"This book examines the public controversies surrounding lifestyle risks in the consumer society. Comparing news coverage of the globesity pandemic in Britain and the USA, it illustrates the way moral panic brought childrens food marketing to the centre of the policy debates about consumer lifestyles"--

In this compelling history, Peter Chapman shows how the United Fruit Company took bananas from the jungles of Costa Rica to the halls of power in Washington, D.C., with not just clever marketing, but covert CIA operations, bloody coups and brutalised workforces. And how along the way they turned the banana into a blueprint for a new model of unfettered global capitalism: one that serves corporate power at any cost.

Living with Things provides an account of consumption in terms of its centrality to our dwelling practices. Its focus is on the home, particularly on the movement of people and things within and through it in everyday habitation. Here dwelling is seen as an activity, as doing things with and to the things to hand around us. Being 'at home' is achieved through living amongst things, as well as amongst people and other non-human presences, such as pets and gardens. Being at home is achieved through what we do with objects, the things that are acquired and stored, that linger around in our homes, sometimes for decades, and which we may eventually get rid of. These ordinary things make dwelling structures accommodating accommodations; they make them homes. Based primarily on a former coal-mining village in North-east England, this book explores practices of inhabitation, from moving in or being modernised, to the daily accommodation of sleep and children. It provides a demonstration of what happens to consumption research when it 'comes home' and is positioned not in sites of exchange but within the home and in households.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"A superb collection of classic and contemporary readings on commodification theory, including the latest, most advanced theorizing on this subject. It is a must-read."
--Elizabeth Anderson, Philosophy, University of Michigan

"As someone who helped to draw attention to the subject of commodification more than two decades ago, I believe that commodification is, if anything, more important today than it has ever been. We must ask ourselves: Are there some things that money can't buy? Who is advantaged and who disadvantaged by desperate market exchanges? This indispensable collection of old and new thoughts on commodification will help us as we struggle towards answering these questions."
--Margaret Jane Radin, Stanford Law School

""Rethinking Commodification" includes several classic texts of commodification theory that familiarize readers with the traditional debate. The work then offers new insights into the issue, with two dozen articles, appellate court opinions, and essays. Taken together, this book comprises an intellecutal mosaic that moves the discussion beyond the early, on-off question of whether or not to commodify."
--"Metapsychology Online"

"A magnificent collection. The subject is profound and complex, the text gripping, lively, and thoroughly enjoyable to read."
--Sylvia A. Law, NYU Law School

"Commodification is on net a great source for good in the world. But the seminal essays in Rethinking Commodification show that the serious questions about alienability are much more than concerns about hypothetical contracts for babies or self-indenture.a
--Ian Ayres, author of "Insincere Promises"

Whatis the price of a limb? A child? Ethnicity? Love? In a world that is often ruled by buyers and sellers, those things that are often considered priceless become objects to be marketed and from which to earn a profit. Ranging from black market babies to exploitative sex trade operations to the marketing of race and culture, Rethinking Commodification presents an interdisciplinary collection of writings, including legal theory, case law, and original essays to reexamine the traditional legal question: aTo commodify or not to commodify?a

In this pathbreaking course reader, Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams present the legal cases and theories that laid the groundwork for traditional critiques of commodification, which tend to view the process as dehumanizing because it reduces all human interactions to economic transactions. This acanonicala section is followed by a selection of original essays that present alternative views of commodification based on the concept that commodification can have diverse meanings in a variety of social contexts. When viewed in this way, the commodification debate moves beyond whether or not commodification is good or bad, and is assessed instead on the quality of the social relationships and wider context that is involved in the transaction. Rethinking Commodification contains an excellent array of contemporary issues, including intellectual property, reparations for slavery, organ transplants, and sex work; and an equally stellar array of contributors, including Richard Posner, Margaret Jane Radin, Regina Austin, and many others.

Success in the business world is not strictly reliant on producing valuable and in-demand products. Without a proper understanding of the consumers that a business markets and sells their products to, a company's accomplishments can quickly become failures. Understanding Consumer Behavior and Consumption Experience discusses the indispensible value of understanding consumer activities and the crucial role they play in developing successful marketing strategies. Focusing on concepts such as consumer perceptions, consumption culture, and the influence of information technology, this book is a pivotal reference source for business managers, marketing executives, and graduate students interested in the relationship between consumer culture and businesses.

