INTRODUCTION
CONSUMER SOCIETY
Seduced and repressed
Industrial and consumer society
SHOPPING – THE POWER OF SUPERMARKETS
Supermarkets against high street stores.
The power of supermarkets
Winners and losers
CONCLUSIONS
We already know that society is made up of individuals, but it also important that society is not just about people, it’s about people and the materials, objects and the environments, that help to make that society. In order to start thinking about how people live today, the kinds of things many of them do it is important to understand what role material goods play in their lives. And consuming is a good the starting point for that.
1. CONSUMER SOCIETY
1.1 Seduced and repressed
A Contemporary consumer society is awash with material goods – clothes, food, and services offered from different shops, that people consume them as every day basics. But consuming has never been simply a matter of necessity to meet basic bodily needs, some social scientist would argue that consuming has become more about individual identity and self – expression .What people buy and what they do with things they acquire provide an important indicator of who they are. As consuming, as activity creates a lifestyle, that reflects their individual identities.
However, not everyone is equally able to consume. Sociologist Kevin Hetherington notes, there are people who are better placed than others to join the consumer society. Employed and unemployed, old and young, able – bodied and less able, those groups of people are divided in a contemporary society and that creates a social divisions. According to the social scientist Zygmund Bauman (1988), people in contemporary Western societies can be broadly divided into two groups of consumers that he calls the seduced and the repressed. The seduced in Bauman’s terms are those in a...