Product placement is now an integral part of what is considered the highest-quality fiction programming on television. Throughout the history of television, until now, direct product placement within fiction has not been a significant marketing strategy. This broadcasting/marketing configuration marks a another definitive step in the history of the commercialization of television. This book is an exploration of the interconnections between media economics and communication discourse. The recessionary, highly competitive economic environment of the 1980s, which affected networks, independent broadcasting, and the media industry in general, has been widely noted in the business pages of the national press. But the dramatic effects on programming wrought by the financial strategies of this period are yet to be understood. Marketing factors account for the heightened emphasis on programming environment during the 1980s. But what are the full implications of the practice of audience marketing and the creation of appropriate programming environments?

This book explores contemporary families as sites of consumption, examining the changing contexts of family life, where new forms of family are altering how family life is practised and produced, and addressing key social issues - childhood obesity, alchohol and drug addiction, social networking, viral marketing - that put pressure on families as the social, economic and regulatory environments of consumption change.

Exercise for women is a heavily-laden social and embodied experience. While exercise promotion has become an increasingly visible part of health campaigns, obesity among women is rising, and studies indicate that women are generally less physically active than men. Women's (lack of) exercise, therefore, has become a public concern, and physiological and psychological research has attempted to develop more effective exercise programs aimed at women. Yet women have a complex relationship with embodiment and physical activity that is difficult for quantitative scientific approaches to explore. This book addresses this neglect by providing a much-needed feminist, qualitative social analysis of women and exercise. The contributors, drawn from across Europe and North America, investigate the ways women experience exercise within the context of the global fitness industry. All the authors take a specifically feminist perspective in their analysis of the fit, feminine body, exploring media images and the global branding of fitness products, the relationship between exercise and fat, the construction of physical activity within health discourse, and the lived experience of the exercising body. The collection explores the diversity of women's experiences of exercise in relation to age, ethnicity and body size. The book is essential for anyone interested in health promotion, sport and exercise or the social and cultural study of gender and embodiment.

This is an economic, social and cultural analysis of the nature of production and consumption activities in households in the counties of Kent and Cornwall. It yields important new insights on the transition to capitalism in England.

Digital media present opportunities for new types of consumption including desiring, buying, collecting, making, and even selling digital virtual goods. To these activities we can add those taking place in virtual communities of consumption, online shops, brand websites, and online auction houses that together amount to a vast new landscape of consumption. Digital virtual consumption motivates concatenated practices which produce meaningful experience for their users as well as market opportunities to profit from them. Consumers create and maintain elaborate wish lists, engaging with simulations of brands on websites and in videogames, coveting items for use in online games and even spending real money on these, undertaking entrepreneurial activity in virtual worlds, conjuring nostalgia via online auctions, engaging in playful consumption in other new retail formats, writing reviews of products as part of the consumption experience, engaging in online activist activities, and many other emerging behaviors.

Analyses of consumption in the digital virtual realm are however limited. This collection brings together experienced researchers from the fields of consumer research, digital games, and virtual worlds to provide conceptual and empirical work that helps us understand these new and significant consumer activities. Online communities negotiate the correct use of goods and offer technical advice, consumers develop new products, individuals create and distribute their own promotional material for their favorite brands, and entrepreneurial consumers marketing and selling their own products online. Here we may see a blurring of consumption and production, or work and leisure activity that requires further thought about what makes it meaningful for individuals. The chapters in this volume take stock of the emergence and likely importance of digital virtual consumption for consumer culture, including a review of both new and existing conceptual and methodological tools as well as a resource of key examples and analyses of practices.

After a catastrophic start to the 2020s, empathetic influence is set to be this decade’s most critical human skillset. In her new book Softening The Edge, Mimi Nicklin explains why.

With the Covid pandemic “accelerating the future”, the need for authentic human connection, and meaningful relationships with colleagues, employees and clients, has never been greater. Empathy is the key to making this happen, a trait of understanding and hope that has the power to not only change our business environments, but to change the shape of our world.

