Postmodern Consumer Culture Research Articles

‘What happened to the truth is not recorded’: Anticipating the Shift from Postmodern Consumer Culture to Post-Truth in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot

This paper will explore the concept of “fakeness” in Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot. Defining “fake” as something “formed by or adapted to an artificial or conventional standard,” I will show how Barnes’ novel exposes the “fakeness” of historical knowledge. Utilizing Linda Hutcheon’s theories regarding postmodern literature—as well has Hayden White’s theories regarding historiography—I will analyze how Flaubert’s Parrot fakes literary biography, historical documents, academic conventions, female voices, and even the novel itself. This paper shows how Flaubert’s Parrot exposes the weaknesses in our understanding of history, as well as our willingness to believe in problematic historical narratives. More than this, my paper will show how Barnes’ novel ultimately succumbs to the narrative conventionality that it claims to subvert—illustrating how it is impossible to escape factitious conventions if one wants to impart a sense of meaning. Flaubert’s Parrot serves as a case study within the fields of deconstruction, narrative theory, and historiography—showing how problematic historical accounts can easily mime conventional academic standards and be readily accepted by readers. My study of Flaubert’s Parrot is particularly relevant with regard to our “Post-Truth” political era, as it shows how the quest to include multiple truths in the historical narrative can be taken advantage of in order to include lies. Flaubert’s Parrot emphasizes Linda Hutcheon’s claim that our understanding of history is based upon unreliable “traces” and “relics,” and is susceptible to being radically altered by the addition or subtraction of historical “relics” (Hutcheon 119). Although Flaubert’s Parrot problematizes our system of historical knowledge, its ultimate submission to the conventional novel form shows that it may be impossible to escape from the factitious conventions that shape our modes of knowledge.

Negative word of mouth about foreign lands: Dimensions of the shared discomforts narrated in travel blogs

ABSTRACTThis study seeks to report international tourists’ negative accounts of their visits to Sichuan, an emerging international tourist destination in the southwest of China and the hometown of Giant Pandas. Using the Interpretative Netnography Approach, the study employs the Atlas.ti and NVivo to analyze blog narratives collected from the TravelPod, one of the first website to offer free service to users to create travel blogs. The results indicate that unpleasant encounters with squat toilet became the targets of frequent complaints while the richest accounts were centered on tough and stuffy long bus ride threatened by potential risk of bad road, uncomfortable train tour, and unpleasant air travel experiences. This study recognizes that international travelers’ negative accounts on foreign lands as indicated in travel blogs have been produced in the context of cultural politics, filters and barriers, post-colonialism, and narrative turn, as well as personal point of reference and travelers’ bias. The findings will deepen the current understanding of negative word of mouth narrated in travel blogs so as to respond accordingly and prevent its undesirable consequences to destination image throughout postmodern consumer culture in the economic and cultural globalized world.

Luxury branding: the industry, trends, and future conceptualisations

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of a global luxury brand industry and discusses previous conceptualisations of luxury brands. In this endeavour, the study illustrates the unique context of luxury consumption, to highlight several developments in extant literature, and to advocate for the advancement of the consumer-centric paradigm of luxury branding.Design/methodology/approach– The study reviews the emergence of a global luxury brand industry, discusses macro-environmental trends that have influenced luxury brand consumption, critically evaluates the existing literature on luxury brands, and offers directions for future research.Findings– The study highlights that luxury brands have emerged as a special form of branding that conveys the unique sociocultural and individual meanings to their adherents. Moreover, it was found that these meanings have been shaped by a number of important cultural, social, and external trends, which call researchers and practitioners to consider the consumer-centric paradigm of luxury branding.Originality/value– The study calls for a shift in the focus from the characteristics of luxury brandsper se, and towards phenomenological experiences and socio-cultural influences, in the pursuits to understand what brand luxury conveys in the broader context of post-modern consumer culture. The study offers two distinct areas for future research to address these developments.

