Consumer Capitalism Research Articles

Adversaries of advertising: anti-consumerism and subvertisers’ critique and practice

ABSTRACT Anti-consumerism is a rich and diverse field of advocacy and activism and has historically been studied in terms of its tactics, representations and ideologies. This paper presents an original contribution to this field through, first, its presentation of primary research conducted among subvertising practitioners in an international context. Subvertising (aka culture jamming) can be both a movement and a set of tactics used by movements. As an emergent anti-consumerist social movement, it has been connecting individuals and collectives in transnational actions against advertising. Drawing on twenty-four interviews with subvertisers in seven countries, I illustrate their perspectives of advertising as a problem, as well as their practices as responses to that. I argue that their theory and practice of anti-consumerism goes beyond a for/against binary which regards advertising as an ideological enemy. Instead, they protest the deleterious effects of contemporary Habermasian ‘publicity’. Thus, the second contribution of this paper is in its application of a grounded theory approach complemented by framing theory to gain insights with respect to those, specifically in terms of public wellbeing, damage to democracy, and damage to the environment. To this set of problems, they offer solutions oriented towards critical pedagogy or policy change. Mobilising all tools at their disposal, from media production to media disruption, subvertisers are involved in the struggle against consumer capitalism, in both cultural and material terms. In their articulation of resistance narratives, and through their variant and often coordinated practices, subvertisers are united in a transnational anti-consumerist social movement.

The Chav Youth Subculture and Its Representation in Academia as Anomalous Phenomenon

The Chav Youth Subculture and Its Representation in Academia as Anomalous Phenomenon

Women, Magazines and the Politics of Shopping: Holtby, Jameson and Woolf

Shopping was a vital part of the housewife’s work in the interwar era, an activity extending from her domestic identity as homemaker but realized through economic participation in the public sphere. Directed by the consumer capitalism that sustained them, interwar women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping (UK) portrayed the modern female shopper as rational, informed, and empowered by her consumer choices. This article explores responses to consumer capitalism that trouble this ideal by Winifred Holtby, Margaret Storm Jameson and Virginia Woolf in the pages of Good Housekeeping. It demonstrates the different ways these three prominent interwar women writers critiqued consumerism in essays published in this highly commercialized periodical. Jameson drew attention to the pervasive power of advertising in ‘Money is not Happiness’ (March 1929) and ‘Advertising as a Career for Women’ (August 1928), a contribution to Good Housekeeping’s serial careers column. Holtby considered the relationship between consumption and social class in ‘The Sable Standard’ (March 1932). In ‘The Docks of London’ (December 1931) and ‘Oxford Street Tide’ (January 1932), Woolf examined the exploitative workings of imperial trade and the capitalist illusion of the democratic availability of goods. Each of these writers, I argue, urged Good Housekeeping’s readers to engage critically with the politics of shopping.

Designing Secularity at Sarang Church

Abstract The Sarang Global Ministry Center (SGMC) in Seoul, South Korea, is well known for its architectural design and for several controversies surrounding its construction. The SGMC does not have conventional Christian architectural features, such as a steeple or stone facade; instead, the church resembles a luxury department store. Reactions to this building have been mixed, reflecting differing opinions about Christianity in South Korea. Some value the fact that the building’s aesthetics blend Christian activities with everyday life outside the church. Others criticize the building’s corporate appearance, citing it as evidence that Sarang Church is “just a business.” While the way religion is permitted to operate in South Korean secular society is partially defined by legal principles, such as the separation of church and state and state neutrality toward religion, secularism also entails an active configuration of the social order through lived experience. Secularity both constitutes and is constituted by the materiality of religious space, which disputes over the SGMC design make clear. Considering varied responses to the SGMC building project, this article highlights how church architecture, city planning, and consumer capitalism participate in the shaping of Korean Protestant Christianity and how it manifests within South Korea’s secular social and political order.

“Ibero-American participation, world exhibitions, and the long nineteenth century: a historiographical overview”

ABSTRACT Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), while working on the Arcades Project during the final years of his life, produced two extended outlines – he called them Exposés – for “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” The third part was titled “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions.” An important source for scholars working on world’s fairs and international exhibitions, Benjamin’s Exposés provide a place from which to explore a broad number of themes related to the development of nineteenth-century modernity and consumer capitalism, from advertising and fashion to entertainment and representation. Spectacular environments that purportedly reproduced the world, international exhibitions were fabulously popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They continue to be so today.

Overdaad schaadt

The lifeblood of contemporary consumer capitalism is ever-growing and accelerating human needs for new consumer goods and services. Needs that remain unsatisfied on the one hand but defy the carrying capacity of planet Earth on the other. Anything but a win-win situation. Although excess harms, the infrastructure of consumption pays full service to perpetuate and cultivate the ‘more and faster’ orientation of today’s consumers. It is believed that we can cope with excess by taking efficiency measures and paying attention to recycling and refurbishing. This article, however, points out that there is need to rethink consumption and reconsider prevalent orientations dedicated to excess consumption more fundamentally.

Postfeminism™: celebrity feminism, branding and the performance of activist capital

ABSTRACT This article contributes to postfeminist media debates by interrogating an emerging configuration of celebrity feminism; one in which authenticity, entrepreneurial subjectivities and intersectionality mark the uneasy contours of a new political subject. Coining the term “activist capital”, this paper moves beyond the impasse of celebrity feminism debates (where branding and commerce = bad, grassroots organising = good) to establish the uneven conditions through which celebrity feminist activisms are accepted, even deferred to, in media and activist accounts. Drawing on an illustrative case study of the high-profile Amber Rose SlutWalk (2015–2018), a Los Angeles-based monetised and branded edition of an existing political movement against sexual violence, this paper employs a discourse analytical approach to argue that celebrity and activist cultures condition each other. Aided by digital media, a celebrity activism nexus is now emergent that is mediated by practices of individualised consumer capitalism and oriented by explicit social justice frameworks, troubling dominant narratives of depoliticised postfeminist sensibilities. These ambivalences, where commodification no longer holds the power of disavowal it once did, and where grassroots activism and celebrity culture collide, condition the emergence of new activist arrangements in this late capitalist moment.

Looking ‘acceptably’ feminine: A single case study of a female bodybuilder’s use of steroids

This article aims to shed some light on the motivations for and methods of female steroid consumption apropos broader changes in female body image ideals. Moreover, the study attempts to explore the connections between the competitive logic of liberal-postmodern consumer capitalism, ‘competitive femininity’ and steroid use. There is a growing consensus that an increasing number of women are consuming steroids, yet this phenomenon remains relatively under-researched and as such not much is known about this particular group of users. Utilising a single in-depth case study, this paper offers some additional insight gleaned from an ethnographic interview with a female bodybuilder who uses steroids. Her narrative elucidates some of the risks, harms and motivations for steroid consumption alongside broader changes in female body image ideals. Among the central findings, this paper highlights that the female bodybuilder is not resisting cultural norms but rather hyper-conforming to them by over-identifying with a hyper-idealised form of what constitutes ‘acceptable femininity’. We conclude that steroid consumption retains a strong connection to the desire for aesthetic appeal and that both short and long-term motivations for using steroids are grounded in the drive for conformity. This has pertinent clinical implications for health professionals, particularly in relation to the efficacy of attempts to reduce steroid consumption by warning users of the potential adverse health effects.

Advertising and the Way Forward

In this editorial for WPCC’s special issue on ‘Advertising for the Human Good’ editor Carl Jones outlines a few milestones demonstrating advertising’s potential via mass media for motivating progressive behaviours in the public. Matching corporate social responsibility ideals and reflecting the social concerns of millennial consumers and audiences is becoming increasingly important for brands and even governments.Whilst existing publications in academic and professional literature raise concerns over the links between capitalist consumerism and advertising, articles in this issue highlight different examples of practice or approach that have the potential to motivate progressive behaviours in various cultures. These include ambient advertising, neuroscience, brands’ cause donations, decolonisation and social modelling on the one hand, and anti-racism, recycling, sustainable tourism and choice of advertising talent, on the other.This editorial observes how the evolved practice of advertising can work within different ideologies, with the objective of generating advertising for the human good but also how change may need to come from within advertising and society generally as attitudes change over time.

The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America, 1880–1930

The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America, 1880–1930

Enlightened hedonism? Independent drug checking amongst a group of ecstasy users.

BackgroundResearch indicates that a body of ecstasy users across the globe employ ‘home’ drug testing technologies to learn more about the content of their drugs – a process referred to throughout this article as independent drug checking (IDC). Whilst a small number of studies offer accounts of this process, they do so through a narrow lens of harm reduction, potentially overlooking wider socio-cultural factors which may affect this. In response, this article draws on Slavoj Žižek's political theory of the cultural injunction to enjoy, situating IDC in the wider political economy of neoliberal consumer capitalism to contextualise and interpret its use as integral to pleasure and leisure. MethodsThis empirical study documents the thoughts and experiences of a group of UK ecstasy users who independently use a privately owned drug-testing kit. Drawing on qualitative data generated through 20 semi-structured interviews, the article considers two research questions; what role did drug checking play in the group's drug journeys and leisure activities?; and is drug checking thought to be purposeful? FindingsFor this group of ecstasy users, issues of safety and self-responsibility interweaved with the pursuit of pleasure as they sought to enjoy their drug consumption, but in a way that navigated potential harms. IDC therefore served to maximise pleasure via its ‘guarantee’ of a prolonged, enjoyable, authentic consumer experience whilst simultaneously safeguarding wellbeing via its premise of more responsible and controlled consumption practices. ConclusionIDC allowed this group of drug consumers to partake in ‘enlightened hedonism’ – demonstrating their conformity to the imperatives of capitalism and its social norms. Despite recognising the limitations of IDC and disclosing potentially harmful outcomes, the group's engagement with capitalist markets provided a belief that investment in your consumer experience can both improve it and make it safer – premises that belie the empirical reality.

Framing the Market at the Paris Universal Expositions

ABSTRACT From 1855 to 1900, the Paris expositions gradually included an increasing number of commercial spots and venues operated by private companies and entrepreneurs. This article examines the emergence and development of these private concessions such as cafés, kiosks, shops and restaurants on the exhibitions grounds, and how they accompanied the rise of entertainment and mass culture in fin-de-siècle Paris. More specifically, it will address the organizational aspects and the logistics of these new sites of consumer culture in order to show how consumer capitalism was not just exhibited but also materially performed at the Paris universal expositions.

Representations of sustainability and environmental welfare in Country Calendar

ABSTRACT This article examines representations of sustainability and environmental welfare in episodes of the iconic Aotearoa New Zealand television programme, Country Calendar. It initially locates the programme within the rural idyll myth and then outlines different understandings of sustainability while highlighting the normative basis of sustainability. The analysis identifies different portrayals of sustainability across episodes from the 2019 series, ranging from sustainable development, where sustainability practices are incorporated within existing economic and industry regimes, to more substantive expressions of sustainability that evoke different ways of living on the land and which more directly challenge dominant values of consumer capitalism. The analysis then reveals the ‘content’ of sustainability, ranging from enhancing soil quality to reduced plastic usage. Finally, the analysis also identifies the significance of social and cultural features of sustainability, ranging from community mobilisation to educational strategies that are put into practice on the farms.

The increasing centrality of prosumption in the digital capitalist economy

Prosumption, or the integration of production and consumption, has always been predominant, although thinking about economic activity has been dominated in the past by the concept of production (especially after the Industrial Revolution) and later by consumption (with the Consumer Revolution after WWII). However, both production and consumption can be thought of as types of prosumption involving varying degrees of each. In the digital age it has become increasingly difficult to conceive of a sharp separation between the two, partially due to the intrinsic nature of digital prosumption itself. All acts in that realm involve both production and consumption. That is particularly the case in what we would ordinarily consider digital consumption where acts of consumption require acts of production. This is a small part of the broader process of the emergence of prosumer capitalism as the major economic form rather than producer or consumer capitalism.

Marketing lifestyles: The ready-to-wear industry and the genesis of the consumer in the United States (1880–1930)

This article aims to make a specific contribution to the field of fashion studies through a discussion of the role of marketing in the emergence of consumer capitalism in the United States between 1880 and 1930. Specifically, the orientation of American business towards marketing and its impact on the growth of the ready-to-wear industry after the First World War are presented and discussed. This new orientation is attributed to the emergence of a new ‘consumer culture’ related to the ‘democratization’ of fashion, which actively contributed towards shaping an appropriate type of subjectivity: the fashion-conscious consumer. Rather than discussing whether marketing forged new or responded to already existing fashion trends, this article employs a genealogical approach and focuses on the process of co-emergence: under what conditions and through what kind of forces did separate developments in fashion and marketing eventually join to meet the needs of a new form of subjectivity-in-the-making?

