Conspicuous Consumption

Conspicuous consumption is the use of commodities and possessions to display and demonstrate financial and social standing. The concept of conspicuous consumption was coined, theorized, and popularized by Thorstein Veblen. An economist, sociologist, and a pioneer in the study of consumption, Veblen was a key figure in the development of sociology in America. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899/1970) is his treatise on the effects and influence social and cultural change has on economic changes in society. In this work, Veblen demonstrates the increasing importance of money as a means to rank people, and as a measure of social standing. One of the first major contributions to the literature on consumption, this book provides the classical sociological account and analysis of conspicuous consumption. Veblen developed an important concept by drawing attention to the role consumption plays as the key way of gaining and indicating social status in modern societies.

Veblen shows how rare, expensive, and highly visible commodities are acquired for their social and cultural value, rather than for useful purposes, and how they are a means by which elite social groups mark their existence and privilege to other groupings. His focus was the emergent American nouveaux riches of the late-nineteenth century. This new social group of newly rich individuals was an element of the upper classes, who Veblen famously called the “leisure class.” This social group publicly demonstrated their status through the use of consumer goods in leisure practices and also practiced a conspicuous absence from all useful employment, in other words they engaged in “conspicuous leisure.”

Leisure here is not laziness or indolence, instead, what it refers to is time that is consumed nonproductively. This enables the leisure classes to demonstrate their financial ability to afford a life of idleness, and reflects their belief in the “unworthiness” of productive work. The “conspicuous abstention from labor therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability” (Veblen in Lerner 1948/1975, 86). However, for conspicuous consumption and leisure to be effective, there needs to be an excessive consumption of resources and an explicit display of waste and wastefulness, one that requires an individual to have a circle of others around himself or herself to consume this excess vicariously. These individuals, family, friends, servants, or competitors, act as vehicles through which to display prodigious wastefulness.

As Stephen Edgell has noted, there are three key factors that contribute to conspicuous consumption. First, there is cost or conspicuous expense. Second, there is the abstention from productive work, or what Veblen calls conspicuous leisure. Third, there is the extravagant consumption of resources, or what can be termed conspicuous waste. In short, conspicuous consumption can be characterized as the conspicuous consumption of money, time, and resources.

In outlining his theory of conspicuous consumption, Veblen notes that in every society there are two types of economic activity, that which involves “workmanship” or “serviceability,” and consequently enhances material life, and that which involves “predation” or which exploits and enhances social repute. [Page 232]With regard to the production of goods and services, this dualism leads Veblen to identify two types of work, industrial and nonindustrial occupations, and two types of commodities, useful and wasteful. Useful commodities are vital to sustain human life, whereas wasteful commodities are crucial to sustaining social status and social standing.

...