The Significance of Style describes how the preparation and consumption of food is used to mark class boundaries . Use this chapter to learn why the cost of food is not necessarily the main determinant of why people buy it. Many sociologists believe gender is the most important division in society. In a consumer society life revolves around commodities. Lecture 10 .
Nothing is naturally a commodity.
In this section we focus on an aspect of commodification crucial to modern marketing and the survival of modern capitalist economies - branding. If branding is all about image , then business competition takes place over images. The war of signs is nicely illustrated in the recent history of professional sports, where basketball rose from the dead, commercially speaking, while ice hockey is still in danger of suffering the same fate as Sylvania television or Studebaker cars. Lecture 14 . If everything can be a sign of something else, perhaps nothing is real.