Ed McQuarrie has been a leading light among sociological consumer researchers for a long time, his research devoted to deep and interdisciplinary exploration. This book is a much-needed development of the vast new terrain of consumers' online behaviors. From megaphone effects to soapbox imperatives, from Bourdieu to Goffman, cultural capital to trust, McQuarrie builds on his prior work to provide exciting new thinking to help us understand the radical and important changes that the Internet continues to spur. Highly recommended!' - Robert Kozinets, York University, CanadaIt's a new world online, where consumers can publish their writing and gain a public presence, even a mass audience. This book links together blogging, writing reviews for Yelp, and creating pinboards for Pinterest, all of which provide ordinary people the opportunity to display their tastes to strangers. Edward McQuarrie shows how the operation of taste in consumption has been changed by the Internet and offers a fresh perspective on why websites like Yelp and Pinterest have become so successful. Drawing on Bourdieu and Campbell to support his thesis, Edward McQuarrie uncovers what is new online by: - presenting a sociological perspective on what consumers do online and contrasting it to more familiar economic, psychological and ethnographic views - reinterpreting Bourdieu s idea of cultural capital to understand the success of fashion bloggers - showing how the meaning of taste and what it means to dress fashionably have changed with the Web - explaining why online reviews cannot be considered word-of-mouth and therefore cannot be understood using that idea - examining why Pinterest is so attractive to female consumers while relating Pinterest to Walter Benjamin's ideas about how mechanical reproduction changes the meaning of art. This book will be valuable to students and scholars interested in consumer research, marketing, and sociology, specifically those who seek an alternative to purely psychological and economic explanations for what consumers do online.

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.

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.

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.

This is an accessible black and white edition of the successful full colour book, at a lower price point.

Some of the leading names in the globalisation debate have contributed to the book, including Naomi Klein, Susan George and David Korten, as well as organisations and charities such as Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network.

The book deals with a diverse range of the issues surrounding globalisation, including human rights, the environment, international trade and finance, health, the food we eat and the clothes we wear.

Ultimately, this book is a call to action, showing how each and every one of us can take on the corporate giants and make a real difference.

?Globalisation is the most important change in the history of humankind, and the latest name for the conspiracy of the rich against the poor. It is the phenomenon most subject to the efforts of economists and statisticians, and the least understood and measured change in our time.? Anita Roddick

Economic development in Asia is associated with expanding urbanism, overconsumption, and a steep growth in living standards. At the same time, rapid urbanisation, changing class consciousness, and a new rural-urban divide in the region have led to fundamental shifts in the way ecological concerns are articulated politically and culturally. Moreover, these changes are often viewed through a Western moralistic lens, which at the same time applauds Asia's economic growth as the welcome reviver of a floundering world economy and simultaneously condemns this growth as encouraging hyperconsumerism and a rupture with more natural ways of living. This book presents an analysis of a range of practices and activities from across Asia that demonstrate that people in Asia are alert to ecological concerns, that they are taking action to implement new styles of green living, and that Asia offers interesting alternatives to narrow Anglo-American models of sustainable living. Subjects explored include eco-tourism in the Philippines, green co-operatives in Korea, the importance of "tradition" within Asian discourses of sustainability, and much more.

Across Asia, consumer culture is increasingly shaping everyday life, with neoliberal economic and social policies increasingly adopted by governments who see their citizens as individualised, sovereign consumers with choices about their lifestyles and identities. One aspect of this development has been the emergence of new wealthy middle classes with lifestyle aspirations shaped by national, regional and global media - especially by a range of new popular lifestyle media, which includes magazines, television and mobile and social media. This book explores how far everyday conceptions and experiences of identity are being transformed by media cultures across the region. It considers a range of different media in different Asian contexts, contrasting how the shaping of lifestyles in Asia differs from similar processes in Western countries, and assessing how the new lifestyle media represents not just a new emergent media culture, but also illustrates wider cultural and social changes in the Asian region.

"Commodification" refers most explicitly to the activities of turning things into commodities and of commercialising that which is not commercial in essence. The mass marketing of pets, the rise of the coffin industry, the conversion of preacher into salesmen, and the globalization of Taleggio cheese are some of the exciting but surprising topics in this volume that show how friendship, death, spirituality, and artisanship all have a price after being commodified.
This unique collection of essays is a fascinating take on creating consumer products and consumer identities when what's for sale goes well beyond the thing itself. It will be a course-in-a-box for instructors who want to teach their students about commodification.

We now call it The Great Realisation and, yes, since then there have been many. But that's the story of how it started ... and why hindsight's 2020. First performed online in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Tomos Roberts' heartfelt poem, with its message of hope and resilience, has been viewed over 60 million times and translated into over 20 languages. Adapted by Ashley Banjo and Diversity into a BAFTA-winning dance performance for Britain's Got Talent! As featured in the official BBC New Years Eve fireworks spectacular! 'A beautiful book and beautifully illustrated' - Kate Garraway, Good Morning Britain Written in the form of a bedtime story, The Great Realisation is a celebration of the many things - from simple acts of kindness, to applauding the heroic efforts of our key workers - that have brought us together at a time of global crisis. It captures, with magical resonance, the thoughts and feelings of millions in lockdown, as we adapted to a new way of life, found joy in unexpected places, cast aside old habits and reflected on what truly matters to us. The Great Realisation is a timely reminder that, even during our most challenging moments, there is always hope. Tomos's second book, The World Awaits, was published in July 2021 and he was commissioned by the Royal British Legion to write an Armistice Day poem, Alive With Poppies, which he performed at the Royal Albert Hall in commemoration of 100 years of the poppy. He wrote a Christmas poem, 'I Actually, Love London' for BBC London in December 2021. 'This fairytale-style story provides a springboard for discussion of current events with children, and presents a more optimistic view of the future in a time where the outlook often seems bleak' - School Library Journal, US

Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory is the first work to compile the contributions of the greatest social thinkers in the global conversation about consumption and consumer culture. A prestigious reference work, it offers original chapters by the world's most prominent thought leaders and surveys how the work of historical theorists has influenced and shaped consumption theory, both through history and at the cutting edge of research. Consumption is at the core of contemporary lifestyles, of political successes and failures and of discussions around sustainability and environmental change. Contemporary consumer culture shapes modern identities, and is the engine of the globalizing capitalist economy. Still, most social theorizations over the last century and a half have addressed production processes rather than consumption processes. This is about to change. Studies of consumption play an increasing role as a topic and a domain of study in marketing, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Currently, there is no single compilation that systematically links scholarly work published by the greatest social thinkers of the last 150 years to the understanding of contemporary consumer society. This book provides a solid framework for understanding the relevance of these canonical authors in social theory to facilitate analysis of consumer culture, and to act as a comprehensive reference point for consumer researchers, doctoral students and practitioners.

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.

This important and highly original book explores the application of economics to the subject of hate via such diverse topics as war, terrorism, road rage, witchcraft mania, marriage and divorce, and bullying and harassment. As yet there is no overall economic approach to hate; Samuel Cameron pioneers this work by using standard neo-classical economics concepts of the utility-maximizing consumer and the entrepreneur. He examines emotions as a form of personal capital and hate as a form of 'negative social capital', and investigates the idea of a modular matrix of hatred as the appropriate means of examining the subject. The likely form and scope of future effects of hate on government policy are also discussed. Seeking to explore the dimensions of hate as a commodity from a wider economic perspective, this exceptional book will prove a fascinating read for those with an interest in the economic value of hatred in particular, and the economics of the unusual more generally.

