This book analyzes the factors behind the recent expansion of Fairtrade and questions whether the trust given to the scheme by "ethical" shoppers is warranted. It goes about this assessment by analyzing the claim of ethical shopping and by scrutinizing the specific contribution of the Fairtrade Certification Mark to producer's welfare. This assessment is based on information gathered in a mixture of desk-based research and fieldwork carried out in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Tanzania and South Africa. This book comprises separate chapters written by academics of various backgrounds, who have worked together on Fairtrade, it should however be noted that the authors do not necessarily hold a common set of views in respect to Fairtrade.

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.

A unique insight into the decision-making and food consumption of the European consumer. The volume is essential reading for those involved in product development, market research and consumer science in food and agro industries and academic research. It brings together experts from different disciplines in order to address the fundamental issues related to predicting food choice, consumer behavior and societal trust in quality and safety regulatory systems. The importance of the social and psychological context and the cross-cultural differences and how they influence food choice are also covered in great detail.

Garifuna live in Central America, primarily Honduras, and the United States. Identified as Black by others and by themselves, they also claim indigenous status and rights in Latin America. Examining this set of paradoxes, Mark Anderson shows how, on the one hand, Garifuna embrace discourses of tradition, roots, and a paradigm of ethnic political struggle. On the other hand, Garifuna often affirm blackness through assertions of African roots and affiliations with Blacks elsewhere, drawing particularly on popular images of U.S. blackness embodied by hip-hop music and culture.

"Black and Indigenous" explores the politics of race and culture among Garifuna in Honduras as a window into the active relations among multiculturalism, consumption, and neoliberalism in the Americas. Based on ethnographic work, Anderson questions perspectives that view indigeneity and blackness, nativist attachments and diasporic affiliations, as mutually exclusive paradigms of representation, being, and belonging.

As Anderson reveals, within contemporary struggles of race, ethnicity, and culture, indigeneity serves as a normative model for collective rights, while blackness confers a status of subaltern cosmopolitanism. Indigeneity and blackness, he concludes, operate as unstable, often ambivalent, and sometimes overlapping modes through which people both represent themselves and negotiate oppression.

The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and the consumer rights movement. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, not only has American consumerism triumphed, there isn't even an "ism" left to challenge it. "An All-Consuming Century" is a rich history of how market goods came to dominate American life over that remarkable hundred years between 1900 and 2000 and why for the first time in history there are no practical limits to consumerism.

By 1930 a distinct consumer society had emerged in the United States in which the taste, speed, control, and comfort of goods offered new meanings of freedom, thus laying the groundwork for a full-scale ideology of consumer's democracy after World War II. From the introduction of Henry Ford's Model T ("so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one") and the innovations in selling that arrived with the department store (window displays, self service, the installment plan) to the development of new arenas for spending (amusement parks, penny arcades, baseball parks, and dance halls), Americans embraced the new culture of commercialism -- with reservations. However, Gary Cross shows that even the Depression, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the inflation of the 1970s made Americans more materialistic, opening new channels of desire and offering opportunities for more innovative and aggressive marketing. The conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism of today, thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and communities together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates Americans.

Consumer culture has provided affluent societies with peaceful alternatives to tribalism and class war, Cross writes, and it has fueled extraordinary economic growth. The challenge for the future is to find ways to revive the still valid portion of the culture of constraint and control the overpowering success of the all-consuming twentieth century.

"A fascinating investigation that explains semiotics, the science of signs, and shows how it can help us understand the way marketing and advertising shape our behavior as consumers and the way we use brands to help create our public identities. Semiotics deals with the messages we are always sending about ourselves by the clothes we wear, our facial expressions, our body language, and the objects we purchase. It also helps us learn how to interpret the messages that others are always sending to us. The book also analyzes a number of the "objects of our affection" such as toasters, teddy bears, hamburgers and computers. In the appendix, there are a number of learning games and activities that involve using semiotics to better understand consumer culture"--Provided by publisher.

This book explores the new politics of leisure and pleasure in relation to a range of popular activities. Current generations in Western societies are essentially recipients of the changes that the Sixties - fabled decade of sex, drugs and rock n' roll - left behind. In their leisure lives - whether drinking, reading, surfing the net, taking drugs, going to a comedy gig, watching TV, taking a holiday, downloading music, supporting a football club, having a bet, having sex or simply roaming the countryside - people seem to enjoy unprecedented freedoms. But what are these freedoms? How are they exercised? And to what extent have traditional controls been relinquished?

Political consumerism is turning the market into a site for politics and ethics. It is consumer choice of producers and products on the basis of attitudes and values of personal and family well-being as well as ethical or political assessment of business and government practice. In the face of economic globalization and a regulatory vacuum, consumers increasingly take responsibility in their own hands, making the market an important venue for political action through their decisions of what to purchase. This book opens the 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. Contemporary forms of political consumerism - boycotts, labelling schemes, stewardship certification, socially responsible investing, etc. - are described and evaluated. Individual actions are shown to be important in the complexity of globalization.

Does what we consume define who we are? Harry Wallop takes a fresh look at society and shows you to your place in today's modern consumer world. Are you an Asda Mum, Wood Burning Stover or Sun Skittler? Do you know a Portland Privateer or Rockabilly? And exactly who are the Hyphen-Leighs? Journalist Harry Wallop has spent a disproportionate amount of his working life chronicling the buying habits of the British people. Taking a sweep through the seismic changes that have happened in the UK since the end of food rationing in 1954, he argues that our social standing in today's society is no longer determined by the accent you speak with, the school you attended, or your parents. Rather, it is determined by the food we eat, our choice of holiday destination, the clothes we wear, the size of the TV we sit in front of, and whether you use a plug-in air freshener or a smelly candle. He shows us how retailers and big business are making the most of how we fit into these new social categories, and offers up some intriguing insights into the state of Britain today.

Despite increasing public awareness of climate change, our behaviours relating to consumption and energy use remain largely unchanged. This book answers the urgent call for effective engagement methods to foster sustainable lifestyles, community action, and social change. Written by practitioners and academics, the chapters combine theoretical perspectives with case studies and practical guidance, examining what works and what doesn't, and providing transferable lessons for future engagement approaches. Showcasing innovative thought and approaches from around the world, this book is essential reading for anyone working to foster real and lasting behavioural and social change.

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.

Climate change is forcing us to rethink our lifestyles, but green consumerism won't save the planet. Mainstream approaches simply cannot deliver the radical changes we need for a sustainable society. This book, now available in paperback, offers a fresh look at sustainable consumption, presenting a holistic "New Economics" approach. It explores how grassroots community actions for sustainability are experimenting with new ways of working, measuring value and progress, and expressing ecological citizenship.
Local organic food systems, low-impact eco-housing, and complementary currencies are examined to measure their success at delivering localized economies and inclusive communities, enabling people to reduce their ecological footprints, harnessing collective energies and building new forms of social organization. Viewing these activities as innovative "green niches," the book explores the opportunities for grassroots innovations to spread and influence wider society, and the barriers preventing them achieving their potential.

As conscientious consumers, we have become overwhelmed with alarms about food contamination, over-fishing, clear-felled forests, loss of biodiversity, climate change, chemical pollution, and other environmental and health-related risks. This book is an analysis of a primary set of tools aimed at dealing with these risks: green labels and other eco-standards. The authors address political, regulatory, discursive, and organizational circumstances and raise the questions: how can ecological complexities be translated into a trustworthy and categorical label? Is there a mismatch between the production and consumption of green labels? Is it possible to achieve broad public participation in environmental issues through labelling? This is a timely book that provides a social and policy-oriented analysis of the challenges for green consumerism through green labelling.

"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.

