What does it mean to live in a consumer society and how does this impact on our behaviour? In this insightful and engaging introduction to the psychology of consumption, Cathrine Jansson-Boyd discusses the various ways that consumer activities pervade our everyday lives, whether we are buying the latest trends to keep up with our peers or altering our physical looks so that we can fit the media's beauty mould. Highlighting why the spread of consumption through society is so important, the book looks at the impact on both children and the environment as well as at ethical considerations. Consumption Matters is the essential starting point for both students and general readers interested in consumer psychology.

In 2008, average, ordinary family guy Dave Bruno decided to winnow down everything he owned to merely 100 things and to unhook himself from the intravenous drip of consumerism that seemed to be fueling his life. Media around the world started taking immediate notice of Dave and the grass-roots movement he was starting. The culture of consumerism has created a continuous rushing to acquire ever more stuff, but without realising any gain in life satisfaction. "The 100 Thing Challenge" is meant to be a cause for pause. Dave Bruno offers compelling anecdotes and practical advice readers can use to resist consumerism and live a more meaningful life. Each chapter introduces a theme and presents a conflict between that theme and the culture of consumerism. In addition to his own experience, Dave collects and shares the thoughts and experiences of others who are fighting consumerism in their lives. Each chapter concludes by describing in practical terms how an average person can resist consumerism in order to engage the theme in more spiritually and socially meaningful ways. "The 100 Thing Challenge" provides an opportunity for readers to consider how positive life changes can occur when an individual chooses to defiantly hop off the treadmill of consumerism and start living a saner and more satisfying life.

What factors are contributing to the continuing growth in consumption of goods and services? At what point do the costs associated with consumerism begin to call our way of life into question? How are the problems of resource depletion, waste and pollution, and environmental impact being addressed? What is to be done about the consequences of our all-consuming way of life? Ever-increasing consumption and a relentless pursuit of growth in output are the twin pillars on which the modern economy and contemporary social life rest. But the consumer way of life is globally unsustainable. We can't all live the consumer dream. This comprehensive, lively and informative book will quickly be recognized as a benchmark in the field. It brings together a huge set of resources for thinking about the development of consumer culture, its defining features, and global consequences. Adept in handling a complex range of classical and contemporary theoretical sources, the book draws on an impressive range of comparative material and provides a variety of contemporary examples to inform and enhance understanding of our consuming way of life. Smart writes with verve and feeling and has produced a stimulating book that enlarges our understanding of consumer culture and provides a timely critical analysis of its consequences. Clear, engaging, and original this book will be essential reading for all those interested in and concerned about our global culture of consumption including researchers and students in sociology, politics, cultural studies, economics, and social geography.

That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey-not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator, it tells the curious story of the quality stored inside: freshness. We want fresh foods to keep us healthy, and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient, pretty, and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption, when freshness seemed both proof of and an antidote to progress. Susanne Freidberg begins with refrigeration, a trend as controversial at the turn of the twentieth century as genetically modified crops are today. Consumers blamed cold storage for high prices and rotten eggs but, ultimately, aggressive marketing, advances in technology, and new ideas about health and hygiene overcame this distrust. Freidberg then takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Fruit, for instance, shows why beauty trumped taste at a surprisingly early date. In the case of fish, we see how the value of a living, quivering catch has ironically hastened the death of species. And of all supermarket staples, why has milk remained the most stubbornly local? Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.

A classic expose in company with "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Silent Spring," "The Story of Stuff" expands on the celebrated documentary exploring the threat of overconsumption on the environment, economy, and our health. Leonard examines the "stuff" we use everyday, offering a galvanizing critique and steps for a changed planet.
"The Story of Stuff" was received with widespread enthusiasm in hardcover, by everyone from Stephen Colbert to Tavis Smiley to George Stephanopolous on "Good Morning America," as well as far-reaching print and blog coverage. Uncovering and communicating a critically important idea--that there is an intentional system behind our patterns of consumption and disposal--Annie Leonard transforms how we think about our lives and our relationship to the planet.
From sneaking into factories and dumps around the world to visiting textile workers in Haiti and children mining coltan for cell phones in the Congo, Leonard, named one of "Time "magazine's 100 environmental heroes of 2009, highlights each step of the materials economy and its actual effect on the earth and the people who live near sites like these.
With curiosity, compassion, and humor, Leonard shares concrete steps for taking action at the individual and political level that will bring about sustainability, community health, and economic justice. Embraced by teachers, parents, churches, community centers, activists, and everyday readers, "The Story of Stuff" will be a long-lived classic.

