Contagion eff ectA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWeties. See mcdonaldization; technology:
the consumerization of technology.
▶Jeff Hearn and Sasha Roseneil, eds, Consuming
Cultures: Power and Resistance (Macmillan, 1999);
Peter N. Stearns, Consumerization in World History:
The Global Transformation of Desire (Routledge,
2001); Paul Ransome, Work, Consumption and
Culture (Sage, 2005).
Consumer sovereignty A phrase used in the
Peacock Report, 1985, summarizing the attitude
towards broadcasting of the Committee on
Financing the BBC. The Committee took the
market-place view that the customer knows best
and that consumer tastes should be the guiding
principle of radio and television program-
ming. See public service broadcasting
(psb).
Consumption behaviour Te r m u s e d b y
researchers to describe the ways in which audi-
ences respond to product marketing – attitudes
towards advertising, knowledge of commer-
cials and people’s buying behaviour. At the nub
of market research into consumption behaviour
is motivation. Why do people watch a TV
commercial, what makes them pay attention and
heed the message?
Regularly cited are three major reasons for a
positive audience response: (1) social utility –
watching commercials in order to gain informa-
tion about the ‘social signifi cance’ of products or
brands, and the association of advertising objects
with social roles and lifestyles; (2) communica-
tion utility – watching in order to provide a
basis for later interpersonal communication;
(3) vicarious consumption – participating at
second-hand in desired lifestyles as a means of
indirect association with those people possess-
ing glamour or prestige. See vals typology.
▶Martin Evans, Ahmed Jamal and Gordon Foxall,
Consumer Behaviour (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Contagion eff ect Power of the media to create a
craze or even an epidemic. Examples of this are
the so-called Swastika Epidemic of 1959–60, in
which an outbreak of swastika-daubing in the
US was accelerated by media coverage, and the
UK Mods v. Rockers seaside battles of the 1960s.
Debate continues as to whether media cover-
age ‘worsens’ or prompts the street riots, often
named Copycat Riots.
Stanley Cohen in ‘Sensitization: the case of the
Mods and Rockers’ in Th e Manufacture of News
(Constable, 1st edition, 1973), edited by Cohen
and Jock Young, writes, ‘Constant repetition
of the warring gangs’ image ... had the eff ect of
giving these loose collections a structure they
never possessed and a mythology with whichSome commentators see consumption as being
a modern substitute for religion – spending as a
substitute for praying – while the cathedrals of
today are shopping malls. Big business spon-
sors art and thereby brings it under the wing
of consumer criteria – is there a market for it,
and will it directly or indirectly make a profi t?
Big business also sponsors schools and thus is in
at least a pole-position to appropriate education
itself.
American writer Herbert J. Schiller, until
his death in 2000, proved himself a scourge of
corporate intrusions into the life of communi-
ties. In Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover
of Public Expression (Oxford University Press,
1989), Schiller believed that ‘the Corporate voice,
not surprisingly, is the loudest in the land’ and
it also rings around the world. He was of the
view that consumerism ‘as it is propagated by
the transnational corporate system and carried
to the four corners of the world by new informa-
tion age technologies, now seems triumphant’.
He talked of ‘corporate pillaging of the national
information supply’ and the ‘proprietory control
of information’.
Even the museum has ‘been enlisted as a
corporate instrument’: history is adopted for
corporate use through sponsorship. Th us even-
tually museums become reliant on corporate
‘approval’ of the past. Th e pressure upon them
is to choose to record the kind of history that
suits the corporate purpose. Corporate power in
the fi eld of communication is so great, Schiller
argued, that the active-audience paradigm is
called into question: ‘A great emphasis is given
to the “resistance”, “subversion”, and “empower-
ment” of the viewer. Where this resistance and
subversion of the audience lead and what eff ects
they have on the existing structure of power
remain a mystery.’
He expressed the view that ‘it is not a matter
of people being dupes, informational or cultural.
It is that human beings are not equipped to
deal with a pervasive disinformational system
- administered from the command posts of
social order – that assails the senses through all
cultural forms and channels’.
Schiller’s theme is echoed in the work of the
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose
The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
made its fi rst appearance in English – translated
by Chris Turner and published by Sage – in
- A question engaging twenty-fi rst-century
commentators is the extent to which the digital
age of the internet has seen challenges to
corporate ambitions to consumerize world soci-