This book provides an analysis of the politics of consumption and how the 'educated consumer' plays a vital role in advancing responsible market practices and consumption. Based on a comprehensive interdisciplinary perspective, it explores the extent, drives and links of boycotting, buycotting, labelling schemes and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in 20 European countries. A central question addressed is whether macro-societal patterns of orientation concerning the roles of the state, companies and citizens can explain individual and cross-national differences in boycotting and buycotting. As the book shows, there is not one type of 'political consumer', but several, and their occurrence is directly connected to national variations of labelling schemes and Corporate Social Responsibility. Consumers need reference points and information on the political backgrounds of purchases, and policy makers must address that need through political measures which fit to the national patterns in views about cooperation and market relationships.

Jackie Phamotse digs deep into the climate of law and policy in the social media landscape.

After a David and Goliath social media legal battle that saw many take note tweeting about her, the result is a brace, thought-provoking and remarkably detailed social media guide and personal narrative. A first-hand approach on beating public humiliation and cyber victimization, Phamotse combines personal anecdotes, hard data and compelling research to cut through an unjust system governed by the rich and famous. The author directly addresses the question of power and obsession related to social media influencers.

Written with equal doses of humor, compassion and wisdom, I Tweet What I Like is an inspiring call to action, celebrating diversity and human potential. I Tweet What I Like will inspire you!

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.

Through in-depth analysis of advertisements, politics and group-based practices, this book analyses the complex local, regional, and national historical developments related to the making of the Indian consumer across a century of global involvement. In assessing the nationalist discourse, debates on the morality of consumption and public and private spheres, the book demonstrates how the Indian consumer was both imagined and informed and how the politics of consumption formed the consumer society in India. Shedding new light on consumer cultures in India, the book will be of interest to academics from interdisciplinary fields such as anthropology, history, geography, sociology, South Asian studies and area studies, popular and visual cultures.

This book looks at the recent emergence of "new ordinary consumption," in urban China and defines new ordinary consumption as a consumer practice in which people routinely integrate products and items, traditionally reserved for special occasions, into their daily lives, to accentuate their own well-being. The book, through the case study on the adoption of cut flowers and upscaling non-floral goods, provides insights on how deal proneness and high price sensitivity pose challenges to many market retailers. It also proposes how to go about resolving these challenging issues in retail through the alteration of perceived reasons to consume. The author also examined social media marketing narrative that two direct-to-consumer floral goods sellers used, to guide consumers away from the social and cultural baggage of consumption, thereby giving more consideration to products reshaping consumers' motivation, and driving the purchase. Heeding the findings of floral startups that awakened consumers' aspirations to redefine their everyday personal lives, and making such aspirations a profitable business, this interesting case study suggests that it is time to revisit the appeal of conspicuous consumption in the present-day Chinese markets. Anyone interested to learn more about the Chinese consumers and their novel consumption habits would find the book a useful reference.

Beauty matters. Throughout the world, more and more people from all walks of life spend time and money to make themselves beautiful because beauty expresses identity and shapes status and success. Whether white or black, male or female, young or old, gay or straight, working- or middle-class, Western or non-Western, democratic or fascist, people everywhere have adopted a central maxim of the twentieth century: everyone can be beautiful, and everyone should become beautiful. This volume tracks the historical roots and meanings of modern beauty cultures in the twentieth century, drawing on examples from Europe, North America, the Near East, Asia, and Africa.

Consumers in eighteenth-century England were firmly embedded in an expanding world of goods, one that incorporated a range of novel foods (tobacco, chocolate, coffee, and tea) and new supplies of more established commodities, including sugar, spices, and dried fruits. Much has been written about the attraction of these goods, which went from being novelties or expensive luxuries in the mid-seventeenth century to central elements of the British diet a century or so later. They have been linked to the rise of Britain as a commercial and imperial power, whilst their consumption is seen as transforming many aspects of British society and culture, from mealtimes to gender identity. Despite this huge significance to ideas of consumer change, we know remarkably little about the everyday processes through which groceries were sold, bought, and consumed. In tracing the lines of supply that carried groceries from merchants to consumers, Sugar and Spice reveals how changes in retailing and shopping were central to the broader transformation of consumption and consumer practices, but also questions established ideas about the motivations underpinning consumer choices. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of eighteenth-century retailing; the importance of advertisements in promoting sales and shaping consumer perceptions, and the role of groceries in making shopping an everyday activity. At the same time, it shows how both retailers and their customers were influenced by the practicalities and pleasures of consumption. They were active agents in consumer change, shaping their own practices rather than caught up in a single socially-inclusive cultural project such as politeness or respectability.

