Author: Juliet B. Schor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300206984
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Many of today’s most troubling environmental and economic issues have come to seem insoluble: carbon emissions, overshoot, inequality, joblessness, and a dysfunctional food system. Can we change direction, move away from business as usual, and achieve a more sustainable, empowering, and humane economy? Through a fascinating array of illuminating case studies, this hope-filled book affirms that we can. In locations across the United States and around the globe, local participants are forging their own versions of small-scale, low-footprint, high-satisfaction lifestyles and communities. From raw-milk consumers and members of alternative agricultural initiatives to time bankers, artisan producers in the Aude region of France, and bicycle mechanics on the South Side of Chicago, individuals and small groups are exploring the practice of plenitude. Their efforts demonstrate how social and economic transformation happens and suggest new paths toward larger-scale change and a richer quality of life for all.
Author: Donica Belisle
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442629118
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Exploring the roots of Canadian consumer culture, this book uncovers the meanings that Canadians have historically attached to consumer goods. Focusing on white women during the early twentieth century, it reveals that for thousands of Canadians between the 1890s and World War II, consumption was about not only survival, but also civic expression. Offering a new perspective on the temperance, conservation, home economics, feminist, and co-operative movements, this book brings white women's consumer interests to the fore. Due to their exclusion from formal politics and paid employment, many white Canadian women turned their consumer roles into personal and social opportunities. They sought solutions in the consumer sphere to isolation, upward mobility, personal expression, and family survival. They effectively transformed consumer culture into an arena of political engagement. Yet if white Canadian women viewed consumption as a tool of empowerment, so did they wield consumption as a tool of exclusion. As Purchasing Power reveals, Canadian women of privileged race and class status tended to disparage racialized and lower income women's consumer habits. In so doing, they constructed hierarchical notions of taste that defined who - and who did not - belong in the modern Canadian nation.
Author: Isabel Cruz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658213469
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
This book provides critical perspectives on contemporary collaborative consumption, a recent societal phenomenon shaking up previously fixed socio-economic categories such as the producer and the consumer. The contributors discuss the role of trust and reciprocity in collaborative consumption through seven case studies. The chapters advance debates on the contradictions of positioning collaborative consumption as possible solutions for a more sustainable development and exacerbating new forms of inequalities and injustice. The book contributes a nuanced appraisal of social and economic activity for reflecting socio-technological changes in contemporary societies.
Author: Maurie J. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198768559
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
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.
Author: Peter A. Victor
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1783473568
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 593
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Book Description
This Handbook assembles original contributions from influential authors such as Herman Daly, Paul Ekins, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Jeroen van den Bergh, William E. Rees and Tim Jackson who have helped to define our understanding of growth and sustainability. The Handbook also presents new contributions on topics such as degrowth, the debt-based financial system, cultural change, energy return on investment, shorter working hours and employment, and innovation and technology. Explorations of these issues can deepen our understanding of whether growth is sustainable and, in turn, whether a move away from growth can be sustained. With issues such as climate change looming large, our understanding of growth and sustainability is critical. This Handbook offers a broad range of perspectives that can help the reader to decide: Growth? Sustainability? Both? Or neither?
Author: Maurie J Cohen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317246217
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Consumer society is an unquestionably complex social construct. However, after decades of unremitting dominance there are signs emerging that it is starting to falter, both as a coherent and durable system of social organization and as a strategy for societal advancement. Debates concerning how we can transition beyond present energy- and materials-intensive consumer society are beginning to gain greater salience. Social Change and the Coming of Post-Consumer Society aims to develop more complete appreciation of the relevant processes of social change and to identify effective interventions that could enable a transition to supersede consumer society. Bringing together leading interdisciplinary experts on social change, the book identifies and analyzes several ongoing small- and modest-scale social experiments. Possibilities for macro-scale change from the interlinked perspectives of culture, economics, finance, and governance are then explored. These contributions expose the systemic problems that are emblematic of the current condition of consumer society, specifically the unsustainability of prevailing consumption practices and lifestyles and the persistence of inequalities. These observations are summarized and extended in the final chapter of the book. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable consumption, sustainability transitions, environmental sociology, and sustainable development.
Author: Thomas Taro Lennerfors
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000987744
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Digital technologies, now ubiquitous around the world, can promote positive values, as well as support those that are less socially acceptable. To better understand such technologies’ impact on ethics and sustainability, this book situates digital technologies within a cultural context, arguing that the technology is received differently in different cultural contexts. The book contains chapters on state-of-the-art digital technologies such as artificial intelligence from various countries including Japan and Sweden to highlight the multifarious ways in how ethical and sustainability issues are being manifested in certain cultural contexts. The book contributes to furthering understandings on the similarities and differences between digital technology implementations in different cultures, promoting a cross-cultural dialogue on desired values and how they are promoted or downplayed by such technologies. The book is divided into two parts: the former focuses on how individuals relate to new digital technologies, and the latter focuses on those who develop digital technologies. The book targets scholars, businesspeople and policymakers interested in the interconnection between digital technologies, ethics and sustainability from various cultural viewpoints. It provides new case studies on a range of digital technologies and discussions about digital technology implementations in cultural contexts.
Author: David Michalski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137544287
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
The Dialectic of Taste examines the aesthetic economy in the context of economic crises. It explains how a new concern for aesthetics, seen in artisan markets, was born out of the ashes of McDonaldization to become a potent force today, capable of both regulating social identity and sparking social change.
Author: Joerg Rieger
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506487157
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
In times of rising pressures and catastrophes, people yearn for alternatives. So does the planet. Protests are often a start, but rebellion is not revolution, nor does it always lead to transformation. In this incisive and compelling new book, Joerg Rieger takes a new look at the things that cause unease and discomfort in our time, leading to the growing destruction and death of people and the planet. Only when these causes are understood, he argues, can real alternatives be developed. And yet, understanding is only a start. Solidarity, and the willingness to work at the seemingly impossible intersections of everything--the triad of gender, race, and class, yes, but more beyond--must mark the work of theology. Without solidarities that match the complexities of our world, the best we can hope for is inclusion in the dominant system but hardly the systemic change and liberation we so desperately need.
Author: Maurizio Ferrera
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1035311445
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Automation, digitalisation, the post-industrial transition and climate change are creating new social risks which are not adequately supported by established welfare state institutions. In this timely book, Maurizio Ferrera, Joan Miró and Stefano Ronchi propose critical social and institutional policy reform in response to the nation state’s inability to maintain a balanced ecosystem between democracy, the market economy, welfare and the rule of law.
