Showing papers on "Consumerism published in 2002"

Marketing, the consumer society and hedonism

Abstract: Marketing is commonly assumed to be responsible for the consumer society with its hedonistic lifestyle and for undermining other cultures by its materialistic stance. This, for many critics, is the dark side of consumer marketing, undermining its ethical standing. This paper considers the connection between marketing, the consumer society, globalization and the hedonistic lifestyle, and whether marketing is guilty as charged. After all, anything that affects the image of marketing as a profession is important, as this influences both recruitment and social acceptance.

Narratives of sustainable ways of living: constructing the self and the other as a green consumer

Abstract: This paper discusses the representation of “green consumerism” in the prevalent institutionalised discourses of green consumerism, and in the self‐narratives of people who identify themselves as ecologically oriented citizens, focusing on the construction of the self and the other in these texts The aim is to investigate the ways in which “radical” ecologically oriented citizens, who are largely “marginalised” and positioned as the other in the dominant discourses of green consumerism, engage in resistance towards western, materialistic consumption culture Drawing from the Foucauldian ideas of political struggle as the “politics of the self”, and personal ethics and moral agency as a mode of self‐formation, this paper analyses the ways in which these “green consumers” reject their received subjectivity as consumers The focus is on the practices of self, and on the ways in which they invent and promote new forms of subjectivity that are more in line with their environmentalist ideology

Consumer resistance in a world of advertising clutter: The case of Adbusters

Abstract: The pervasive influence of advertising and consumer culture is examined in relation to a postmodern condition marked by increased speed, fragmentation, and the decentering of the subject. This condition often prompts the consumer to develop ad-avoidance strategies that protect his/her psychic space by filtering out excess advertising clutter (which also colonizes the public and discursive space of consumer culture). The struggle for these cultural spaces resembles a war of position between the ideology of consumerism and its opponents, who attempt to cultivate alternative worldviews toward consumerism. Although some perspectives see consumption as a means for self-expression and the fashioning of multiple identities, this position valorizes consumption practices irrespective of their environmental and social impact. An evaluation of the antiadvertising magazine Adbusters illustrates the obstacles inherent in launching challenges to consumerism, and the difficulty of resisting consumerism given advertising's control over cultural spaces. Marketers have converted resistance efforts from some of consumption's most ardent critics into market segments by targeting certain goods and services toward them. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America

Abstract: Preface 1. The Irony of a Century 2. Setting the Course, 1900--1930 3. Promises of More, 1930--1960 4. Coping with Abundance 5. A New Consumerism, 1960--1980 6. Markets Triumphant, 1980--2000 7. An Ambiguous Legacy Index

Toward an Eco-justice Pedagogy

Abstract: This paper will address three issues: (1) the nature and importance of an eco-justice pedagogy; (2) how an eco-justice pedagogy differs from the recommendations of critical pedagogy theorists who rely upon key root metaphors (e.g. emancipated individualism, linear view of progress, anthropocentrism) that co-evolved with the Industrial Revolution and are now the basis of the globalization process; and (3) the reforms that need to be undertaken in teacher education in order for teachers to balance critical inquiry with helping students recognize and participate in the non-commodified aspects of community life. The latter will involve giving special attention to what teachers need to understand about how the language of the curriculum is based on root metaphors that organize thinking in ways that ignore environmental racism and the marginalization of different cultural approaches to community not oriented toward dependency upon modern technology and consumerism.

The virtual university? : knowledge, markets, and management

Abstract: PART I: THE NEW GLOBAL CONTEXT 1. The Virtual University? 2. Globalizing the Academy 3. The University and Modernity: A History of the Present 4. The University in the 'Global' Economy PART II: PRACTICES AND POLICIES 5. Working Through the Work of Making Work Mobile 6. The Virtual University: The Learner's Perspective 7. New Managerialism: The Manager-Academic and Technologies of Management in Universities--Looking Forward to Virtuality? 8. Exporting Management - Neo-Imperialism and Global Consumerism 9. Saving the Soul of the University: What is to be Done? 10. Commodity and Community: Institutional Design for the Networked University PART III: PROSPECTS AND POSSIBILITIES 11. Marketizing Higher Education: Neo-Liberal Strategies and Counter Strategies 12. Digital Discourses, Online Classes, Electronic Documents: Developing New University Techno-Cultures 13. Rehearsal for the Revolution 14. Some Consequences of the New Information and Communications Technologies for Higher Education Afterword: What Will be the Global Identity of the University?

The Myth Of Consumerism

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part One THE IDEOLOGY OF CONSUMERISM 1 The Latest Ideology of Consumerism 2 The Symbolic Value of Consumption 3 Consumption, Identity and Lifestyle 4 Consumption and Freedom Part Two EXPLAINING INDIVIDUAL CONSUMPTION 5 Compelled to Consume 6 Compelled to Consume More Part Three CONSUMPTION, CAPITALISM AND POST-CAPITALISM 7 Consumption for What? Digression: Elitism, Adorno and Football Notes and References Index

Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914

Abstract: This work is a historical account of the production, distribution, and consumption of pornography in Great Britain from the early 19th century to the turn of the 20th century. It examines how pornography changed over time as a cultural and symbolic object in British society, and asks: What was considered pornographic? Who looked at pornography and read it? What sorts of messages did this medium transmit to both men and women? What was its thematic content, who controlled it, and how did these messages affect sexual and social dynamics? In contrast to recent ahistorical feminist assertions that pornography necessarily teaches men how to oppress women, this work views the use of pornography through the lens of historical and social change. In a careful analysis, it shows the cultural complexities of the medium and links Victorian pornography to other areas such as language, science, consumerism, and politics.

Consumption and Emotion: The Romantic Ethic Revisited

Abstract: This article revisits Campbell's (1987) The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism thesis in the light of new intersections with sociological issues of embodiment and emotions. A variety of themes and issues are raised the persistence of mind/body, reason,emotion dualities in the consumption literature, the importance of disappointment in consumer culture, external factors which mediate the consumption experience, and finally, the interpretation of both Romanticism and romantic interpersonal relationships. A largely disembodied and socially disembedded account of consumption and emotion is on offer here the implications of which extend far beyond the limits of Campbell's thesis to debates on consumer culture and the sociological enterprise in general in making these claims, we highlight the need for a passionate sociology which would in turn integrate embodiment and emotions more fully into the consumption agenda. These key themes are discussed with some sociological pointers for the future in consumption and beyond.

Tomorrow's consumer — the shifting balance of power

Abstract: What are the prospects for consumerism? Often despised as self-indulgent, consumers are frequently motivated by altruism and their needs to express their identity, to build relationships, to obtain fulfilment and even to find a substitute for religion. Mass-customisation is producing fundamental change, revolutionising attitudes to choice, with a key role for agents (human and online) in helping people choose. Consumer power will grow and brands will be under pressure from rising consumer expectations. While retailers fight back with targeted marketing and special offers, brands will need to serve consumer needs as much as suppliers. Online shopping could transform consumer behaviour, driven by cost saving and convenience and spurred on by competition. Will retailers protect their traditional channels or go online because they are afraid not to? ‘Etailing’ will need to create consumer trust, so regulation will be critical, possibly leading to legal responsibilities for quality on Internet service providers (ISPs) and portals and with systems to help new entrants build a track record of reliability, thereby increasing competition, choice and consumer power. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.

The female consumer and the politics of consumption in twentieth-century britain

Abstract: This article traces the history of women's participation in consumer politics and the gendering of the consumer in twentieth-century Britain. It does so by focusing on two important moments in the official discussion of the consumer interest: the Consumers' Council of the First World War and the Molony Committee on Consumer Protection, 1959–1962. It argues that notions of consumer-citizenship have been varied and forever in flux and that the involvement of women in consumer issues within the state apparatus has always been at once both disputed and encouraged. Within this complex history, however, a number of discernible trends are apparent. In the first half of the twentieth century, consumer issues were articulated by women's organizations on the political left and the consumer was considered largely a working-class housewife within official consumer politics. By mid-century, an increasingly dominant view of the consumer was that of the middle-class housewife, and a host of socially conservative women's groups came to speak for the consumer. By the 1950s, while the definition of the consumer remained contested, it had increasingly become a gender-neutral category, as business groups defined consumer interests in government committees and an emerging affluent consumer movement inscribed consumerism with the values of a male professional class.

The new agents: personal transfiguration and radical privatization in New Age self-help

Abstract: The New Age is a broad milieu which allows participants to undertake a range of activities in pursuit of self-improvement. Often characterized as a form of religious consumerism in the popular media, it does not easily fit into received church-sect models of the sociology of religion. This article argues that the movement’s market-type organizational logic, in which individuals typically choose from a range of belief options rather than commit to a central doctrine, is consonant with the privatist concerns of personal authority and self-care found in its discourse. However, at the same time, the New Age does not reduce to some simple acquisitive consumerism. It is better understood as offering solutions to the problem of personal agency in a post-traditional society which obliges individuals to assume the burden of plotting their own destinies.

Quality as Politics

Abstract: Globalization has become a new way of describing the imposition of cultural, political and economic priorities formerly associated with imperialism. In the analysis of this trend, education in general, and higher education in particular, is usually absent. The article explores the ways in which globalization has led to the ideological crystallization of two contradictory views of higher education: the traditional, disciplinary one, and the operational or entrepreneurial view. It then explores the consequences each has for the definition of quality linked to it, and the risks of not recognizing them as ideological constructions. Finally, it addresses the issue of quality, and its colonization by consumerism and short term effectiveness, pointing out the special challenges faced by developing countries in this context.

Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero's Dawn of the Dead

Abstract: In George Romero's satirical film about consumerism, Dawn of the Dead (1978), an American shopping mall becomes the site of battles between the zombies who have overrun the country, four human "survivors" who exterminate the zombies and appropriate the mall for themselves, and a gang of marauding bikers which, in the movie's violent climax, seeks to take over the mall. These battles serve as a useful, if melodramatic metaphor for recent theoretical disputes over the nature and value of consumerism, disputes which remain of central importance among cultural critics of differing political persuasions. 1. At the risk of crudely dichotomizing, these critics have tended to affiliate with one of two camps with respect to what might be called the "consumerism debate."On one side of this debate, a host of unrepentantly Marxian critics have described the baleful impact of capitalist production on those whom it exploits and the depoliticizing effects of commodity fetishism on consumers. On the other side, postmodern ethnographers and sociologists have argued that consumerism empowers capitalist subjects by granting them a limited, but politically important space in which to live out utopian fantasies of autonomy. The exchanges between these camps are as frequent as they are ill-tempered: just when the "issue" of consumerism seems to be dead and buried, it rises zombie-like from the critical grave. A recent irascible polemic is James Twitchell's denunciation of the "melancholy Marxist" view of consumerism, complete with some scandalous ad hominem attacks on academics working in cultural studies. Recently, Western arguments about consumerism have even moved outside the confines of academia and into the realm of popular culture - witness the recent sparring in the British press between Germaine Greer and Nigella Lawson (see Lawson). This paper offers some observations on what might be called the "consumerism debate" based on a consideration of radical anti-consumerist elements in Romero's film.Before discussing this film, I would like to consider briefly one influential theoretical intervention in what I am calling the "consumerism debate." In Reading the Popular, John Fiske argues that while consumer "tactics" are never radical, they may be "liberating" to a certain extent. Moreover, he argues, following de Certeau and many others, that consumers should not be despised as the "cultural dupes" of capitalist producers; consumers are instead "secondary producers," finding value in their consumption and making use of capitalist products for their own ends. Fiske rightly reminds cultural critics that people should not be patronized as idiots who compliantly consume the images and products imposed on them by the dominant ideology; and he is surely correct that consumers may be temporarily empowered by the experience of shopping, a point well established by Angela McRobbie and others. But his well-practiced indignation about "cultural dupes" requires a caveat, for this injunction risks patronizing the "ordinary" people whose shopping habits Fiske aims to redeem. Few critics would dispute that an unacceptably dismissive view of consumers as "cultural dupes" has been presented (or at least implied) by radical critics from Adorno to Eagleton. It is important, however, to remember that many "ordinary" people actually sympathize with anti-consumerist views and feel empowered, rather than patronized, by their engagement with oppositional perspectives. Anti-consumerist -as well as consumerist - attitudes and activities can be a source of both pleasure and liberation.As Raymond Williams famously observed, there is no such thing as "the masses," only ways of imagining people as masses. Of all of these ways, Romero's is surely among the most extraordinary. Zombies function in Dawn of the Dead as a lumpenproletariat of shifting significance, walking symbols of any oppressed social group. This function is derived in part from their origins in the literature and cinema of the twentieth century, in which zombies are synonymous with oppression and slavery. …

