Work, Consumption and Capitalism

Work, Consumption and Capitalism
Author: Lynne Pettinger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137342781

Sonic branding, guerrilla marketing, celebrity endorsements, customer service excellence and multi-channel advertising are just some of the popular sales techniques that currently promote consumerism in contemporary capitalism. Considerable energy is devoted to encouraging consumers to desire new fashions, to celebrate 'good design', to have feelings for brands and to immerse themselves in sensory experiences, without worrying about the ethics of their practices. Work, Consumption and Capitalism looks at how consumption is produced by focusing on the multiple kinds of work that make consumption possible, from advertising creatives to fashion designers, from self-service checkouts to the hippest barista in the coolest coffee shop. The text encourages students to consider the place of consumerism in global capitalism to develop their own answers to the question: How is consumption made possible? This wide-ranging study of the relations between work, consumption and capitalism draws on interdisciplinary research in cultural and economic sociology, history, marketing studies and cultural studies. With research tasks and discussion questions at the end of each chapter and case studies throughout, it stands as an accessible introduction for students of sociology, business and management, media and communication, cultural policy and cultural studies. Listen to a podcast about the book.

Beyond Consumer Capitalism

Beyond Consumer Capitalism
Author: Justin Lewis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2014-01-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745671667

Consumer capitalism dominates our economy, our politics and our culture. Yet there is a growing body of research from a range of disciplines that suggests that consumer capitalism may be past its sell-by date. Beyond Consumer Capitalism begins by showing how, for people in the developed world, consumer capitalism has become economically and environmentally unsustainable and is no longer able to deliver its abiding promise of enhancing quality of life . This cutting-edge book then asks why we devote so little time and effort to imagining other forms of human progress. The answer, Lewis suggests, is that our cultural and information industries limit rather than stimulate critical thinking, keeping us on the treadmill of consumption and narrowing our vision of what constitutes progress. If we are to find a way out of this cul de sac, Lewis argues, we must begin by analysing the role of media in consumer capitalism and changing the way we organize media and communications. We need a cultural environment that encourages rather than stifles new ideas about what guides our economy and our society. Timely and compelling, Beyond Consumer Capitalism will have strong appeal to students and scholars of media studies, cultural studies and consumer culture.

Post-Growth Living

Post-Growth Living
Author: Kate Soper
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788738896

An urgent and passionate plea for a new and ecologically sustainable vision of the good life. The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities isn't only destroying the world, it is damaging ourselves and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on? In Post-Growth Living, philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, she calls for a renewed emphasis on the joys of being, one that is capable of collective happiness not in consumption but by creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.

Consumerism and the Movement of Housewives into Wage Work

Consumerism and the Movement of Housewives into Wage Work
Author: David R. Wells
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-12-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429864868

First published in 1998, this volume explores the connections between the rises in consumerism and the number of married women in paid work in light of the centrality of shopping and consumerism to the modern world. David R. Wells argues for women’s incomplete gains from consumerism through an analysis of married women’s employment, the structure of capitalism and the contradictory requirements of consumerism, the homemaker ideal and gender identity. Through this, Wells demonstrates how the gendered expectations of consumerism became motivating factors for women to join the workforce, resulting in higher standards of living and greater marital power.

Creating the New Worker

Creating the New Worker
Author: Jean-Pierre Durand
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2018-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319932608

This book explores the relationship between the changing nature of capitalism and the creation of the new worker. In a changing global economy, work - as the activity that structures individuals in capitalism both socially and psychologically - is being undermined. Combining a Gramscian critique of contemporary patterns of capitalist labour control with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Durand examines what kinds of human beings are emerging in and through modern work, or on its margins. Creating the New Worker will be of interest to students and scholars who engage in the sociology and psychology of work, economics, and labour.

Addictive Consumption

Addictive Consumption
Author: Gerda Reith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429875649

In this engaging new book, Gerda Reith explores key theoretical concepts in the sociology of consumption. Drawing on the ideas of Foucault, Marx and Bataille, amongst others, she investigates the ways that understandings of ‘the problems of consumption’ change over time, and asks what these changes can tell us about their wider social and political contexts. Through this, she uses ideas about both consumption and addiction to explore issues around identity and desire, excess and control and reason and disorder. She also assesses how our concept of 'normal' consumption has grown out of efforts to regulate behaviour historically considered as disruptive or deviant, and how in the contemporary world the 'dark side' of consumption has been medicalised in terms of addiction, pathology and irrationality. By drawing on case studies of drugs, food and gambling, the volume demonstrates the ways in which modern practices of consumption are rooted in historical processes and embedded in geopolitical structures of power. It not only asks how modern consumer culture came to be in the form it is today, but also questions what its various manifestations can tell us about wider issues in capitalist modernity. Addictive Consumption offers a compelling new perspective on the origins, development and problems of consumption in modern society. The volume’s interdisciplinary profile will appeal to scholars and students in sociology, psychology, history, philosophy and anthropology.

Delirious Consumption

Delirious Consumption
Author: Sergio Delgado Moya
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-10-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1477314377

In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion. Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.

Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Author: Moritz Föllmer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2022-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108983634

Arguing that capitalism had a significant presence in Weimar and Nazi Germany, but in a different guise from before World War I, this volume sheds fresh light on the question of how Adolf Hitler and his followers came to power and were able to gain widespread support.

Consumer Capitalism

Consumer Capitalism
Author: Anastasios Korkotsides
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2007-05-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134187718

An excellent addition to Routledge’s strong tradition of publishing exceptional books in heterodox economics, this innovative and groundbreaking volume draws on the work of Schumpeter, Marx and Sraffa, three of the most influential economists of all time. It bases value on a single, inwardly felt scarcity, the scarcity of life, which consumers scramble to experience more of through private possession of the product of socially contributed human time-space, in the form of knowledge embodied in commodities. This coercive urge, which appears outwardly as ‘commodity fetishism’, sets the context of ‘utility’ and self-interest, implicating consumers in the plunder of each other’s toil and of the earth, showing that capitalistic growth surveys existential distress rather than welfare. Existential motivational uniformity joins the seemingly disparate individualistic pursuits into a race for growth, while markets promote variety and innovation. Markets assist consumption innovations to blend with Schumpeterian production innovations as consumers try to foresee market conditions and structure their expenditures towards gaining positional advantage. These explain the structural dynamics of increased roundaboutness through adjustment of prices and demand to an evolving techno-structure. A valuable resource, this book unfolds a new vision of economic theorizing through the extreme basics of agent behaviour.

The Ethical Capitalist: How to Make Business Work Better for Society

The Ethical Capitalist: How to Make Business Work Better for Society
Author: Julian Richer
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2018-05-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 147355456X

__________________ *A road-map for a kinder, fairer capitalism that is fit for the 21st century* Financial Times Book of the Month ‘The founder of Richer Sounds is one of the finest entrepreneurs we have.’ Archie Norman, chairman of Marks & Spencer __________________ Capitalism has lost its way. Every week brings fresh news stories about businesses exploiting their staff, avoiding their taxes, and ripping off their customers. Every week, public anger at the system grows. Now, one of Britain’s foremost entrepreneurs intervenes to make the case for putting business back firmly in the service of society, and setting out on a new path to a kinder, fairer form of capitalism. Drawing on four decades of hands-on management experience, the founder of Richer Sounds argues that ethically run businesses are invariably more efficient, more motivated and more innovative than those that care only about the bottom line. He uncovers the simple tools that the best leaders use to make their businesses fair, revealing how others can follow suit. And he also delves into the big questions that modern capitalism has to answer if it is to survive and to thrive.