J Value Inquiry (2011) 45:293–298

DOI 10.1007/s10790-011-9292-y

Consumer Culture and the Crisis of Identity

Wang Chengbing

Published online: 30 October 2011

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Consumer culture has played an important role in a process of change away from
many traditional attitudes. It appears among various traits of contemporary society
and has fostered a crisis of identity among some people today. To understand the
crisis of identity, we must examine it in the cultural context in which it occurs.
Along with the improvement in living standards that people today have come to
enjoy, there has been an abandonment of a consumption style common to past
generations in favor of a new, more open consumption style. The new style is more
individualized than the older style and it has led to changes in methods and purposes of
consumption. With the restless capital in the economic expansion since the cold war,
consumer culture has followed the tide of economic globalization. Consumer culture
has become pervasive and has led at least one commentator to exclaim: ‘‘The whole
ideology of consumption is there to persuade us that we have entered a new era and that a
decisive human ‘Revolution’ separates the painful, heroic Age of Production from the
euphoric Age of Consumption.’’1 In China where thrift has long been stressed and an
agricultural social tradition has a long history, consumer culture has, over three decades,
greatly altered the bearing and behavior of people in urban areas especially. Among
people in some social classes, consumer behavior actuated by contemporary consumer
culture has come to dominate their daily lives as they scramble to keep with current
fashions.

1 Some Distinctive Traits of Consumer Culture in Contemporary Society

Since the 1990s, the notion of consumer culture, common enough in the West
throughout the twentieth century, has been widely discussed in China among
1
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (London: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 82.

Wang Chengbing (&)

Department of Philosophy, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
e-mail: wangchengbing@bnu.edu.cn

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academics and people at large. As Mike Featherstone has said, the term ‘‘consumer
culture,’’ as it has come to be used, ‘‘refers to the culture of the consumer society.’’2
Featherstone adds: ‘‘To use the term ‘consumer culture’ is to emphasize that the
world of goods and their principles of structuration are central to the understanding
of contemporary society.’’3
Consumer culture produces the milieu in which many people come to face a
crisis of identity. Consumer culture is a particular phenomenon of popular culture in
contemporary society. In part, it reflects consumption as an economic act and
changes in consumer behavior. Consumption meets the needs and desires of people
as a matter of some instrumental value through use. Whether or not a product can
suffice to meet needs and desires depends on whether or not it has value through
use. To some degree, the consumption value of a good is determined by the value
through use that it has. Insofar as it is, the consumption value can be put on a fairly
definite objective scale, and a good will not be found to have consumption value
unless it has certain value through use. In contemporary society, however, the scale
for consumption value also includes criteria of fashion to a considerable degree.
Before making a purchase, people will first observe, whether or not what they are
considering buying is fashionable, and will only make the purchase if they deem it
sufficiently in accord with current fashions. This has the effect of making the price
of a fashionable product higher than it would be if it were determined solely by the
value of the product through use. As a result, a person’s desires and feelings form
part of the basis for the scale of the consumption value. Desires and feelings of a
person frequently form a large part of the basis for the scale of consumption value as
the person constantly pursues the dictates of fashion. Often, something that still has
as much value through use as it did when it was purchased, will be thrown away
once it is no longer fashionable.
The appearance of consumer culture meets demands of capital in an expanding
market. Until recently, in China, people lived by traditional attitudes and accounted
thrift as a virtue, contending that the pursuit of creature comfort is superficial
sometimes immoral. But consumer culture in a contemporary industrialized society
spurs on the desires that people have to buy more and more. Consumer culture
appears when there is an abundance of products. It was not all that long ago that
ordinary consumer goods were rationed in China. At that time there was no
consumer culture to speak of in China. The great increase in consumption is only
possible because of the abundance of products that surround people.
In a consumer culture, the consumer behavior is not just a matter of pure
consumption. Consumption becomes part of a way of life, which is itself a way for
people to express their personalities. Consumer culture allows people to construct a
way of life that promotes self-display to gain satisfaction from their consumer
behavior. It has brought about a world in which many people now say: ‘‘Our society
is a consumer society.’’4 In a consumer society, consumption becomes partly a game
that is not merely directed toward the accumulation of tangible material goods as
2
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage Publications, 1991), p. 113.
3
Ibid., p. 84.
4
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), p. 79.

