Showing papers in "ACR North American Advances in 1992"

Postmodernism, Consumer Culture and the Society of the Spectacle

Abstract: The notions of modernism (or modernity) and postmodernism (or postmodernity) are currently a subject of great debate across many disciplines. Featherstone (l988) lists several fields where this debate has been raging for some years in the Western world: art (including music), fiction, film, and photography, architecture, philosophy and literary criticism. Recently, the debate has entered the social sciences, and in particular into cultural and social anthropology, sociology, political theory and social theory. In the field of consumer behavior specific attention to postmodernism is limited and is quite recent (Firat l989, Firat and Venkatesh l992, Sherry l990, Venkatesh l989). However, there has been a burgeoning of research in a related area, now known as post-positivism, as represented in the contributions of Belk, Hirschman, Holbrook, Mick, Anderson and Ozanne, O'Guinn, Thompson, Wallendorf, to name an important few.