The study of the desire, acquisition, use, and disposal of goods and services, consumption, has grown enormously in recent years, and has been the subject of major historiographical debates: did the eighteenth century bring a consumer revolution? Was there a great divergence between East and West? Did the twentieth century see the triumph of global consumerism? Questions of consumption have become defining topics in all branches of history, from gender and labour history to political history and cultural studies. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption offers a timely overview of how our understanding of consumption in history has changed in the last generation, taking the reader from the ancient period to the twenty-first century. It includes chapters on Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America, brings together new perspectives, highlights cutting-edge areas of research, and offers a guide through the main historiographical developments. Contributions from leading historians examine the spaces of consumption, consumer politics, luxury and waste, nationalism and empire, the body, well-being, youth cultures and fashion. The Handbook also showcases the different ways in which recent historians have approached the subject, from cultural and economic history, to political history and technology studies, including areas where multidisciplinary approaches have been especially fruitful.

In the world of economics and business, engaging with loyal customers while also seeking out new, potential customers is a must. With the recent advancements of social media technology, these operations have increased the need for more developed methods to mesh consumer-business relationships and retention. The Handbook of Research on Retailing Techniques for Optimal Consumer Engagement and Experiences is a thought-provoking reference source that provides vital insight into the application of present-day customer relationship management within the retail industry. While highlighting topics such as digital communication, e-retailing, and social media marketing, this publication explores in-depth merchandiser knowledge as well as the methods behind positive retailer-consumer relationships. This book is ideally designed for managers, executives, CEOs, sales professionals, marketers, advertisers, brand managers, retail experts, academicians, researchers, and students.

Our country is in turmoil: political corruption at the highest levels of government; criminals able to walk out of prison at their convenience and live lives of luxury; and power blackouts for 12 hours a day.

But we South Africans also know how to make things work.

This book is a wealth of simple, cost-effective ideas that could immediately improve our nation:

• Want to know how to revitalize tourism in SA? There’s a way, and it’s free!
• Transform our policing system without breaking the bank.
• Upgrade our education and healthcare without adding a cent to the budget.
• Implement a sustainable alternative to the basic income grant while boosting the economy.
• Resolve the land issue without resorting to expropriation.

No matter who you vote for, get your politicians to drive these ideas.

Luxury. The word alone conjures up visions of visions of attractive, desirable lifestyle choices, yet it also faces criticism as a moral vice harmful to both the self and society. Engaging with ideas from business, marketing, and economics, The Vice of Luxury takes on the challenging task of naming how much is too much in today's consumer-oriented society. David Cloutier's critique goes to the heart of a fundamental contradiction. Though overconsumption and materialism make us uneasy, they also seem inevitable in advanced economies. Current studies of economic ethics focus on the structural problems of poverty, of international trade, of workers' rights -- but rarely, if ever, do such studies speak directly to the excesses of the wealthy, including the middle classes of advanced economies. Cloutier proposes a new approach to economic ethics that focuses attention on our everyday economic choices. He shows why luxury is a problem, explains how to identify what counts as the vice of luxury today, and develops an ethic of consumption that is grounded in Christian moral convictions.

Introduction: Green Consumerism, Green Labelling?
The Historical Context Key Trends
Green Labels and other Eco-Standards: A Definition
The Consumers Role: Trusting, Reflecting or Influencing?
Our Cases
Sceptical and Encouraging Arguments
Policy Contexts and Labelling
Three Framing Strategies: From a Complex Reality to a Categorical Label
Organizing the Labelling
Dealing with Mutual Mistrust
Green Labelling and Green Consumerism: Challenges and Horizons

Junmin Wan takes a two prong approach to analysing this pressure in Japan in his new volume Consumer Casualties. He first clarifies the consumer preference for habit to identify useful approaches toward solving a number of economic issues, such as gambling and other addictive practices.

Significant recent changes in the structure and composition of households make the study of the economic relationships within the household of particular interest for academics and policy-makers. In this context, Household Economic Behaviors, through its focus on theoretical and empirical chapters on a range of economic behaviors within the household, provides a new and timely viewpoint. Following the Introduction and one or two surveys which give a general background, the volume includes theoretical and empirical perspectives on allocation of available time within the household, monetary and non-monetary transfers between household members, and intra-household bargaining.

In a world of finite resources, expanding populations and widening structural inequalities, the ownership of things is increasingly contested. Not only are the commons being rapidly enclosed and privatized, but the very idea of what can be owned is expanding, generating conflicts over the ownership of resources, ideas, culture, people, and even parts of people. Understanding processes of ownership and appropriation is not only central to anthropological theorizing but also has major practical applications, for policy, legislative development and conflict resolution.
"Ownership and Appropriation" significantly extends anthropology's long-term concern with property by focusing on everyday notions and acts of owning and appropriating. The chapters document the relationship between ownership, subjectivities and personhood; they demonstrate the critical consequences of materiality and immateriality on what is owned; and they examine the social relations of property. By approaching ownership as social communication and negotiation, the text points to a more dynamic and processual understanding of property, ownership and appropriation.

