Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society) (Paperback)

'One must congratulate the publishers for their decision to bring together under one cover the seminal studies of one of the central and most influential participants of the on-going postmodernist debate. All readers will benefit from this decision: the 'absolute beginners' - as yet uninitiated in the intricacies of the debate who step gingerly into this minefield of subversive and iconoclastic ideas - will be grateful for the unmatched comprehensiveness and lucidity of Featherstone's survey of the history and current state of the discourse; those who have already fought their way through the essential literature who will still gain enormously from the wealth of profound and original insights and the elegance of theoretical synthesis; and the numberless 'ordinary' readers, simply wanting to know more about the world they live in will find in this book a rich and precise portrait of their daily lives and a sympathetic account of the joys and sorrows of the contemporary consumer. This book is a significant step towards popularization of intrinsically difficult yet culturally central subject matter and toward raising the debate from its intuitive and confusing stage to the level of systematic theory.' - Zygmunt Bauman

'The unmatched comprehensiveness and lucidity of Featherstone's survey.... the wealth of profound and original insights and the elegance of theoretical synthesis.... This book is a significant step towards popularization of intrinsically difficult yet culturally central subject matter and toward raising the debate from its intuitive and confusing stage to the level of systematic theory' - Zygmunt Bauman

`The author reveals a striong grounding in sociological theory and research, leading to some penetrating insights about contemporary consumer life. Uncovering the sociocultural significance of these particular cultural developments is Featherstone's chief concern and he does an admirable job...a worthy addition to the growing body of scholarship focused on consumer culture in the postmodern world - Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences

Product Description
Implicit within claims that society itself is in some sense postmodern is an argument about the priority of consumption as a determinant of everyday life. In this view, mass media advertising and market dynamics lead to a constant search for new fashions, new styles, new sensations and experiences. Material goods are consumed as `communicators'; they are valued as signifiers of taste and of lifestyle. This volume examines the viability of this portrait of contemporary society. Mike Featherstone explores the roots of consumer culture, how it is defined and differentiated and the extent to which it represents the arrival of a `postmodern' world. He examines the theories of consumption and postmodernism among contemporary social theorists such as Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Lyotard and Jameson and relates these to the actual nature of contemporary consumer culture.