The Framework of Racism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: A Psychosocial Interpretation

In The Bluest Eye , Toni Morrison presents a community in which a racist ideology is internalized. The sufferers of racial abuse in this community both endure and resist in a complex inverse interrelationship between the two actions. This contradiction of the internalization and the insurrection of racial abuse is one of the crucial characteristics of this community which is best comprehended if looked at from both a Marxist and a psychoanalytic point of view. The objective of the paper is to have a look at the politics of postmodern consumer culture of capitalism in a racist community. At the same time, the paper aims at tracing the sadomasochist attitude of the characters in this framework of internalized racism in the African-American community of The Bluest Eye .

Intolerance and joy, violence and love among male football fans: towards a psychosocial explanation of ‘excessive’ behaviours

This paper examines the phenomena of intolerance and violence among male football fans through psychoanalytic theory as read through the sociology of postmodern group life. We think of intolerance and violence as points on a shared spectrum of emotion and (unconscious) desire that incorporates other forms of ‘excessive’ behaviour, notably public displays of homosocial love and affection. We argue that the notion of ‘transference-love’ as proposed by Freud and reformulated by Lacan is an important aspect of fans' libidinal investments in players. We maintain that a psychosocial approach to the problem enables a discussion of the ambiguous place of football fandom within postmodern consumer culture, where such identities are necessarily tenuous, but, at the same time, tenaciously held. Uncertainties of identity are exacerbated by the gendered and unconscious (homo)sexual dynamics that exist in the emotional cauldron of the male football crowd. Displays of excessive behaviour can be seen as a defence against the confusion over gender and sexuality that might arise in this cauldron at the time of the match and in the space of the stadium.

Postmodern paradoxes in Thai-Asian consumer identity

Much research on consumption and identity is framed by a Western perspective, and cast in terms of the de-coupling of identity from class within a fluid postmodern consumer culture. Little of this work engages with the subjective Asian experience in a cross-cultural context. We explore this theme through an inter-subjective, introspective analysis based on the jointly reconstructed experiences of the first author, a Thai national living and working in the UK for 8years, and her UK born-husband and co-researcher. The study feeds into research areas focusing on identity dilemmas faced by immigrants to the West, and on Asian culture and religion in relation to Western modes of consumption. Our analysis shows that consumption acts as a site for exposing both cross- and intra-cultural dilemmas of identity, and also for resolving them.

Searching for Spiritual Roots and Discipleship in a Postmodern Consumer Culture: The Norwegian CrossRoad Movement

The article analyzes the distinctive character of the Christian spirituality developed within the Norwegian movement Korsvei-bevegelsen, The CrossRoad Movement . I seek to demonstrate how this radically Christian spirituality relates to and interacts with dominant processes in its postmodern social and cultural context. These patterns of interaction develop in a characteristically dialectical way: Established cultural patterns and priorities are both confirmed and critically confronted. Christian practices are embedded in as well as strongly opposed to dominating values and lifestyles. This can be seen in a variety of social and ethical issues and in relation to important existential concerns like autonomy and authority, freedom and commitment.

Verbal Montage and Visual Apostrophe: Zanzotto's "Filò" and Fellini's Voce della luna

This essay explores how a technique indelibly associated with film, montage, finds a literary mode of expression and how the literary figure of the apostrophe achieves cinematic form. I show how Andrea Zanzotto's Leopardian text "Filò" (1976), written during his collaboration with Federico Fellini on the film Casanova (1976), creates patterns of "verbal montage" that show how poetry can partake of cinematic modes of expression. My subsequent analysis of Fellini's film La voce della luna (1990) considers how the rhetorical figure of apostrophe--and a poet often associated with it, once again Giacomo Leopardi--becomes central to Fellini's critique of postmodern consumer culture.

