The Consumer Culture Research Landscape

This introductory article for the special issue of The Journal of American Culture serves two functions. First it briefly sketches the current status and historical background of consumer cultural research. And second, it introduces the reader to the individual scholarly research articles that appear herein. Current Developments in Consumer Culture Research The scholarly study of consumer culture is expanding at an explosive rate. In this brief introduction to this development, we stress some of the post-2000 highlights. They include, in chronological order, the start of a new scholarly journal, the Journal of Consumer Culture (2001); the publication of Lizabeth Cohen's landmark tome, A Consumers' Republic, the appearance of a seminal article in the March 2005 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research ("Consumer Culture Theory: Twenty Years of Research" by Eric Arnould and Craig Thompson); and the first international conference on consumer culture theory, held at the University of Notre Dame in August 2006. These various milestones point to two observations about the direction of current research on consumer culture: 1. Researchers are going beyond the traditional consumer culture discipline of marketing (the home discipline of Russell Belk and John Sherry, the two organizers of the Notre Dame conference) to include such disciplines as sociology (the home discipline of George Ritzer, the editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture), as well as other social science and humanities disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, and history. Historians, in particular, have contributed significantly to our understanding of consumer culture, and among the seminal figures here are Daniel Boorstin, Lizabeth Cohen, Gary Cross, Richard Fox, Daniel Horowitz, Jackson Lears, and Susan Strasser. 2. Researchers and their foci are becoming increasingly international. For example, scholars who made presentations at the Notre Dame conference have their origins in about a dozen countries representing several continents. The nations that were represented included India, Australia, France, Mexico, Canada, and Turkey. These research studies should permit useful cross-cultural comparisons. Also helping the international movement is the global perspective being assumed by the Journal of Consumer Culture. Historical Developments in Consumer Culture Research: Definitional Issues The historical shift from an economy dominated by production to one strongly influenced by consumption has led to the use of the term consumer society or consumer culture by many scholars to describe the latter circumstance. However, there is little agreement as to what these terms mean. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, in an influential edited 1983 volume (The Culture of Consumption), identify some of the dimensions of the definitional problems and pose some key questions about historical origins in the introduction to their book. Some observers of all stripes have agreed on the importance of consumption in twentiethcentury American culture. But they have expended so much energy praising or blaming it that they have generally begged the most basic questions. Exactly what is a consumer culture? It is not enough to point to the abundance of televisions and automobiles, to call it a culture of leisure instead of work, since people obviously still work-assuming they can find a job. It will not do to view it as an elite conspiracy in which advertisers defraud the "people" by drowning them in a sea of glittering goods. The people are not that passive; they have been active consumers, preferring some commodities to others. They have also been more than consumers; they have pursued other goals in their leisure besides consumption. When and how did a consumer culture arise in the United States? What were the processes by which a nineteenth-century "producer ethic"-a value system based on work, sacrifice and saving-evolved into a dominant twentiethcentury "consumer ethic? …