Consumerist Encounters

Consumerist Encounters PDF Author: Sreedeep Bhattacharya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190991321
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Economic liberalization and globalization in India in the early 1990s resulted in a whirlwind of consumerist activities. New material and visual temptations swamped the markets. Expanding field of commodification infiltrated consumer minds through media imageries. New objects of desire aroused inhibited cravings. This engendered an accelerated and intensified relationship with things and images that permeate our everyday lives. Consumerist Encounters elucidates how our all-consuming relationship with objects and their representations have transformed rapidly over the last few decades in contemporary urban India. It argues that ephemerality, frivolousness, and multiplicity of choice regulate our flirtatious encounters with commodities and their images as we restlessly use, exhaust, dispose, and move on. Such a trend is illustrated by examining a plethora of commodity-centric phenomena such as exclusion through apparel, eroticization of body images, population of the T-shirt surface with graphics and text, rise of business process outsourcing, instantaneous seeing and sharing of images, and rejection of material goods in junkyards and ruins. These explorations collectively shed light on the constant negotiation of our identities, statuses, and mobilities in the image-saturated commodity landscape.

Consumerist Encounters

Consumerist Encounters PDF Author: Sreedeep Bhattacharya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190991321
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Economic liberalization and globalization in India in the early 1990s resulted in a whirlwind of consumerist activities. New material and visual temptations swamped the markets. Expanding field of commodification infiltrated consumer minds through media imageries. New objects of desire aroused inhibited cravings. This engendered an accelerated and intensified relationship with things and images that permeate our everyday lives. Consumerist Encounters elucidates how our all-consuming relationship with objects and their representations have transformed rapidly over the last few decades in contemporary urban India. It argues that ephemerality, frivolousness, and multiplicity of choice regulate our flirtatious encounters with commodities and their images as we restlessly use, exhaust, dispose, and move on. Such a trend is illustrated by examining a plethora of commodity-centric phenomena such as exclusion through apparel, eroticization of body images, population of the T-shirt surface with graphics and text, rise of business process outsourcing, instantaneous seeing and sharing of images, and rejection of material goods in junkyards and ruins. These explorations collectively shed light on the constant negotiation of our identities, statuses, and mobilities in the image-saturated commodity landscape.

Excess

Excess PDF Author: Kim Humphery
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745645402
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Over-consumption is one of the key issues of our time, especially in the Western world. Over the past decade, in the face of historically unprecedented levels of consumer spending in the West - and the more recent impact of recession - a vigorous politics of anti-consumerism has emerged in a range of wealthy nations. This timely and original new book provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of what has come to be called the 'new politics of consumption'; a politics embodied in movements such as culture jamming, simple living, slow food and fair trade. The book offers an examination of anti-consumerism at a time when the idea of 'consumer excess' is being re-framed by a global economic downturn, and crucially explores what this means for the future of political debate. Drawing on interviews with activists across three continents, and offering a refreshingly accessible discussion of contemporary commentary and theory, Kim Humphery sympathetically explores anti-consumerism as cultural interpretation, lifestyle change, and collective action. Whilst analysing the positive advances of the anti-consumerist movement, Excess also challenges contemporary critical thinking on consumption, taking issue with the return to theories of mass culture in contemporary anti-consumerist polemic. Alternatively, Humphery begins to forge a politics of anti-consumerism that addresses the complexity of material acquisition and which avoids treating consumers as mere dupes in the logic of capitalism, viewing them instead as active participants in a culture which is capable of transformation.

The Practice of Misuse

The Practice of Misuse PDF Author: Raymond Malewitz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804792992
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In the age of Ikea Hackers and salvagepunks, this book charts the emergence of "rugged consumers" who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. Figures of both literary and material culture whose behavior evokes an American can-do ethic, rugged consumers mediate between older mythic models of self-sufficiency and the consumption-driven realities of our passive, post-industrial economy. Through their unorthodox encounters with the material world, rugged consumers show that using objects 'properly' is a conventional behavior that must be renewed and reinforced rather than a naturalized process that persists untroubled through time and space. At the same time, this Utopian ideal is rarely met: most examples of rugged consumerism conceal rather than foreground the ideological problems to which they respond and thus support or ignore rather than challenge the structures of late capitalist consumerism. By analyzing convergences and divergences between subjective material practices and collectivist politics, Raymond Malewitz shows how rugged consumerism both recodes and reflects the dynamic social history of objects in the United States from the 1960s to the present.

Improving Tourism and Hospitality Services

Improving Tourism and Hospitality Services PDF Author:
Publisher: CABI
ISBN: 9780851990446
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Consumer satisfaction is a key issue for all those involved in tourism and hospitality services. Through a multitude of case studies this book explores the challenges of managing tourism and hospitality businesses in order to produce maximum customer satisfaction. It outlines the various frameworks available for the study of tourist satisfaction, before examining service delivery systems and definitions of quality. It then discusses the role that marketing can play in tourism and hospitality services, and the ways in which hospitality and tourism services can be improved. The book contains examples of customer dissatisfaction, and examples of organisations that have succeeded in providing profitable services with high levels of customer loyalty.

