The Consumption of Tourism - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 372

Tourism and Postmodern Consumer Culture
The important point here is the fact that, for many, postmodernity is
epitomised by the emergence of a consumer society. That is, within post-
modern societies the practice of consumption has assumed a dominant and
significantly more complex role than simple utilitarian need satisfaction.
People now consume goods and services, including tourism, for a variety of
reasons and purposes, in particular as a means of compensating for the loss,
through the process of de-differentiation, of traditional social markers. In
other words, a fundamental feature of postmodern culture is that 'consump-
tion, rather than production, becomes dominant, and the commodity attains
the total occupation of social life' (Pretes, 1995: 2).
The emergence of this dominant consumer culture has resulted, in part,
from a variety of factors and transformations within the wider social and
economic system in post-industrial societies. Such factors include the large,
widely available and ever-increasing range of consumer goods and services,
the popularity of leisure-shopping, easily accessible credit facilities, the emer-
gence of consumer groups and consumer legislation, pervasive advertising,
greater and faster access to goods and services through the internet, and 'the
impossibility of avoiding making choices in relation to consumer goods'
(Lury, 1996: 36). In short, the practice of consumption has been simplified
and facilitated by socio-economic transformations - it has become easy to be
a consumer.
However, of equal, if not greater interest has been the increasing signifi-
cance of consumption. It has long been recognised that commodities, whether
goods or services, embrace a meaning beyond their economic exchange or use
value (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979). 'The utility of goods is always framed by
a cultural context, that even the use of the most mundane objects in daily life
has cultural meaning . . . material goods are not only used to do things, but
they also have a meaning, and act as meaningful markers of social relation-
ships' (Lury, 1996: 11). Indeed, it has been argued that consumption results
only from the inherent significance of goods and services, their use value
being irrelevant (Baudrillard, 1988), although this is disputed by others
(Warde, 1992: 6). Nevertheless, social lives are patterned or even created by
the acquisition and use of things, including tourism.
To put it another way, consumption in postmodern capitalist societies
'must not be understood as the consumption of use-values, a material utility,
but primarily as the consumption of signs' (Featherstone, 1991: 85). Typically,
this significance of consumption is related to status or identity messages or
for establishing distinctions between different social groups (Bourdieu, 1986)
and, not surprisingly, much contemporary consumer behaviour research
is concerned with the symbolism of consumption, with how consumption
conveys 'information to us and others about who we are' (Belk, 1995: 64).