Overall, since the end of the 20th century, the burgeoning of consumerism as a way of life across all domains has remade politics, economics and culture:
“ In the almost complete absence of other sustained macro-political and social narratives – concern about global climate change notwithstanding – the pursuit of the 'good life' through practices of what is known as 'consumerism' has become one of the dominant global social forces, cutting across differences of religion, class, gender, ethnicity and nationality. It is the other side of the dominant ideology of market globalism and is central to what Manfred Steger calls the 'global imaginary'.[4]