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such, but also toward an accompanying fresh feeling. Zygmunt Bauman has noted
this, saying: ‘‘Consumers are first and foremost gathers of sensations; they are
collectors of things only in a secondary and derivative sense.’’5 As a result,
consumer culture can lead to alienated, irrational consumption with the identities of
individuals subsumed by their consumption. As Mark C. Taylor and Esa Sarrinen
have put it, in consumer cultures: ‘‘Desire does not desire satisfaction. To the
contrary, desire desires desire.’’6 Consumers then rush about all too often in
dissimilated consumption.
When consumption is not merely directed toward physical needs, it becomes
increasingly imbued with social signification. Jean Baudrillard has maintained:
‘‘Consumption is an order of significations, like language, or like the kinship system
in primitive society.’’7 Goods are endowed with a type of social meaning. Fashion
becomes an encoding system that allows people to attribute social status to
themselves and others. People try to display their status by means of the social
significations of their consumption. They try to raise their status by raising
their level of consumption. With value not tied directly through use, wasteful,
intemperate consumption can also raise the status of a person. This has the effect of
ratcheting up the general level of consumption.

2 The Influence of Consumer Culture on the Contemporary Crisis

of Identity

The contemporary crisis of identity has to do with the sense of self formed and
developed through social activities. It concerns what is sometimes called a loss of
meaning in life. Bauman observes that in a consumer society, the sense of self is fed
by a ‘‘combination of the consumers, constantly greedy for new attractions and fast
bored with attractions already had, and of the world transformed in all its
dimensions—economic, political, or personal.’’8 What has happened in consumer
societies is striking. As Robert G. Dunn points out: ‘‘Social roles, identities,
attitudes, values and the structures of daily life have undergone fundamental change
as a consequence of a relative decline in the importance of production and the rise of
consumption as a way of life.’’9
Part of the crisis of identity stems from the emphasis placed by members of
a consumer culture on satisfying materialistic desires. As Featherstone puts it:
‘‘Consumer culture is generally presented as being extremely destructive for
religion in terms of its emphasis on hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure here
and now, the cultivation of expressive lifestyles, the development of narcissistic

5
Ibid., p. 83.
6
Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 11.
7
Jean Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 79.
8
Zygmunt Bauman, op. cit., p. 84.
9
Robert G. Dunn, Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 110.

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and egoistic personality types.’’10 That emphasis leads to a simplistic approach to

the complexities of life. Problems are dealt with as if they were pangs of hunger.
Bauman highlights the unreflective nature of the approach promoted by consumer
culture when he says: ‘‘The consumerist reflex is melancholic, supposing that
malaise takes the form of feeling empty, cold, flat—in need of filing up warm, rich,
vital things…. Gorging is the path to salvation—consume and feel good!’’11
In a consumer culture, the whims of fashion threaten to undermine self-identity,
as people face rapidly changing fashions. Dunn writes that people identify
‘‘themselves through clothing, food, music, automobiles, television shows, and
other commodities.’’12 As consumer behavior becomes alienated, people come to
consume fashion more than goods valued through use. Erich Fromm suggests that
we ‘‘ have lost contact with the real thing we eat. Our palate, our body, are excluded
from an act of consumption which primarily concerns them. We drink labels. With a
bottle of Coca-Cola we drink the picture of the pretty boy and girl who drink it in
the advertisement, we drink the slogan of ‘the pause that refreshes’’’13 The speed of
the changes in fashion leave people who are subject to their dictates with a
weakened or unstable sense of self. As Dunn maintains: ‘‘The transitory and
temporary sense of the world of objects experienced in a rapid-turnover consumer
culture disrupts feelings of self-continuity and wholeness.’’14 This fostered a
fragmented sense of self. The identity of a person can be divided into self-identity
and social or group identity. Self-identity is due to a process of internalization. It is a
reflective understanding of an individual by the individual focusing on his
experiences. Social identity has to do with the more general social significance
of human behavior. The two types of identity are not wholly independent. In a
consumer culture, when someone leaves the public setting of social life and turns to
a personal arena of consumption, the values pertaining to general social significance
can conflict with the values promoted by consumption. This can add to a sense of
alienation from society at large. The conflict also adds to a sense of fragmentation.
As Baudrillard notes: ‘‘The fact remains that, at the distribution level, goods and
objects… form a global, arbitrary, coherent system of signs, a cultural system
which, for the contingent world of needs and enjoyment, for the natural and
biological order, substitutes a social order of values and classification.’’15

3 The Crisis of Identity in Context

Consumer culture is an economic and cultural phenomenon arising from industri-

alization. In an age of economic globalization, it is inevitable that consumer culture

10
Mike Featherstone, op. cit., p. 113.
11
Zygmunt Bauman, op. cit., p. 82.
12
Robert G. Dunn, ‘‘Identity, Commodification, and Consumer Culture,’’ in Joseph E. Davis, ed.,
Identity and Social Change (New Brunswick, N.J.:Transactions Publishers, 2000), p. 116.
13
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 133.
14
Robert G. Dunn, ‘‘Identity and Social Change,’’ in Davis, op. cit., p. 128.
15
Jean Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 79.

