Consumption and Consumerism in times of crisis: Consumer Action and Discourse Repertoires

In this book, we attempt to reformulate and critically interpret some basic ‘consumer action and discourse repertoires’ of middle-class research participants. These repertoires are deployed by the subjects in order to organize, perform and justify their consumption practices. We try to designate the consolidated modes of consumer action and forms of (conscious and unconscious) knowledge, that is the schemes of perception, evaluation and understanding, the values, targets and the duties which support and orientate the modes of action as well as the modes of feeling and desiring that are involved in these modes of consumer action. Furthermore, we point out the interpretative schemes invoked and deployed by the research participants in order to justify, understand and clarify their consumption practices. We also attempt to embed these repertoires with the historical context, aspiring to designate the effects of both the subjects’ material living conditions and the institutional discourses, techniques and practices regarding the shaping of these ‘consumer action and discourse repertoires’. Through these methodological pathways, we attempt to give an answer to the crucial (and not only cultural) question being, at large, the starting point of this research: In a period of economic crisis, but also afterwards, is consumerism –conceived as a cultural ethos started to be cultivated in 1960s, being shaped in 1980s and come of age as a middle-class way of life and heightened since the mid-1990s and in after years, at least until the outbreak of the Greek economic crisis in 2009/2010– reproduced, modified or does it lose its cultural validity?