How Much is Enough?

How Much is Enough?
Author: Alan Thein Durning
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1992
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780393308914

It discusses the use of resources, pollution, and the distortions created in the economies of both wealthy industrialized nations and Third World countries.

The Future of Consumer Society

The Future of Consumer Society
Author: Maurie J. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198768559

Shows how consumer society is changing due to demographic ageing, rising income inequality, political paralysis, resource scarcity, and steady jobs being replaced by freelancing. It examines how people are striving to find new ways to ensure livelihoods and the role that the role that worker-consumer cooperatives could play.

Consumer Society in American History

Consumer Society in American History
Author: Lawrence B. Glickman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780801484865

This volume offers the most comprehensive and incisive exploration of American consumer history to date, spanning the four centuries from the colonial era to the present.

Constructing the New Consumer Society

Constructing the New Consumer Society
Author: John Holmwood
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 309
Release: 1997-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1349253375

This book argues that the coming of the 'a new consumerism' in the affluent societies marks a distinct phase of modernity. Limits of production no longer confine consumption to what is necessary or instrumental. Demands for increasing production no longer shape ideology and culture as they did previously. Important contemporary themes of morality, the body, citizenship and inequality are here placed in a new theoretical light. The book provides examples of new codes of happiness in consuming products, culture and entertainment. Issues of nutrition, consumer policy, environmental risk and health are discussed in the light of these new codes.

The Consumer Society Reader

The Consumer Society Reader
Author: Juliet Schor
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2011-07-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1595587586

The Consumer Society Reader features a range of key works on the nature and evolution of consumer society. Included here is much-discussed work by leading critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Susan Bordo, Dick Hebdige, bell hooks, and Janice Radway. Also included is a full range of classics, such as Frankfurt School writers Adorno and Horkheimer on the Culture Industry; Thorstein Veblen's oft-cited writings on "conspicuous consumption"; Betty Friedan on the housewife's central role in consumer society; John Kenneth Galbraith's influential analysis of the "affluent society"; and Pierre Bourdieu on the notion of "taste." "Consumer society--the 'air we breathe,' as George Orwell has described it--disappears during economic downtruns and political crises. It becomes visible again when prosperity seems secure, cultural transformation is too rapid, or enviornmental disasters occur. Such is the time in which we now find ourselves. As the roads clog with gas-guzzling SUVs and McMansions proliferate in the suburbs, the nation is once again asking fundamental questions about lifestyle. Has 'luxury fever,' to use Robert Frank's phrase, gotten out of hand? Are we really comfortable with the 'Brand Is Me' mentality? Have we gone too far in pursuit of the almighty dollar, to the detriment of our families, communities, and natural enviornment? Even politicians, ordinarily impermeable to questions about consumerism, are voicing doubts... [and] polls suggest majorities of Americans feel the country has become too materialistic, too focused on getting and spending, and increasingly removed from long-standing non-materialist values." —From the introduction by Douglas B. Holt and Juliet B. Schor

Consumer Society

Consumer Society
Author: Barry Smart
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857026933

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.

New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society

New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society
Author: Elaine L Ritch
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1839095563

Digital communication has altered the flow of global information,evolved consumer values and changed consumption practices worldwide.New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society provides an illuminating, challenging and thought-provoking guide for all upper-level students of marketing,branding and consumer behaviour.

Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society

Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society
Author: Ted Trainer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2007-07-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1402055498

It is widely assumed that our consumer society can move from using fossil fuels to using renewable energy sources while maintaining the high levels of energy use to which we have become accustomed. This book details the reasons why this almost unquestioned assumption is seriously mistaken. It challenges fundamental assumptions and stimulates the discussion about our common future in a way that will be of interest to professionals and lay-readers alike.

Innovation in an Advanced Consumer Society

Innovation in an Advanced Consumer Society
Author: Peder Inge Furseth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2016
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198705115

This book aims to develop innovation theory by focusing on innovation in a consumer society. In an advanced consumer society, services dominate and are provided through digital as well as physical channels by local, national and global firms. This book aims to identify the ways in which value can be increased for all stakeholders through both incremental and disruptive innovation. When interacting with leading businesses, there is a common acceptance that we need a better understanding of how to innovate in a service economy. Today, most advanced economies are service and knowledge based, accounting for about 70 percent of GDP. OECD reports document a considerable knowledge gap related to service innovation. It is a challenge for both business and society that future economic growth will increasingly be based on services rather than manufacturing and products. Failing to understand innovation issues in this context as an engine for growth is somewhat alarming. This raises the question: do we know how to innovate successfully in a consumer driven society? In this book, the authors develop the concept of Value Driven Service Innovation, alongside a methodology for applying this approach in practice: the Service Innovation Triangle. They develop a better understanding of innovation, based on the uniqueness of services in order to develop the theory of service innovation suitable for a consumer society.

Suitably Modern

Suitably Modern
Author: Mark Liechty
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 069122174X

Suitably Modern traces the growth of a new middle class in Kathmandu as urban Nepalis harness the modern cultural resources of mass media and consumer goods to build modern identities and pioneer a new sociocultural space in one of the world's "least developed countries." Since Nepal's "opening" in the 1950s, a new urban population of bureaucrats, service personnel, small business owners, and others have worked to make a space between Kathmandu's old (and still privileged) elites and its large (and growing) urban poor. Mark Liechty looks at the cultural practices of this new middle class, examining such phenomena as cinema and video viewing, popular music, film magazines, local fashion systems, and advertising. He explores three interactive and mutually constitutive ethnographic terrains: a burgeoning local consumer culture, a growing mass-mediated popular imagination, and a recently emerging youth culture. He shows how an array of local cultural narratives--stories of honor, value, prestige, and piety--flow in and around global narratives of "progress," modernity, and consumer fulfillment. Urban Nepalis simultaneously adopt and critique these narrative strands, braiding them into local middle-class cultural life. Building on both Marxian and Weberian understandings of class, this study moves beyond them to describe the lived experience of "middle classness"--how class is actually produced and reproduced in everyday practice. It considers how people speak and act themselves into cultural existence, carving out real and conceptual spaces in which to produce class culture.