Consumption Identity
Consumption identity refers to the way individuals express their sense of self and belonging through their consumption choices. It encompasses the products, brands, and experiences people choose to associate with, which can reflect their values, aspirations, and social status. This concept is often studied in the context of consumer behavior and cultural studies to understand the role of consumption in shaping personal and social identities.
7 Key excerpts on "Consumption Identity"
- Steven Miles(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Pluto Press(Publisher)
...But this transition can only be understood as part of the evolution of a much more profound process in which the influences on what and how we consume have become more sophisticated in how they affect our sense of self than they would have been in the past. In this chapter I will consider what it is that constitutes the consumption–identity relationship, before beginning to reflect on why it is different today and how this changes the ideological power and influence of consumer capitalism on our everyday lives. The Psycho-social Self At first glance it seems preposterous to claim that consumption has a significant role to play in the construction of identities as compared to manifestly more acute factors such as gender, race, sexuality and perhaps even class. The fact that it seems so is precisely why we should treat such a claim seriously. How and what we consume matters because we take it for granted. Yes, of course, our gender, race or sexuality is a crucial part of who we are. But so, potentially at least, is what we consume, not merely because it represents a vehicle by which we express who we are, but also because how we consume may feed back into how we feel about ourselves. As Collareo noted in 2003, the sociology of the symbolic and the communicative strategies employed in the construction of self-meanings have long been a concern for social scientists. Indeed, the way in which we consume arguably has as important a role in stabilising our selves as communities and families used to (Knorr Cetina, 2001). The role of consumption in identity construction has changed over time. The ability to consume came to be more than just an economic necessity, but a social and a cultural one too. It became a focal point for how individualised consumers related to and felt belonging in a society that came to be defined by the ability to choose and the freedoms that this implied. The concept of identity is a relatively recent one that did not exist prior to the 1960s...
eBook - ePubConsuming Symbolic Goods
Identity and Commitment, Values and Economics
- Wilfred Dolfsma, Wilfred Dolfsma(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Certainly socialization and enculturation — via family, community, school, religion, media, and other sources — constitute a central axis around which “preferences” crystallize: they aim to convey ideals of behavior, lifestyle, social place, etc., using mechanisms intended to naturalize them (discipline, reinforcement, modeling). 4 But with the range of options available in post-traditional society, the establishment of adult identity involves sorting through the varied messages of upbringing, and crafting from them patterns of consumption, work, relationships, that seem meaningful, sensible, pleasurable, acceptable, and/or feasible, given the opportunities and constraints present in the person's environment. Consumption relates to identity in several ways: It is a material reflection of preferences, it signals how one perceives oneself and wants to be perceived, it can establish or preclude access to work opportunities and social circles. Using consumption to establish identity hinges on manipulating its visible aspects, including clothing and personal appearance, the vehicle driven, location and size of residence, and leisure pursuits. In this respect, for example, vehicles tend to be chosen not just for their concrete attributes but also as symbols of lifestyle and social place: minivans for the family oriented, luxury vehicles for executives, pick-up trucks for the rugged, etc. Indeed some authors see consumption as figuring ever more importantly in signaling identity, since the increasingly anonymous and fragmented character of contemporary social life favors ways of representing oneself that use compact and widely recognized signs (Featherstone 1991). For consumption to work in this way requires shared perceptions of the symbolic value of goods...
eBook - ePubRoutledge Handbook of Identity Studies
2nd edition
- Anthony Elliott, Anthony Elliott(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...14 Consumer identities Roberta Sassatelli Introduction Consumption is best considered as a complex economic, social and cultural set of practices, interconnected with all of the most important phenomena which have come to make up contemporary Western society: the spread of the market economy, a developing globalisation, the creation and recreation of national traditions, a succession of technological and media innovations, etc. If it is true that in today’s ‘consumer society’ we are born to consume, it is also true that consumption has cultural and practical implications that go way beyond satisfying our daily needs through commodities, or even symbolically play with them in variously elaborated manners. To consume is also to act as ‘consumers’, that is, to put on a particular kind of identity and to deal with its contradictions. In this light, consumer culture is more than commoditisation and affluence, more than conspicuous consumption and the democratisation of luxuries. Consumer culture is deeply implicated in the fabrication of identities: it produces consumers, and does so in a variety of ways. For a growing variety of activities growing numbers of people now speak of themselves as consumers, and they are being addressed as consumers by a host of institutions, within and without the market. The centrality of the ‘consumer’, the lengthy and contested historical processes which led to its formation, the many theoretical portrayals of consumer agency which have followed each other in a succession of criticism and cross-reference, the political implications of conceiving contemporary culture as made of consumers are addressed in this chapter...