The only book to connect the everyday world of the 20-something undergraduate consumer with sound sociological analysis of the world of consumption Enchanting a Disenchanted World, Third Edition examines Disney, malls, cruise lines, Las Vegas, the world wide web, Planet Hollywood, credit cards, and all the other ways we now consume. Thoroughly updated to reflect the recent economic recession and the impact of the internet, bestselling author George Ritzer continues to explore this book's central thesis: that our society has undergone fundamental change because of the way and the level at which we consume. This Third Edition demonstrates how we have created new "cathedrals" of consumption (places that enchant us so as to entice us to stay longer and consume more) while continuing to take capitalism to a new level. These places of consumption, whether in our homes, the mall, or cyberspace, are in a constant state of "enchanting the disenchanted," luring us through new spectacles because their rational qualities are both necessary and deadening at the same time. New and Hallmark Features Offers a unique analysis of the world of consumption, especially the settings in which consumption takes place Discusses the recent global economic recession throughout Offers rich details on consuming in such places as Las Vegas, Disney World, on cruise ships, in Wal-Mart, at McDonald's, and, new to this edition, on the Web Includes a wide range of theoretical perspectives-Marxian, Weberian, critical theory, postmodern theory-as well as a number of concepts such as hyperconsumption, implosion, simulation, and time and space to show students how sociological theory can be applied to everyday phenomena Intended Audience Enchanting in a Disenchanted World, Third Edition brings life to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Introductory Sociology, Social Problems, Sociological Theory, Economic Sociology, Sociology of Culture, and the Sociology of Consumption. Contributor to the SAGE Teaching Innovations and Professional Development Award

The Third Edition of McDonaldization: The Reader includes a wide array of sources, from journal articles, to essays from edited books, to newspaper and magazine articles. George Ritzer, best-selling author of McDonaldization of Society, has updated this popular anthology to build upon and go beyond the thesis of McDonaldization. Classic articles from the First and Second Editions remain in this volume and are supplemented by a significant number of new pieces which bring the discussion about McDonaldization up to date.

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Amid a display of sunshine-yellow electric appliances in a model home at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon squared off on the merits of their respective economic systems. One of the signature events of the cold war, the impromptu Kitchen Debate has been widely viewed as the opening skirmish in a propaganda war over which superpower could provide a better standard of living for its citizens. However, as Greg Castillo shows in "Cold War on the Home Front," this debate and the American National Exhibition itself were, in fact, the culmination of a decade-long ideological battle fought with refrigerators, televisions, living room suites, and prefab homes.

The first in-depth history of how domestic environments were exploited to promote the superiority of either capitalism or socialism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, "Cold War on the Home Front" reveals the tactics used by the American government to seduce citizens of the Soviet bloc with state-of-the-art consumer goods and the reactions of the Communist Party. Beginning in 1950, the U.S. State Department sponsored home expositions in West Berlin that were specifically designed to attract residents of East Berlin, featuring dream homes with modernist furnishings that presented an idealized vision of the lifestyle enjoyed by the consumer-citizen in the West. In response, Party authorities in East Germany staged socialist home expositions intended to evoke the domestic ideal of a cultured proletariat.

Castillo closely follows the course of this escalating rivalry between competing consumer cultures through the 1950s, concluding that the Soviet bloc's inability to make good on the claim that it could emulate goods and living standards offered by the West was a contributing factor in communism's eventual demise. Using a mosaic of sources ranging from recently declassified government documents to homemaking journals and popular fiction, "Cold War on the Home Front" contributes an engaging new perspective on midcentury modernist style and its political uses at the dawn of the cold war.

Venda mas y mejor conociendo a su cliente.
La ciencia es muy clara: los hombres y las mujeres usan diferentes partes de su cerebro y por lo tanto se comportan de manera distinta en muchisimas situaciones, incluyendo la manera en que vamos de compras, compramos y consumimos productos y servicios. Como profesional de ventas, publicidad o mercadeo, entender estas diferencias es la clave de nuestro exito. Para aumentar las ventas, usted debe comprender lo que de manera singular impulsa a sus clientes, masculinos o femeninos, y maximizar sus opciones para comunicarse con ellos. Ya sea que venda productos tangibles como autos y casas o productos intangibles como servicios financieros o soluciones de negocios, "De compras con el y ella" le ayudara a entender las inherentes percepciones, motivaciones y emociones especificas de los cromosomas X e Y. Estas perspectivas son la manera mas poderosa para aumentar los ingresos.

