Consumer Capitalism Research Articles

Tracing Saint Germain: Absolute Knowledge and the Specter of Immortality

So‐called New Age practices and popular culture phenomena have virtually inundated the postmodern world, giving rise to numerous critical responses as well as welcome investments in their presumed significance. Sometimes dubbed a “religion”, New Age ideas and their various cultural manifestations have provoked sectarian and at times vituperative responses from significant critics of various ideological persuasions. Umberto Eco indicts the New Age movement for its lack of critical thinking, chastising the odd preference for a multiplicity of mystical truths, ranging from Dan Brown’s novels to faith in psychics. His position echoes the sentiments of a number of scholars who view New Age adherents as self‐centered and gullible. Slavoj Žižek, from his Marxist/Lacanian position, excoriates New Agers as deluded because of their withdrawal from political commitment, and he also views them as merely another symptom reproducing the mystified logic of consumer capitalism. Given the range of critical responses to New Age beliefs, it is particularly important to understand their historical antecedents. Some of these, such as the Saint Germain phenomenon, can be mined for what they disclose about the deeper motivations underlying the present willingness to grasp at arcane and ephemeral beliefs and dubious cultural practices. Some fall within the purview of “spiritualism”, including the search for a confirmation of immortality, which Saint Germain has symbolized for many, including certain of the nobility of pre‐revolutionary France. Saint Germain provides an ideological and psychoanalytic test case for what drives the alternative quests of New Age occultism. By reading Isabel Cooper‐Oakley’s work on Saint Germain, in conjunction with other representations, the objective is to launch a dialogue with both Eco and Žižek that builds a critical response to the New Age from a more informed historical and cultural studies approach.

Cultural Tourism in Transnational Adoption

The discursive practices of adoptive parents in two online transnational adoption forums (2006-2008) and observations of five international adoption workshops suggest that what Heather Jacobson described as culture keeping, the cultural socialization of children that retains a sense of native group identity, is more aptly characterized as cultural tourism, the selective appropriation and consumption of renovated cultural symbols, artifacts, and events that serve as the source of identity construction for adopted children. A feature of consumer capitalism, cultural tourism in transnational adoption helps shape the contours of cultural and racial identity. It also provides a partial understanding of how adopted children often fail to develop hybrid identities and how adult adoptees exist on the margins of two cultures.

Researching Islamic marketing: past and future perspectives

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons underlying the recent interest on Islamic marketing, discusses past research on the topic and offers a future research perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a critical review of the existing literature. It offers ethnoconsumerism as a way to develop a situated understanding of Muslim consumers and businesses.FindingsTwo distinct phases, omission and discovery, characterize the existing literature. Omission derives from the stereotyping of Muslims as traditional and uncivilized people and Islam as incompatible with capitalist consumer ideology. Discovery relates to the identification of Muslims as an untapped and viable consumer segment and the increasing visibility of Muslim entrepreneurs.Research limitations/implicationsA deeper understanding of Muslim consumers and marketers requires doing away with essentialist approaches that reify difference. Instead of focusing on differences future research needs to pay attention to how such differences play out in the daily lives of consumers and examine the religious, political, cultural and economic resources, forces and tensions that consumers experience and negotiate as they (re)construct and communicate their identities as Muslims.Practical implicationsManagers should not assume Muslims to be a homogeneous and preexisting segment. They should focus on the daily practices for which the product may be relevant and generate solutions that will help Muslims live proper Islamic lives.Originality/valueThe paper draws attention to the potential problems in carrying out research on Islamic marketing and highlights the dangers of an essentialist perspective.

The Biggest Loser: The discursive constitution of fatness

Located within a superficially depoliticized ‘more government’ predicated on the technocratic embedding of routines and institutions of neo-liberal governance, reality television operates as a ‘cultural technology’ concerned with the conduct of conduct, or more specifically, with the calculated direction of conduct to shape behaviour to certain ends. Focused on physical fitness and weight loss, we focus on the globally successful reality TV format, The Biggest Loser (TBL), as a highly politicized space that educates subjects and disciplines the non-compliant: part of a moral economy that differentiates between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. We read TBL as a powerful public pedagogy that circulates techniques and provides the platforms for a government of the self, a component in the neo-liberal reinvention of ‘welfare’ that promotes choice, personal accountability and self-empowerment as ethics of citizenship while, at the same time, masking social forces that position people into the dejected borderlands of consumer capitalism. Contributing to the ‘biopedagogies’ of weight, TBL classifies the obese, overweight and physically unfit as personal moral failures, immoral and irresponsible citizens, socially, morally and economically pathologized outsiders.

