A interdisciplinary collection of readings that answers the question: How do men and women practice consumer culture differently? What is the relationship between gender and consumerism? Jennifer Scanlon gathers a collection of readings and archival materials to explore the multiple and contradictory ways in which women and men consume. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural in scope, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader introduces the reader to some of the most compelling issues and arguments in this growing field of study. In questioning traditional ways of analyzing the relationships between gender and consumer culture, these essays analyze the liberatory and oppressive nature of consumer culture in both historical and contemporary contexts. The scholars gathered here look at the gendered relationship between the home and consumer culture, individual and group identity through purchasing, the supply side of consumer culture, and the ways in which consumers embrace, resist, and manipulate the messages and the activities of consumer culture. Topics range from white middle-class female shoplifters to the gendered depiction of Native Americans in nineteenth-century advertising, from gay men's acquisition of domestic space in early twentieth-century New York to black and Latino men's cultural resistance through dress. Archival materials link the essays in each section, creating a further historical context, and providing a connection between the readings and larger questions and issues currently being debated about gender and consumer culture. Contributors include Andrew Heinze, Erika Rappaport, George Chauncey, Steven M. Gelber, Jeffrey Steele, Ann McClintock, Robert E. Weems, Jr., Lillian Faderman, Malcolm Gladwell, Jennifer Scanlon, Lizabeth Cohen, Jane Bryce, Susan J. Douglas, Kenon Breazeale, Kathy Peiss, Elaine S. Abelson, Natasha B. Barnes, Danae Clark, Stuart Cosgrove.

"Tying shoelaces, jumping rope, listening to circle-time stories, Allison Pugh immersed herself in the busy--and commercial-studded--worlds of schoolchildren. In this brilliantly argued, lyrically written and riveting book, Pugh asks how kids cope with the incessant ads for the must-have toy, the latest shoe, the coolest game. Children don't cave into or resist capitalism, Pugh tells us. They build worlds of their own from it. 'Corporate marketing acts as a powerful mint, ' she writes, 'always churning out shinier coinage, but not always dictating whether or how those tokens are used.' They set up their own Lilliputian 'economies of dignity' which poignantly determine who does and doesn't feel worthy of belonging to the group. A complement to Juliet Schor's "Born to Buy," Pugh's book is a must-read."--Arlie Hochschild, author of "The Time Bind" and "The Commercialization of Intimate Life"
"Pugh is curious about what parents buy for their kids, what they refuse to buy, and why they make the decisions they do. But this isn't a marketing book. Far from it: Pugh is very critical of corporations that cynically target young children. But she is attempting to understand the social and emotional consequences of this commercial culture for children and for family life. She argues--quite convincingly--that consumerism has negatively impacted the quality of relationships in families and in society in general. By focusing on consumption instead of production, she also develops a fresh new approach to analyzing social inequality."--Christine Williams, author of "Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping, and Social Inequality"
"In her richly documented ethnographic study, Allison Pugh firstidentifies, then resolves, an important contrast in American working-class and middle-class approaches to their children's acquisition of consumer goods: symbolic indulgence on the working-class side, symbolic deprivation on the middle-class side. Her work offers deep insights into children's experience in contemporary America."--Viviana Zelizer, Princeton University
"Written with extraordinary grace and insight, Allison Pugh has given us a truly original and fresh way of understanding the material desires of children. With vivid interviews, she shows with both subtlety and force how the emotional needs of children and their parents has shaped overconsumption today. This should be read well beyond the academy and for a long time."--Gary Cross, author of "An All-Consuming Century"
"This imaginative and beautifully written book makes a significant contribution to the study of parents, children, consumption, and lived experiences of social inequality."--Barrie Thorne, author of "Gender Play"
"Going well beyond the standard story of manipulative advertising that turns our kids into greedy little consumption addicts, "Longing and Belonging" provides a fascinating portrait of how children themselves come to translate Gameboys and Nikes into personal dignity and social membership. This smart and highly readable book offers multiple insights into the cultures of class, race, parenting, and childhood in an increasingly materialistic America."--Sharon Hays, author of "Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform"
"With "Longing and Belonging," Allison Pugh brings the study of children's consumer lives to a level of insight and clarity rarely encountered in theoften panic-stricken and sanctimonious discussions surrounding kids and commercial life. Skillfully navigating the social landscape where children, inequality and consumer culture intersect, Pugh combines ethnographic empathy with deft sociological analysis in a manner that invites the reader to enter children's lives and see the world from their perspectives. This work represents a break from the received wisdom about children and commercialism and surely will mark a transition to new and thoughtful approaches to thinking about how consumption matters in everyday life."--Daniel Thomas Cook, author of "The Commodification of Childhood"

Consumer Behaviour is the first truly European consumer behaviour textbook, placing the subject clearly within its economic, psychological, sociological and historical context. The authors provide greater insight for readers by examining both the determinants and the consequences of consumer decision making. Antonides and Van Raaij include numerous examples, cases and sociodemographic data and provide complete coverage of core topics together with important new ones. Innovative chapters are included on:

• financial behaviour

• welfare, wellbeing and property

• families and household production

• consumption and the environment

• shopping behaviour.

