Rise of Consumerism

7 Key excerpts on "Rise of Consumerism"

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  Acknowledging Consumption

  • Daniel Miller(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 CONSUMPTION WITHIN HISTORICAL STUDIES

  Paul Glennie

  IThe significance of consumption for history

  INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

  Earlier this century, industrial and agricultural revolutions were being discovered almost everywhere that historians looked. Recently it has been consumer revolutions, at least among European and American historians (little literature has hitherto addressed other histories of consumption, though see Clunas 1991). Phrases like the birth of consumer society, emergent modern consumption, the rise of mass consumption, and the rise of mass market culture have been applied to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Thirsk 1978); Restoration England (Earle 1989: Shammas 1990; Weatherill 1988); the early eighteenth century (Eversley 1967); the Georgian period (Campbell 1987; McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb 1982; Williams 1987); the late nineteenth century (Fox and Lears 1983; Fraser 1981; Lee 1981); and between the two World Wars (Miller 1991). And, of course, each account raises questions about defining ‘consumer society’, and about consumption’s connections to wider economic and cultural changes.

  This proliferation reflects both continuous growth in Western consumption, and historians’ various definitions of ‘consumer society’. In addition, work on consumption is characterised by fragmentation, with very many local case-studies. Most general treatments of consumption either cover short periods and a single country, or take a long-run comparative view only for certain goods. The sheer variety of available sources (artefactual, documentary, visual, literary), and the divergent agendas of specialised research fields in different countries, exacerbate diversity and fragmentation. Different histories inform, and are informed by, highly divergent general analyses on consumption, and many historians distrust explicit theorising as a comparative and synthesising device.

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  Consumption

  • Dr Robert Bocock, Robert Bocock(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 The emergence of modern consumerism

  The social and cultural processes surrounding consumption in western capitalism during the twentieth century have been influ-enced by earlier cultural values, carried by various social status groups into the modern capitalist period. Among these carriers of cultural values, the early rational, peaceable, bourgeois capitalists of Britain and Holland, whose world-view was analysed by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, have played a crucial role of world historical significance. Their migration, sometimes forced upon them, across the Atlantic, laid the basis of the modern United States of America—the social formation which has come to epitomise the modern consumer’s dreamland, or heaven on earth. The analysis Weber provided of this group, the early rational, Calvinist capitalists of the seventeenth century, will be discussed briefly here, before looking at later changes to this cultural patterning underpinning rational capitalism in the eighteenth century.

  The changes in patterns of consumption during late nineteenthand early twentiethcentury capitalism, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, will be discussed in the light of the sociology of consumption from Veblen and of the newly emerging metropolitan life-style analysed by Simmel. The period of the two world wars, and the intervening economic recession and depression of the 1920s and 1930s, was one in which capitalism failed to deliver consumer goods to the working classes. Reflecting this bleak and violent economic and political period, sociologists concentrated on other issues, such as the appeal of fascism, rather than upon consumption.

  The story of the social and cultural role of consumption in modern, western capitalism continued with the growth of what was often called at the time, that is in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘the growth of mass consumption’. There were some interesting features of mass consumption which have been seen as distinctive of the period from the early 1950s up to the late 1960s. From the 1970s to the 1980s, some writers have argued that a new, even ‘post-modern’ pattern of consumption developed. The significance of this will be explored in the last part of this chapter.

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  America in the World

  The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941

  • Frank Costigliola, Michael J. Hogan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Indeed, as so much of the rich scholarly literature suggests, politics plays out on the fields of hopes, dreams, and fears that mass consumer sensibilities have conjured. Notes 1 Major recent studies of the global history of consumerism include Peter Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire, revised ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford: Berg, 2006), quote, pp. 51–52; Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Craig Clunas, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” American Historical Review 104 (Dec., 1999), 1497–1511 is a review essay; much more bibliography may be found from Trentmann’s Cultures of Consumption project at http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/publications. html. Works such as Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Geneologies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) and Douglas Haynes, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, Haruka Yanagisawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South Emily S. Rosenberg 328 Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010) provide an important challenge to seeing consumer globalization as a Eurocentric and twentieth-century phe- nomenon. See Martyn J. Lee (ed.), The Consumer Society Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) for a selection of theoretical works. 2 Brewer and Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives.

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  Consumer Culture

  History, Theory and Politics

  • Roberta Sassatelli(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  To account for these, we do not need to build a stage theory of development (see Stearns 2001). Instead we can resort to an imagery of increasing but uneven stratification, whereby a variety of ongoing processes, among different sections of the population in different places and times, are piled one on another, partly displacing previous trends, partly resuming them. To outline the phenomenon of modern consumption, historiography has traditionally focused not only on the commercial cities of the Renaissance and the consumption of colonial produce of the 17th-18th centuries, but also, and especially, on a much more recent period which runs, approximately, from the second half of the 19th century to after the Second World War. Studies on the end of the 19th century overwhelmingly focus on the spread of department stores and the modern system of advertising; those on the post-war period are mostly concerned with the spread of mass-produced durable goods for domestic use, from fridges to televisions. To these we can add various sociological studies on contemporary society which underline the shift to a post-Fordist model of production and the subsequent diffusion, thanks also to new technologies, of ever more individualized flexible models of consumption. These different studies of the changes in the practices of consumption may be read via a focus on how consumption has been framed and which features have been ascribed to consumers as social actors. In the next few pages I shall briefly run through a selection of the crucial shifts which have characterized the consolidation of modern patterns of consumption in the last two centuries, suggesting an initial picture of the most important factors behind the historical formation of the consumer society (see Figure 2.2)

