ConclusionIt is also our hope that

Conclusion
It is also our hope that this article has implications beyond the more narrowly realized consumer behavior community (see Miller 1998; Ritzer 1999). We believe the notion of brand communities has value to the larger discourse on community, modernity, and consumer culture. We hold that brand communities are significantly situated historically and theoretically (Gainer and Fischer 1994). The brand is itself a thoroughly modern invention, in fact, as good an icon of modernity as there is. If it is true that modernity has brought with it what Weber ([1922] 1978, p. 177) called “the disenchantment of the world,” is it possible that community could coalesce around brands of things, to satisfy (successfully or not) a yearning for a “reconstructed and re‐mystified community” (Barber 1995, p. 161)? We believe so. Perhaps brands do this in part due to their ability to mediate the inherent tension between highly stylized consumer lifestyles (Simmel [1903] 1964; Warde 1994) and underlying conformity (Firat 1991). This then places brand community in the line of sociological tradition from Kant’s sensus communis ([1790] 1980), to Simmel’s ([1904] 1981) discussions of style and sociability, to Blumer (1969), to Lyotard (1988), and significantly to Bourdieu’s (1984) habitus. Do brand communities mark and signify this long recognized and central tension of modernity? We believe they do, yet they simultaneously allow individuals to successfully negotiate a preferred social space, a preferred consumption collective (Holt 1997). Economically, it is true that the actions of some brand community members may yield profits for non‐community corporate shareholders, while receiving no share of profit themselves. Whether by virtue of lesser economic means or by the sway of habitus, this surely occurs. In other cases, the enhanced agency of the brand community may threaten these same corporate interests. We do not, however, believe brand community members to be simple dupes or boosters of a false consciousness who foolishly exchange economic participation for limited cultural capital and social connection. Rather, we believe in what Marshall Berman (1988, p. 32) called the “affirmative vision of modernism, to open oneself to the immense variety and richness of things, materials and ideas that the modern world inexhaustibly brought forth.” This vision is marked by its playfulness, its rejection of the too somber and too self‐righteous modernists and, most relevant here, its informed celebration of mass material culture (Berman 1988). We believe brand communities exist in this spirit.