This collection of classic and contemporary articles provides context for the study of advertising by exploring the historical, economic, and ideological factors that spawned the development of a consumer culture. It begins with articles that take an institutional and historical perspective to provide background for approaching the social and ethical concerns that evolve around advertising. Subsequent sections then address the legal and economic consequences of life in a material culture; the regulation of advertising in a culture that weighs free speech against the needs of society; and the ethics of promoting materialism to consumers. The concluding section includes links to a variety of resources such as trade association codes of ethics, standards and guidelines for particular types of advertising, and information about self-regulatory organizations.

A powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers-and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. Disturbing, provocative, and compelling, this book examines phenomena as seemingly disparate as adolescent fashion trends for adults, megachurches, declining voter participation, the privatization of the public sphere, branding, and the rise of online shopping to show how the freedoms of the free market have undermined the freedoms of the deliberative adult citizen. Barber brings together extensive empirical research with an original theoretical framework for understanding our contemporary predicament.

A book that taps into the current debate around resource rentals in South Africa, and outlines practical steps that can be taken to a different tax regime.

Land rent can provide jobs for all if we just collect it instead of taxing those who create wealth or seek merely to survive. This rent, or the locational advantage of each piece of land, is owed to the community, whose grant of security of tenure enables the owner to enjoy its man-made and natural advantages. Rent has been a phenomenon since the time of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, but its potential has been ignored and the world has got lost in an economic jungle of its own making.

This book is based on a very simple proposal: replace most taxation with collection of land and other natural resource rentals. It shows the way to the broad uplands of prosperity for all, and explains why it is time for us to talk about rent! It taps into the current debate in the media and economic and political circles around resource rentals in South Africa, and outlines practical steps that can be taken to a different tax regime. This book is highly relevant and topical, and offers much to stimulate further debate whilst offering something positive and workable.

America's economic revolution isn't just driven by technology. It's about markets.The past twenty-five years have witnessed a remarkable shift in how we get the stuff we want. If you've ever owned a business, rented an apartment, or shopped online, you've had a front-row seat for this revolution-in-progress. Breakthrough companies like Amazon and Uber have disrupted the old ways and made the economy work better,all thanks to technology.At least that's how the story of the modern economy is usually told. But in this lucid, wry book, Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan show that the revolution is bigger than tech: it is really a story about the transformation of markets. From the auction theories that power Google's ad sales algorithms to the models that online retailers use to prevent internet fraud, even the most high-tech modern businesses are empowered by theory first envisioned by economists.And we're all participants in this revolution. Every time you book a room on Airbnb, hire a car on Lyft, or click on an ad, you too are reshaping our social institutions and our lives. The Inner Lives of Markets is necessary reading for the modern world: it reveals the blueprint for how we work, live, and shop, and offers wisdom for how to do it better.

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.

What makes political freedom valuable to us? Two well-known arguments are that freedom contributes to our desire satisfaction and to our personal responsibility. Here, Boudewijn de Bruin argues that freedom is valuable when it is accompanied by knowledge. He offers an original and systematic account of the relationship between freedom and knowledge and defends two original normative ideals of known freedom and acknowledged freedom. By combining psychological perspectives on choice and philosophical views on the value of knowledge, he shows how known freedom is crucial to satisfy our desires and assume responsibility. Known freedom is compromised when salespeople deploy consumer-obfuscation, or when news outlets use contextual framing techniques to steer the way their audiences process information. Conversely, carefully developed consumer protection and information disclosure regulation can foster known freedom. Acknowledged freedom, from ethical and economic perspectives, offers protection and makes our freedoms more stable. It embodies an ideal of mutual recognition that underlies informed consent and the ethics of communication, and can also contribute to a flourishing corporate culture. This book integrates and extends cutting-edge research from philosophy, economics, psychology, and law to reorient debates on privacy, neuromarketing, sustainable finance, corporate culture, consumer protection, media violence, and freedom of speech.

On 5 February 2014, world-renowned scientist Tim Noakes fired off a tweet allegedly dispensing dietary advice to a young mother into a highly volatile media space; the fallout threatened to destroy his career. This is the untold backstory.