Nicklin draws from her eye-opening true-life business journey to present the case for empathy, and bolsters the argument with comprehensive scientific data. As a Millennial, she straddles the generational gap between the up-and-coming Gen-Zs and the established captains of industry, a much-needed conduit between the two.

A genuinely insightful book, Softening the Edge will inspire and challenge you in equal measure. It will show you how to successfully harness your emotional intelligence to authentically connect with and influence people on a deeper level, and it will ultimately help you to evolve and future-proof the way you do business and live your life.

This book covers the gamut of topics related to gender and consumer culture. Changing gender roles have forced scholars and practitioners to re-examine some of the fundamental assumptions and theories in this area. Gender is a core component of identity and thus holds significant implications for how consumers behave in the marketplace. This book offers innovative research in gender and consumer behavior with topics relevant to psychology, marketing, advertising, sociology, women s studies and cultural studies. It offers 16 chapters of cutting-edge research on gender, international culture and consumption. Unique to this volume is its emphasis on consumption and masculinity and inclusion of topics on a rapidly changing world of issues related to culture and gender in advertising, communications, psychology and consumer behavior.

Consumption forms a major part of people s lives. As such, geographers, historians of technology and sociologists have devoted much attention to trying to figure out what makes consumption meaningful. By contrast, economists have been content to hold onto theories of consumption that depend on a self-interested representative agent making utility maximizing decisions.

Pietrykowski develops this alternative account through the recovery of past attempts to forge a different analytical approach to the study of consumption. In particular, theories of consumption espoused by home economists, psychological economists and Regulation school theorists are critically reviewed. These research projects, marginalized by the mainstream, are the precursors of contemporary scholarship in feminist, behavioural and radical political economics. Reclaiming this work greatly enlarges the scope for contemporary research in consumer behavior. Pietrykowski then provides a richly textured set of case studies of green automobility, slow food and alternative/local currency in order to explore the diversity of user cultures and to highlight resistant forms of consumer practice. By carefully interweaving historical and interdisciplinary research Pietrykowski creates a lively and incisive critique of mainstream economics

This monograph will be of interest to academic economists, sociologists, historians and graduate students. In addition, the economics of consumption would also be of interest to readers in management, marketing and schools of business administration. "

Ever since the dawn of the Hollywood star system in the early 1920s, consumers have been fascinated by film stars and other celebrities and their seemingly glamorous private lives. The public demand for celebrities has become so pervasive that it is arguably an essential element of our everyday culture and market economy, and the focus of increasing study. This book explores the widespread phenomenon of celebrity fandom and provides a deeper understanding of why individual consumers develop an emotional attachment to their favourite celebrity and what this parasocial fan relationship means in their life. Based on an in-depth insider study of a consumer's fan relationship with a film actress, the book provides unique insights into the celebrity-fan relationship, revealing the meaning it has for the consumer in everyday life, and how it evolves and expresses itself over time. While this book is primarily located within the field of consumer research, fandom and celebrity are of interest to a variety of academic disciplines. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience from marketing and consumer research, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

Originally published to coincide with a major V&A exhibition, "Brand New" takes a look at contemporary consumer culture and the proliferation of brand identities which affect all our daily lives at the beginning of the 21st century. Ranging across fashion, design and media, "Brand New" sets out some provocative debates about brands, design and consuming habits. Five key sections look at: the economics and business of branding; personal and social identities in a global, commodified world; the shopping experience from mall to website and the ethical and social questions for both brand and consumer.;20 short features complement the main text, presenting snapshots of retail, branding and consumer behaviour from around the world. Critics, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, designers as well as voices from the business world offer a range of opinions on topics as diverse as shopping in China, fakes and counterfeiting, and the branding of personality. It is aimed at students and observers of modern culture and should appeal to anyone who shops as well as those with an interest in advertising, product design and fashion.

