Morden consumption is mediated by market relations and takes the form of the consumption commidities. The consumer’s access to consumption is largely structured by the distribution of material and cultural resources like money and taste, which itself is determined in crucial ways by maket relations-above all the wage relation and social class. Consumer culture is incompatible with the political regulation of consumption that suppresses the market. It does not arise in non-capitalist societies.Consumer culture is often identified with the idea of mass consumption. Market relations are anonymous and in principle universal. The idea that consumer culture serves a general public also promotes a more positive idea that it embraces everyone. We are all formally free and equal, unconstrained in our choices by legally fixed status of cultural prohibitions. Yet, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer: this particular freedon is compulsory.In many important aspects consumption is still the black box of the social sciences–its size and material composition is well known, but its operating principles remain obscure. Patent offices are the mausoleums of new products nobody wants. The question remains what producers chose to manufacture or what makes consumers adopt, modify, change or reject new technology. Mentally rooted in the nineteenth century, the social and economic sciences until very recently were in no position to answer this question, since they all too often shared a productivist perspective. In studies of mass consumption almost inevitably the point of departure was the industrial firm, its manufacturing and research facilities. “New” technology invariably was being “created” by engineers and then “given” to the public for consumption. When it comes to innovations, activity resides with the “makers” of technology and not with the “users”.As long as such a passive picture of consumption exists, there is little hope to achieve more than a mere quantitative description based on the common denominator money. The assertion that consumers tend to maximize the marginal utility of the goods they purchase does not explain what makes them useful in the first place. In overcoming this intellectual deadlock, anthropologists, sociologists, and feminists have been leading historians to investigate consumption as a social and cultural activity shaping twentieth century society at least as much–or even more–as industry, science, and business.
