The New Age: Towards a Market Model

Abstract

The problem of how the New Age may be defined is widely acknowledged among commentators. It is hard to delineate and does not fit easily into existing analytical categories. This paper will review how scholars have conceptualised the movement. It will discuss the problems inherent in attempting to specify its constituents, fix its limits, and characterise its organisational forms. The later sections advances the argument that some of its most distinctive characteristics may be accounted for by acknowledging the market dynamics at play in New Age milieux. It is proposed that the diffuse overall shape of the movement is the result of determinate commercial institutional arrangements.

Notes

Guy Redden teaches media and cultural studies at Lincoln University. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Queensland in 2003. It provides an interdisciplinary reading of the New Age movement in the light of contemporary social and cultural theories. Articles on this topic are published in the Journal of Consumer Culture and Journal of Australian Studies. His principal research interests are alternative cultures and consumer cultures.

1. Much contemporary use of market models in the sociology of religion is based upon rational choice views of religious participation. Stark and Finke, among others, have described the social field of religion as a market-place in which people seek alternatives that best satisfy their religious needs. Quite unlike those approaches which attempt to capture the historical specificities of increasing social pluralism, this is a transhistorical, predictive market model designed to correlate the degree of monopoly or competition between religious providers with the levels of religiosity apparent in any given social context.

2. When such cases have been developed in the past, they have almost exclusively been directed towards the end of criticising the New Age by suggesting that it revolves around ‘fleecing’ those prone to buy a panacea in a poke. See, for example, Lau.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Guy Redden

Guy Redden teaches media and cultural studies at Lincoln University. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Queensland in 2003. It provides an interdisciplinary reading of the New Age movement in the light of contemporary social and cultural theories. Articles on this topic are published in the Journal of Consumer Culture and Journal of Australian Studies. His principal research interests are alternative cultures and consumer cultures.