Credit and Community examines the history of consumer credit and debt in working class communities. Concentrating on forms of credit that were traditionally very dependent on personal relationships and social networks, such as mail-order catalogues and co-operatives, it demonstrates how community-based arrangements declined as more impersonal forms of borrowing emerged during the twentieth century.
Tallymen and check traders moved into doorstep money-lending during the 1960s, but in subsequent decades the loss of their best working class customers, owing to increased spending power and the emergence of a broader range of credit alternatives, forced them to focus on the 'financially excluded'. This 'sub-prime' market was open for exploitation by unlicensed lenders, and Sean O'Connell offers the first detailed historical investigation of illegal money-lending in the UK, encompassing the 'she usurers' of Edwardian Liverpool and the violent loan sharks of Blair's Britain.
O'Connell contrasts such commercial forms of credit with formal and informal co-operative alternatives, such as "diddlum clubs," "partners," and mutuality clubs. He provides the first history of the UK credit unions, revealing the importance of Irish and Caribbean immigrant volunteers, and explains the relative failure of the movement compared with Ireland.
Drawing on a wide range of neglected sources, including the archives of consumer credit companies, the records of the co-operative and credit union movements, and government papers, Credit and Community makes a strong contribution to historical understandings of credit and debt. Oral history testimony from both sides of the credit divide is used totelling effect, offering key insights into the complex nature of the relationship between borrowers and lenders.

Presenting a unique study of shopping, the life of shopping centres and the nature of shoppers, this book offers new understanding of the significance of place and the construction of identity. From an historical and thematic survey of the nature of consumer societies and their implications for identity, the authors examine the commercial and historical background of two London shopping centres. Drawing on their own primary research on shoppers from particular streets, focus groups and survey questionnaires, the authors examine particular issues that arise in the action of locating identity through shopping.

This is the first scholarly book to fully address the topics of the psychology of deceptive persuasion in the marketplace and consumer self-protection. Deception permeates the American marketplace. Deceptive marketing harms consumers health, welfare and financial resources, reduces people s privacy and self-esteem, and ultimately undermines trust in society. Individual consumers must try to protect themselves from marketers misleading communications by acquiring personal marketplace deception-protection skills that go beyond reliance on legal or regulatory protections. Understanding the psychology of deceptive persuasion and consumer self-protection should be a central goal for future consumer behavior research.

The authors explore these questions. What makes persuasive communications misleading and deceptive? How do marketing managers decide to prevent or practice deception in planning their campaigns? What skills must consumers acquire to effectively cope with marketers deception tactics? What does research tell us about how people detect, neutralize and resist misleading persuasion attempts? What does research suggest about how to teach marketplace deception protection skills to adolescents and adults?

Chapters cover theoretical perspectives on deceptive persuasion; different types of deception tactics; how deception-minded marketers think; prior research on how people cope with deceptiveness; the nature of marketplace deception protection skills; how people develop deception protection skills in adolescence and adulthood; prior research on teaching consumers marketplace deception protection skills; and societal issues such as regulatory frontiers, societal trust, and consumer education practices.

This unique book is intended for scholars and researchers. It should be essential reading for upper level and graduate courses in consumer behavior, social psychology, communication, and marketing. Marketing practitioners and marketplace regulators will find it stimulating and authoritative, as will social scientists and educators who are concerned with consumer welfare.

This new volume, Green Consumerism: The Behavior of New Age Consumer, provides a holistic understanding the importance of promoting green products and discusses consumers' buying intentions and decisions. The chapters consider consumer behavior theory in the context of green or ecologically friendly products from both the academic and business perspectives. The chapters present the latest empirical and analytical research in the field of green marketing and provide an abundance of information about profitable and sustainable ways and strategies to deal with environmental problems. The volume considers how consumers are taking responsibility and becoming more aware, driving change in the marketplace. In response, companies are integrating appropriate green strategies into their operational activities, product development processes, and marketing activities to achieve a competitive advantage in saturated markets. This helps companies gain market share and minimize their production costs. Topics discussed in the volume include green pricing, green consumer behavior, various dimensions of consumer purchase intention, sustainable marketing, innovation techniques used to go green, eco-awareness, and other ongoing developments in this rapidly expanding area. Key features: * Discusses research on the latest trends in the field of green marketing, green practices, green products, eco-literacy, environment awareness, protection, management etc. * Provides insight about current consumer behavior, consumers' eco-literacy levels, and their desires to go green * Covers a multitude of topics, including green pricing, green consumer behavior, sustainable marketing, innovation techniques used to go green, eco-awareness, and more