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  State of the World 2010

  Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability

  • Worldwatch Institute(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  One annual survey of first-year college students in the United States has investigated students’ life priorities for more than 35 years. Over this time the importance of being well-off financially has grown while the importance of developing a meaningful life philosophy has fallen. (See Figure 2.) And this is not just an American phenomenon. A study by psychologists Güliz Ger and Russell Belk found high levels of materialism in two thirds of the 12 countries they surveyed, including several transitional economies. 28 While consumerism is now found in nearly all cultures, it is not without consequences. On this finite planet, defining success and happiness through how much a person consumes is not sustainable. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that this cultural orientation did not just happen to appear as a byproduct of growing incomes. It was engineered over several centuries. Today, since consumerism has been internalized by many societies, it is self-perpetuating to some extent, yet institutions within society—including businesses, the media, governments, and educational facilities—continue to prop up this cultural orientation. These institutions also are actively working to expand markets around the world for new consumer goods and services. Understanding the role of these institutional drivers will be essential in order to cultivate new cultures of sustainability. Institutional Roots of Consumerism As long ago as the late 1600s, societal shifts in Europe began to lay the groundwork for the emergence of consumerism. Expanding populations and a fixed base of land, combined with a weakening of traditional sources of authority such as the church and community social structures, meant that a young person’s customary path of social advancement—inheriting the family plot or apprenticing in a father’s trade—could no longer be taken for granted

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  Consumption Patterns of the Middle Class in Contemporary China

  • Di Zhu(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • WSPC

    (Publisher)

  After the reforms of 1978, with the transition to a market-based economy, Chinese people began to have access to various material goods and society also became more stratified. Throughout the 1980s, however, Chinese consumers were left ambivalent as they were confused about the “apparent inconsistency between a communist legacy emphasising austerity and equalitarianism and an emerging consumerist ethos celebrating individual hedonism and distinction-seeking through consumption” (Zhao and Belk, 2008: 3). Soon after the spring of 1992 when Deng’s “Southern talk” was released, the party began to actively encourage hedonism in order to transform people’s political zeal into sensational passions to be fulfilled through consumption (Ci, 1994, cited in Zhao and Belk, 2008). No matter what role the government plays in the rise of consumer culture, consumption patterns as well as consumer orientations have dramatically changed since the shift to a market-based economy. The ideology which advocates a rising consumer culture, with constant adjustments though, has remained in the official discourse ever since (Zhao and Belk, 2008).

  In contemporary society, the change of consumption patterns among Chinese people has been revealed by many studies in market and academic research. Through analysis of data from the National Statistic Bureau, it is found that household durables, rather than food, became the expenditure focus of the urban population during the period of 1985–1988, with an orientation to “spending the money due in the future” (chao qian xiao fei) (Hang, 2007: 57). From 1995 until 2006, the expenditure share of healthcare, telecom, education and housing (excluding purchasing of houses) increased more significantly among the urban population (ibid.: 59). At the micro level, as a result of rapid economic development (Li, 1996) and the growth of individual income (Lu, 1997), the purchasing power of Chinese people has been largely improved, which enabled them to pursue pleasure and comfort. Therefore, it is suggested that Chinese people became more enthusiastic for material goods and services that improve quality of life, and the desire of Chinese consumers has been far more than basic goods (McEwen et al

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  Collecting in a Consumer Society

  • Russell W. Belk(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE RISE OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

  The world is so full of a number of thingsI’m sure we should all be as happy as kings (Stevenson 1905)

  ON BEING AS HAPPY AS KINGS

  Written during the rise of the age of consumerism, Stevenson’s couplet contemplates the abundant things of the world with a child’s sense of wonder. The happiness of kings is seen as a happiness that comes from having things. If this happiness was once restricted to kings it was because only they could command any thing they wished. But in a democratic consumer society within a market economy, the consumer is king. Given sufficient resources, any of us can now have our most regal material wishes fulfilled. The belief that such unbridled access to things should lead to unbridled happiness is the central premise of a consumer society.

  The development of contemporary consumer societies has had a profound effect on the way we view the world. Stated most simply, we have come to regard an increasing profusion of both natural and human-produced things as objects to be desired, acquired, savored, and possessed. Both individuals and social institutions have enthusiastically, if sometimes guiltily, embraced this world view. Perhaps the most prominent manifestation of such consumerism is in the proliferation of individual and institutional collections. For collecting is consumption writ large. It is a perpetual pursuit of inessential luxury goods. It is a continuing quest for self completion in the marketplace. And it is a sustained faith that happiness lies only an acquisition away. But while collecting may well be the stylized and distilled essence of a consumer orientation toward life, the conceptual relationship between collecting and consuming remains largely unexplored.

  This investigation of the interplay of collecting and consuming attempts to understand the interdependence of these phenomena both historically and in contemporary cultures. The primary focus is on collecting as a consumption activity that is shaped by the same cultural processes that affect other types of consumption activities. The dramatic growth of mass production, mass distribution, and mass communication is found to parallel the similarly dramatic growth of mass consumption, mass individual collecting, and massive museum collecting. More importantly, collecting is found to be a key activity that articulates our sometimes conflicting values concerning work and leisure, science and art, male and female, high culture and popular culture, us and the “other,” and production and consumption. These values are socially constructed and accordingly differ over times and cultures. My focus will be mainly on the phenomenon of collecting and on contemporary Western collecting. But before narrowing the focus too much, it is important to situate the development of consumption and collecting more broadly.

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