0ICollecting in a Consumer Society outlines the history of museum collecting from ancient civilizations to the present. It also looks at aspects of consumer culture - advertising, department stores, mass merchandising, consumer desire, and how this relates to the activity of collecting
This was, and still is, the first book to focus on collecting as material consumption. The author's new preface updates this provocative and engaging book with new references and an analysis of how the internet has effected collecting cultures, ensuring that this work remains essential reading for anyone involved with the process of collecting, across a variety of disciplines - anthropology, psychology, consumption studies, museum studies, sociology and collecting.
This title continues to be extremely useful for students of collecting cultures, consumer studies, psychology, sociology and anthropology.

Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire. The abbreviation of this empire is called a consumer culture. We think the free market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress. We are called to better adapt, be more agile, more lean, more schooled, more, more, more. Give it up. There is no such thing as customer satisfaction. We need a new narrative, a shift in our thinking and speaking. An Other Kingdom takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place where life is ours to create together. This satisfying way depends upon a neighborly covenant an agreement that we together, will better raise our children, be healthy, be connected, be safe, and provide a livelihood. The neighborly covenant has a different language than market-hype. It speaks instead in a sacred tongue. Authors Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight invite you on a journey of departure from our consumer market culture, with its constellations of empire and control. Discover an alternative set of beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable a culture in which the social order produces enough for all. They ask you to consider this other kingdom. To participate in this modern exodus towards a modern community. To awaken its beginnings are all around us. An Other Kingdom outlines this journey to construct a future outside the systems world of solutions.

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.

China's rapid economic growth has attracted much international attention in recent years, partly due to the potential purchasing power of the largest population in the world. This timely book examines general patterns of Chinese household demand for a variety of consumer goods such as food, durables, housing and health care and investigates the impact of economic and social factors on household consumption. China's Consumer Revolution focuses on comparisons between different consumer groups, such as rural versus urban and rich versus poor. Special attention is given to the impact of the newly affluent consumers, the so-called 'new rich'. This book also compares China with other countries in terms of household demand for consumer goods and sheds light on the prospects for international trade in this area. Drawing upon newly released household surveys, this book is the first of its kind and it will be of interest to both academic researchers and business advisors.

'A must-read for any marketer, be it a curious researcher, entry level manager or senior leader. Chapters in this book offer the right amount of theory and practical implications on how to infuse customer centricity into an organization by making systematic changes to organizational design, strategy, offerings, and capabilities.' - Shrihari Sridhar, Texas A&M University, US 'This would be the first book to purchase if you want to get out of functional silos and build a truly customer-centric organization. This book illustrates that customer centricity is not confined with CRM or segmentation tactics, but rather it requires a major paradigm shift in every aspect of marketing strategy and business operations.' - Steve Samaha, Wells Fargo Bank, US 'The world's renowned scholars in marketing strategy offer very thorough coverage of customer centricity. Each chapter complements the others and shares applicable and deep knowledge regarding how firms should transform the entire organization, from cultures and human capital to structures, to better serve customers.' - Mark B. Houston, Texas Christian University, US 'This book is a comprehensive reference for scholars conducing customer-centricity research. Leading academics illustrate a theoretical framework and empirical insights on how to embrace customer centricity. Executives will find a treasure trove of actionable insights for their companies.' - Vikas Mittal, Rice University, US Drawing on the expertise of leading marketing scholars, this book provides managers and researchers with insights into the fundamentals of customer centricity and how firms can develop it. Customer centricity is not just about segmentation or short-term marketing tactics. Rather, it represents an organization-wide philosophy that focuses on the systematic and continuous alignment of the firm's internal architecture, strategy, capabilities, and offerings with external customers. This philosophy means that to be truly customer-centric, firms need to make multilevel transformations in internal architecture and organizational design, including leadership, metrics, incentives, structure, processes, and systems. These reorganizations are often accompanied by reshaped relational strategies, such as customer loyalty programs and marketing channel strategies that make customer centricity a reality. These changes also need to be backed by reconfigurations of brand and technological capabilities, as manifested in healthy customer-centric brands and in technology systems and skills that enable customer centricity at scale. The contributors to this book provide current thinking and cutting-edge research to further scholars' understanding of this key concept in marketing. Academics teaching or researching customer centricity, consultants implementing customer centricity and managers directly implementing customer centricity in their organizations will come to rely on the Handbook of Customer Centricity. Marketing associations, industry associations and local and university libraries will find the insights within offer critical reflection on the key features of customer centricity and the detailed roadmap to achieve it.