This collection offers a global perspective on the changing character of cities and the increasing importance that consumer culture plays in defining their symbolic economies. Increasingly, forms of spectacle have come to shape how cities are imagined and to influence their character and the practices through which we know them - from advertising and the selling of real estate, to youth cultural consumption practices and forms of entrepreneurship, to the regeneration of urban areas under the guise of the heritage industry and the development of a WiFi landscape. Using examples of cities such as New York, Sydney, Atlantic City, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Douala, Liverpool, San Juan, Berlin and Harbin this book illustrates how image and practice have become entangled in the performance of the symbolic economy. It also argues that it is not just how the urban present is being shaped in this way that is significant to the development of cities but also that a prominent feature of their development has been the spectacular imagining of the past as heritage and through regeneration. Yet the ghosts that this conjures up in practice offer us a possible form of political unsettlement and alternative ways of viewing cities that is only just beginning to be explored. Through this important collection by some of the leading analysts of consumption, cities and space Consuming the Entrepreneurial City offers a cutting edge analysis of the ways in which cities are developing and the implications this has for their future. It is essential reading for students of Urban Studies, Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Heritage Studies and Anthropology.

"One problem with the food system is that price is the bottom line rather than having the bottom line be land stewardship, an appreciation for the environmental and social value of small-scale family farms, or for organically grown produce." --Interview with farmer in Skagit County, Washington

For much of the later twentieth century, food has been abundant and convenient for most residents of advanced industrial societies. The luxury of taking the safety and dependability of food for granted pushed it to the back burner in the consciousness of many. Increasingly, however, this once taken-for-granted food system is coming under question on issues such as the humane treatment of animals, genetically engineered foods, and social and environmental justice. Many consumers are no longer content with buying into the mainstream, commodity-driven food market on which they once depended. Resistance has emerged in diverse forms, from protests at the opening of McDonald's restaurants worldwide to ever-greater interest in alternatives, such as CSAs (community-supported agriculture), fair trade, and organic foods. The food system is increasingly becoming an arena of struggle that reflects larger changes in societal values and norms, as expectations are moving beyond the desire for affordable, convenient foods to a need for healthy and environmentally sound alternatives. In this book, leading scholars and scholar-activists provide case studies that illuminate the complexities and contradictions that surround the emergence of a "new day" in agriculture.

The essays found in The Fight Over Food analyze and evaluate both the theoretical and historical contexts of the agrifood system and the ways in which trends of individual action and collective activity have led to an "accumulation of resistance" that greatly affects the mainstream market of food production. The overarching theme that integrates the case studies is the idea of human agency and the ways in which people purposefully and creatively generate new forms of action or resistance to facilitate social changes within the structure of predominant cultural norms. Together these studies examine whether these combined efforts will have the strength to create significant and enduring transformations in the food system.

In 1812, a series of revolts known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion erupted across the island of Cuba, comprising one of the largest and most important slave insurrections in Caribbean history. Matt Childs provides the first in-depth analysis of the rebellion, situating it in local, colonial, imperial, and Atlantic World contexts. Childs explains how slaves and free people of color responded to the nineteenth-century ""sugar boom"" in the Spanish colony by planning a rebellion against racial slavery and plantation agriculture. Striking alliances among free people of color and slaves, blacks and mulattoes, Africans and Creoles, and rural and urban populations, rebels were prompted to act by a widespread belief in rumors promising that emancipation was near. Taking further inspiration from the 1791 Haitian Revolution, rebels sought to destroy slavery in Cuba and perhaps even end Spanish rule. By comparing his findings to studies of slave insurrections in Brazil, Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the United States, Childs places the rebellion within the wider story of Atlantic World revolution and political change. The book also features a biographical table, constructed by Childs, of the more than 350 people investigated for their involvement in the rebellion, 34 of whom were executed.

This book deals with the entertainment industries and their engagement in widespread marketing of violent movies, music, and electronic games to children that is inconsistent with the cautionary messages of their own parental advisories and that undermines parents' attempts to make informed decisions about their children's exposure to violent content.

This superb historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union's "Regional Economies," takes up the difficult question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining rich oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the authors examine the growing divide between government and its citizens in a region that has in the last four decades been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to a primarily industrial one. Offering a new form of ethnography appropriate for the study of suprastate polities and a globalized economy, Immediate Struggles contributes to our understanding of one region as well as the way we think about changing class relations, modes of production, and cultural practices in a newly emerging Europe. The authors also consider how phenomena such as the "informal economy" and "black market" are not marginal to the normal operation of state and economic institutions but are intertwined with both.

How is it that a Big Mac is merely lunch in America and a symbol of cultural imperialism in France? Why did the September 11 terrorists choose United and American over any other airlines? Because they are branded, looming as larger-than-life symbols of America. Branding, to hear James Twitchell tell it, is nothing more than commercial storytelling - and it's become so ubiquitous that even institutions we thought were above branding have succumbed. And according to Twitchell, that's probably just fine. BRANDED NATION lays bare an American society where megachurches resemble shopping malls, where a university lives or dies on the talents of its image-makers, and where museums have turned to motorcycle exhibits and fashion shows to bolster revenue. Full of provocative anecdotes and penetrating analyses, Twitchell's parsing of the age of 'McCulture' is a triumph of great verve, sharp wit and, most striking of all, infectious optimism.

