About CCT

After 25 years of research in the area now considered Consumer Culture Theory, the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium was established to provide a formal forum for researchers to exchange ideas and to support the study of Consumer Culture through a formal institution. The CCTC administers the Sidney J Levy Award, provides support for the Consumer Culture Theory Conference as well as other symposia and workshops, promotes CCT research, and provides travel scholarships.

The term Consumer Culture refers to the system of commercially produced images, signs, discourses, experiences, and material objects that social groups use to make collective sense of their environments and to orient their identities and social experiences.

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Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) is an interdisciplinary field of research oriented around developing a better understand of why consumers do what they do and why consumer culture takes the forms that it does. Theorists focus on understanding the interrelationships between various material, economic, symbolic, institutional, and social relationships, and their effects on consumers, the marketplace, other institutions, and society. Researchers typically draw from and build on theories rooted in sociology, anthropology, media studies and communications, history, literary criticism and semiotics, gender and queer theory, cultural studies, and marketing.

Accordingly, consumer culture theorists pursue a robust and nuanced understanding of how market-mediated, global consumer culture and its localized instantiations shape people’s identities. Their research illuminates the co-creative practices through which consumers integrate these resources into their contextually grounded lifestyles. And, it theorizes how these activities influence and are influenced by social relationships, power structures, and institutions.

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Consumer Culture Theory research has tended to address four key theoretical domains and their various points of intersection: 1) Consumer Identity Projects; 2) Marketplace Cultures; 3) The Socio-historic Patterning of Consumption; and 4) Mass-Mediated Marketplace Ideologies and Consumers’ Interpretive Strategies. Across the areas of inquiry, research findings have implications for theory, organizational practice, public policy, and consumer’s lives.