Identify and illustrate some of the dominant cultural values of modern Essay

Identify and illustrate some of the dominant cultural values of modern consumer societies - Essay Example Moreover, it is still a debatable issue whether modern consumerism has espoused globalised or localised philosophies (Merz et al. 2008: 166-182). Yet, literature on this topic has focused on finding the disparities between theoretical knowledge and its practical implementations. The main difficulty in arriving any conclusive model of consumer culture in modern societies is that social values and systems are too generic to hint at any distinctive features of consumerism. On one hand, the 21st century is market-centric. The pervasive market trends have engulfed everything material or immaterial. Theories of branding, especially those involving adolescent psychologies, clearly show how cultural propensities are directly regulated by the market economy (Naim et al. 2008: 627-640). On the other hand, this market driven economy fails to justify behaviours such as religious preferences or jingoism (Slater 1997: 24). This essay strives to discuss the key factors that can be held as probable identifiers of the dominant cultural values that underpin modern consumer societies. Culture is an abstract term for a number of social, economic and behaviorist aspects. The process of locating cultural attributes in any given society is extremely complex, for the notion of culture is highly de-territorialised due to regular intermingling of a diverse array of cultures across domestic as well as international borders. Hence, there is a pluralistic dimension to the study of ethnology in the context of consumerism (Craig and Douglas 2006: 322-342). The counter-culture movements in the 1960s may be examined in order to explore the subtleties of social hegemony and its impact on human culture. Market oriented economic practices in the modern era have not diffused into the realm of mass consumerism. Such practices are cultural properties of the elites who rule the economy of any given society. The mass, on the contrary, are compelled to using what is