Investigation of big malls on the basis of ideology and consumption relation: Denizli instance

In this thesis, the general ideology of consumer society and in this ideological framework the idea of orientation consumers in the big shopping malls and this idea as a way of social management mechanism and in terms of the consumer independence and freedom has been aimed for discussion.On the contrary to the to the liberal economical thesis which assumes the consumption has in general the role of social manegement mechanism and consumer consume freely and an independent way, based on our main assumption that there is a consumer elicitation and a restriction on decision making process in consumption environment and location, the discussion about the ideal consumer freedom, freedom of choice and orientation mechanism have been discussed and the subject of orientation has been examined under four parts; surveillance, time, reasoning and positional arrangements. In the 3rd and 4th part of thesis, the positional structure, the orientation mechanisms and structure of big shopping malls as new consuming tools has been examined in details, in procedural 4th section, due to the empirical difficulties and multidimensional aspect of subject , two different examination methods sought to be appropriate, on two big shopping mall of choice, the orientation mechanism of shopping malls; the location(material shape) and the subject of people (experience) are taken into account in two ways. First of all, semiological methods has been used to discuss the material shape of shopping mall namely positional aspect and positional allocations as a way of orientation mechanism and secondly a descriptive analysis has been made in terms of the users of shopping mall as a way of shopping experience by using questionnaire. As a result, the shopping malls, while pretending to enable freedom to their customers by way of presenting various choices they have, at the same time they take away this false freedom by enslaving them with various imitations and entertaining and attractive environment; so that preventing them to leave. For this reason, in our opinion this is nothing but just a falsification of freedom. The main argument in this thesis is the remarks in liberal capitalist economic system such as the consumption being constructed as an area of freedom, moreover an area of freedom of choice, the consumers described as free doer and rational actor in following their best interest, knowledgeable and demanding their rights and the word itself ?consumer freedom? are ideologically motivated to orientation and enslave the consumption and consumer and are tools of social management.