Capital vs. Digital Labor in the Post-industrial Information Age: A Marxist Analysis

In the third millennium AD, humanity has reached the phase of the post-industrial information age. This age is characterized by the ubiquitous usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in all aspects of social reality. ICTs are not just a tool for automation of social production but are qualitatively different from other preceding technologies. It can be understood that ICTs are situated at the cutting edge of current global capitalism. There is a danger that ICTs are enhancing capitalist consumerism by converting the “complete human being” into the “complete consumer.” ICT-enabled “telework” has changed the “political economy of the home,” so that more surplus value can be extracted. ICTs have influenced the contestation of time between capital and labor that has been happening all through the history of capitalism. “Telework” and flexible production have influenced workers’ powers of collective bargaining. There are new challenges in organizing workers in the gig economy. When the ontological roots of ICTs are situated within the neo-Marxist Habermasian framework of critical theory, its potential for human emancipation is understood. On the contrary, there is also a danger that ICTs may end up as a tool to consolidate and strengthen the existing powers of the bourgeoisie. After engaging with such issues, this article surmises that the nature of the relation between capital and labor in the post-industrial information age is qualitatively different from the earlier industrial age. Nevertheless, it concludes that the possibilities of labor getting into a more just relation with capital and in the process bring about a more equitable global social order still exists.

Amazonians in New York

This article is the product of ongoing collaborative work over three years between indigenous intellectuals and western scholars with the aim of creating a new vision of New York as a centre of first-nation environmental and climate activism. It examines efforts of governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental communities and social movements from across the Americas as they came together in New York City to challenge consumer capitalism and the fossil fuel industry—powerful forces that drive the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems. The article amplifies the voices of the first nation peoples of the Amazon basin, from Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, who spoke up during Climate Week in New York in September 2019 to defend their land rights, the Amazon rainforest and the Rights of Nature. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have taken a leading position in lobbying corporations—and the governments who support them—to rethink their ongoing extractive operations that are devastating national parks and protected areas across the continent. From a postdevelopment perspective, quoting directly from the voices of indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples in their engagement with the modernity of the city, the authors reveal the narrative fusion of the global and the local, the postmodern and the pre-modern. The article challenges binary divisions between the urban and the rural, the material and the spiritual—in an analysis of the confluence of Amazonians’ cosmovision of sumac kawsay/buen vivir, ‘life in plenitude’, and the environmental demands of climate activists and scholars of the Global North. This comes at a time when the ancestral peoples of Turtle Island (North America) and Abya Yala (South America) are joining together with the support of colonisers to reclaim the continent for themselves and for nature.

Herbert Marcuse and Environmentalism

Book Review| March 01 2020 Herbert Marcuse and Environmentalism Ecology and Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World Order, by Reitz, Charles, New York: Routledge, 2019, 194 pages, $31.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-138-34187-6 Malcolm Miles Malcolm Miles Malcolm Miles is a writer on critical theory and modern culture; his most recent book is Cities and Literature (2019), and his next will be Paradoxical Urbanism (2020). He was professor of cultural theory in the Architecture School, Plymouth University, until 2016. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (1): 135–137. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017359 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Malcolm Miles; Herbert Marcuse and Environmentalism. Cultural Politics 1 March 2020; 16 (1): 135–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017359 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search Charles Reitz has written two previous books on Herbert Marcuse, Philosophy and Critical Pedagogy (2016) and Art, Alienation, and the Humanities (2000). In this volume he turns to Marcuse’s writing on ecology, noting that Marcuse stood out among the New Left of the 1970s in recognizing environmental campaigning as an element within a wider movement for radical social change. Marcuse wrote two papers on ecology: “Ecology and Revolution,” from a conference paper given in France in 1972; and “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” from a lecture to a wilderness group in California in1979. Both align environmental destruction with consumer capitalism and what Marcuse called the warfare state. Both papers are included in Marcuse’s Collected Papers (vols. 3 and 5, respectively), but Reitz adds his own reading of five papers from the Marcuse archive at Frankfurt University, all unpublished until 2017, to contextualize... © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity

Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity

Commitment, Convergence, Alterity

This contribution looks comparatively at the everyday pursuit of religious commitment among young, revivalist-oriented Sunni Muslims and Protestant Christians in the Netherlands. In both public debates and academic scholarship, the differences between these groups tend to be stressed, particularly through dichotomies such as migrant/native and minority/majority. This article, by contrast, takes their potential common ground as a starting point by examining the pursuit of religious aspirations under shared conditions of consumer capitalism and cultural pluralism. I argue that my Christian and Muslim interlocutors experienced a noticeably similar dynamic of constraint on and reinvigoration of their faith. Further, I note the different degrees to which they emphasized their moral distinctiveness, and discuss how this disparity is related to dominant public representations of these groups.