Question

Explain how economic policy change a consumer culture? (5-8 sentences)

Answer 1

Consumer culture can be defined as a “social arrangement in which the relations between the [lived cultural experience of everyday life] and social resources, between meaningful [valued] ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, is mediated through markets.” Consumer culture is a system in which consumption, a set of behaviors found in all times and places, is dominated by the consumption of commercial products. It is also a system in which the transmission of existing cultural values, norms and customary ways of doing things from generation to generation “is largely understood to be carried out through the exercise of free personal choice in the private sphere of everyday life.” Furthermore, consumer culture is also bound up with the idea of modernity, that is, a world “no longer governed by tradition but rather by flux,” and in which “social actors who are deemed to be individually free and rational” holds sway . And finally, consumer culture denote an economy in which value has been divorced from the material satisfaction of wants and the sign value of goods takes precedence .   In consumer culture predispositions toward social emulation, matching, and imitation expressed through marketplace choices are accompanied by a penchant for differentiation, individuality, and distinction also expressed through marketplace choices. Together these motives drive the characteristically rapid turn‐over in goods and services. These dynamics are often thought to have been triggered by the purposeful social engineering of marketers, advertisers and retailers , and to have spread from roots in the fashion industry into all parts of social life . Four more crucial aspects of consumer culture include:

1. The pervasive and rapid circulation of commercial products, that is, things produced for exchange within a capitalist market, takes priority over and above things redistributed by governmental through the welfare state or exchanged among social groups through gift giving.

2. The relative independence of consumption activities from those related to production and the growing power and authority this gives to some consumers over market dynamics

. 3. Changes in the relationships between different systems of production and valuation in society such that these are all increasingly interlinked and mediated by market values; i.e., How much does it cost? How much will someone pay?

4. The special importance given to the use of consumer goods in the allocation of individual status, prestige, perceived well‐being and quality of life .  

Consumer culture is produced by agents who work directly in the market economy as managers, marketers, and advertising “creatives;” by independent “brokers” who analyze and criticize consumer products; by cultural intermediaries such as media figures (e.g., movie and television stars, celebrity chefs, religious broadcasters, public intellectuals, politicians, etc) who model and disseminate attractive models for consumption behavior; and by dissidents who initiate alternative responses to the mass consumption system, responses that are typically re‐ appropriated into the market system as differentiated, niche products . This broad definitional framework allows us to consider consumption as an institutional field, i.e., a set of interconnected economic and cultural institutions complicit in the global production of commodities for individual demand with enormous scope for local elaboration and differentiation