Consumption: The Interpretation Of The Social Structure Perspective

At present, consumption has become a hot topic of scientific research. Consumption is not only the subject matter of economics and management, but also causes the interests of other humanities and sociology sciences, and sociology is no exception. Jean Baudrillard's book "consumer society" was a major contribution to contemporary sociology, he analyzed the historical changes of the consumer society in the context of globalization from an unique perspective, sharply criticized the Western capitalist society, which was a depth of reflection of human civilization and a valuable asset of sociology. Baudrillard profoundly pointed that the arrival of consumer society meant abundant instead of poverty in human society. However, did the consumer society mean that human society has entered into an ideal and perfect state? Can abundant society bring equality? In the process of thinking about these issues, Baudrillard's theory of consumer society provides us with a new analytical perspective, and supplies China's transformation of consumer society extremely important theoretical and practical implications in the context of globalization.On the basis of summarizing and refining the existing literatures, this paper gradually researches Baudrillard's theory of consumer society. To begin with, this article tries to describe the characteristics of consumer society and its significance through the analysis of this new schema of consumer society. what's next is exploring the social logic of consumption and revealing the production and reproduction of the consumer society inequality or the hierarchical order and the process of consumption from the logical distinction of consumer society. Furthermore, we explore the structural contradictions between the social ideology hypothesis of the growing material and the specific logic of consumer society, and profoundly interpret Baudrillard's theory of consumer society from the perspective of social structure. At last, this article evaluates Baudrillard's theory of consumer society and describes the theoretical and practical implications which Baudrillard's theory of consumer society gives contribution to China's transformation from production society to consumer society.