Airbnb, gaming, escape rooms, major sporting events: contemporary capitalism no longer demands we merely consume things, but that we buy experiences. This book is concerned with the social, cultural and personal implications of this shift. The technologically-driven world we live in is no closer to securing the utopian ideal of a leisure society. Instead, the pursuit of leisure is often an attempt to escape our everyday existence. Exploring examples including sport, architecture, travel and social media, Steven Miles investigates how consumer culture has colonised 'experiences', revealing the ideological and psycho-social tensions at the heart of the 'experience society'. This first critical analysis of the experience economy sheds light on capitalism's ever more sophisticated infiltration of the everyday.

A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement. As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement demands that we must slow down the economy by transforming our economies, our politics and our cultures to live within the Earth's limits. This book navigates the practice and strategies of the movement, looking at its strengths and weaknesses. Covering horizontal democracy, local economies and the reduction of work, it shows us why degrowth is a compelling and realistic project.

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.

The chapters in this volume have been selected from the best papers presented at the 9th Annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held at the home of Aalto University in Finland in June 2014. The theme of the conference was Mapping Consumer Culture. The diverse interpretive research and theory represented in this volume provides the reader with intellectually stimulating opportunities to examine the intersections between a variety of theories and methods that represent the cutting edge in consumer research. These studies draw on an array of qualitative methodologies including ethnography, netnography, narrative and visual analysis, phenomenology, and semiotics. The substantive topics represent crucial issues for our times including understanding and navigating cultural diversity and cultural perspectives on co-creating market value.

Retail is going through difficult times and is suffering the consequences of both the economic crisis and the digitization of society. Fundamentally, there is a bigger problem: stores cannot keep up with the changing behavior of customers who are connected 24/7, customers for whom there is no distinction between online and offline.The End of Online Shopping: The Future of New Retail in an Always Connected World describes how the smart, the sharing, the circular, and the platform economy are shaping a new era of always connected retail. Retailers urgently need to innovate if they want to stay relevant in a world dominated by marketplaces and sharing platforms. The book contains inspiring examples from different industries - which include the usual suspects such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Google, but also local startups - and covers all aspects of the customer journey, from orientation and selection to delivery.The End of Online Shopping provides an excellent overview of shopping trends and developments worldwide, and offers readers indispensable insights into the future of retail.

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. * Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes * Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns * Fills a gap in research on the topic with its distinctive focus on fair trade consumption * Locates ethical consumption within a range of social theoretical debates -on neoliberalism, governmentality, and globalisation * Challenges the moralism of much of the analysis of ethical consumption, which sees it as a retreat from proper citizenly politics and an expression of individualised consumerism

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Chinese advertising as an industry, a discourse and profession in China s search for modernity and cultural globalization. It compares and contrasts the advertising practices of Chinese advertising agencies and foreign advertising agencies, and Chinese brands and foreign brands, with a particular focus on the newest digital advertising practices in the post WTO era. Based on extensive interviews, participant observation, and a critical analysis of secondary data, Li offers an engaging analysis of the transformation of Chinese advertising in the past three decades in Post-Mao China. Drawing upon theories of political economy, media, and cultural studies, her analysis offers most significant insights in advertising and consumer culture as well as the economic, social, political, and cultural transformations in China. The book is essential for students and scholars of communication, media, cultural studies and international business, and all those interested in cultural globalization and China.

Women are the world's most powerful consumers, yet they are largely marketed to erroneously through misconceptions and patriarchal views that distort the reality of women's lives, bodies, and work. This book examines the contradictions and mismatches between women's everyday experiences and market representations. It considers how women themselves exhibit paradoxical behaviour in both resisting and supporting conflicting messages. The volume emphasizes paradox as a form of agency and negotiation through which women develop dialogical meanings. The contributions highlight the ways in which women transform inconsistencies and contradictions in advertising and marketing, global consumption practices, and material consumption into positive practices for living. The rich range of ethnographic accounts, drawn from countries including the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Denmark, Japan, and China, provide readers with a valuable perspective on consumer behaviour.

