SOCI 342 Chapter n/a: Commodification, Advertising and Corporate Power
Document Summary
Consumption debates of the twentieth century, the annals of the. American academy of political and social science 611:16-30. I will argue that their legacy has become constraining by ruling out more sophisticated and less problematic ver- sions of the critics" arguments and by putting macro-level or systemic critiques of consumer culture off limits. Veblen and models of status consumption nalysis of the spending patterns of the rich and nouveau riches in the late nineteenth century. The core of the approach is a hierarchical social struc- ture driven by a competitive status competition in which position is determined by wealth. Dynamically, the model uses a trickle-down mechanism in which status goods are first adopted by the wealthy, whose spending patterns are even- tually mimicked by households further down the wealth distribution. A second fea- ture of the model is that individuals are highly intentional status maximizer.
