This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context.


Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach...