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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Consumer issues
In the context of rising consumerism and globalization, books on consumption are numerous. These tend to be firmly rooted in particular disciplines, however sociology, anthropology, business or cultural studies and as a result often present a blinkered view. Charged with the mission of unravelling what consumption means and how it operates, the worlds leading experts were flown to a secluded location in Sweden to 'battle it out'. This pioneering book represents the outcome. Ranging from the 'little black dress' to on-line communities, Elusive Consumption challenges our very understanding of consumerism. How successful is the advertising world in manipulating our buying patterns? Does the global marketplace promote cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity? Is the West really more of a 'consumerist civilization' than other countries? Does the advertising of certain products influence a voters choice of political party? How are products associated and marketed to different genders? These controversial topics and many more are discussed. Covering virtually every aspect of the word 'consumerism', Elusive Consumption provides a state-of-the-art view of the highly commercialized society we inhabit today. Some might have it that consumers are unwitting pawns, completely lacking in agency. Others might argue that consumer choices are empowering and subtly shape production. Richard Wilk, Colin Campbell, John F. Sherry, Richard Elliott, Russell Belk, and Daniel Miller who offers the most persuasive argument in this battle royal?
In the context of rising consumerism and globalization, books on consumption are numerous. These tend to be firmly rooted in particular disciplines, however sociology, anthropology, business or cultural studies and as a result often present a blinkered view. Charged with the mission of unravelling what consumption means and how it operates, the worlds leading experts were flown to a secluded location in Sweden to 'battle it out'. This pioneering book represents the outcome. Ranging from the 'little black dress' to on-line communities, Elusive Consumption challenges our very understanding of consumerism. How successful is the advertising world in manipulating our buying patterns? Does the global marketplace promote cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity? Is the West really more of a 'consumerist civilization' than other countries? Does the advertising of certain products influence a voters choice of political party? How are products associated and marketed to different genders? These controversial topics and many more are discussed. Covering virtually every aspect of the word 'consumerism', Elusive Consumption provides a state-of-the-art view of the highly commercialized society we inhabit today. Some might have it that consumers are unwitting pawns, completely lacking in agency. Others might argue that consumer choices are empowering and subtly shape production. Richard Wilk, Colin Campbell, John F. Sherry, Richard Elliott, Russell Belk, and Daniel Miller who offers the most persuasive argument in this battle royal?
Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.
For courses in Consumer Behavior. Beyond Consumer Behavior: How Buying Habits Shape Identity Solomon's Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being deepens the study of consumer behavior into an investigation of how having (or not having) certain products affects our lives. Solomon looks at how possessions influence how we feel about ourselves and each other, especially in the canon of social media and the digital age. In the Twelfth Edition, Solomon has revised and updated the content to reflect major marketing trends and changes that impact the study of consumer behavior. Since we are all consumers, many of the topics have both professional and personal relevance to students, making it easy to apply them outside of the classroom. The updated text is rich with up-to-the-minute discussions on a range of topics such as "Dadvertising," "Meerkating," and the "Digital Self" to maintain an edge in the fluid and evolving field of consumer behavior. MyMarketingLab(TM) not included. Students, if MyMarketingLab is a recommended/mandatory component of the course, please ask your instructor for the correct ISBN and course ID. MyMarketingLab should only be purchased when required by an instructor. Instructors, contact your Pearson representative for more information. MyMarketingLab is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment product designed to personalize learning and improve results. With a wide range of interactive, engaging, and assignable activities, students are encouraged to actively learn and retain tough course concepts.
One Big Thing is about finding out what you were born to do with your life and how to use it to revolutionize your business or ministry--and change the world. In a complex, multi-layered world, it's more difficult than ever to get your voice heard and to accomplish your dreams. To stand out today, you need to cut through the clutter and get noticed. Making that happen means to focus on the one thing in your life that drives you, inspires your passion, and separates you from the pack. For everyone who's been pulled in different directions, born with multiple abilities, or just wondered what to do with their lives, this is the answer. Phil Cooke helps you not only discover that one big thing, but also teaches you the secrets of making an unforgettable impact with your life. Stop being average at so many things, and become extraordinary at One Big Thing. What were you born to accomplish with your life? One Big Thing will help you discover what you were born to do and allow it to revolutionize your business, your ministry, and your life. In today's distracted, digital culture, it's harder than ever to identify your calling, get your voice heard, and achieve your dreams. To stand out and communicate your ideas and message, you need to cut through the clutter and get noticed. Making that happen means focusing on the one thing that drives you, inspires your passion, and separates you from the pack. If you've ever felt pulled in different directions or wondered what to do with your varied talents and interests, Phil Cooke will teach you the secrets of living a life-on-purpose that rises above the noise and leaves a lasting mark on the world.
