The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class PDF Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Leisure class
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description

The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class PDF Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Leisure class
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Sum of Small Things

The Sum of Small Things PDF Author: Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884691
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
How the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us all In today’s world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society “the aspirational class” and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class reproduces wealth and upward mobility, deepening the ever-wider class divide. Exploring the rise of the aspirational class, Currid-Halkett considers how much has changed since the 1899 publication of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. In that inflammatory classic, which coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen described upper-class frivolities: men who used walking sticks for show, and women who bought silver flatware despite the effectiveness of cheaper aluminum utensils. Now, Currid-Halkett argues, the power of material goods as symbols of social position has diminished due to their accessibility. As a result, the aspirational class has altered its consumer habits away from overt materialism to more subtle expenditures that reveal status and knowledge. And these transformations influence how we all make choices. With a rich narrative and extensive interviews and research, The Sum of Small Things illustrates how cultural capital leads to lifestyle shifts and what this forecasts, not just for the aspirational class but for everyone.

The Tourist

The Tourist PDF Author: Dean MacCannell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520280008
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In this classic analysis of travel and sightseeing, author Dean MacCannell brings social scientific understandings to bear on tourism in the postindustrial age, during which the middle class has acquired leisure time for international travel. In The Tourist—now with a new introduction framing it as part of a broader contemporary social and cultural analysis—the author examines notions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality around tourism.

The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class PDF Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
ISBN: 3986474412
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise on economics and a detailed, social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social class and of consumerism, derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labour, which are social institutions of the feudal period (9th15th c.) that have continued to the modern era.Veblen asserts that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society, while it is the middle class and the working class who are usefully employed in the industrialised, productive occupations that support the whole of society.

The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class

The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class PDF Author: Nikolaĭ Bukharin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Austrian school of economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Conspicuous Consumption

Conspicuous Consumption PDF Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141964316
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 83

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Book Description
With its wry portrayal of a shallow, materialistic 'leisure class' obsessed by clothes, cars, consumer goods and climbing the social ladder, this withering satire on modern capitalism is as pertinent today as when it was written over a century ago.

One True Theory & the Quest for an American Aesthetic

One True Theory & the Quest for an American Aesthetic PDF Author: Martha Banta
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300122977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation." The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challenge?artists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquiry?brought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested.

Veblen

Veblen PDF Author: Charles Camic
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674659724
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics. Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”

The Theory of the Leisure Class

The Theory of the Leisure Class PDF Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Classic of economic and social theory offers a satiric examination of the hollowness and falsity suggested by the term "conspicuous consumption," exposing the emptiness of many cherished standards of taste, education, dress, and culture. Since first appearing in 1899, it has become a classic of social theory that has contributed to the modernization of economic policy.

The Higher Learning in America

The Higher Learning in America PDF Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education, Higher
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description