The Consumer Society Reader

The Consumer Society Reader PDF Author: Juliet Schor
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1565845986
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
A unique and definitive read on our "national passion"--buying stuff--and its consequences for American society, this landmark work of social criticism is sure to become the standard book on the subject.

The Expert Consumer

The Expert Consumer PDF Author: Alain Chatriot
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135188994X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Recent work has focused on the politics of consumption and its manifestation in a number of situations. This volume extends these debates, providing a tighter focus and contributing to a noticeable gap in the field that numerous scholars are beginning to turn towards: that is, organizations of consumers themselves who have chosen to speak for all consumers and similar such bodies of experts which act on behalf of consumers. The volume is fortunate in drawing upon a number of scholars who are about to publish major works on the subject, but who are happy to provide summary versions of their work for the volume. The book pays particular attention to specific moments in consumer mobilization and expertise, capturing the range of types of expert consumers across the twentieth century, from ethical consumer groups at the beginning, to intellectuals, housewives, economists and public officials. It addresses questions on the nature of consumer organizing, which bodies can speak for consumers, whether one consumer voice can ever be identified and the relationship between consumption and citizenship. Overview pieces demonstrate the larger narratives involved in the study of the expert consumer, whilst more comparative essays set out the nature of transatlantic exchanges. Other contributions point to the similarities across seemingly different consumption regimes, while case studies of specific organisations and key historical moments draw out the particularities of consumer expertise.

Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism

Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism PDF Author: Sam Binkley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317984994
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Anti-consumerism has become a conspicuous part of contemporary activism and popular culture, from ‘culture jams’ and actions against Esso and Starbucks, through the downshifting and voluntary simplicity movements, the rise of ethical consumption and organic and the high profile of films and books like Supersize Me! and No Logo. A rising awareness of labor conditions in overseas plants, the environmental impact of intensified consumer lifestyles and the effects of neo-liberal privatization have all stimulated such popular cultural opposition. However, the subject of anti-consumerism has received relatively little theoretical attention – particularly from cultural studies, which is surprising given the discipline’s historical investments in extending radical politics and exploring the complexities of consumer desire. This book considers how the expanding resources of contemporary cultural theory might be drawn upon to understand anti-consumerist identifications and practices; how railing against the social and cultural effects of consumerism has a complex past as well as present; and it pays attention to the interplays between the different movements of anti-consumerism and the particular modes of consumer culture in which they exist. In addition, as well as ‘using’ cultural studies to analyse anti-consumerism, it also asks how such anti-consumerist practices and discourse challenges some of the presumptions and positions currently held in cultural studies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Consumer Culture and Society

Consumer Culture and Society PDF Author: Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1506351034
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The author is a proud sponsor of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. Consumer Culture and Society offers an introduction to the study of consumerism and mass consumption from a sociological perspective. It 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.

Moral Encounters in Tourism

Moral Encounters in Tourism PDF Author: Mary Mostafanezhad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317094158
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This first full length treatment of the role of morality in tourism examines how the tourism encounter is also fundamentally a moral encounter. Drawing upon interdisciplinary perspectives, leading and new authors in the field address topics that range from volunteer tourism to fertility tourism to reveal new insights into the ways tourism encounters are implicated in, and contribute to, broader moral reconfigurations in Western and non-Western contexts. Illustrating the role of power and power relations in tourism encounters within different political, economic, environmental and cultural contexts, the authors in this anthology analyse, theoretically and empirically, the implications of the privileging of some moralities at the expense of others. Key themes include the moral consumption of tourism experiences, embodiment in tourism encounters, environmental moralities as well as methodological aspects of morality in tourism research. Crossing disciplinary and chronological boundaries, Moral Encounters in Tourism provides a much-anticipated overview of this new interdisciplinary terrain and offers possible routes for new research on the intersection of morality and tourism studies.

Encounters in Thought

Encounters in Thought PDF Author: Aaron K. Kerr
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 153263918X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Thinking is a dynamic process resulting from practices of integration. Thought encounters in openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation confer upon us intellectual work that is uniquely our own. Digital patterns, however, distract us from these creative encounters. Our intellectual searching is weakened and fragmented by frenetic consumption of information. We miss out on reason's innate pull toward integration and concrete reality. This book is an invitation to enter into openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation with deeper understanding and intentionality. We can do this by considering exemplars, persons who lived out the integrity of their hard-won beliefs. Each process of integration is applied also, so that practical knowledge and practice become a way into this intellectual restoration. We need deeper knowledge won in the slow orbit of encounters. Encounters in thought are precisely what each generation needs to apprehend the cosmos, nature, authority, truth, and moral action. Responsibility to this ecologic age requires a reform of reason; this book is just one attempt to convey a way toward this restoration.