Brands in Society, Society in Brands

Abstract

After offering a summary of what the book deals with, I discuss grid-group theory, which argues that there are four competing lifestyles/taste cultures that exist in any society: elitists, individualists, egalitarians, and fatalists. I suggest how each of these lifestyles shapes our choices in automobiles, smartphones, wine, and so on, and our choices in media and popular culture. This leads to a consideration of class differences in societies and the role class differences play, according to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in determining our taste preferences. These preferences involve objects we buy but also political parties with which we identify.

Sociology. The scientific study of the phenomena arising out of group relations of human beings. The study of man and his human environment in their relations to each other. Different schools of sociology lay varying emphasis upon the related factors, some stressing the relationships themselves, such as interaction, association, etc., others emphasizing the human beings in their social relationships, focusing their attention on the socius in his varying roles and functions. Whether sociology, as developed hitherto, is entitled to the rank of a science is still a matter of some disagreement, but it is uniformly recognized that the methods of sociology may be strictly scientific, and that the verified generalizations which are the earmark of a true science are being progressively built up out of extensive and painstaking observation and analysis or the repetitious uniformities in group behavior.

Henry Pratt Fairchild, (Ed.) Dictionary of Sociology and Related Sciences

Everyday life is crisscrossed by patterns that regulate the behavior of its inhabitants with each other and that, at the same time, relate this behavior to much larger contexts of meaning (such as in our instance, canons of acceptable etiquette, the moral order and the sanctions of law). These regulatory are what are commonly called institutions. Everyday life takes place with the enveloping context of an institutional order; it is intersected at different points by specific institutions that, as it were, reach into it, and its routines themselves consist of institutionalize behavior, that is, of behavior that is patterned and regulated in established ways. Again, it is important to understand the reciprocal relationship of these two aspects of our experience of society: everyday life can only be understood against the background of the specific institutions that penetrate it and the overall institutional order within which it is located. Conversely, specific institutions and the institutional order as a whole are real only insofar as they are represented by people and by events that are immediately experienced in everyday life.

Peter L. Berger and Brigitte Berger, Sociology: A Biographical Approach