"The problems and possibilities associated with the emergence of a global consumerist ethos is one with which scholars have only just begun to come to grips. For much of the past century, beginning with Thorstein Veblen’s investigation of conspicuous consumption in 1899, anxieties about commodity culture were treated as national or Western rather than global concerns. They have been explored in articles and books on a dizzying array of themes and topics, and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Attempts to make analytic sense of the impact and significance of consumerism on modern cultures have been complicated from the outset by normative considerations – either of a moralizing character or by concerns about consumerism as a form of social control – as well as by the role played by consumerism in the rise of ‘mass’ societies. When these long-standing anxieties about consumption and consumerism are set against the space of the entire globe, coming to clear conclusions about its impact on global and local social relations is made even more difficult. The idea of consumerism as a form of social control, for example, blends easily into existing discourses of economic and cultural imperialism; what is described as ‘Americanism’ is often the threat of a consumer culture associated with US society. 7 Expressed more structurally, the addition of new global communication technologies and the increasing role of techno-scientific inquiry (labelled R&D) in the production of goods, have intersected with and altered practices of production and exchange, further multiplying the difficulties of accounting for consumption and consumerism in the world today."