Psychological Processes of Consuming

Consumerism has defined a whole culture's relationship to itself over the last two decades (Williamson 1986, Orbach 1986). The way we enter and partake of the public sphere is not through the exercise of conventional political relationships but through the relations of consumption. To be excluded from the relations of consumption is to be disenfranchised.

At the turn of the century, the development of the department store (and mail order through Sears Roebuck) in the United States had the effect of enfranchising women across the class spectrum. Similar products on sale on different floors with different price tags allowed working-class women to emulate middle-class values and so join in the dominant culture. Immigrant women, seeking to assimilate, battled with parental values of the old country to wear the clothes of the New World thus allowing them participation in the American Dream (Ewan & Ewan 1982).

In the UK and Western Europe, consumerism is a very recent post World War Two development, not really taking off seriously until the long economic boom of the 60's when fashion, hi-fi's, cars and other consumer durables became available at a mass level. In the 1980's we saw politicians exhorting the righteousness of consuming. Both the left and the right introduced the concept of the citizen as consumer. In an ironic twist from the prevailing pre-consumerist puritanism where ascetism was prized - especially for the needy - and consuming was reserved as the privileged activity of the wealthy, conservative politicians hopped on the bandwagon of consumerism as a way to deal with the difficulties inherent in present political programmes.

Along with consumerism went movements which, while not essentially anticonsumerist, contained within them an implicit critique of consumerism. First the Beats, then the hippies and the New Left rejected the conformity and the encoded statuses associated with consumerism. The Greens were the first explicitly anticonsumerist movement but con