(la société de consummation) A term adopted by French cultural critic Baudrillard, Jean to characterize a trend in society to treat consumption (i.e. the purchasing of material goods) as a socially valuable activity in its own right. His point is that in the post-World War II boom economy consumption became decoupled from production; whereas previous economic models focused on production as the only source of growth, in the 1950s and 1960s economic modelling began to focus more on consumption. Perhaps the most important sign of this was the new availability of relatively easy to obtain cheap credit, enabling people to buy now what they could only afford later. Consumer society also constitutes a change of mindset, a shift away from the ‘save then buy’ mode of thinking to a ‘buy now pay later’ attitude. The result of this change of mindset was, according to Baudrillard, a massive proliferation of objects whose purpose was no longer justified by need, but instead catered solely to want. See also postmodernism.