Subculture, style, chavs and consumer capitalism: Towards a critical cultural criminology of youth

This article examines current controversies in youth culture studies and relates them to recent developments in ‘cultural criminology’. On the one hand, post-subcultural theorists argue the concept of ‘subculture’ is redundant and obsolete and should be replaced by less bounded or rigid concepts, such as ‘neo-tribe’, which supposedly better capture the essence of identity formation and lifestyle choices in postmodern consumer culture. On the other hand, critics argue postmodern subcultural theory is an apology for consumerism and posit the continuing relevance of social class as an analytical category. In the last decade or so, and unbeknownst to those working in youth culture studies, cultural criminologists have attempted to adapt ‘traditional’ subcultural theory to new experiences of ‘transgression’ which now emerge in the transition to late modernity. Cultural criminology nevertheless has poststructural tendencies. By examining the ‘chav’ phenomenon in Britain as well as research in youth transitions under ‘consumer capitalism’, this article argues that ‘old’ theories and concepts, such as subculture, ought not be so readily disregarded and discarded, and that the notion of ‘style’ remains applicable to some young people who are marginalized and disadvantaged. The article thus proposes a ‘critical cultural criminology’ of youth.

Rethinking the social and cultural dimensions of charitable giving

Gifts to distant others, such as charitable giving, represent an important segment of contemporary gift‐giving that has often been overlooked due to the excessive focus on dyadic giving between intimate individuals. In response, this paper adopts a sociological systemic perspective on gift‐giving and focuses on charitable gifts as an emblem of postmodern gift‐giving to distant others. Historical evidence and sociological theory on postmodern solidarity are combined to shed light on the fluid duality of contemporary giving and the importance of the imaginary in charitable giving. The outlined socially symbolic dimensions of charitable giving are critically examined in light of postmodern consumer culture and the recent social corporate responsibility trends. By openly engaging the proposed complexities of gift‐giving, our vocabulary and understanding of postmodern giving can be revised so as to invite novel routes of investigation.

Mainstreaming Kink

This article explores nonpractitioners' understandings of and responses to the increasingly mainstream representation of BDSM in U.S. media, focusing on the film Secretary(Shainberg, 2002). Survey, focus group, and interview data indicate that popular images of SM promote the acceptance and understanding of sexual minorities through two mechanisms: acceptance via normalizationand understanding viapathologizing. Rather than challenging the privileged status of normative sexuality, these mechanisms reinforce boundaries between protected/privileged and policed/pathological sexualities. Instead of celebrating increased representation, this article argues that political energy might be directed toward the desire that the popularity of BDSM representations signifies: the desire to encounter authentic, undisciplined, and noncommodified representations that would transgress the sexual norms of American postmodern consumer culture.

Joe's rhetoric: Finding authenticity at starbucks

In this essay, I explore the materiality of rhetoric through a close analysis of one Starbucks coffee shop. Starbucks’ rhetoric works to suture individual bodies and subjectivities into a seemingly natural world through the practices of production and consumption of coffee and through the use of “natural”; colors, shapes and materials. This turn to nature is augmented by a claim to authenticity made by the coffee itself and is further reinforced by the rituals surrounding the buying and drinking of coffee. These rituals provide sanctifying performances that strive to cover the sins of postmodern consumer culture.

Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding

Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post-postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists.

Consumer Value Systems in the Age of Postmodern Fragmentation: The Case of the Natural Health Microculture

This article extends postmodern theories of consumption-oriented microcultures by analyzing the natural health value system and the microcultural meanings through which it is constructed. We first compare our theoretical approach to the conventional, Rokeachian view of the consumer value system. Drawing from a range of cultural and postmodern theories, we argue that the Rokeachian view is not sufficiently attuned to the meaning-based aspects of consumer value systems. Furthermore, it largely ignores the intracultural diversity among consumer value systems that arises from the fragmentation of postmodern consumer culture into diverse consumption microcultures. Our analysis focuses on the narratives that natural health consumers use to articulate the values manifest in their wellness-oriented consumption outlooks and practices. These narratives reveal the meaning-based linkages between these articulated values and the consumption goals being pursued through natural health practices. We further contextualize the natural health value system by highlighting four higher-order postmodern orientations that are inflected in this microculture. We discuss the implications of our analysis for conceptualizations of the fragmented postmodern marketplace, means-end analyses of consumer values, and generative theories of consumer goal formation.