Tax Favors for Philanthropy: Should Our Republic Underwrite de Tocqueville's Democracy?

Tax theorists have long debated the rationales for the federal income tax system’s favorable treatment of philanthropy. The debate has certainly become more sophisticated, but it has nonetheless failed to produce anything near full convergence of opinion. This article reviews that debate and reaches a paradoxical conclusion: Although the present system of exemption and deduction is perhaps impossible to justify in any other way, that system almost perfectly co-ordinates three basic features of American society: the populist and anti-statist sources of American philanthropy, the consumerist orientation of our form of market capitalism, and our tax system’s reliance on income as its principal revenue source. To say that the Code’s treatment of philanthropy accommodates these three features well, however, is not to say that any of them is itself good; as an alternative to the current system’s fundamental populism and consumerism, this paper proposes a neo-classically republican view of the public good, grounded in the constitutional values of justice and general welfare. Philanthropy’s core function will be to promote those values. This, in turn, implies not only a very different tax treatment of philanthropy, but also a very different relationship between philanthropy and the state. The Code implicitly endorses the philanthropy of Jacksonian democracy and consumerist capitalism; the philanthropy of both Jefferson and Lincoln’s republicanism would look quite different (and much more like that of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics). It would better fit both the neo-classically republican elements of our constitutional culture and what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

Prioritizing Dimensions of Consumer Value through Consumer Capital

Prioritizing Dimensions of Consumer Value through Consumer Capital

THE BRANDED ARENA: UGANDAN ‘TRADITIONAL’ DANCE IN THE MARKETING ERA

ABSTRACTBrand marketing in its latest global advances offers ideologies of public participation and the audience–‘provider’ relationship that many in the developing world are finding compelling, even when consumer capitalism fails to produce its promised rewards immediately. Strategies of ‘branding’ are being explored in combination with older performance strategies, with new syncretic branded arenas emerging as a result. In Africa, music and dance have always been important for establishing certain arenas and mediating transactions within them. In the era of post-independence nationalism, ‘traditional’ dances were itemized and made more disciplined and spectacular to give new states an aura of inclusiveness, rigour and historical depth. As the image of a powerful African state declines, these same dance traditions are being hitched to commercial brands, and to the globalized consumerist/entreprenurial dream. This article considers the Senator National Cultural Extravaganza, an annual traditional music-and-dance competition sponsored by East Africa Breweries Ltd, which requires participants to compose ‘local’ songs and dances in praise of Senator Extra Lager. It focuses on the spatial and temporal architectures of events and the way these channel, and are complicated by, the energies and significances of dance. The ‘textbook’ brand–consumer relationship does not, it is argued, survive wholly intact.

Satiated and Denied

Today realism is in any event strategic. -Friedrich Kittier (1) For political, ethical, and historical reasons--as well as for pleasure--modern culture has esteemed horrific and atrocious images of war. From the earliest examples of war photography to the latest developments in media technologies, this appetite for visual realism has been both satiated and denied. However, it is not the desire to see horror and abominations that is the problem; rather, the issue is how we see and engage these images of atrocity. Who shapes these perceptual fields, for what reasons, and under what conditions? The how of seeing--which techniques and desires reveal or mask war--makes war and visual realism a question of ethics and politics. REALISM Often associated with modernism, realism renders people, places, and things in a true-to-life objective fashion. Unlike literature or painting, photographic realism raised audience expectations for the genre. Once emancipated from the tripod, portable cameras gave birth to an unprecedented demand for close-up and graphic depictions of death and decay. Only cameras can capture and embalm death, Susan Sontag argued in 1977. (2) Through photography, the twentieth century nurtured its taste for visual atrocity, which became an aesthetic norm--a testament to its truth and matter-of-fact reality. In comparison to fallible humans, a machine's slice of reality was incontrovertible. If the horrors and injustices of war are made visually explicit, many believe, an appropriate response of outrage will result. In 1924 Ernst Friedrich set out to accomplish this with his book War Against War!, filling its pages with numerous images of war atrocities under the guise of shock therapy. (3) This notion was reinforced during the Vietnam War--the first war to receive daily television coverage--as images of death, coupled with photographs of children running from napalmed villages, shocked and horrified Western viewers. As televised images of death entered the homes and lives of those far away and safe, graphic images of war incited passionate anti-war protest and political action. Today, the same link between images of war and political activism does not hold. The sheer number of international wars waged in the past fifty years, coupled with a growing appetite for immediate and graphic evidence of the violence, has made the horrors of war common, banal, and everyday. (4) Many argue that we, denizens of the first world, have become politically and ethically numb--hypnotized by the hypodermic needle of visual media. Are the realities of war still real to us? THE DEATH OF REALISM That reality has imploded into its inverse, a hyperreal--a series of media effects and simulations--is not an uncommon view among contemporary critical theorists. From Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord to Paul Virilio and Slavoj Zizek, one encounters a slew of sophisticated arguments explaining the fundamental erasure of truth, origin, authenticity, and reality. In 1995, Baudrillard argued that the first Gulf War did not take place, and that what we witnessed was not a genuine war, but a media spectacle. In Ecstasy of Communication (1988), Baudrillard analyzed how media images have been brought too close, made too real, and as a result, have imploded into their opposite: a hyperreal that simulates reality in a better, yet more artificial, fashion. (5) Consider the 1992 Breadline Massacre and the 1994 Market Massacre in Bosnia. In both cases, large-caliber shells were launched on public markets in Sarajevo, killing and wounding dozens of civilians and creating, in Sontag's words, some exceptionally gruesome sights for the foreign journalists' cameras. (6) This is precisely the implosion of reality Baudrillard diagnoses--or simply, the CNN-effect that creates a reality of war by way of simulated spectacle. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Two decades earlier, French theorist Debord similarly argued that society had become a visual spectacle for capitalist consumption. …

