The Saturated Society

Pekka Sulkunen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki

A provocative and stimulating intervention in a debate of key contemporary importance.Chris ShillingProfessor of Sociology, University of Kent Pekka Sulkunen offers a fresh look at the transition from industrial society to consumer capitalism. He asks important questions about how consumer desires are produced and regulated and what it means to attempt to regulate the way we live. This book is stimulating, erudite and important.Sue ScottPro Vice Chancellor at Glasgow Caledonian University ′A wide-ranging and multidimensional book...Overall, this is an interesting, thought-provoking and challenging book, and there is much in the thesis of the saturated society that we might usefully reflect upon.′Acta Sociologica September ′The Saturated Society is an erudite and well reflected analysis of the complexitiesof current consumer culture in general as well as in relation to the handling of specific risk and lifestyle issues of consumption... indispensable for the consumption researcher who wishes to be provoked in relation to her/his own habitual analytical assumptions about consumer culture.′ Journal of Consumer Culture

• IntroductionLifestyle and the Social BondThe Good Order of Nature: Progress and Criticism in Adam Smith′s Sociology of ModernityAutonomy: the Contracting individualIntimacy: the Romantic SelfThe New Consumer Society and Its CriticsThe Welfare State in the Consumer SocietyFrom Pastoral to Epistolary PowerInner-Directed or Other-Directed? Agency and Citizenship in Mass SocietyRe-Inventing the Social Contract