Over the past few generations, expectations of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have altered radically, but these dramatic changes have largely gone unnoticed. This intriguing book brings together the sociology of consumption and technology to investigate the evolution of these changes, as well the social meaning of the practices themselves.Homes, offices, domestic appliances and clothes play a crucial role in our lives, but not many of us question exactly how and why we perform so many daily rituals associated with them. Showers, heating, air-conditioning and clothes washing are simply accepted as part of our normal, everyday lives, but clearly this was not always the case. When did the 'daily shower' become de rigueur? What effect has air conditioning had on the siesta - at one time an integral part of Mediterranean life and culture? This book interrogates the meaning and supposed 'normality' of these practices and draws disturbing conclusions. There is clear evidence supporting the view that routine consumption is controlled by conceptions of normality and profoundly shaped by cultural and economic forces. Shove maintains that habits are not just changing, but are changing in ways that imply escalating and standardizing patterns of consumption. This shrewd and engrossing analysis shows just how far the social meanings and practices of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have eluded us.

This is a comparative study of how drinks and drinking, as embodied semiotic and material forms, mediate modern social life. Drink, as an embodied semiotic and material form, mediates social life. This book examines the fundamental nature of drink through a series of modular but connected ethnographic discussions. It looks at the way the materiality of a specific drink (coffee, wine, water, beer) serves as the semiotic medium for a genre of sociability in a specific time and place. As an explicitly comparative semiotic study, the book uses familiar and unfamiliar case studies to show how drinks with similar material properties are semiotically organized into very different drinking practices, including ethnographic examples as diverse as the relation of coffee to talk (in ordering at Starbucks). Further chapters look at the dryness of gin in relation to the modern cocktail party and the embedding of beer brands in the ethnographic imagination of the nation. Rather than treat drinks as mere propos in the exclusively human drama of the social, the book promotes them to actors on the stage. "Semiotics" has complemented linguistics by expanding its scope beyond the phoneme and the sentence to include texts and discourse, and their rhetorical, performative, and ideological functions. It has brought into focus the multimodality of human communication. "Continuum Advances in Semiotics" publishes original works in the field demonstrating robust scholarship, intellectual creativity, and clarity of exposition. These works apply semiotic approaches to linguistics and non-verbal productions, social institutions and discourses, embodied cognition and communication, and the new virtual realities that have been ushered in by the Internet. It also is inclusive of publications in relevant domains such as socio-semiotics, evolutionary semiotics, game theory, cultural and literary studies, human-computer interactions, and the challenging new dimensions of human networking afforded by social websites.

This book offers a fresh look at sustainable consumption, exploring how grassroots community action can spread ideas in society. It presents a "New Economics" approach based on alternative measures of wealth and value, examining how these are put into practice through local organic food systems, low-impact eco-housing, and complementary currencies.

These in-depth profiles of major non-governmental organizations show how they compete to protect consumer or business interests ranging across all stages of American life from baby foods to funerals. The analyses of 109 interest groups portray a wide array of the political tactics that have helped shape consumer policy over the past generation. Drawing upon materials from the organizations themselves, as well as from other original and secondary sources, the profiles depict who the groups represent, their goals, how they were founded, their resources, organizational structures and procedures, the services and benefits that they offer, the issues that they address, and the tactics that they use to affect federal policy. Students, teachers, policymakers, administrators, consumer and business activities and interest group watchdogs will learn through this pioneering new reference who gets what in the marketplace and in politics and why. Drawing upon materials from the organizations themselves, as well as from other original and secondary sources, the profiles depict who the groups represent, their goals, how they were founded, their resources, organization structures and procedures, and the services and benefits that they offer. The profiles also describe specific issues that the groups address, their positions, and their tactics and ways in which they try to affect federal policymaking-from boycotts to group buying, research, testifying before congressional committees, serving on executive department advisory committees, election candidate ratings, filing lawsuits, publicizing research results, becoming media experts on particular subjects, and persuading members to contact a member of Congress. Students, teachers, policymakers, administrators, consumer and business activists and watchdogs will learn through this pioneering new reference who gets what in the marketplace and in politics and why.

Eco-labelling is an increasingly popular way of meeting consumer's demands for environmental information about the products they purchase. The first book on this important subject collects contributions from the academic, policy-making and commercial spheres to look at the conceptual and practical issues, and to discuss how eco-labelling can be made effective and equitable, and must avoid distorting international trade to the detriment of developing countries.

