Chapter 5 Consumer society? Identity and lifestyle Flashcards
Lifestyle
A shared set of activities and forms of identification that can be recognised as being part of a distinctive way of life (for example, luxury lifestyle, alternative lifestyle, retired lifestyle).
Industrial society
A society based on manufacturing, mass production and mass consumption.
Life chances
People’s ability to adopt a particular lifestyle, which depends on both choices and constraints, such as the unequal distribution of economic and social resources in society.
Post-industrial society
A society based on services, information technologies and consumer choice.
Status
A common, shared and recognised position that some people hold in society. Having a particular status is determined by a person’s access to social resources that convey, in different degrees, recognition, honour
and prestige on the status holder.
Social cleavage
The main lines of division and inequality that characterise a particular society.
Seductions
Enticement and suggestion to direct people’s choices along certain lines and not others, closing them down by degree.
Conspicuous consumption
Thorstein Veblen used this term to convey the process of visibly displaying status to others through what had been acquired – especially when a person had newly gained wealth and wanted to make an impression in wealthy circles. Buying luxury things and showing them off to others through display is what the concept is meant to capture. Conspicuous consumption is thus Veblen’s shorthand way of isolating that social activity. These people, it turns out, were open to all manner of seduction in the nineteenth century.
Commodity
A good or service that is produced for exchange and sold in a market with the intention of generating a profit for the seller.
Seduced
those Bauman calls ‘seduced’ are able to see through that
manipulation
Repressed
those Bauman calls ‘repressed’ might be able to create space to consume in ways that they find satisfying and inclusive.