From Counterculture to Consumer Culture

This article contributes to an analysis of the origins of contemporary post-modern consumer culture, centred on the notion of lifestyle choice. It presents a case study of Piaggio's marketing strategies for their motor scooters – the Vespa being the most famous one – during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Vespa had become an icon of the international youth culture already at the beginning of this period, it is argued that Piaggio's advertising agency did not appropriate the counterculture on account of its quantitative importance. Rather, countercultural attachments were mobilized and made part of Piaggio's advertising discourse first when they harmonized with visions for a future ‘postmaterialistic' consumer society harboured by advertising professionals. They subsequently used new techniques of market research, like motivation research, to translate such countercultural attachments into a consumer culture centred on individual self-realization rather than collective rebellion. In the 1970s, it is argued, this new consumer culture was transformed into what is now known as ‘life-style consumerism'.

Downshifting: Regaining the Essence of Leisure

(2000). Downshifting: Regaining the Essence of Leisure. Journal of Leisure Research: Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 69-73.

An existential analysis of the embodied self in postmodern consumer culture

This paper presents an existentialist interpretation of the identity constituting meanings that middle‐class men and women ascribe to their bodies and their related motivations to engage in consumption activities that seek to transform their embodied selves. We begin by describing the relevance of the existential conceptualization of the embodied self to the postmodern condition of consumer culture. We apply this existential perspective to discern three dialectically structured themes drawn from phenomenological interviews with men and women across a broad age range. One emergent and unexpected finding is the extent to which these men and women expressed a constellation of common body image anxieties, thematic meanings, and self‐critical, objectifying interpretations of their bodies. Based on these findings and historical considerations, we propose that men's embodied selves are, like women's, fully inscribed in the patriarchal discourses that circulate throughout postmodern consumer culture. However, men occupy a distinct social space and, accordingly, we argue that their embodied selves are uniquely situated in a cultural model of hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that the postmodern ideal of the plastic, transformable body has become a resonant cultural metaphor through which middle‐class consumers enact their identity projects of creating a desired embodied self.

Health inequalities in the early years: Is there equalisation in youth?

In the light of a still prevalent view that health inequalities are an invariant feature of the life-course, this paper re-examines the thesis that youth, in contrast to childhood, is characterised by relative equality in health, and proposes a process of equalisation to account for changes in the social class patterning of certain dimensions of health between these life stages. The evidence relating to the relationship between class of background and health over the early years is first reviewed, focusing on seven dimensions of health: mortality, chronic illness, specific conditions, self-rated health, symptoms of acute illness, accidents and injuries, and mental health. The overall picture is consistent with a conclusion of relative equality of health in youth with one major exception, severe chronic illness, which particularly on the evidence of the 1991 British Census is class differentiated from infancy. In respect of other dimensions of health, notably symptoms, non-fatal accidents and (probably) mental health, there is evidence of a change in class patterning between childhood and youth consistent with a hypothesis of equalisation. Within a theoretical perspective that juxtaposes class and age (youth) based influences, it is suggested that this could occur when effects associated with the secondary (high) school, the peer group and youth culture cut across those of the family, home background and neighbourhood in such a way as to reduce or remove class differences in health. In later youth, in the post-school period, the relative balance of class and age based influences shifts once more to produce a “re-emergence” of class gradients in adulthood. Youth may be a barometer of the relative power of post-modern consumer culture and traditional class based structures to shape the pattern of health inequalities over the early years into adulthood.