GLOBALIZATION, CONSUMER CULTURE AND IDENTITY: The Middle Class in a Postmodern Society

Globalization, Consumer Culture and Identity is a study of consumer culture touching on questions of globalization, liberalization, social change, and the middle class. Born out of an original empirical study of changing consumer habits of the middle class and their relationship to the new media culture, it seeks to understand the nature of consumer culture and how it shapes identities within the middle class. On the broader canvas, the book engages with the sociological debate on the dialectics between the macro and the micro aspects of globalization, mirrored in the paradoxical relation between the global and the local. It explores the global spread of market culture and interrogates how the Indian middle class appropriates, indigenizes, negotiates and/or resists new forms of production and consumption.

More specifically, the book opens up an inquiry into the everyday practices of social life that unravels subjective orientations in constructing human trajectories. The issue of identity is more pressing and contested than ever before in contemporary societies. The book examines the manner in which consumer culture constructs identities of the middle class people. Kerala, the southernmost state of India, known for its paradoxical forms of social development, constitutes the specific locale of this sociological gaze.

The book is one among the pioneering attempts at examining the micro-level ramifications and implications of globalization from a cultural perspective in the Indian context. This will be a useful guide in the fields of development and culture, and studies on globalization, gender, media, business, and marketing and a good source book for the academic, scholarly and student community in social sciences, mass media and communication.

Antony Palackal teaches in the Post-Graduate Department of Sociology in Loyola College of Social Sciences, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. He is the India Coordinator of the World Science Project that studies social networks, collaboration and productivity among scientists in the developing countries in the wake of ICTs. He was a Visiting Professor in Cleveland State University, Ohio, USA.

He has published six books and several research and popular articles. His areas of specialization include sociology of science and development, new social movements, culture and gender studies.