This volume analyses the interaction of business lobbyists, consumer critics, and government officials for the first time in 20 years. It offers important new insights and revisionist views about the impact of consumer issue networks in the making of public policy in Congress during the 1980s and 1990s. It shows how consumer groups lobby Congressional committees and their leaders and staffers to reform legislation in areas of critical concern. This text for undergraduate and graduate courses in American politics, business and government, lobbying and interest group behavior, and political sociology covers the expanding range and activities of consumer lobbyists in recent years and gives a short history of their role in Congressional decisionmaking from the Progressive and New Deal eras to the present. The study details their activities in terms of civic outcomes (campaign finance, intervenor funding, freedom of information); consumer protection (impure food, unsafe drugs, autos, toys, and household appliances); economic regulation and deregulation (airlines, financing services, trucking, and telecommunications); and highly politicized pocketbook issues (health care, tax, energy, income, and trade policies). Journalists, activists, and students of politics, business administration, and sociology will find the conclusions about consumers, businesses, and Congressional decisionmaking and the arguments for government and citizen activism arresting.

Packaging is ephemeral - its purpose is to be 'wasted' once we've removed the product it contains. Whilst we are encouraged to 'reduce, re-use and recycle', Designing for Re-Use proposes that domestic re-use is the 'Cinderella' of this trinity, because it is under researched and little understood. The re-use of packaging could have a significant effect on the quantity of material that enters the waste stream and the energy and consequently carbon that is expended in its production - every re-used item is another item not purchased. The authors demonstrate that we do re-use - but usually despite, rather than because of, the actions of government and designers. The book shows that by understanding the ways in which actions of this sort fit with everyday life, opportunities may be identified to enhance the potential for re-use through packaging design.The authors itemize the factors that affect the re-use of packaging, and analyse the home as a system in which objects are processed. Some of these factors relate to the specifics of the design, including the type of materials used and the symbolism of the branding. Other factors are more obviously social - for instance the effects on re-use of different consumer orientations. The book provides practical guidance from a design perspective, in the context of real-life examples, to provide professionals with vital design recommendations and evaluate how a practice orientated approach to understanding consumers' behaviour is significant for moving towards sustainability through design.

"This major new contribution to the study of consumption examines how dominant groups express and display their sense of superiority through material and aesthetic attributes, demonstrating that differences from one society to another, and across historical periods, challenge current understandings of elite distinction"--Provided by publisher.

This volume casts a critical eye on representations and practices of consumption in the Western world. It offers a unique contemporary perspective on the themes of counter-consumerism, ecological crisis and sustainability that are rising fast on the political and cultural agenda.

Storytelling-Case Archetype Decoding and Assignment Manual (SCADAM) reviews cultural and tourism/hospitality applications of Carl Jung's work on archetypes in shaping behavior and unconscious/conscious thought. SCADAM includes a testing manual on how to use Donald T. Campbell's "degrees of freedom" (DOF) test for story-archetype assignments of what consumers and brands tell about consumption experiences of product/service brands, places, and drama/life enactments. SCADAM includes assignment testing and example scoring for each of 12 archetypes: 1. Caregiver (CA); 2. Creator (CR); 3. Everyman/woman (EV); 4. Explorer (EX); 5. Hero (HE); 6. Innocent (IN); 7. Jester (JE); 8. Lover (LO); 9. Magician (MA); 10. Ruler (RU); 11. Sage (SA); 12. Shadow (SH). SCADAM increases accuracy of researchers' interpretations of consumers' (emic) interpretations of dramas in consumption experiences; SCADAM provides for comparing DOF testing in scoring alternative archetypes. Thus, this manual provides tools for confirming relevancy and falsifying incorrect archetype assignments of stories consumers and brands tell. SCADAM builds on prior studies in the literature by the authors and colleagues.

This is the first book to bring together a focus on governance with that on cultures of consumption. It asks about the changing place of the consumer as citizen in recent trends in governance, about the tensions between competing ideas and practices of consumerism, and about the active role of consumers in the construction of governance. The book seeks to expand the debate about consumers and governance and to raise the possibility of new conceptions and policy agendas.

Shoppers can express their values as they search for value. Political consumerism is turning the market into a site for politics and ethics, as consumer choices reflect personal attitudes and purchases are informed by ethical or political assessment of business and government practice. In such forms as boycotts, when consumers refuse to buy, or buycotts, where consumers shift their purchases, the ostensibly apolitical marketplace is a site of contestation at the intersection of globalization and individualization. This book opens readers' eyes to a new way of viewing everyday consumer choices and the role of the market in our lives, illuminating the broader theoretical and historical context of concerns about sweatshops, responsible coffee, and ethical and free trade.