Machine-Age Communication: Media, Transportation, and Contact in the Interwar United States

Many American intellectuals and business figures between the world wars envisioned modernity as an era of heightened spatial connectivity ushered in by a new array of mass-marketed communication technologies. Consistently paired in public discourse, media and transportation products and services were thought to be mechanizing everyday routines and rendering contact with faraway places a habitual part of modern life. Within this context, key events such as Richard Byrd’s polar expeditions and the New York World’s Fair were taken as metaphoric for a coming era of perpetual connectivity. For industry champions, communication devices offered users agency to live beyond their immediate environments. Critics—framing communicative contact in terms of contamination, imperialism, and escapism—saw the same technologies ensnaring leisure time and spaces within the domain of consumer capitalism. As a new round of communication technologies permeate everyday life, revisiting interwar debates offers historical grounding for contemporary discussions of mobility and connectivity.

Resistance on Aisle Three?: Exploring the Big Curriculum of Consumption and the (Im)Possibility of Resistance in John Updike’s “A&P”

In this article, we examine John Updike’s short story “A&P” and its depiction of the grocery store as a curricular space re/presenting consumption and resistance to it. We position Updike’s fictional A&P as a space where the “big curriculum” (Schubert, 2006a) of consumption is enacted in everyday life and explore both how the curriculum of consumption works and how resistance to consumerism might operate. We argue that this story provides insight into how consumption works as educational practice—one that teaches us how to be consumers, how to operate within consumer capitalism, and how to accept consumerism as natural—and also raises more specific questions about consumptive resistance by pointing toward the ways in which our particular positions within cultural narratives determine our individual perceptions of consumption-focused counterhegemonic action. Through an analysis of the fictional A&P in Updike’s story, we examine how physical spaces of consumption such as grocery stores embody particular consumer capitalist ideologies and how shoppers are socialized into behaving in particular ways in such stores. We also address the issue of consumer resistance by focusing on how audiences interpret such consumptive resistance, rather than focusing solely on those resisting. These audiences include the story’s protagonist, Sammy, and by extension us, both as readers of Updike’s story and as viewers of various sites and acts of consumer resistance in current consumer culture. Our examination shifts the focus from the usual object of analysis—those resisting—to the audiences who, like ourselves, interpret that resistance.

The Decade of Luxury: The People’s Republic of Poland and Hotels in the 1970s

For the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL), the 1970s was a decade of luxury, characterized by a boom in hotel and vacation resort building. The perception of the attributes of capitalist consumption as signs of progress demonstrates that the Communist regime was ready to submit to a process of “auto-colonization” and create a hyperrealist picture of the West as a model. The new luxury was not available to everyone, and its “democratization” was only possible in resorts constructed by state-owned enterprises. In the 1970s, recreation architecture offered a form of control over society. If referred to Bakhtin’s notion of “carnivalization” defined as a temporary inversion of social order and suspension of ordinary life, hotels may be considered as the spaces of such “carnivalization of reality.”

