Consumer Culture and Modernity

Consumer Culture and Modernity PDF Author: Don Slater
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745603032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context. Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought. With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.

Consumer Culture and Modernity

Consumer Culture and Modernity PDF Author: Don Slater
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745603032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context. Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought. With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.

Consumer Culture and Modernity

Consumer Culture and Modernity PDF Author: Don Slater
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745603049
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context. Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought. With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.

Consumer Culture and Society

Consumer Culture and Society PDF Author: Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 148335816X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Consumer Culture and Society offers an introduction to the study of consumerism and consumption from a sociological perspective. Author Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy examines what we buy, how and where we consume, the meanings attached to the things we purchase, and the social forces that enable and constrain consumer behavior. Opening chapters provide a theoretical overview and history of consumer society and featured case studies look at mass consumption in familiar contexts, such as tourism, food, and higher education. The book explores ethical and political concerns, including consumer activism, indebtedness, alternative forms of consumption, and dilemmas surrounding the globalization of consumer culture.

Consumer Culture, Modernity and Identity

Consumer Culture, Modernity and Identity PDF Author: Nita Mathur
Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited
ISBN: 9788132111276
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book offers analysis of articulation of consumer culture and modernity in everyday lives of people in a transnational framework. It pursues three broad themes: lifestyle choices and construction of modern identities; fashion and advertising; and subaltern concerns and moral subjectivities. It juxtaposes empirical studies with theoretical traditions in addressing questions such as: How do people imagine modernity and identity in consumer culture? What does modernity or ‘being modern’ mean to people in different societies? Are modernity and tradition antithetical to or develop an interface with each other? The chapters in the book trace manifestations and trajectories of consumer culture and modernity as they connect to develop a sense of renewed identity.

Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran

Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran PDF Author: Zahra Pamela Karimi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415781833
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book explores the transformation of home culture and domestic architecture in twentieth century Iran. While highlighting the role of architects and urban planners since the turn of the century, the book also studies the interplay between foreign influences, gender roles, consumer culture, and women's education as they intersect with taste, fashion, and interior design.

Consumer Culture

Consumer Culture PDF Author: Joanne Entwistle
Publisher: Sage Publications
ISBN: 9780761968368
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description


Consumer Culture and Postmodernism

Consumer Culture and Postmodernism PDF Author: Mike Featherstone
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803984158
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Implicit within claims that society itself is in some sense postmodern is an argument about the priority of consumption as a determinant of everyday life. In this view, mass media advertising and market dynamics lead to a constant search for new fashions, new styles, new sensations and experiences. Material goods are consumed as `communicators'; they are valued as signifiers of taste and of lifestyle. This volume examines the viability of this portrait of contemporary society. Mike Featherstone explores the roots of consumer culture, how it is defined and differentiated and the extent to which it represents the arrival of a `postmodern' world. He examines the theories of consumption and postmodernism among contemporary social theorists such

Consumer Culture, Modernity and Identity

Consumer Culture, Modernity and Identity PDF Author: Nita Mathur
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789351507932
Category : Consumers
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
'Consumer Culture, Modernity and Identity' offers analysis of articulation of consumer culture and modernity in everyday lives of people in a transnational framework. It pursues three broad themes: lifestyle and construction of modern identity; fashion and identity; and subaltern concerns and moral subjectivities. It juxtaposes empirical studies with theoretical traditions in addressing questions such as: How do people imagine modernity and identity in consumer culture? What does modernity or 'being modern' mean to people in different societies? Are modernity and tradition antithetical to or develop an interface with each other?

Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus

Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus PDF Author: James P. Grehan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Damascus was for centuries a center of learning and commerce. Drawing on the city's dazzling literary tradition-a rich collection of poetry, chronicles, travel accounts, and biographical dictionaries-as well as on Islamic court records, James Grehan explores the material culture of premodern Damascus, reconstructing the economic infrastructure, social customs, and private consumer habits that dominated this cosmopolitan hub in the 1700s. He sketches a lively history of diet, furniture, fashion, and other aspects of daily life, providing an unusual and intimate account of the choices, constraints, and compromises that defined consumer behavior. Coffee, tobacco, and light firearms had arisen as new luxury items in preceding centuries, and Grehan traces the usage of such goods in order to get a picture of the overall standard of living in the premodern Middle East. He looks particularly at how wealth and poverty were defined and how consumption patterns expressed notions of taste, class, and power, illuminating the prominent role played by Damascus in shaping the economy and culture of the Middle East. In assessing the magnitude of social change in modern times, we have few benchmarks from the period preceding the onset of modernity in the nineteenth century. This informative study will make possible more precise cultural and economic comparisons between different parts of the world as it stood on the brink of a radically new economic and political order. The book's focus on a little-examined period and region will appeal to scholars and students of urban social history and Arab popular culture.

Suitably Modern

Suitably Modern PDF Author: Mark Liechty
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122174X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
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.