We identify seven key features of consumer culture. What have thinkers found to be different or dangerous about the way consumption is organised in the modern world?

Core social practices and cultural values, ideas, aspirations and identities are defined and oriented in relation to consumption rather than to other social dimensions such as work or citizenship, religion or military: a culture of consumption.

Dominant values of a society not only organised through consumption practices but also in some sense derive from them. Thus, contemporary society is described as materialistic, as more concerned with ‘having’ to the exclusion of ‘being’, as commodified, as hedonistic, or more positively, as a society of choice and consumer sovereignty.

The values from the realm of consumption spill over into other domains of social action:

• consumption becomes a central focus of social life (reproduce increasingly through commodities)
• values of consumer culture acquire a prestige that encourages their extension to other social domains; e.g. the extension of the consumer model to public service broadcasting or health provision.

Modern consumption is mediated by market relations and takes the form of the consumption of commodities. The consumer’s access to consumption is largely structured by the distribution of material and cultural resources (money and taste), which itself is determined in crucial ways by market relations – above all the wage relation and social class.

From a Marxist perspective, it is the wage-relation (not industrial mass production), it is capitalist relations of production (not its technical forces) that produce the consumer.

Consumer culture is incompatible with the political regulation of consumption that suppresses the market. It does not arise in non-capitalist societies.

Consumer culture is often identified with the idea of mass consumption. Market relations are anonymous and in principle universal.

The idea that consumer culture serves a general public also promotes a more positive idea that it embraces ‘everyone’. We are all formally free and equal, unconstrained in our choices by legally fixed status or cultural prohibitions. Yet, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer: this particular freedom is compulsory.

If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities.

To be a consumer is to make choices: this exercise of choice is in principle unconstrained. The freedom of consumer culture is defined in a modern and liberal way: consumer choice is a private act. Two senses of meaning of this:

• in the positive sense, it occurs within a domain of the private, which is ideologically declared out of bounds to public intervention, social and political authority
• in the negative sense, it is restricted to the household, mundane domesticity, the world of private relationships

A critical remark is that in becoming ‘free’ as consumer we barter away power and freedom in the workplace or in the political arena in exchange for more private contentment.

The idea of insatiable need is bound up with notions of cultural modernisation: the increased productivity of modern industry is a response and a spur to the capacity of people’s desires to become increasingly sophisticated, refined, and personal, as well as people’s desire to advance themselves socially and economically.

On the other hand, commercial society is systematically dependent on the insatiability of needs. Therefore, the market society fears the possibility that needs might be satisfied. To counter these fears, society develops demand management strategies and advertising, marketing and promotion.

Cultural contradictions arises: economic modernisation underpinned by regime of rational planning and discipline and a work ethic, yet it depends upon fostering irrational desires and passions and a hedonistic ethic.

Modern concepts of individualism sweep away the possibility and desirability of fixed status order, characteristic of feudal times. In a post-traditional society, social identity must be constructed by individuals because it is no longer given or ascribed.

Goods can always signify social identity, but in the fluid processes of a post-traditional society, identity seems to be more a function of consumption rather than as in the feudal society where social order and identity dictate consumption patterns.

Consumer culture is crucially about the negotiation of status and identity. Regulation of these issues by tradition is replaced by negotiation and construction, and consumer goods are crucial to the way in which we make up our social appearance, our social networks, our structure of social values.

Consumer culture is awash with signs, images, publicity. This involves an aestheticisation of commodities and their environment. Consumption becomes a privileged site of autonomy, meanings, subjectivity, privacy and freedom.

Yet, all these meanings around consumption become crucial to economic competition and rational organisation, become the objects of strategic action by dominating institutions. The sense of autonomy and identity comes under threat. Hence the controversy over whether consumption is a sphere of manipulation or freedom.