Anti-consumerism has become a conspicuous part of contemporary activism and popular culture, from 'culture jams' and actions against Esso and Starbucks, through the downshifting and voluntary simplicity movements, the rise of ethical consumption and organic and the high profile of films and books like Supersize Me! and No Logo. A rising awareness of labor conditions in overseas plants, the environmental impact of intensified consumer lifestyles and the effects of neo-liberal privatization have all stimulated such popular cultural opposition. However, the subject of anti-consumerism has received relatively little theoretical attention - particularly from cultural studies, which is surprising given the discipline's historical investments in extending radical politics and exploring the complexities of consumer desire. This book considers how the expanding resources of contemporary cultural theory might be drawn upon to understand anti-consumerist identifications and practices; how railing against the social and cultural effects of consumerism has a complex past as well as present; and it pays attention to the interplays between the different movements of anti-consumerism and the particular modes of consumer culture in which they exist. In addition, as well as 'using' cultural studies to analyse anti-consumerism, it also asks how such anti-consumerist practices and discourse challenges some of the presumptions and positions currently held in cultural studies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

This book engages with the topic of ethical consumption and applies a critical-realist approach to explore the process of becoming and being an ethical consumer. By integrating Margaret Archer's theory of identity formation and Christian Coff's work on food ethics, it develops a theoretical account explicating the generative mechanism that gives rise to ethical consumer practices and identities. The second part of the book presents the findings from a qualitative study with self-perceived ethical food consumers to demonstrate the fit between the proposed theoretical mechanism and the actual experiences of ethically committed consumers. Through integrating agency-focused and socio-centric perspectives on consumer behaviour, the book develops a more comprehensive and balanced approach to conceptualising and studying consumption processes and phenomena.

Exercise for women is a heavily-laden social and embodied experience. While exercise promotion has become an increasingly visible part of health campaigns, obesity among women is rising, and studies indicate that women are generally less physically active than men. Women's (lack of) exercise, therefore, has become a public concern, and physiological and psychological research has attempted to develop more effective exercise programs aimed at women. Yet women have a complex relationship with embodiment and physical activity that is difficult for quantitative scientific approaches to explore. This book addresses this neglect by providing a much-needed feminist, qualitative social analysis of women and exercise. The contributors, drawn from across Europe and North America, investigate the ways women experience exercise within the context of the global fitness industry. All the authors take a specifically feminist perspective in their analysis of the fit, feminine body, exploring media images and the global branding of fitness products, the relationship between exercise and fat, the construction of physical activity within health discourse, and the lived experience of the exercising body. The collection explores the diversity of women's experiences of exercise in relation to age, ethnicity and body size. The book is essential for anyone interested in health promotion, sport and exercise or the social and cultural study of gender and embodiment.

Praise for Sharon Beder's previous book Global Spin: 'Sharon Beder has taken the taboo subjects of propaganda and censorship in free societies and exposed their insidious threat.' John Pilger 'Beder's analysis is comprehensive, steely and clinical. She lifts the lid on an elaborate tapestry of lies, deceit, intimidation and destruction.' Harold Pinter This book investigates the way that corporations are strategically shaping children to be under-aged hyperconsumers as well as the submissive employees and uncritical citizens of the future. Sharon Beder shows how marketers and advertisers are targeting ever younger children in a relentless campaign, transforming children's play into a commercial opportunity and taking advantage of childish anxieties. Beder investigates the corporate relations and ideals that infiltrate every aspect of our lives. She presents an alarming picture of how a child's social development -- through education, health care and nutrition -- has become an ordered conveyor belt of consumerist conditioning. Focusing on education in particular, Beder explains how businesses are taking control of more and more aspects of schooling, not only for profit but to erode state schooling and promote business values. Similarly, she shows how 'difficult' children are taught from an early age that pharmaceuticals can be used to discipline them or to make them 'happy'.

The creation and expression of identity (or of multiple identities) in immersive computer-mediated environments (CMEs) is rapidly transforming consumer behavior. The various social networking and gaming sites have millions of registered users worldwide, and major corporations are beginning to attempt to reach and entice the growing flood of consumers occupying these virtual worlds. Despite this huge potential, however, experts know very little about the best way to talk to consumers in these online environments. How will well-established research findings from the offline world transfer to CMEs? That's where "Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior" comes in. Written by two of the leading experts in the field, it presents cutting-edge academic research on virtual social identity, explores consumer behavior in virtual worlds, and offers important implications for marketers interested in working in these environments. The book provides special insight into the largest and fastest growing group of users - kids and teens. There is no better source for understanding the impact of virtual social identities on consumers, consumer behavior, and electronic commerce.

