Conspicuous Consumption: an Analysis of Class, Family, and Spending Habits

Through learning, families values, community relationships, and the willingness to achieve. Culture can be easily seen - the behavior of people – is the smallest part of culture. The greatest part, internal culture is inside people’s heads. It is our way of thinking and perceiving. Most importantly, it includes the values and beliefs unconsciously learned while growing up. The collision of two cultures as people come together causes us to become more aware of the differences and similarities between cultural values. By understanding the internal culture and significant values, we have a system to analyze and interpret behavior. People from around the globe bring their cultures here to American and institute them into society. Although, the United States is a culturally diverse society, there is a dominant culture and others give up their culture (depending upon where they may live) so they can fit into mainstream society. My family as other African American families changed their ways to fit into society hoping to become socially accepted because of not being members of the dominant culture. As with most societal trends, family values in all cultures are in constant motion; the list of American family values is always evolving. African

Deluxe: How luxury lost its luster, by Dana Thomas, brings a hard hitting, raw look at the world of luxury and the mass demand of luxury that has occurred. The book was published by the Penguin Group in 2007. Luxury is defined by Thomas as truly special, and was only available to the aristocratic world of wealth and old money in western culture. Luxury signified an experience and lifestyle that denotes royalty, fame, and fortune. However, with large companies owning the former family-owned luxury producing businesses, profits are the main goal not the production of luxury. Thomas reveals the unfortunate demise and rise of

Affluenza has been found to be a family problem as well. “There is a tension between materialism and family values.” Family life is often viewed by parents as instilling competitive values in their children so they can compile the best resumes, go to the best college to get the best jobs to earn the most money. The number of families that are regularly eating together and going on a vacation together has dropped by a third since 1970. Overspending is one of the many conflicts that families face as well as the weakening of marriages. “The choices available to people in terms of products are so overwhelming. Whether you are going to buy a car or a bagel, there are so many choices. There’s a feeling when you’ve bought something that maybe you didn’t make the right choice, maybe you missed something. And it can’t help but carry over into

Using material from Item A and elsewhere assess sociological explanations of the nature and extent of family diversity today.

women, children, and it also create cross-generational influences unique to every family. In using this example of Asian American families, Brooks (2008) suggested:

How do you feel race, ethnicity, social class, and religion has shaped you and your family lives? Whether we take notice or not these aspects of our childhood and today’s life contributed to our viewpoint about different parts of the world. Also, the way your family interacted with you and others is determined in a way by these key points. My race, social class, ethnicity, and religion have helped mold me into the young adult I am, beliefs, and values I hold today because my understanding of who I am provides me with the ability to understand others backgrounds.

Such possessions are utilized in a competitive manner in order to display status and values “Whom we invite to dinner affects who marries whom, which then affects who inherits what, which affects whose children get a head start” (76). This reinforces the existence of social class and capitalism in the sense that bodies are used as machines to work and eventually gain money to spend it on objects that seems to impress people on the surface, but in reality it only validates the person’s status and social class. Using my family home as an example, each room is designed to host different kinds of guests for certain occasions. No guest will ever be situated in the family’s living room for the reason that the wood design on the walls, the green velvet couches, the simple picture frames and the fact that it is directly open to the kitchen does not scream fancy, but comfort instead. For that, the guests are always welcomed in the fancy guest room, which has the fancy purple couches that are perfectly suited with the expensive silver accessories, the silver vases that contains the weekly rearranged black flowers and the displaced silver see-through cabinets that contains the finest chinas, crystals and silverware. In addition, some people in the Middle East still hold on to their culture, and as a result, some guests prefer to

There was a time when social classes were most easily identified through material goods and possessions. Whether wealth was gained through inheritance or hard work, it was the luxury items that made the most visible and tangible statement regarding a person’s social status. Men could rely on a large house or expensive car to proclaim the success they had earned. It was much more common to see women adorned in jewels, designer clothes, and furs as symbols of her upper class status. The extravagance of a woman’s appearance was a reflection of the success of her husband, so it was natural to indulge her desire for expensive material possessions.

I resonated with Diana Kendall’s, “Framing Class, Vicarious Living and Consumption” article. This author’s choice of language had a huge impact on me. It helped convey the message of the article in a much smoother way. The media has people thinking they can be rich and famous like the people in the television shows. With her language and choice of words, she was able to eloquently portray that TV shows make us feel as if we need to have what the celebrities have, so we buy into what they sell and we feel like we are living a life just like theirs. Living like this only makes us acquire debt, because we are spending money we do not have in prevalence. It does the exact opposite we will only end up being poor and not reach the same status as

Because of how ingrained culture is within a person, many parents are unaware of how large of an impact these cultural biases have when creating a family

beliefs with them. But these families often feel the need to accommodate to the culture of where they

It is my belief that recognizing any family structure or definition is important, as the traditional version may be skewed in so many ways, without knowing or recognizing the “family” that people we run across may come from. We can also learn from other family definitions to build upon our own themes, rules, and beliefs. Adding stigma and prejudice toward families different from our own not only alienate the members, but can add unnecessary stress upon that family system. Stress in any family system can be seen as either an adaptation potential or a negative force. Many effects on the

Consumption behavior has also been identified as one of the examples that can be used to show the negative correlation between environmental outcome and income inequality (Islam, 2015). Research conducted by Danny Dorling and his associates, found that rich countries tend to have higher inequality and their consumption rate and waste generation is higher per person, which makes it more difficult to sustain their

The overall sales of luxury goods in the year 2009 is expected to be more than US$150 billion and Asia contributes 10% to it. The concept of luxury is now not confined to only to Europe and US, the Asian subcontinent contributes majorly to it, with India and China as the newly emerging markets. Professor James Twitchell (2002) comments on the democratization of luxury and the changing consumer psychology These new customers for luxury are younger than clients of the old luxe used to be, they are far more numerous, they make their money far sooner, and they are far more flexible in financing and fickle in choice. They do not

There are some economists who support a theory the U.S. economic system is without a social class system, in the typical sense. However, through many proven research methods, science leans in the opposite direction of that theory. It has been shown that humans have a natural tendency to not only roam in places where they feel as though they belong, but they also exhibit similar traits in spending based on their surroundings. The main idea of the article “Social Classes and Spending Behavior” by Pierre Martineau is to understand consumer spending behavior in different social classes in order to apply a specific research design, created by Lloyd Warner, to several different market models. When a consumer of visibly lower social class walks into a expensive department store, the clerks inside will treat her considerably different than they would if a different customer from a noticeably higher living standard walked in (121). By having the difference between them, people who have the same standard will be treated differently in subtle ways (121). Apart from how others from separate social classes are treated, there is also differences among consumers of the same income level, which serves as a better indicator of their social class, as opposed to income level. It is said that Middle-class people do not hesitate when buying refrigerators and other appliances which is durable goods, also no hesitation when buying things in discount houses and making purchase in bargain stores