Rethinking consumer culture theory from the postmodern to the communist horizon

Abstract

We explore the slow disappearance of the postmodern critique that challenged mainstream marketing and emphasised the importance of locating phenomena in their wider social, political and historic contexts to expose embedded power relationships and ideologies. After an initial overview of how postmodernism impacted on theorising in consumer research, we highlight how it reached saturation point, with many of its ideas accepted into mainstream marketing. Following this claimed demise of the postmodern critique, we review the proliferation of post-postmodern proposals and speculate from where the next theoretical direction will originate. As part of this analysis, we focus on a group of theorists who are giving communism a renaissance and consider how these ideas can help us critique and reimagine consumer culture theory.