"When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping."
Consumerism is an acceptance of consumption as a way to self-development, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. It makes a clear separation between producers and consumers. In a consumer society an individual's identity is tied to what s/he consumes. People living in consumer cultures have a tendency to satisfy social, emotional, and spiritual needs with material things.
For critics of consumerism, such as Zygmunt Bauman (Consuming Life), “the consumerist society has to rely on excess and waste” (p.38) The advent of consumerism augurs the era of ‘inbuilt obsolescence” and the insatiability of needs. New needs need new commodities; new commodities need new needs and desires, and this dynamic makes individuals wish to do what is needed for the to enable the system to reproduce itself. Thus consumption is a “hedonic treadmill” (p.45). Its promises of satisfaction remain seductive only as long as the desire stays ungratified.
Read More"Consumers are poor substitutes for citizens." Benjamin Barber
"In a nutshell, the governing impulse of the consumer is "I want". The governing impulse of the citizen is "we need".
Mutual respect does not imply uncertainty or skepticism about the good; it implies, instead, a certain higher-order good, a vision of the citizen as an active searcher for what has worth, whose sincere engagement in that search should be allowed to unfold in freedom, even if it should lead to what seems to be error -- unless it inflicts manifest harm on others." (Martha Nussbaum, in Ethics of Consumption)
In Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0, Cass Sunstein distinguishes between "consumer sovereignty" and "political sovereignty". For Sunstein, consumer sovereignty takes preferences and priorities as given, as matters of personal taste that are neither amenable to, nor in need of, public justification. The main question for consumer sovereignty is whether consumers are getting what they want, and it often draws on market research to manipulate them into thinking so. If we believe in consumer sovereignty, we are likely to think that freedom consists in the satisfaction of private preferences -- in the absence of restrictions on individual choices. (p.45)
Political sovereignty, by contrast, "does not take individual tastes as fixed or given. It prizes democratic self-government, understood as a requirement of 'government by discussion,' accompanied by reason-giving in the public domain." (p.40) Within the political sphere, decisions have impact beyond the purely individual, and decisions need to take into account the potential impact on others.
Read MoreThe word glocal is a fusion of global and local.
Glocalization has provided a way for multinational corporations to distance themselves from Americanization. Savvy multinationals, such as Coca-Cola were able to establish "local relevance" by claiming "We are not a multi-national. We are a multi-local." One of the leaders in "glocal" marketing was said to be McDonald's, which "has adapted itself so successfully to foreign markets that consumers outside the US often believe it is a domestic company."
In a similar way, "Mass-customization" is a production technique that promises to reconfigure the generic and the particular. These examples are seller's strategies to cater to cultural differences and are known as micro-marketing. But these techniques create increasingly differentiated consumers just as much as they respond to existing varietes or heterogeneities.
Read MoreHow long can we sustain the unsustainable?
The rapid increase in the world's population as a whole, the presence of many people that live below the level of any equitable living standards, the emergence of large and rapidly developing economies such as India's and China's, and the profligate model of the American lifestyle (and to a slightly lesser extent, the Western European) have all contributed to concern over the "carrying capacity" of the planet. How many people can obtain adequate amounts of clean water, food, and shelter, let alone automobiles, computers, and a constant supply of consumer goods? The environmental group Bioregional.com calculates that if everyone on earth adopted the British lifestyle, it would require three planets to support. The American lifestyle would require seven planets, but we still only have one. Will wars and catastrophes be the only way to know when those limits have been reached?
The growing awareness of environmental consequence, and the sense that "we can't go on this way" without serious adverse consequences for future generations underlies the development of the term sustainability. The expression was first put into widespread political use by the United Nation's World Commission on the Environment and Development, which issued a report in 1987 known as the Brundtland Report, named after its chairperson, Gro Harlem Brundtand, the former prime minister of Norway.
Although it draws on scientific study and environmental forecasts, the concept of sustainability is a political and moral term, like justice or freedom, and the history of sustainability as as much social, political, and economic as it is environmental.
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