Veteran journalist and writer Daryl Ilbury unveils, layer by layer, a combustible mix of scientific ignorance, academic jealousy, the collapse of media ethics, and the interests of a world-renowned scientist in highlighting the intricacies of human nutrition and exposing those he believes have vested interests in regulating it.

Featuring interviews with people who have worked closely with Noakes, including former Springbok coach Jake White and polar swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh, as well as award-winning journalists and fellow scientists and academics, some of whom now consider Noakes dangerous and out of control, this book is bound to be as controversial as the man himself.

'Magnificent ... groundbreaking ... a triumph' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads 'A masterpiece, a delight to read ... a rare and beautiful thing' Gerard DeGroot, The Times What we consume has become the defining feature of our lives: our economies live or die by spending, we are treated more as consumers than workers, and even public services are presented to us as products in a supermarket. In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British empire to the present. Astonishingly wide-ranging and richly detailed, Empire of Things explores how we have come to live with so much more, how this changed the course of history, and the global challenges we face as a result. 'I read Empire Of Things with unflagging fascination ... elegant, adventurous and colourful ... gleefully provocative' John Preston, Daily Mail 'Such a pleasure to read ... From Victorian department stores to modernist kitchens, his book revels in the things that most historians tend to overlook' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

What will become of the shops? More than ever, the high street appears to be under mortal threat, its shops boarded up as the sad 'bricks and mortar' survivals of a pre-online retail world. But behind the bleak appearance, there is more to see. Back to the Shops offers a set of short and surprising chapters, each one a window into a different shop type or mode of selling. Old shopping streets are seen from new angles; fast fashion shows up in eighteenth-century edits. Here are pedlars and pop-ups, mail order catalogues and mobile greengrocers' shops. Here too are food markets open till late on a Saturday night, and tiny subscription libraries tucked away at the back of the sweet shop. Over time, shops have occupied radically different places in cultural arguments and in our everyday lives. They are essential sources of daily provisions, but they are also the visible evidence of consuming excess. They are local community hubs and they are dreamlands of distraction. Shops are inherently spaces of imagination as well as of practicality. They belong with their own surrounding streets and town; they bring back the times and places of our lives. They linger in stories of all kinds, whether far-fetched or round the corner. From butcher to baker and from markets to motor vans-after reading this book, you will want to go back to the shops.

Providing comparisons to the United States and Britain, this book examines Japan's postwar consumer protection movement. Organized largely by and for housewives and spurred by major cases of price gouging and product contamination, the movement led to the passage of basic consumer protection legislation in 1968. Although much of the story concerns the famous "iron triangle" of big business, national bureaucrats, and conservative party politics, Maclachlan takes a broader perspective. She points to the importance of activity at the local level, the role of minority parties, the limited utility of the courts, and the place of lawyers and academics in providing access to power. These mild social strategies have resulted in a significant amount of consumer protection.

'Moving and hopeful ... will stay with me for a long time' Daisy Buchanan 'A fearless, young new voice' Carol Ann Duffy 'One of the most exciting debuts I've read in ages' Kaveh Akbar 'One of the most startling and original poets of her generation' Joy Harjo The voice of Tayi Tibble is one of most exciting in poetry today. In Poukahangatus (pronounced 'Pocahontas'), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies - Greek, Maori, feminist, kiwi - peeling them apart and respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies and Twilight to exquisite renderings of precise emotions and the natural world alike. Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics chart the overflowing beauty, irony and ruination of her surroundings. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history without merely telling it, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation. These are warm, provocative and profoundly original poems, written from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work and gender are intimately and insidiously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and asks how she as a Maori woman fits into trends, stereotypes and popular culture. With language that is at once colourful, passionate and laugh-out-loud funny, Poukahangatus announces the presence of a surpassingly daring new poet.

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.

Exploring the roots of Canadian consumer culture between the 1890s and the Second World War, Purchasing Power uncovers the meanings that Canadians have attached to consumer goods. Offering a new perspective on the temperance, conservation, home economics, feminist, and co-operative movements of this period, this book brings women's consumer interests to the fore. Due to their exclusion from formal politics and most paid employment, many Canadian women leveraged their consumer roles into personal and social opportunities. In the consumer sphere, they sought solutions for their isolation, their desire for upward mobility and personal expression, and their families' survival. Through their purchasing power, Canadian women transformed consumer culture into an arena of political engagement.

"A Year Without "Made in China"" provides you with a thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining account of how the most populous nation on Earth influences almost every aspect of our daily lives. Drawing on her years as an award-winning journalist, author Sara Bongiorni fills this book with engaging stories and anecdotes of her family's attempt to outrun China's reach-by boycotting Chinese made products-and does a remarkable job of taking a decidedly big-picture issue and breaking it down to a personal level.