The Christians Kill Jesus Again: Spectacle, Drama, and Politics at Oberammergau

The Oberammergau Passion Play is an impressive spectacle. The play’s typological tableaus and theological music incorporate the play’s action into the larger imaginative world of the Christian epic. The tumultuous crowd scenes include the audience in the spectacle. The music and the tableaus script the audience’s role and configure the audience as worshipers who watch the sacrifice of Jesus on their behalf. Like spectacle generally, the play is religious, and religion fascinates and frightens. Spectacle is also inherently part of consumer capitalism, and the play is the life of Oberammergau. Nonetheless, the play’s theology, voice, and impetus are Christian. In the play, an intra-Jewish debate and Jewish worship ultimately become Christian worship/myth. The play flirts with but does not realize the possibilities of tragic dialogue and dilemma. Interpretation can move beyond the monologue of spectacular myth to find tensions in the play. These include the tension between Jewish roles and Christian voice, between intra-Jewish debate and Christian worship, between politics and theology, and between the villagers of Oberammergau who create the play and the tradition of the (passion) play. In these tensions, lie the hope of dialogue and the hope of resisting the fascinations of spectacular myth, but that hope does not exist for those who remain mere spectators.

Affective body, nationalism and consumer capitalism: Consumption and reproduction of celebrated bodies though media

Affective body, nationalism and consumer capitalism: Consumption and reproduction of celebrated bodies though media

Survivors' History

The twenty years of social upheaval since the Soviet collapse have added a bitter postscript to Stephen Cohen's story. Most of the survivors, including Anna Larina, are now dead, and with them the dream of a humane communist future that had kept them alive though their long detention. Poverty, ideological exhaustion, and the double-edged promise of consumer capitalism have shattered the fragile, idealistic unity of the Perestroika era. In many ways, including the subtle (albeit half-hearted) rehabilitation of Stalin, the pendulum has again swung back toward a Brezhnev-style authoritarian conservatism. Yet this situation is exactly what makes The Victims Return relevant and necessary. Cohen's account of the survivors' struggle for truth and dignity is his testament that while every story may not have what his Russian friends would call a "kheppy end," every system of oppression always produces its eventual gravediggers.

Économie de la contribution et innovation sociétale

Résumé Cet article s’intéresse à l’économie de la contribution, qui constitue une nouvelle manière de comprendre les activités économiques. L’émergence d’une économie de la contribution est non seulement un changement mais aussi une réponse alternative au capitalisme du consommateur. L’économie de la contribution est impliquée dans le champ des technologies relationnelles de l’internet, des systèmes locaux d’innovation et du tiers secteur. D’un point de vue méthodologique, la compréhension de l’économie de la contribution nécessite de définir la signification de la valeur sociétale, de l’innovation sociétale et de la création collective. Codes JEL : A13, D 46, D 62, D 63, L 86, Z 13

Consumerism and the Crisis: Wither ‘the American Dream’?

Starting with an inquiry into the socio-material foundations of American-style consumer capitalism as it emerged under Fordism and evolved under neoliberalism, this article seeks to outline the origins of the present economic crisis and the possible implications for the future of consumerism. The article argues that the ongoing crisis in the USA is not a regular cyclical downturn but signifies the end of finance-driven consumer capitalism as an accumulation regime whose key features can be summed up as debt-financed mass consumption of largely offshore produced goods and ‘wealth creation’ through rapidly appreciating asset values. The crisis qualifies as systemic in that various disproportionalities of the capitalist mode of production have resurfaced at the same time. While debt-driven consumer capitalism seems damaged to the extent of being no longer operable, the contours of a ‘post-consumerist’ future are not yet in sight.

NennuandShunu: Gender, Body Politics, and the Beauty Economy in China

This essay analyzes recent discourse on two emerging representations of women in China, "tender" women (nennu) and "ripe" women (shunu), in order to examine the relationships among gender, body politics, and consumerism. The discourse of nennu and shunu suggests that older, ripe women become younger and more tender by consuming fashions, cosmetic surgery technologies, and beauty and health care products and services because tender women represent the ideal active consumership that celebrates beauty, sexuality, and individuality. This discourse serves to enhance consumers' desire for beauty and health and to ensure the continued growth of China's beauty economy and consumer capitalism. Highlighting the role of the female body, feminine beauty, and feminine youth in developing consumerism, this discourse downplays the contributions of millions of beauty and health care providers (predominantly laid-off female workers and rural migrant women) and new forms of gender exploitation. Such an overemphasis on gender masks intensified class division. This essay suggests that women and their bodies become new terrains from which post-Mao China can draw its power and enact consumerism. Gender constitutes both an economic multiplier to boost China's consumer capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to regulate and remold women and their bodies into subjects that are identified with the state's political and economic objectives. Since consumerism has been incorporated into China's nation-building project, gender thus becomes a vital resource for both consumer capitalist development and nation building. This essay shows that both gender and the body are useful analytic categories for the study of postsocialism.