Examines the Protestant origins of motherhood and the child consumer Throughout history, the responsibility for children's moral well-being has fallen into the laps of mothers. In The Moral Project of Childhood, the noted childhood studies scholar Daniel Thomas Cook illustrates how mothers in the nineteenth-century United States meticulously managed their children's needs and wants, pleasures and pains, through the material world so as to produce the "child" as a moral project. Drawing on a century of religiously-oriented child care advice in women's periodicals, he examines how children ultimately came to be understood by mothers-and later, by commercial actors-as consumers. From concerns about taste, to forms of discipline and punishment, to play and toys, Cook delves into the social politics of motherhood, historical anxieties about childhood, and early children's consumer culture. An engaging read, The Moral Project of Childhood provides a rich cultural history of childhood.
Ethical consumerism is on the rise. No longer bound to the counter-cultural fringes, ethical concerns and practices are reaching into the mainstream of society and being adopted by everyday consumers - from considering carbon miles to purchasing free-range eggs to making renewable energy choices. The wide reach and magnitude of ethical issues in society across individual and collective consumption has given rise to a series of important questions that are inspiring scholars from a range of disciplinary areas. These differing disciplinary lenses, however, tend to be contained in separate streams of research literature that are developing in parallel and in relative isolation. Ethics in Morality and Consumption takes an interdisciplinary perspective to provide multiple vantage points in creating a more holistic and integrated view of ethics in consumption. In this sense, interdisciplinary presupposes the consideration of multiple and distinct disciplines, which in this book are considered in delineated chapters. In addition, the Editors make an editorial contribution in the final chapter of the book by combining these separate disciplinary perspectives to develop a nascent interdisciplinary perspective that integrates these perspectives and presents platforms for further research.
How did we arrive at our contemporary consumer media economy? Why are we now fixated on screens, imbibing information that constantly expires, and longing for more direct or authentic kinds of experience? The Mediated Mind answers these questions by revisiting a previous media revolution, the nineteenth-century explosion of mass print. Like our own smartphone screens, printed paper and imprinted objects touched the most intimate regions of nineteenth-century life. The rise of this printed ephemera, and its new information economy, generated modern consumer experiences such as voracious collecting and curating, fantasies of disembodied mental travel, and information addiction. Susan Zieger demonstrates how the nineteenth century established affective, psychological, social, and cultural habits of media consumption that we still experience, even as pixels supersede paper. Revealing the history of our own moment, The Mediated Mind challenges the commonplace assumption that our own new media lack a past, or that our own experiences are unprecedented.
We are living in the age of packaging, where books really are judged by their covers. Corporations now have branded identities and maintain narratives about who they are and what they sell. Every aspect of a product is designed to appeal. This award-winning book is the first sociological study of industrial design, showing the success or failure of goods based on their actual 'career' over time. It is a meditation into the meaning of the stuff in our lives and what that stuff in turn says about us. Moltoch takes a sweeping look at the role of design in contemporary life, covering everything from toasters to cars and garlic presses. He shows how the look, the touch, and the mechanics of any product reflect the way our culture and economy combine -- how we interact, do business, exploit technology, and use art. On this fascinating exploration of the worlds of technology, design, corporate and popular culture, we see how corporations, designers, retailers, advertisers, and other middle-men influence what a thing can be and how it is made. We see the way goods link into ordinary life as well as vast systems of consumption, economic and political operation. the world.
Debates around the concept of authenticity date to the earliest theories of tourism, as scholars attempted to understand motivations for traveling away from 'home' and touristic experiences of places far 'away'. Over time, theories of authenticity have burgeoned from epistemological to ontological notions drawing a broad range of philosophers into tourism research. This edited volume features chapters that engage with key debates about authenticity - its materiality, how it is perceived, and how it is experienced. The book is comprised of four sections thematically organized around popular trends in authenticity research in tourism, making this volume appropriate as both a comprehensive text and as individual investigations. Authenticity & Tourism: Materialities, Perceptions, Experiences includes chapters that engage with the pragmatic and the theoretical, including conversations on marketing and the production of tourism attractions, examinations of the constructive nature of authenticity, and the politics of authentication processes. Also included are contributions that revisit technological trends in tourism and advance debates of authenticity in souvenirs, photographs, and simulated experiences, as well as those more firmly anchored in the theoretical, pushing boundaries and establishing paths for future research. Across these chapters, the authors employ a range of methodologies, from autoethnography to photo and food-elicitation combinations to discourse and content analyses. Set against a backdrop of truly global case studies, this collection exemplifies the multiple facets of authenticity research in tourism.
