Culture does not emerge out of the blue. It is learned and taught through the process of enculturation. It is created over time, shaped by people and the institutions they establish in relationship to the environment around them. Culture is not fixed. It is invented, changed, contested, and negotiated. Nor is it bounded. It moves and flows across regions and between people. You will help create many cultures over the course of your life, even if on a small scale. Humans create cultures every time we form a new group, whether a classroom, club, nonprofit, business, or family. How does a new group establish a set of norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, and relationships of power? Just as we have examined the relationship between culture and power, we can analyze the processes through which culture is created (Moussa, Newberry, and Urban 2021). Let’s consider the consumer culture that has become so central to contemporary life.
Creating Consumer Culture
In many parts of the world, consumerism has become more than an economic activity. It is a way of life, a way of looking at the world—a culture. The culture of consumerism includes norms, values, beliefs, practices, and institutions that have become commonplace and accepted as normal and that cultivate the desire to acquire consumer goods to enhance one’s lifestyle (McCracken 1991, 2005).
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A high angle view of a department store crowded with shoppers.
What stirs your desire to consume? Shopping on Black Friday at the Macy’s flagship location in New York. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, marks the start of the U.S. holiday shopping season.
The German political philosopher Max Weber (1864–1920), in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), linked the origins of capitalism in Europe directly to the cultural values of Protestant Christianity that developed in the seventeenth century. Thrift, modesty, moderation, frugality, and self-denial—values Weber considered central to the “Protestant ethic”—led people to develop a very particular relationship to the accumulation of capital that enabled early capitalism to flourish in the West. But as capitalism has grown and shifted over the centuries into its present global form, so has the culture that supports and shapes it.
Advertising, marketing, and financial services industries work to transform the cultural values of frugality, modesty, and self-denial into patterns of spending and consumption associated with acquiring the material goods of a middle-class lifestyle. Many key cultural rituals now focus on consumption. In the United States, holidays such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day all promote the purchase of gifts, as do birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries. Christmas, which in early U.S. history featured public drinking, lewd behavior, and aggressive begging, by the nineteenth century was being transformed into a family-centered ritual of gift giving from parents to children. Moreover, the invented character of Santa Claus was promoted as the mythical mediator of gift exchange and the symbol of Christmas consumer marketing (Nissenbaum 1996). The culture of consumerism has become so powerful that it successfully promotes spending and consumption even when people don’t have money.
Today, through global marketing and media advertising campaigns, increased trade, and rising migration, the desire for this lifestyle is being promoted around the world. Thanks to economic and political reforms in India, China, Russia, and the Middle East over the last few decades, hundreds of millions more people are now seeking the middle-class, consumer-oriented lifestyle that they see advertised on television and social media.
Advertising
Advertising is a powerful tool of enculturation, teaching us how to be “successful” in consumer culture, how to be cool and normal. Social media influencers champion products assured to make us popular. Commercials promise that clothes, perfume, deodorant, haircuts, and expensive gifts will bring us love. Having our teeth straightened and whitened will help us network. A large, expensive car and proper insurance will protect our families and make us responsible and mature adults. Magazines, television shows, and films promote stars we are encouraged to emulate. If only we could dress like them and imitate their lifestyles, then we would be more desirable. The culture of consumerism tells us that having these things will bring us better friends, better sex, stronger families, higher-paying jobs, fancier houses, faster cars, sharper picture definition, and truer sound quality.
YOUR TURN: FIELDWORK
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College Students and Consumer Culture
College students are not immune to efforts to create a consumer culture. In fact, you are deeply immersed in it. With your classmates, try this collective project. Ask yourself what you need to have in order to feel like an average college student. Think about all the things you own. List your electronics (computer, smartphone, television, sound system) and your school supplies (books, notebooks, pens, calculator, backpack). Go through your closets and dressers and list your clothing. Don’t forget your clothes for different seasons and special occasions, as well as accessories (bags, hats, belts, and shoes) and grooming items and cosmetics. Include your mode of transportation, household furnishings, appliances, and so on. Once you have created your own list or a collective list with your classmates, continue your analysis with a few questions: Did you find differences based on gender, age, race, or ethnic identity? Where were things made, and what does that suggest to you about globalization? What did all of these things cost? Now ask yourself whether each item is something you need or something you want. For all of those items you identify as things you want more than you absolutely need, ask yourself how the desire to acquire them—to consume them—was aroused and cultivated. Take into account our discussion about how culture is created, and consider how those insights can be applied to this exercise.
The advertising industry is key in shaping cultural norms and values around shopping while arousing our desires for goods and services. Consider that children in the United States watch up to 40,000 television commercials a year (Vitelli 2013). In addition, they are bombarded with advertising on the Internet, social media, video games, and YouTube videos. Many children’s television programs are themselves thinly disguised advertisements for products featuring their characters, from lunch boxes to clothing to action figures.
Advertising appears before and during movies in the theater, at sporting events, in department stores and shopping malls, on billboards, and in store windows. Your favorite websites and social media are covered with advertisements. So are your clothes. Even your classroom is full of advertisements that you most likely do not notice: all the labels and tags on computers, pens, notebooks, backpacks, food packaging, and soda cans. Owning certain products and brands becomes symbolic of happiness, love, beauty, and success, or at least the potential for upward social mobility.
Financial Services and Credit Cards
The financial services industry makes sure that once our desires are aroused, we have access to money to make our dreams a reality—at a small price. With the advent of computers and the deregulation of banking in the 1970s, credit cards burst on the scene, transforming the financial environment. Banks, chain stores, and financial services corporations carry out intensive marketing to promote their cards. In 2022, Americans carried $838 billion dollars of credit card debt (Latham 2022).
College students are a key target of the credit industry, which promotes credit cards on campus and through the mail regardless of students’ ability to repay any debts they accrue. Credit cards grease the wheels of consumer culture. To pay them off, we need to intensify our participation: Work harder. Make more money. Then we can shop more. As credit card limits max out, banks and mortgage companies encourage homeowners to refinance their homes, taking out second mortgages to pay for day-to-day expenses and speculating that housing prices will remain high and continue to increase. Underlying these shifts is the fundamental drive of contemporary capitalism toward perpetual growth. People need to buy, make, invest, and profit more and more each year if the economy is to keep growing. And so contemporary capitalism invests heavily to arouse our desire and promote the expansion of the culture of consumerism.
