Education and educational organizations are considered as influential agents on students’ consumer skills, attitudes and practices. As such, they are confronted with diverse political and societal concerns such as the promotion of public health or sustainable consumption.

Surprisingly, comprehensive analyses of these assumed and potential effects of educational organizations on the consumer socialization of youths and young adults are rare. While sociological research on consumer socialization focused predominantly on the role of family, peer relations, marketing influences and the media, educational research restricted itself largely to the field of formal education. Processes of informal consumer socialization and tacit consumer learning in educational organizations have been widely neglected so far.

This paper adopts a cultural perspective and sets out to explore the role of schools and universities as learning environments in the transformation and transmission of consumer culture. Educational organizations are conceptualized as entities that bring about a distinct cultural order of dominant and marginalized consumption-related norms, values and assumptions. Drawing on and integrating approaches from the field of organizational culture, school and university culture as well as organization and consumer culture theory, this configuration is analyzed in three corresponding steps.

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