Refusing the digital world of late capitalism In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our "digital age" is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

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.

The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption by Gad Saad applies Darwinian principles in understanding our consumption patterns and the products of popular culture that most appeal to individuals. The first and only scholarly work to do so, this is a captivating study of the adaptive reasons behind our behaviors, cognitions, emotions, and perceptions. This lens of analysis suggests how we come to make selections such as choosing a mate, the foods we eat, the gifts that we offer, and more. It also highlights how numerous forms of dark side consumption, including pathological gambling, compulsive buying, pornographic addiction, and eating disorders, possess a Darwinian etiology. Engaging and diverse in scope, the book maps consumption phenomena onto four key Darwinian modules: survival, reproduction, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism. As an interesting proposal, the author suggests that media and advertising contents exist in their particular forms because they are a reflection of our evolved human nature - negating the notion that they exist through the reverse causal link, as proposed by social constructivists. The link between evolutionary theory and consumption behaviors is detailed throughout the book via an examination of (among many others): appearance-enhancing products and services; financial and physical risk-taking; use of sexual imagery and the depictions of women in advertising; and television programs, movies, songs, music videos, literature, religion, and art. The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption will appeal to evolutionists who desire to explore new areas wherein evolutionary theory can be applied; consumer and marketing scholars who wish to learn about the ways in which biological-and evolutionary-based theorizing can be infused into the consumer behavior/marketing/advertising disciplines; as well as other interdisciplinary scholars interested in gaining knowledge about the power of evolutionary theory in explaining a wide range of behavioral phenomena.

This book offers a genealogical account of the rise of consumer capitalism, tracing its origins in America between 1880 and 1930 and explaining how it emerged to become the dominant form of social organization of our time. Asking how it was that we came to be consumers who live in societies that revolve around an ever-spinning circle of production and consumption, not only of goods, but also of events, experiences, emotions and relations, The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America presents an extensive analysis of primary sources to demonstrate the conditions and forces from which consumer capitalism emerged and became victorious. Employing a Weberian approach that brings liminality to the fore as a master concept to make sense of historical change, the author links an in-depth empirical investigation to supple sociological theorizing to show how the encirclement of all aspects of life by the logic of consumer capitalism was a time-bound historical creation rather than a necessary one. A fascinating study of the appearance and triumph of the "ideology" of our age, this book will appeal to scholars of social and anthropological theory, historical sociology, cultural history and American studies.

'Tourist Behaviour: The Essential Companion edited by Philip L. Pearce is an indispensable resource for courses on consumer behaviour in tourism and for all serious scholars in the field. The structure of the book is unique in following the entire consumer journey from ''dreaming and longing'' to ''returning home''. Pearce, the preeminent scholar and author on tourist behaviour, has produced another brilliant work together with an impressive list of contributing authors.' - Alastair Morrison, Purdue University, US Comprehensive and accessible, this Companion offers a thorough investigation into both traditional and fresh topics in tourist behaviour and experience. Arranged chronologically, the chapters examine tourist experience from the very idea of a tourist visit to the aftermath of returning home. With contributions from leading experts and emerging scholars across the globe, this Companion establishes the importance of studying tourist behaviour. Innovative topics including packing and preparation, dreaming and longing for trips, and memory are explored in detail. The book incorporates a selection of illustrative key case studies to ensure that it is highly accessible and readable to a range of audiences, while ensuring academic rigour. It examines both positive and negative impacts of the tourist experience on tourists themselves and the communities and environments they visit. The concluding chapter includes a vision for how tourism and sustainable development goals can be integrated to maximise the benefits of tourist behaviour and experience. Students and researchers of tourism and sustainability will greatly benefit from the research directions and suggestions indicated in each chapter of the book. This timely Companion will also prove to be a valuable resource for stakeholders looking to improve and expand upon the tourist experience.

