Functions, power and future of consumerism

Abstract

The subject of research is consumerism, as a total social phenomenon, which affects both the material and spiritual level of people's existence in society. The research problems are the functions, power and future of consumerism, that is, the questions: What are the functions and power of consumerism? Why did consumerism triumph during the historical development of society? What are the challenges of modern consumerism? The main hypothesis is that there is a complementarity of the functions of consumerism, as well as the impact of consumerism on societies in the post-socialist (post-scarcity) transformation and on sustainable development through universal basic income. The scientific goals of the work are: 1) to describe consumerism and the process of its creation; 2) to classify the functions of consumerism and to functionally explain the difference between them, with an emphasis on the integrative point of view of complementarity between them; 3) to anticipate the future of consumerism, i.e. the potential challenges as well as the experiential connection (scientific law) between post-scarcity societies, in the process of post-socialist transformation, and uncontrolled shopping (compulsive buying syndrome), and the experiential connection between consumerism and universal basic income in order to reduce economic inequality, poverty, illiteracy, labor demotivation, mental imbalances, addiction and crime, with the aim of moving towards sustainable development. The methods of (descriptive and comparative) analysis, deduction, synthesis, induction, case studies, content analysis of concepts about consumerism and its functions will be used based on a simple classification (material dimension, level of society, system - symbolic dimension, level of individual, actor) (Kukic & Markic, 2006: 217) and desk research. The results of qualitative-quantitative research relate to knowledge about consumerism, its etymological, total and particular conceptual definition, its functions and their corresponding power, and about the future of consumerism from the perspective of the reasons for its past triumph, as well as real and potential challenges. These findings were obtained through secondary, mostly qualitative (in the form of words) data (Kothari, 2004; Dale, Wathan & Higgins, 2008), with a few quantitative, statistical data collected during 'library research' (Kuba & Koking , 2004: 90) that is, during studious work on bibliographic units from an abstracted sample.