Rabīʿ Jābir’s Bayrūt Trilogy: Recovering an Obscured Urban History

Abstract How does a generation without personal memory begin to grapple with its urban past in a nation that has silenced its memories? Moreover, how are symbolic sites of memory recovered and represented by such a generation? Much recent scholarship on post-war Lebanon has studied the memory culture of the decades following the declared end of civil war in 1990. This scholarship deals with the implications of Lebanon’s ‘amnesiac’ political culture on the social and political landscape. In the meantime, Lebanon—and especially Beirut’s—urban landscape has been altered beyond recognition by post-war reconstruction, mostly by private real estate holding companies, the most notorious of which is Solidere. In the early 2000s, as Solidere’s activity picked up speed, a slew of historical novels about Lebanon and especially Beirut was published in both Arabic and French. In this article, I will focus exclusively on the strategies of urban commemoration in Rabīʿ Jābir’s trilogy. I argue that the genre of historical fiction is used in these novels to re-create the downtown life of Beirut in and around Martyrs’ Square from the 19th and early 20th century, a commemoration of a cityscape and an urban lifestyle that its author recreates using the tools of the archive (documents, bibliographies, etc.). This post-memorial fiction—here, I use Marianne Hirsch’s definition of postmemory as “second-generation memories of cultural and collective traumas and experience” (22)—attempts to recover Beirut’s repressed Ottoman urban history, and to re-write Solidere’s narrative of the city center. By intertwining downtown Beirut’s past with its present, in a clever back-and-forth palimpsestic act that superimposes the historical city upon the present city—site of capitalist consumption—Jābir’s novels map out the old upon the new, and thus refuses the erasure of the ancient city by its newest urbanists. In Jābir’s novels, a new, contestatory commemorative narrative of Beirut’s history and—more significantly, its present—emerges.

Fair Trade Tourism South Africa: consumer virtue or moral selving?

The academic focus on tourism impacts has raised questions regarding stakeholder responsibility. From a consumption perspective, many ethical consumers, by enacting their political and moral concerns through their consumer choice demonstrate their virtuous qualities and at the same time construct themselves as ethical. Ethical consumption and the consumption of Fairtrade, Fair Trade Tourism and Fair Trade Tourism South Africa (FTTSA) – which derived from Pro-Poor Tourism and ecotourism principles –, are embedded into a cultural context of global consumer capitalism. This macro discourse informs the way people think about the extent of their responsibility, what constitutes a fair exchange, and how they construct themselves as ethical consumers. Ethical consumption, although virtuous can then be described as a form of conspicuous consumption because consumption in its self is a hedonistic act especially when one uses ethical consumption as a mechanism to demonstrate one's ‘ethical self’. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with eleven FTTSA travellers in December–February of 2009 at two FTTSA businesses. The paper employed Critical Discourse Analysis to explore some of the tensions between consumer virtue and the hedonistic behaviours of the informants. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of moral selving in the context of ethical travel and in particular FTTSA. Results revealed that motivations for participation in ethical consumption and travel are varied and sometimes influenced by the appeal of moral selving.

The Consumerism-Development-Security Nexus

Critics of global governance have been influenced by Foucault’s analysis of modern total institutions disciplining both the mind and the body. However, Foucauldian biopolitics may present global governance too smoothly. This article takes critiques arguing that consumer capitalism’s divorce from industrial production encourages romantic understandings of global problems and applies them to development aspects of the development—security nexus. It discusses three influential economists each of whose work is emblematic of consumer capitalism’s international development vision at particular historical junctures. The article outlines how Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth, arising during the postwar economic growth boom, envisages developing countries becoming consumer societies at the highest stage of development, but also anticipates consumer society’s romantic critiques of modernity. It next examines Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and his Buddhist economics, arising in the post-Bretton Woods crisis period, as symptomatic of re-emerging romantic critiques of society. Finally, it discusses Sen’s human development approach as a market romance illustrating consumer capitalism’s individual-orientated development strategies. The article concludes that the contemporary development romance addresses neither people’s basic needs nor their aspirations, and it problematizes global governance’s ability to secure and govern populations.