de-commoditization, developing an integrated understanding of consumer agency, subjectivity, and power. The discussion of the politics of consumption turns to some of the key sites of tension between freedom and domination in consumption such as representation and advertising, the commodity form and de-commoditization, normalization and the boundaries of consumption, spatialities and feelings, globalization and localization, alternative consumption, and sustainability. Taken together, these perspectives show consumer culture as a contested and relational field in which agency and normativity, subjectivity and power are continuously negotiated. Its enduring ambivalence lies precisely in the ways consumption can simultaneously enable and constrain, empower and regulate, while opening spaces for appropriation, negotiation, resistance, and refusal.