The Study Of Social Stratification And Symbolic Consumption Behaviours Of The Citizens In Chengdu

Five years ago, Dr. Li Peilin, a famous sociologist, raised some methods of consumption stratification and began to stratify the society on the basis of Engle Coefficient, which is an internationally accepted coefficient. From this, it's not difficult to see the importance of consumption behaviours to the study of social stratification. Nowadays, more and more studies from home and abroad reveal that under the influence of consumerism the consumption behaviours among different social strata tend to be the same, though people of various strata have different consuming partialities and habits. The aim of current consumption activities is not to satisfy the basic living requirements any more, but to satisfy the consumers' desire which is stimulated by the culture of modern consumerism. This kind of consumption is not only the consumption of the use value of products and service, but also of the symbolic value of them in a certain culture. At present, some related studies have already been focused on daily consumption behaviours of Chinese people. However, till now there is no such a study and analysis of social stratification and symbolic consumption behaviours of local residents in a particular city.This paper assumes that the consumption of the citizens in Chengdu has gradually shifted from the lower level of satisfying basic living requirements to a higher level of pursuing those things that can reflect their social status, such as styles and brands, due to the abundance of materials and products and the influence of theculture of western consumerism. However, the increasingly large gap of citizens' incomes has gradually created a tendency of stratification based on different strata and thus produced a differential system on grounds of consumption. The difference of consumption behaviours among various strata has become quite obvious. The higher status people have, the more active their symbolic consumption inclination is. Meanwhile, people's ways of consumption can be regarded as the centralised reflection of their life styles as well as of the difference of their social status. And this difference can be identified or even reconstructed by their consumption behaviours. By means of stratified sampling, deep interview, etc, this paper has a further study of the situations, features, differences and reasons of the symbolic consumption behaviours among various strata in Chengdu, from the point of the citizens' process of making consumption strategies. The result shows that what the writer assumed before has basically proved to be true. Such an inclination of symbolic consumption does exist in the citizens' daily consumption, and this tendency of stratification based on different strata is rather obvious. With the increase of their social status, the people's inclination of symbolic consumption is becoming more obvious, and through this kind of symbolic consumption behaviours they can achieve the goal of group identification and group difference formation.