Managerial views of consumerism: a two-country comparison

Abstract: Empirically examines the managerial perception of consumerism with reference to the very different macro environments of two countries – Australia and Bangladesh. Consumerism is defined as a social movement seeking to augment the rights and powers of buyers in relation to sellers. The attitudes of a sample of CEOs towards various aspects of consumerism are analyzed. The results of ANOVA indicate that there are statistically significant differences between the two groups of managers in terms of their commitment to consumerism on such issues as government regulation, advertising to children, the role of consumer organization and industry self‐regulation. Interestingly, Bangladeshi managers perceived most of the consumerism issues at a higher level than their Australian counterparts. There are interesting interpretations and implications of these findings for firms operating at the international level. These are explored here. Also explores the potential of future research in this area.

Faludi, Fight Club, and Phallic Masculinity: Exploring the Emasculating Economics of Patriarchy:

Abstract: Both Susan Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (text) and the film Fight Club (image) insist that men have been emasculated by consumerism; that the post-war legacy of the so-called good life has shifted men from active, heroic, confrontational roles into the passive, ornamental roles usually assigned to women; and that, without a Great Depression, or Great War, or any other dragon to slay, emasculated men have become imprisoned in their job cubicles and possessed by their possessions, often with not only negative, but even violent repercussions. Ecofeminism and ecotheology provide the tools for better understanding this idolatrous false god of consumerism, as well as for beginning to explore how the economics of plenty affect seemingly privileged men. Importantly, however, this study does not further privilege the already privileged, but seeks instead to understand how the globalizing economy negatively impacts both the human poor and the nonhuman ecosystems which altogether constitute our...

Not Afraid to Blame: The Neglected Role of Blame Attribution in Medical Consumerism and Some Implications for Health Policy

Abstract: Starting roughly a quarter century ago, american medicine began a dramatic transformation from a system dominated by clinicians' decision making and professional norms to one in which medical care is expected to reflect the preferences and choices of individual consumers. This growing aspiration toward “medical consumerism” began during the 1970s with a set of popular social movements devoted to giving patients more control over their own treatment and a more informed choice of their physicians (Rodwin 1994). Although the seeds of consumerism were only haphazardly sown and incompletely germinated (Hibbard and Weeks 1987), by the end of the decade they had grown into a noticeable presence in the health care system (Haug and Lavin 1981). During the 1980s, these shifts in popular attitudes were reinforced by public policies and private practices intended to give consumers greater incentives to learn more about their medical choices and to exercise these choices in a cost-conscious manner (Arnould, Rich, and White 1993).

Why Good is Good: The Sources of Morality

Abstract: Where do our moral beliefs come from? Theologians and scientists provide often conflicting answers. Robert Hinde resolves these conflicts to offer a groundbreaking, multidisciplinary response, drawing on psychology, philosophy, evolutionary biology and social anthropology. Hinde argues that understanding the origins of our morality can clarify the debates surrounding contemporary ethical dilemmas such as genetic modification, increasing consumerism and globalisation. Well-chosen examples and helpful summaries make this an accessible volume for students, professionals and others interested in contemporary and historical ethics.