This book is the first of its kind to bring together a collection of critical scholarly work on consumer culture in South Africa, exploring the cultural, political, economic, and social aspects of consumption in post-Apartheid society. From sushi and Japanese diplomacy to Queen Sophie's writhing gown, from middle class Sowetan golfers to an indebted working class citizenry, from wedding websites to wedding nostalgia, from the liberation of consuming to the low wage labour of selling, the chapters in this book demonstrate a variety of themes, showing that to start with consumption, rather than ending with it, allows for new insights into long-standing areas of social research. By mapping, exploring and theorizing the diverse aspects of consumption and consumer culture, the volume collectively works towards a fresh set of empirically rooted conceptual commentaries on the politics, economics, and social dynamics of modern South Africa. This effort, in turn, can serve as a foundation for thinking less parochially about neoliberal power and consumer culture. On a global scale, studying consumption in South Africa matters because in some ways the country serves as a microcosm for global patterns of income inequality, race-based economic oppression, and hopes for the material betterment of life. By exploring what consumption means on the 'local' scale in South Africa, the possibility arises to trace new global links and dissonances. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts.
Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning examines the issues of jazz, consumption, and capitalism through advertising. On television, on the Internet, in radio, and in print, advertising is a critically important medium for the mass dissemination of music and musical meaning. This book is a study of the use of the jazz genre as a musical signifier in promotional efforts, exploring how the relationship between brand, jazz music, and jazz discourses come together to create meaning for the product and the consumer. At the same time, it examines how jazz offers an invaluable lens through which to examine the complex and often contradictory culture of consumption upon which capitalism is predicated.
This series epitomizes the 2017 Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) conference themes of hyper-reality and cultural hybridization. The partnership of the co-editors, with diverse backgrounds including Caribbean, Mexican and Indian roots, itself depicts cultural hybridity, culminating in a series of fascinating articles written by authors from around the globe. The eleven research papers provide a global perspective on a range of consumer discourses both in the physical marketplace (research on mobility practices within the transportation market in Vietnam; or an examination of stigma in beef consumption practices in India), or in the virtual marketplace (a study of the discourses surrounding the mythic nature of Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto; or parental management understood through the media marketplace experiences of black women in Britain). The conference's Best Competitive Award paper is featured; a compelling look at hyper-reality within the world of the Broadway musical, Wicked, examining how new media platforms are used to appeal to new and existing consumers. This series also includes two insightful papers on wine producers and their cultural intermediaries, and on wine tourism, where the authors traverse the globe to better understand market development and consumer engagement respectively. Whether it be an examination of consumer tribes, breast cancer and gender identity, or product gender and design, these authors collectively provide us with unique and riveting perspectives on consumer and marketplace experiences. The series fittingly culminates with a critical look at the emergence of the CCT tradition; an emergence that is both timely and important as this series demonstrates.
Ethical consumption, fair trade, consumer protests, brand backlashes, green goods, boycotts and downshifting: these are all now familiar consumer activities - and in some cases, are almost mainstream. They are part of the expanding field of 'radical consumption' in a world where we are encouraged to shop for change. . . But just how radical are these forms of consumption? This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to examining contemporary radical consumption, analyzing its possibilities and problems, moralities, methods of mediation and its connections to wider cultural formations of production and politics. . . Jo Littler argues that we require a more expansive vocabulary and to open up new approaches of enquiry in order to understand the area's many contradictions, strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on a number of contemporary theories, terms and debates in media and cultural studies, she uses a range of specific case studies to bring theory to life. . . By analysing practices of radical consumption, the book explores a number of key questions: . . Is ethical consumption merely a sop for the middle classes?. What are the contradictions of green consumption?. Should we understand corporate social responsibility as a form of consumer-oriented greenwash? . Who benefits from the new forms of cosmopolitan caring consumption?. Can such forms of consumption ever move beyond their niche market status to become an effective political force? . Can we really buy our way to a better, more equitable or sustainable future? . . "Radical Consumption" is important reading for cultural, media and sociology students..
Sustainable Consumption: Key Issues provides a concise introduction to the field of sustainable consumption, outlining the contribution of the key disciplines in this multi-disciplinary area, and detailing the way in which both the problem and the potential for solutions are understood. Divided into three parts, the book begins by introducing the concept of sustainable consumption, outlining the environmental impacts of current consumption trends, and placing these impacts in social context. The central section looks at six contrasting explanations of sustainable consumption in the public domain, detailing the stories that are told about why people act in the way they do. This section also explores the theory and evidence around each of these stories, linking them to a range of disciplines and approaches in the social sciences. The final section takes a broader look at the solutions proposed by sustainable consumption scholars and practitioners, outlining the visions of the future that are put forward to counteract damage to environment and society. Each chapter highlights key authors and real-world examples to encourage students to broaden their understanding of the topic and to think critically about how their daily lives intersect with environmental and ethical issues. Exploring the ways in which critical thinking and an understanding of sustainable consumption can be used in daily life as well as in professional practice, this book is essential reading for students, academics, professionals and policy-makers with an interest in this growing field.
