Born to consume____"Growing up in most contemporary Western contexts, the average individual will be confronted not only with a cornucopia of commodities and commercialized services but also with a variety of discourses and institutions identifying such a context as ‘consumer society’ or ‘consumer culture’. More or less explicitly, these discourses and institutions will address people as ‘consumers’. This book is concerned precisely with the practices, discourses and institutions which have brought about and characterize ‘consumer culture’. Although the product of an historical process, the contemporary ways of organizing and understanding the relations between people and objects have several distinctive features" (...) "The book is organized to offer an historically grounded and theoretically informeddiscussion of contemporary consumer culture as well as a critical understanding of its diversity, reach and ambivalence.The chapters are thus  divided into three parts, organized around three main dichotomies: production/consumption; rationality/irrationality; freedom/oppression. Both in lay and social scientific discourse, these dichotomies have been applied to understand contemporary consumer culture. Reference to them thus helps in discussing its history,theory and politics, even though much of the book is concerned with showingthat consumption challenges dichotomies and involves other, more complex patternsof relation.