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will take hold throughout the world. In taking hold, it undermines traditional ways
of life but fails to offer stability, since the attention to fashion produces senses of
identity that are always in flux.
It is not so much that people in previous times were immune to crises of identity,
but that the changes due to consumer culture have heightened the sense of crisis.
Despite greatly improved living standards in a material sense, people today are
unsure of themselves in a way that their predecessors were not. Orrin Edgar Klapp
writes: ‘‘ My father lacked many things, but one thing he did not lack was a definite
conception of himself. I am sure it never occurred to him… to ask ‘Who he was’;
and he would have thought it odd, to say the least, that anyone should be concerned
with such a problem. His problem–of which he had his share–were with external
affairs. He had no time for introspection. Today attention is turning inward; more
and more people are becoming aware that they have identity problems.’’16 Only
when placing ourselves in the setting of life today can we really understand the
seriousness of the crisis as it has emerged.
Traditional culture fostered a homogeneous sense of self. We miss the feeling of
being at one with ourselves that it allowed. In contrast, consumer culture leaves us
with a heterogeneous sense of self that is ultimately unsatisfying. People affiliate
themselves to different social groups in fairly rapid succession in order to deal with
the difficulties they face in daily life. At first this seems to work, at any rate,
superficially. But to retain a robust sense of self requires a unity despite the
differences, which is not to be had from a focus on consumer culture. Consumer
culture promotes a self with rapidly changing parts that do not fit together closely
enough to maintain such a unity. What is needed is an organic unity of parts that
merge with each other.
The contemporary crisis of identity is amplified by the fragmented sense of self
which results in what is held out to be a loss of meaning that in turn leaves people
with a weakened sense of morality. The narcissism that gains traction from
consumer culture engenders mediocrity and a narrow attitude toward life. As
Charles Taylor has said: ‘‘The worry has been repeatedly expressed that the
individual lost something important along with the larger social and cosmic
horizons of action. Some have written of this as the loss of a heroic dimension to
life. People no longer have a sense of a higher purpose, of something worth dying
for…. In another articulation, we suffer from a lack of passion.’’17
The effects of consumer culture are particularly evident in China. Over the last
three decades, China has been undergoing a social transformation with a rapidly
developing economy with a wide range of consumption among people. A great
many people remain at the lower end of the range, which is a matter of concern. But
a remarkably large number of people have attained what had previously been nearly
unimaginable incomes, and that number continues to grow. The growing divide in
income between people continuing to lead largely traditional lives and people

16
Orrin Edgar Klapp, Collective Search for Identity (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969),
p. 3.
17
Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991),
pp. 3–4.

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immersed in consumer culture must be of concern. While the people leading more
traditional lives have so far peacefully coexisted with the people leading more
consumer lives, conflict may lie ahead if the divide is not lessened. If that issue can
be adequately addressed, with consumer culture being part and parcel with fast-
paced industrialization, the social transformation can be expected to continue.
It should not be supposed that the social transformation will be limited to a
continued increase in consumption. Standards of living are rising throughout the
world, with trade making trade beyond national boundaries common. The process of
globalization, while partly tied to consumer culture, has other sources as well such
as the electronic storage and transmission of information facilitated by computer
technology. More needs to be done to understand the many effects of globalization
that go beyond the initial economic effects.
In any event, as more people are drawn into a consumer culture, the value of
goods through use is becoming more peripheral to their consumption. For some
people, the border between rational and irrational consumption, generally recog-
nized in the past, is too blurry to reflect seriously on their behavior. This only
exacerbates the crisis of identity that negatively affects their lives. The need to
regain focus to sharpen the border should make us reconsider the values of
traditional culture so that we may positively address the crisis of identity.18

18
I would like to thank Zhang Lin for help in translation and Thomas Magnell for his help in revising
this article.

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