Consumer Culture Reborn focuses on consumption as the point at which economy and culture combine. The book draws the often polarised discourses of political economy and cultural studies closer together in a historical context as a means of understanding our social situations as we approach the end of the millennium. Taking as its central theme the ability of the capitalist mode of production to transform the material and social world which sustains it, the book focuses on some of the ways in which this transformational impulse has altered the means by which ordinary people reproduce their life and their patterns of life. Treating the commodity as the primary touchstone for both the analysis of the economy and culture, Consumer Culture Reborn charts the rise and fall of the first' mass consumption society of the post-war years. It also considers the evidence supporting the idea of the emergence of a new consumer society today, exploring the ways in which the organisation of economic affairs have had profound consequences for the formation of everyday cultures. Neither a history book, nor simply a book of theory, Consumer Culture Reborn fuses elements of economic, social and cultural theory in an historical perspective.