'No Logo' was a book that defined a generation when it was first published in 1999. For its 10th anniversay Naomi Klein has updated this iconic book. By the time you're twenty-one, you'll have seen or heard a million advertisements. But you won't be happier for it. This is a book about that much-maligned, much-misunderstood generation coming up behind the slackers, who are being intelligent and active about the world in which they find themselves. It is a world in which all that is 'alternative' is sold, where any innovation or subversion is immediately adopted by un-radical, faceless corporations. But, gradually, tentatively, a new generation is beginning to fight consumerism with its own best weapons; and it is the first skirmishes in this war that this abrasively intelligent book documents brilliantly.

Theories of Consumption explores the concept of consumption from the post-disciplinary perspective of cultural studies. John Storey brings together work that up until now has been located in distinct disciplinary spaces including work on reception theory in literary studies and philosophy; work on consumer culture in sociology, anthropology and history; and work on media audiences (both ethnographic and theoretical) in media studies and sociology. Moving beyond the usual analysis of consumer culture, Storey presents a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption. In doing so, he provides an authoritative overview of a significant selection of research and analysis that has explored consumption as an object of study. This book provides an ideal introduction to consumption for students of media and cultural studies and will also be useful for students within a number of other disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, cultural geography and both literary and visual studies.

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.

As the "information superhighway" moves into the home through interactive media, enhanced telecom services, and hybrid appliances, interest continually grows in how consumers adopt and use Information Technology (IT), the strategies IT marketers use to reach consumers, and the public policies that help and protect consumers. USE COPY FROM THIS POINT ON FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... This book presents a unique collection of papers dealing with the demand side issues of new information technologies in the home. The contributors are from business, academia, and the public policy sector and represent many disciplines including communication, marketing, economics, psychology, engineering, and information systems. This book provides one of the best introductions to complex issues such as: * business forces that will shape "Home IT" of the future; * industry structure of the future "Infotainment" mega-business; * factors affecting consumer adoption and use of IT; * international differences in the management of the IT sector; and * public policies that will shape the deployment and use of IT.

Explores the impact of consumerism from a design perspectiveEssential reading for practitioners, researchers and students in the design industryWill be of interest to sustainability professionals, as well as conscious consumers

Digital media present opportunities for new types of consumption including desiring, buying, collecting, making, and even selling digital virtual goods. To these activities we can add those taking place in virtual communities of consumption, online shops, brand websites, and online auction houses that together amount to a vast new landscape of consumption. Digital virtual consumption motivates concatenated practices which produce meaningful experience for their users as well as market opportunities to profit from them. Consumers create and maintain elaborate wish lists, engaging with simulations of brands on websites and in videogames, coveting items for use in online games and even spending 'real' money on these, undertaking entrepreneurial activity in virtual worlds, conjuring nostalgia via online auctions, engaging in playful consumption in other new retail formats, writing reviews of products as part of the consumption experience, engaging in online activist activities, and many other emerging behaviors. Analyses of consumption in the digital virtual realm are however limited. This collection brings together experienced researchers from the fields of consumer research, digital games, and virtual worlds to provide conceptual and empirical work that helps us understand these new and significant consumer activities. Online communities negotiate the 'correct' use of goods and offer technical advice, consumers develop new products, individuals create and distribute their own promotional material for their favorite brands, and entrepreneurial consumers marketing and selling their own products online. Here we may see a blurring of consumption and production, or work and leisure activity that requires further thought about what makes it meaningful for individuals. The chapters in this volume take stock of the emergence and likely importance of digital virtual consumption for consumer culture, including a review of both new and existing conceptual and methodological tools as well as a resource of key examples and analyses of practices.