The elemental power of food politics has not been fully appraised. Food marketing and consumption were matters of politics as much as economics as England became a market society. In times of dearth, concatenations of food riots, repression, and relief created a maturing politics of provisions. Over three centuries, some eight hundred riots crackled in waves across England. Crowds seized wagons, attacked mills and granaries, and lowered prices in marketplaces or farmyards. Sometimes rioters parleyed with magistrates. More often both acted out a well-rehearsed political minuet that evolved from Tudor risings and state policies down to a complex culmination during the Napoleonic Wars. 'Provision politics' thus comprised both customary negotiations over scarcity and hunger, and 'negotiations' of the social vessel through the turbulence of dearth. Occasionally troops killed rioters, or judges condemned them to the gallows, but increasingly riots prompted wealthy citizens to procure relief supplies. In short, food riots worked: in a sense they were a first draft of the welfare state. This pioneering analysis connects a generation of social protest studies spawned by E.P. Thompson's essay on the 'moral economy' with new work on economic history and state formation. The dynamics of provision politics that emerged during England's social, economic and political transformations should furnish fruitful models for analyses of 'total war' and famine as well as broader transitions elsewhere in world history.

A not-so-quiet revolution seems to be occurring in wealthy capitalist societies - supermarkets selling 'guilt free' Fairtrade products; lifestyle TV gurus exhorting us to eat less, buy local and go green; neighbourhood action groups bent on 'swopping not shopping'. And this is happening not at the margins of society but at its heart, in the shopping centres and homes of ordinary people. Today we are seeing a mainstreaming of ethical concerns around consumption that reflects an increasing anxiety with - and accompanying sense of responsibility for - the risks and excesses of contemporary lifestyles in the 'global north'.

This collection of essays provides a range of critical tools for understanding the turn towards responsible or conscience consumption and, in the process, interrogates the notion that we can shop our way to a more ethical, sustainable future. Written by leading international scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds - and drawing upon examples from across the globe - Ethical Consumption makes a major contribution to the still fledgling field of ethical consumption studies. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between consumer culture and contemporary social life.

An examination of the relationship between space, place and consumption offers important insights into some of the most powerful forces constructing contemporary societies. Space and place are made and remade through consumption. Yet how do cultures of consumption discover space, and how do they construct place? This book addresses these questions by exploring the implications of conceptualizing consumption as a spatial, increasingly global, yet intensely localized activity. The work develops integrative approaches that articulate the processes involved in the production and consumption of space and place. The result is a varied, engaging, and innovative study of consumption and its role in structuring contemporary capitalist political economies.

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.

The creation and expression of identity (or of multiple identities) in immersive computer-mediated environments (CMEs) is rapidly transforming consumer behavior. The various social networking and gaming sites have millions of registered users worldwide, and major corporations are beginning to attempt to reach and entice the growing flood of consumers occupying these virtual worlds. Despite this huge potential, however, experts know very little about the best way to talk to consumers in these online environments. How will well-established research findings from the offline world transfer to CMEs? That's where "Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior" comes in. Written by two of the leading experts in the field, it presents cutting-edge academic research on virtual social identity, explores consumer behavior in virtual worlds, and offers important implications for marketers interested in working in these environments. The book provides special insight into the largest and fastest growing group of users - kids and teens. There is no better source for understanding the impact of virtual social identities on consumers, consumer behavior, and electronic commerce.

"Utopian in theme and implication, this book shows how the practices of critical, interpretive inquiry can help change the world in positive ways . This is the promise, the hope, and the agenda that is offered."--Norman K. Denzin, From the Foreword

"Its focus on learning, education and pedagogy gives this book a particular relevance and significance in contemporary cultural studies. Its impressive authors, thoughtful structuring, wide range of perspectives, attention to matters of educational policy and practice, and suggestions for transformative pedagogy all provide for a compelling and significant volume."--H. Svi Shapiro, University of North Carolina Greensboro

Distinguished international scholars from a wide range of disciplines (including curriculum studies, foundations of education, adult education, higher education, and consumer education) come together in this book to explore consumption and its relation to learning, identity development, and education. Readers will learn about a variety of ways in which learning and education intersect with consumption. This volume is unique within the literature of education in its examination of educational sites both formal and informal where learners and teachers are resisting consumerism and enacting a critical pedagogy of consumption.