Estirar el dinero parece ser lo que todos desean. Como vivimos en una sociedad donde impera el consumerismo, se hace dificil comprar lo que se necesita no por emociones ni deseos. En su libro "?Como compro inteligentemente?, " Andres Panasiuk presenta siete principios faciles de aplicar al comprar, asi como una guia precisa para hacer mayores inversiones.

Over the past few generations, expectations of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have altered radically, but these dramatic changes have largely gone unnoticed. This intriguing book brings together the sociology of consumption and technology to investigate the evolution of these changes, as well the social meaning of the practices themselves.Homes, offices, domestic appliances and clothes play a crucial role in our lives, but not many of us question exactly how and why we perform so many daily rituals associated with them. Showers, heating, air-conditioning and clothes washing are simply accepted as part of our normal, everyday lives, but clearly this was not always the case. When did the 'daily shower' become de rigueur? What effect has air conditioning had on the siesta - at one time an integral part of Mediterranean life and culture? This book interrogates the meaning and supposed 'normality' of these practices and draws disturbing conclusions. There is clear evidence supporting the view that routine consumption is controlled by conceptions of normality and profoundly shaped by cultural and economic forces. Shove maintains that habits are not just changing, but are changing in ways that imply escalating and standardizing patterns of consumption. This shrewd and engrossing analysis shows just how far the social meanings and practices of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have eluded us.

"The book aims to present recent studies by researchers working in the field of consumption, advertising and media in relation to children. The purpose is to shed light on the relationship between consumer behavior, advertising and communication in general with a special focus on children and adolescents."

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.

Many of women's everyday experiences and pleasures are tied up inextricably with consumption. In consumer-culture research, it tends to be the activities and interests of women which take center stage. This collection provides a wide range of different perspectives on women as consumers, focusing on popular culture, including examinations of popular media and their targeting of female audiences.

Apart from a grounding in feminism the collection does not present a single view, theoretically; methodologically, or politically. Its contributors work across a wide range of disciplines, including cultural and media studies, design history, and sociolinguistics. What they all have in common is the aim of understanding women's experiences and struggles in relation to consumer culture in the 20th century.

After decades of egalitarian, restricted consumption, the residents of China's cities are today surrounded by material comforts and awash in a level of commercial hype that was totally unimaginable just ten years ago. In this first in-depth treatment of the consumer revolution in China, fourteen leading scholars of Chinese culture and society explore the interpersonal consequences of rapid commercialization.

In the early 1980s Beijing's communist leadership advocated decollectivization, foreign trade, and private entrepreneurship to jump-start a stagnant economy. It explicitly rejected any notion that economic reforms would lead to political change, but by the early 1990s its program had not only produced double-digit growth but also enabled ordinary citizens to nurture dreams and social networks that challenged official monopolies of power. Using participant observation, the authors in this book describe and analyze a wide range of these changing consumer practices, including luxury housing, white wedding gowns, greeting cards, McDonald's, discos, premium cigarettes, and bowling.

Capitalism has brought urban Chinese both a higher material standard of living and new freedoms to create a private life beyond the control of the state. This important book offers rare insights into the world's largest marketplace.

Is Marxism a reflection of the conceptual system it fights against, rather than a truly comprehensive approach to human history? Drawing on recent work in anthropology, history, and philosophy, Donald Donham confronts this problem in analyzing a radically different social order: the former Maale kingdom of southern Ethiopia.
"Every once in a while there appears a book that . . . opens up new ways of inquiring into the ways of the world. Donald Donham has written such a book. The style is quiet and judicious, but the effect is stunning. . . . In putting inherited partisan approaches to the test of explaining the realities of Maale society and culture, Donham enriches anthropology and imparts new vigor to the analytical Marxian traditions. "History, Power, Ideology" embodies a major accomplishment."--From the Foreword

This book provides an introduction to the historical and theoretical foundations of consumerism. It then moves on to examine the experience of consumption in the areas of space and place, technology, fashion, `popular' music and sport. Throughout, the author brings a critical perspective to bear upon the subject, thus providing a reliable and stimulating guide to a complex and many-sided field.

The second edition of this successful textbook continues to offer a sophisticated treatment of consumer psychology which is directly related to the concerns of marketing management, especially in terms of market segmentation, product positioning and new product development. It has an international approach that is reflected in language, examples, and scope and it also has a comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of literature and recent research. The new edition takes into account past reviewers' and users' comments by reducing the amount of material on adaptive/innovative cognitive style and replaces this with a wider range of material on the theme of personality and new product phrase. This edition also includes end-of-chapter questions and suggested further reading.