The BSE epidemic, GM foods, avian flu, the growth of supermarkets and the crisis in obesity have shaken consumer trust in food. Uncovering surprising differences between countries, Trust in Food examines this and challenges the idea of the consumer as a sovereign individual, demonstrating how consumption is institutionalized within society.

In this book, Maxine Berg explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants. This unparalleled 'product revolution' provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a 'new luxury', one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products 'won the world'.

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.

Consuming Citizenship investigates how Korean American and Chinese American children of entrepreneurial immigrants demonstrate their social citizenship as Americans through conspicuous consumption. The American immigrant entrepreneur has played a central role in projecting the American ideology of meritocracy and equality. The children of these immigrants are seen as evidence of an open society. While it appears that these children have readily adapted to American culture, questions remain as to why second-generation Asian Americans feel compelled to convince others of their legitimacy and the way they go about asserting their citizenship status. Extending our understanding of such children beyond the traditional emphasis on assimilation, the author argues that their consumptive behavior is a significant expression of their paradoxical position as citizens who straddle the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion.

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.

We are all 'glass consumers'. Organisations know so much about us, they can almost see through us. Governments and businesses collect and process our personal information on a massive scale. Everything we do, and everywhere we go, leaves a trail. But is this in our interests? The glass consumer appraises this relentless scrutiny of consumers' lives. It reviews what is known about how personal information is used and examines the benefits and risks to consumers. The book takes the debate beyond privacy issues, arguing that we are living in a world in which - more than ever before - our personal information defines our opportunities in life. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of information use, data protection and privacy. It will also appeal more widely to those with an interest in technology and society, social policy, consumption, marketing and business studies.

Credit and debt appear to be natural, permanent facets of Americans' lives, but a debt-based economy and debt-financed lifestyles are actually recent inventions. In 1951 Diners Club issued a plastic card that enabled patrons to pay for their meals at select New York City restaurants at the end of each month. Soon other "charge cards" (as they were then known) offered the convenience for travelers throughout the United States to pay for hotels, food, and entertainment on credit. In the 1970s the advent of computers and the deregulation of banking created an explosion in credit card use-and consumer debt. With gigantic national banks and computer systems that allowed variable interest rates, consumer screening, mass mailings, and methods to discipline slow payers with penalties and fees, middle-class Americans experienced a sea change in their lives. Given the enormous profits from issuing credit, banks and chain stores used aggressive marketing to reach Americans experiencing such crises as divorce or unemployment, to help them make ends meet or to persuade them that they could live beyond their means. After banks exhausted the profits from this group of people, they moved into the market for college credit cards and student loans and then into predatory lending (through check-cashing stores and pawnshops) to the poor. In 2003, Americans owed nearly $8 trillion in consumer debt, amounting to 130 percent of their average disposable income. The role of credit and debt in people's lives is one of the most important social and economic issues of our age. Brett Williams provides a sobering and frank investigation of the credit industry and how it came to dominate the lives of most Americans by propelling the social changes that are enacted when an economy is based on debt. Williams argues that credit and debt act to obscure, reproduce, and exacerbate other inequalities. It is in the best interest of the banks, corporations, and their shareholders to keep consumer debt at high levels. By targeting low-income and young people who would not be eligible for credit in other businesses, these companies are able quickly to gain a stranglehold on the finances of millions. Throughout, Williams provides firsthand accounts of how Americans from all socioeconomic levels use credit. These vignettes complement the history and technical issues of the credit industry, including strategies people use to manage debt, how credit functions in their lives, how they understand their own indebtedness, and the sometimes tragic impact of massive debt on people's lives.