It is a serious mistake to think that all we need for a just world is properly-structured organizations. But it is equally wrong to believe that all we need are virtuous people. Social structures alter people's decisions through the influence of the restrictions and opportunities they present. Does buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the workplace welfare of the women who sewed it half a planet away? Many people interested in justice have claimed so, but without identifying any causal link between consumer and producer, for the simple reason that no single consumer has any perceptible effect on any of those producers. Finn uses a critical realist understanding of social structures to view both the positive and negative effects of the market as a social structure comprising a long chain of causal relations from consumer/clerk to factory manager/seamstress. This causal connection creates a consequent moral responsibility for consumers and society for the destructive effects that markets help to create. Clearly written and engaging, this book is a must-read for scholars involved with these moral issues.

Why do affluent consumers almost automatically acquire new versions or variations of products already at their disposal? Even though most of us know that this novelty consumption poses a serious threat to an environmentally and socially sustainable future, we continue to do it. Why? Research shows that consumption of new automobiles, clothing, furniture, electronics, home furnishing, household apparel, mobile phones, etc., is motivated by a desire to feel more secure, less anxious and better mood-wise. Affluent consumers seem to engage in novelty consumption not to feel better but rather to avoid feeling bad. Stress, Affluence and Sustainable Consumption discusses sustainable consumption from a stress perspective, adding an embodied understanding to the sustainability-related consumption challenges that we face today. A stress perspective on affluent consumption differs from current understandings on consumption, as it fully acknowledges the consumer as having a body (including a mind) that reacts to the numerous product offerings and retail spaces, both physical and online. A stress perspective can explain how our bodies try to cope with an overload of perceptual input provided by advertising messages, product launches and even store structures. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of consumer psychology, sustainable consumption studies, sustainable marketing and markets as well as sustainable development more generally.

Death has never been more visible to consumers. From life insurance to burial plots to estate planning, we are constantly reminded of consumer choices to be made with our mortality in mind. Religious beliefs in the afterlife (or their absence) impact everyday consumption activities. Death in a Consumer Culture presents the broadest array of research on the topic of death and consumer behaviour across disciplinary boundaries. Organised into five sections covering: The Death Industry; Death Rituals; Death and Consumption; Death and the Body; and Alternate Endings, the book explores topics from celebrity death tourism, pet and online memorialization; family history research, to alternatives to traditional corpse disposal methods and patient-assisted suicide. Work from scholars in history, religious studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies sits alongside research in marketing and consumer culture. From eastern and western perspectives, spanning social groups and demographic categories, all explore the ubiquity of death as a physical, emotional, cultural, social, and cosmological inevitability. Offering a richly unique anthology on this challenging topic, this book will be of interest to researchers working at the intersections of consumer culture, marketing and mortality.

With growing awareness of environmental deterioration, atmospheric pollution and resource depletion, the last several decades have brought increased attention and scrutiny to global consumption levels. However, there are significant and well documented limitations associated with current efforts to encourage more sustainable consumption patterns, ranging from informational and time constraints to the highly individualizing effect of market-based participation. This volume, featuring essays solicited from experts engaged in sustainable consumption research from around the world, presents empirical and theoretical illustrations of the various means through which politics and power influence (un)sustainable consumption practices, policies and perspectives. With chapters on compelling topics including collective action, behaviour-change and the transition movement, the authors discuss why current efforts have largely failed to meet environmental targets and explore promising directions for research, policy and practice. Featuring contributions that will help the reader open up politics and power in ways that are accessible and productive and bridge the gaps with current approaches to sustainable consumption, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable consumption and the politics of sustainability.

Consumer society is an unquestionably complex social construct. However, after decades of unremitting dominance there are signs emerging that it is starting to falter, both as a coherent and durable system of social organization and as a strategy for societal advancement. Debates concerning how we can transition beyond present energy- and materials-intensive consumer society are beginning to gain greater salience. Social Change and the Coming of Post-Consumer Society aims to develop more complete appreciation of the relevant processes of social change and to identify effective interventions that could enable a transition to supersede consumer society. Bringing together leading interdisciplinary experts on social change, the book identifies and analyzes several ongoing small- and modest-scale social experiments. Possibilities for macro-scale change from the interlinked perspectives of culture, economics, finance, and governance are then explored. These contributions expose the systemic problems that are emblematic of the current condition of consumer society, specifically the unsustainability of prevailing consumption practices and lifestyles and the persistence of inequalities. These observations are summarized and extended in the final chapter of the book. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable consumption, sustainability transitions, environmental sociology, and sustainable development.