This article is an ethnographic study of the ways whereby some sectors of Rio de Janeiro's elites have been playing a key role in shaping the consumption universe and, therefore, creating new classification criteria of the Brazilian society. Using newspaper evidence on the network of relations known as "The New Emerging Society" and direct observation of those elites' life style, my main hypothesis is that those elites share attitudes and a type of mentality that concomitantly cultivate the work ethics and conspicuous consumption. Such attitudes and mentality have become defining features of certain social groups at a given moment in the country's recent political-economic history. Finally, based on evidence culled from the press media, I endeavor to identify the birth and functioning of a discursive system that sanctions the positive value placed on the binomial work ethics and material success, and, relying on the very notion of success, symbolically upholds this classification system.
consumption; press media; success; work