Interpretive consumer research usually proceeds with a minimum of structure and preconceptions. This book presents a more structured approach than is usual, showing how a simple framework that embodies the rewards and costs associated with consumer choice can be used to interpret a wide range of consumer behaviours from everyday purchasing and saving, innovative choice, imitation, 'green' consumer behavior, to compulsive behaviors such as addictions (to shopping, to gambling, to alcohol and other drugs, etc). Foxall takes a qualitative approach to interpreting behavior, focusing on the epistemological problems that arise in such research and emphasizing the emotional as well as cognitive aspects of consumption.

The author argues that consumer behaviour can be understood with the aid of a very simple model that proposes how the consequences of consumption impact consumers' subsequent choices. The objective is to show that a basic model can be used to interpret consumer behaviour in general, not in isolation from the marketing influences that shape it, but as a course of human choice that is dynamically linked with managerial concerns.

How do drugs get to the market? What controls are there and what procedures for monitoring their effects? And how adequate are the regulators in protecting public health when new drugs have serious side effects? The Therapeutic Nightmare tells the story of the sleeping pill Halcion - a story which is far from over. First marketed in the 1970s, Halcion has been taken by millions of patients around the world. For many years it has been associated with serious adverse effects such as amnesia, hallucinations, aggression and, in extreme cases, homicide. Thirteen years after its first release, it was banned by the British government. It remains on sale in the United States and many other countries. This book explains why patients have come to be exposed to Halcion's risks and examines the corporate interests of the manufacturers, the professional interests of the scientists and medical researchers and the interests of patients in safe and effective medication. It reveals how these contending forces shape the regulatory decision-making process about drug safety. As the number of new drugs and health products grows, a major challenge facing regulators and the medical profession is how to put the interests of public health decisively and consistently above the commercial interests of the drugs industry, while becoming more accountable to patient and consumer organizations.

Consumption forms a major part of people's lives. As such, geographers, historians of technology and sociologists have devoted much attention to trying to figure out what makes consumption meaningful. By contrast, economists have been content to hold onto theories of consumption that depend on a self-interested representative agent making utility maximizing decisions. Pietrykowski develops this alternative account through the recovery of past attempts to forge a different analytical approach to the study of consumption. In particular, theories of consumption espoused by home economists, psychological economists and Regulation school theorists are critically reviewed. These research projects, marginalized by the mainstream, are the precursors of contemporary scholarship in feminist, behavioural and radical political economics. Reclaiming this work greatly enlarges the scope for contemporary research in consumer behavior. Pietrykowski then provides a richly textured set of case studies of green automobility, slow food and alternative/local currency in order to explore the diversity of user cultures and to highlight resistant forms of consumer practice. By carefully interweaving historical and interdisciplinary research Pietrykowski creates a lively and incisive critique of mainstream economics This monograph will be of interest to academic economists, sociologists, historians and graduate students. In addition, the economics of consumption would also be of interest to readers in management, marketing and schools of business administration.

Post-Mao China has been characterized in literature and the media as a burgeoning consumer society. Consuming China investigates this characterization by examining the cultural significance of consumption and consumerism in the People's Republic of China today. In questioning the notion of consumption, this impressive work suggests that it is not simply a symptom of economic reform within China neither a product of the emergence and transformation of contemporary Chinese capitalism. Rather, the essays offer a new perspective on Chinese consumption by focusing on more than just consumerism, looking at the practices of consumption in relation to different manifestations of social and cultural change.
Drawing on case studies from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China, Consuming China affords a greater understanding of the practice of Chinese consumption and will appeal to China scholars and anthropologists, and to those with an interest in cultural and gender studies.