Food trucks announcing "halal" proliferate in many urban areas but how many non-Muslims know what this means, other than cheap lunch? Here Middle Eastern historians Febe Armanios and Bogac Ergene provide an accessible introduction to halal (permissible) food in the Islamic tradition, exploring what halal food means to Muslims and how its legal and cultural interpretations have changed in different geographies up to the present day. Historically, Muslims used food to define their identities in relation to co-believers and non-Muslims. Food taboos are rooted in the Quran and prophetic customs, as well as writings from various periods and geographical settings. As in Judaism and among certain Christian sects, Islamic food traditions make distinctions between clean and impure, and dietary choices and food preparation reflect how believers think about broader issues. Traditionally, most halal interpretations focused on animal slaughter and the consumption of intoxicants. Muslims today, however, must also contend with an array of manufactured food products-yogurts, chocolates, cheeses, candies, and sodas-filled with unknown additives and fillers. To help consumers navigate the new halal marketplace, certifying agencies, government and non-government bodies, and global businesses vie to meet increased demands for food piety. At the same time, blogs, cookbooks, restaurants, and social media apps have proliferated, while animal rights and eco-conscious activists seek to recover halal's more wholesome and ethical inclinations. Covering practices from the Middle East and North Africa to South Asia, Europe, and North America, this timely book is for anyone curious about the history of halal food and its place in the modern world.

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most admired social thinkers of our time. Once a Marxist sociologist, he has surrendered the narrowness of both Marxism and sociology, and dares to write in language that ordinary people can understand--about problems they feel ill equipped to solve. This book is no dry treatise but is instead what Bauman calls "a report from a battlefield," part of the struggle to find new and adequate ways of thinking about the world in which we live. Rather than searching for solutions to what are perhaps the insoluble problems of the modern world, Bauman proposes that we reframe the way we think about these problems. In an era of routine travel, where most people circulate widely, the inherited beliefs that aid our thinking about the world have become an obstacle.

Bauman seeks to liberate us from the thinking that renders us hopeless in the face of our own domineering governments and threats from unknown forces abroad. He shows us we can give up belief in a hierarchical arrangement of states and powers. He challenges members of the "knowledge class" to overcome their estrangement from the rest of society. Gracefully, provocatively, Bauman urges us to think in new ways about a newly flexible, newly challenging modern world. As Bauman notes, quoting Vaclav Havel, "hope is not a prognostication." It is, rather, alongside courage and will, a mundane, common weapon that is too seldom used.

What happens when there is almost unlimited choice? When everything becomes available to everyone? And when the combined value of the millions of items that only sell in small quantities equals or even exceeds the value of a handful of best-sellers? In this ground-breaking book, Chris Anderson shows that the future of business does not lie in hits - the high-volume end of a traditional demand curve - but in what used to be regarded as misses - the endlessly long tail of that same curve. As our world is transformed by the Internet and the near infinite choice it offers consumers, so traditional business models are being overturned and new truths revealed about what consumers want and how they want to get it. Chris Anderson first explored the Long Tail in an article in Wired magazine that has become one of the most influential business essays of our time. Now, in this eagerly anticipated book, he takes a closer look at the new economics of the Internet age, showing where business is going and exploring the huge opportunities that exist: for new producers, new e-tailers, and new tastemakers. He demonstrates how long tail economics apply to industries ranging from the toy business to advertising to kitchen appliances. He sets down the rules for operating in a long tail economy. And he provides a glimpse of a future that's already here.

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

Whether watching baseball or undergoing heart surgery, Americans have bought a variety of goods and services to achieve happiness. Here is a provocative look at what they have chosen to purchase. Stanley Lebergott maintains that the average consumer has behaved more reasonably than many distinguished critics of "materialism" have suggested. He sees consumers seeking to make an uncertain and often cruel world into a pleasanter and more convenient place--and, for the most part, succeeding. With refreshing common sense, he reminds us of what many "luxuries" have meant, especially for women: increased income since 1900 has been used largely to lighten the backbreaking labor once required by household chores. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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.

The idea of social capital allows scholars to assess the quality of relationships among people within a particular community and show how that quality affects the ability to achieve shared goals. With evidence collected from sixty-nine villages in India, Krishna investigates what social capital is, how it operates in practice, and what results it can be expected to produce.

Does social capital provide a viable means for advancing economic development, promoting ethnic peace, and strengthening democratic governance? The world is richer than ever before, but more than a fifth of its people are poor and miserable. Civil wars and ethnic strife continue to mar prospects for peace. Democracy is in place in most countries, but large numbers of citizens do not benefit from it. How can development, peace and democracy become more fruitful for the ordinary citizen? This book shows how social capital is a crucial dimension of any solution to these problems.