Islam Encountering Globalisation

Abstract: One of the greatest dilemmas facing Muslims today is the fact that Muslim culture is often seemingly incompatible with the culture of the modern Western world, and the features associated with it - technological progress, consumerism, and new electronic communication, all of which have the potential for a homogenizing effect on any culture. This book explores many key aspects of the globalisation process, discussing how Muslim countries are coping with globalisation, as well as considering how the West is responding to Islam.

Consumer Choice as Political Participation

Abstract: Consumers have the possibility of expressing political opinion by changing their consumption patterns, a phenomenon analyzed by Michele Micheletti in Consumer Choice as Political Participation. Political consumerism, a politically motivated consumer choice of producers and products, is an old phenomenon. Historically consumerism has mainly been a negative choice in form of boycotts, whereas positive boycotts and global concerns are becoming more dominant today. Consumerism is particularly important as channel for women's political engagement. Relevant distinctions are introduced.

The Kosher Lifestyle: Religious Consumerism and Suburban Orthodox Jews

Abstract: In theMay 1952 issue ofCommentarymagazine, reporter Morris Freedman wrote an extended essay on the phenomenon of Barton’s Chocolates. Established in the late 1930s by Stephen Klein, a European Jewish immigrant, Barton’s almost single-handedly created a market for gourmet chocolates. Its boutiques—not stores—were “all show window, frivolously decked with tinsel and ribbon” and designed to give customers a “pleasure” from entering the premises.When they entered a Barton’s boutique, they found an assortment of some of the finest chocolates available presented in elegant style. The goal, Klein explained, was “to make each piece of candy attractive. All the pieces should look good. You should keep wanting to eat more and not get tired.” For the reporter Freedman, however, Barton’s success lay not somuch in its ability to make chocolate a luxury item but in doing so while having all of Barton’s chocolatesmanufactured and sold under the strict supervision of theOrthodox Union (OU), the kosher certifying agency of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. Such certification meant that every piece of Barton’s chocolate—down to the chocolate Santa Clauses and Easter bunnies—could be eaten by Orthodox Jews who observed the religious dietary laws known as kashruth. Although Jews who observed these laws were the minority of Barton’s customers, Stephen Klein recognized the value of gourmet kosher chocolate. Orthodox Jewish businessmen, for example, could give chocolate as a gift to clients without feeling uncomfortable about giving nonkosher food. ForOrthodox Jews, or for those visitingOrthodox Jews, a box of Barton’s had also become “one of the habitual choices for the ritual gift picked up on theway to dinner at a friend’s home, or for one’sweek-end suburban hostess, or for the weekly gathering of the mishpocha (family).” Kosher chocolate could even bridge the generations, since “a child may be supplied

The Changing Consumerism with the Internet: A Global Perspective

Abstract: This study explores the changing perspectives of consumerism in relation to Internet usage on the cultural individualism-collectivism continuum in five countries. The new consumerism components were tested with the AWMF scale in the U.S., the U.K. and in Denmark where individualistic culture is dominant; and in Japan and Turkey where collectivist culture is dominant. The results showed that the new consumerism in individualist and collectivist cultures on the Internet differ from each other, by which the cause is mainly based on the security issue. The collectivists associate security issues with financial risk while the individualists consider it as a privacy issue or alternatively perceive security as a part of the services and products sold or as one of the convenience/satisfaction components on the Internet.

Beyond Consumerism and Utopianism: How Service Learning Contributes to Liberal Arts Ideals

Abstract: The authors place service learning within the liberal arts tradition of empowering others to help themselves. Such a contextualization supplements visions of students as consumers or customers and education as a means to gain economic advantage in a competitive market. Their attention then turns to how even well-intentioned service-learning projects might be co-opted in ways that foster community dependence on the services offered. Effectively designed service-learning programs should offer a broad range of opportunities for social activism while encouraging critical reflection about the applicability of market-derived educational philosophies.