eBook - ePub- John Storey(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Consumption and Identities In this chapter I discuss ways of thinking about the relationship between consumption and identity. This will include a critical assessment of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and accounts of both ‘displaced meaning’ and the historical role played by the department store in the process of learning to make identities in social practices of consumption. What these accounts have in common is that they all see consumption as fundamental to the production of identity. We are what we consume When we meet someone for the first time, in order to get to know the kind of person they are, we ask certain questions. An obvious question is what kind of work they do. But sooner or later, in order to get to know them better, we will ask questions about matters of consumption. What books do they read? What films do they like? Do they have favourite television programmes? To what kinds of music do they listen? Which football team do they support? These, and many more like them, are all questions that connect consumption with questions of identity. On knowing the answer to enough of these questions, we feel able to construct a cultural and social pattern and thus to begin to locate the person in a particular cultural and social space – we begin, in other words, to think we know who they are. Traditionally, identity has usually been understood as something coherent and fixed; an essential quality of a person that is guaranteed by nature, especially human biology (‘human nature’). This traditional view is sometimes modified to produce a second view of identity in which it is still something fixed and determined, but in this formulation biology is said to combine with social variables such as class, ‘race’, ethnicity, or gender, to produce and guarantee (what is still) a coherent and fixed identity...
eBook - ePubRethinking Children as Consumers
The changing status of childhood and young adulthood
- Cyndy Hawkins(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 7 Consumption, identity and young people Mark Weinstein Introduction: consumer society To borrow from one of the greatest opening lines in English literature, it is a truth universally acknowledged that we now live in a consumer society (Austen, 1992). However, that is where the universality ends and the contention begins. Questions concerning the precise shape of this consumer society, its impact on our lives, our identities and relationships, our power and place in society are as fiercely debated today as they have been at any time since the explosion of modern consumer society in the postwar period (Osgerby, 1997). While the development of consumer society is commonly traced back to the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, modern consumerism is more commonly seen as a feature of the post-industrial society of the late twentieth century (Sassatelli, 2007). Moreover, interconnected processes at the heart of globalisation now mean that we live in an age where powerful transnational cultural corporations seek to shape consumption for a global market (Nederveen Pieterse, 2004). Central to debates around consumer society are questions concerning the extent to which our identity, our own subjective interpretation of how we see ourselves within society, now derives primarily from our consumption practices. As the economies of the advanced industrial capitalist world have moved away from their industrial base and have become increasingly founded on retail, services and consumption (Lash and Urry, 1987), it is now argued that where once people would derive identity through their role as workers, as members of a social class, a religion or through an ethnicity or community, they now define themselves through consumption-based identities...
eBook - ePubThe Material Child
Growing up in Consumer Culture
- David Buckingham(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...Each of these issues will be taken up in more detail, and in relation to different topics, in the following chapters. Consumption as a Social and Cultural Practice Both the approaches I have outlined thus far appear to accept the idea that, in contemporary industrialized societies, consumption has increasingly become a cultural phenomenon. It is no longer simply an instrumental matter, of fulfilling basic physical needs (for food, warmth and so on). On the contrary, it is much more to do with cultural symbols and meanings: it is a matter of aesthetic taste and style – particularly, although by no means exclusively, at the level of visual appearance and design (Lury, 1996). As we have seen, it is possible to regard this as merely a matter of illusion and mystification, or, alternatively, as a domain in which consumers are active and creative participants. However, much of this argument seems to be premised on a fundamentally individualistic view of consumption. By contrast, I would argue that consumption cannot be seen as an isolated act: on the contrary, it is inevitably embedded within everyday life and interpersonal relationships, and in wider social and cultural processes. In seeking to understand this contextual or relational aspect of consumption more fully, many researchers have adopted a broadly anthropological or sociological approach. This approach will be developed in more detail in relation to children in subsequent chapters (especially chapters 8 and 9). A brief indication of some of the key themes of this approach, and the broader issues at stake, will be offered here. As we have seen, critics of consumerism tend to regard the cultural or symbolic dimensions of consumption as somehow irrational, or merely as a consequence of manipulation (Campbell, 1987)...
eBook - ePub- James G. Carrier(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Agenda Publishing(Publisher)
...7 Consumption and meaning The countries that I know best have societies of mass consumption, and at its simplest this means that its members have a lot of stuff. They have so much that, as I noted previously, some people make a living telling them that they ought to have less, that they ought to declutter their lives and that they ought to give and value experiences rather than things. Seeing consumption as stuff accords with the economistic view of people in the market, which says that (a) people have desires, (b) if they have the money to do so they buy things that will satisfy those desires and (c) that is pretty much the end of the story. Economic anthropologists interested in consumption view things differently, and for them the story does not end when people buy things. The buying is important, but they approach it in terms of the origin and nature of the desires and of the social and cultural context of what happens after our consumer brings the stuff home. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (1978 : 66–7) say that ignoring those desires and that context means that we would find it hard to distinguish the gourmet’s meal from “solitary feeding, where the person wolfs or bolts his food, probably standing by his refrigerator in his overcoat”. “What happens after our consumer brings the stuff home” covers a vast range of activity. Indeed, some have complained that the term covers so much that it is effectively meaningless; for a long time my working definition of “consumption” was “not production”. This means that what I say of work on consumption by economic anthropologists has to be very selective. One could invoke Douglas and Isherwood’s (1978 : 57) definition: “[A] use of material possessions that is beyond commerce and free within the law.” That has the authority of Douglas’s stature in anthropology, but it is remarkably vague and its use of “material” and “possessions” is more restrictive than many would like...