The chapters in this volume are selected from the best papers presented at the 11th Annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held in Lille, France in July 2016. 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 topics that represent the cutting edge in consumer research. These studies draw on an array of qualitative methodologies and the substantive topics represent crucial issues for our times.
Ethical consumerism is on the rise. No longer bound to the counter-cultural fringes, ethical concerns and practices are reaching into the mainstream of society and being adopted by everyday consumers - from considering carbon miles to purchasing free-range eggs to making renewable energy choices. The wide reach and magnitude of ethical issues in society across individual and collective consumption has given rise to a series of important questions that are inspiring scholars from a range of disciplinary areas. These differing disciplinary lenses, however, tend to be contained in separate streams of research literature that are developing in parallel and in relative isolation. Ethics in Morality and Consumption takes an interdisciplinary perspective to provide multiple vantage points in creating a more holistic and integrated view of ethics in consumption. In this sense, interdisciplinary presupposes the consideration of multiple and distinct disciplines, which in this book are considered in delineated chapters. In addition, the Editors make an editorial contribution in the final chapter of the book by combining these separate disciplinary perspectives to develop a nascent interdisciplinary perspective that integrates these perspectives and presents platforms for further research.
Unconventional and provocative, My Life with Things is Elizabeth Chin's meditation on her relationship with consumer goods and a critical statement on the politics and method of anthropology. Chin centers the book on diary entries that focus on everyday items-kitchen cabinet knobs, shoes, a piano-and uses them to intimately examine the ways consumption resonates with personal and social meaning: from writing love haikus about her favorite nail polish and discussing the racial implications of her tooth cap, to revealing how she used shopping to cope with a miscarriage and contemplating how her young daughter came to think that she needed Lunesta. Throughout, Chin keeps Karl Marx and his family's relationship to their possessions in mind, drawing parallels between Marx's napkins, the production of late nineteenth-century table linens, and Chin's own vintage linen collection. Unflinchingly and refreshingly honest, Chin unlocks the complexities of her attachments to, reliance on, and complicated relationships with her things. In so doing, she prompts readers to reconsider their own consumption, as well as their assumptions about the possibilities for creative scholarship.
An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically 'consumed', to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society, its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing cultural norms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the very texture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporary France is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of the automobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens through which to examine the evolution of French society in the modern and post-modern eras. Taking the Second World War as a pivotal moment in recent French history, this book demonstrates how the automobile was both consumed and fetishized in distinct ways before and after this conflict. The ways in which society evolved from the pre- to the post-war period allow us to view French culture through the prism of the automobile as it embodied technological and social progress in twentieth-century France. The present volume seeks to explore and interrogate the processes of representation and mediation inherent in the evolving patterns of automobile consumption, and their subsequent impacts on local and national identity, framed by a detailed case study centred on France from the late-nineteenth century to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.
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.
This book explores the development in Japan throughout the twentieth century of marketing and consumerism. It shows how Japan had a long established indigenous traditional approach to marketing, separate from Western approaches to marketing, and discusses how the Japanese approach to marketing was applied in the form of new marketing activities, which, responding to changing patterns of consumption, contributed considerably to Japan's economic success. The book concludes with a discussion of how Japanese approach to marketing is likely to develop at a time when globalisation and international marketing are having an increasing impact in Japan.
Green lifestyles and ethical consumption have become increasingly popular strategies in moving towards environmentally-friendly societies and combating global poverty. Where previously environmentalists saw excess consumption as central to the problem, green consumerism now places consumption at the heart of the solution. However, ethical and sustainable consumption are also important forms of central to the creation and maintenance of class distinction. Green Consumption scrutinizes the emergent phenomenon of what this book terms eco-chic: a combination of lifestyle politics, environmentalism, spirituality, beauty and health. Eco-chic connects ethical, sustainable and elite consumption. It is increasingly part of the identity kit of certain sections of society, who seek to combine taste and style with care for personal wellness and the environment. This book deals with eco-chic as a set of activities, an ideological framework and a popular marketing strategy, offering a critical examination of its manifestations in both the global North and South. The diverse case studies presented in this book range from Basque sheep cheese production and Ghanaian Afro-chic hairstyles to Asian tropical spa culture and Dutch fair-trade jewellery initiatives. The authors assess the ways in which eco-chic, with its apparent paradox of consumption and idealism, can make a genuine contribution to solving some of the most pressing problems of our time. |
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