“Outline the Ways in Which Rubbish Can Be Said to Have Value in a Consumer Society”.

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“Outline the ways in which rubbish can be said to have value in a consumer society”. Zygmunt Bauman (Hetherington 2009 p46) postulates that a consumer society is increasingly characterised by the consumption of material goods and services. He observed that rising levels of disposable income and the concomitant growth in affluence, provides society with the facility to define and organise itself more effectively through consumption patterns rather than through the traditional paradigm of socio-economic and occupational strictures. The phenomenon of mass consumption however, is considered to be causally related to the growing manifestation of rubbish generated by excessive packaging, accelerated replacement cycles, increased disposability, wider product choice and brand-inspired ephemera imparting acquisitive symbolic values (Brown 2009 p112/114). While rubbish is often perceived as worthless reliance on this colloquial definition can be misleading as its meaning can alter in response to temporal changes in social attitudes resulting in its re-valuation. Yet value, like rubbish, is an ambiguous term since it, too, is subject to these same social processes which can modify its meaning. The relationship between rubbish and value, therefore, is arguably dynamic and complex. The objective of this essay is to examine this relationship, exemplifying the ways in which rubbish can undergo a transformation and assume value within the realm of a consumer society. In understanding this transformation process it is relevant to briefly explore Thompson’s ‘Rubbish Theory’ Thompson articulates a ‘sequence of value transformations’ (Thompson 1988 p14) in a product’s consumption cycle whereby the utility stage (transient-value decreasing) becomes rubbish (zero or very low price) and then re-valued as a durable (value increasing). He supports the theory with the example
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