Ideology Of Consumption Research Articles

Diasporic media and migrant worker consumerism: Thematic critique of magazine advertisements for the Filipino community in Taiwan

The financial burdens of Filipino migrant workers are exacerbated by the lure of miscellaneous consumer goods peddled to them by businesses looking for a lucrative share of their remittances. This study examines a profit-oriented model of diasporic media that directly serves the business interests of its publisher and its advertisers. It analyses the Taiwan-based EEC Now magazine and criticizes the duplicity of its proclaimed mission of ‘Caring for Migrant Workers Now and in the Future’. Through a thematic analysis of advertisements published in selected issues of EEC Now, the study reveals the consumerist ideology espoused by the magazine: the commodification of the migrant worker’s body, the obligatory sending of balikbayan (repatriate) cargo boxes and cash remittances and the search for the next overseas destination. Applying concepts from Baudrillard’s theory of consumer society and San Juan’s critique of Filipino diaspora formation, the themes from the analysis reveal how profit-oriented diasporic media reflect social inequities and service the global capitalist system that ultimately spawned labour migration.

Imagining the Periphery: The Construction of Orientalist Discourse in Turkish Airlines Advertisements

Critical studies on Orientalism interrogates the hierarchies of power constructed between the East and the West. It has been stated that orientalist discourse has been instrumentalized by the West as a vehicle to sustain hegemony over the East. Approaching the notion of Orientalism from a national perspective, this article aims to critically analyze the manifestation of Turkey’s center-perphery relations in the advertising discourse. For this purpose, this article undertakes a critical discourse analysis of two Turkish Airlines advertisements about the opening of Igdir and Ordu-Giresun Airports in Turkey’s peripheral provinces. Accompanied by the discourses of nationalist and consumerist ideologies, this article argues that advertisements constitue an orientalist discourse that situates the peripheral other vis-a-vis the Western self, represented by the technological, modern, developed and civilizational values of Turkish Airlines.

The Media of Power, the Power of Media

This essay combines international political economy with a critical political economy of media perspective that recognizes the crucial role of transnational media corporations (tnmc) in building consent for neoliberal globalization. Media are found to be instrumental for consolidating transnational capitalist hegemony—creating a popular culture based on individualism, deference to authority, and consumerism.tnmcs consolidate diverse national media for the production of hybrid programming that features multiple local images and symbols wrapped in consumerist ideology and narratives. Examples from animation reveal consistent themes intnmccontent that entertain and appeal to diverse audiences, illustrating media’s persuasive messages essential to the cultural hegemony of transnational capitalist leadership.

Consumption in China: How China's New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation by LiAnne Yu Cambridge: Polity, 2014. 176 pp.

Consumption in China: How China's New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation by LiAnne Yu Cambridge: Polity, 2014. 176 pp.

The politics of pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and beachgoing

Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnographic research over 2 years I argue that these moments of pleasure are caesuras in the massive apparatus of power – welded from strands of work, neoliberal practice, nationalist certitudes and political exclusion – which binds these women. These acts of pleasure cannot easily be categorised as ‘resistance’ but I argue that they should not facilely be considered reinforcements of hegemonic control either. They are momentary and ephemeral recognitions of ordinary life lived in hard times, attempts at clawing back an instant of joy from the drudgery of the everyday, and a surrender to the enjoyment of conviviality in public and urban spaces. If they are at all political, they are so because such conviviality is ever harder to sustain in the calamity of hopelessness that characterises so much politics today.

Book Review: LiAnne Yu, Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation

Book Review: LiAnne Yu, <i>Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation</i>

Contesting Religious Identity in the Marketplace: Consumption Ideology and the Boycott Halal Movement

Contesting Religious Identity in the Marketplace: Consumption Ideology and the Boycott Halal Movement Elizabeth C. Hirschman, Mourad Touzani Abstract Consumer behavior is often intimately tied to contemporary ethno-religious conflict, as for example the sale of African 'blood diamonds', Somali piracy of international shipping and the use of economic sanctions by Western countries against Iran. Yet much current inquiry in the field remains cast at the domestic, individual level. The present study directs attention to the multinational Boycott Halal movement This consumer movement is presently active in Australia, Denmark, France, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain and the United States. Run largely through social media, the Boycott Halal movement aims to restrict the presence of halal-certified products in what are deemed to be Judeo-Christian countries. We use political theories drawn from Fox and Fukuyama to characterize this movement. Drawing from the religious conflict theories of Moss, we also present parallel historical movements which share similarities with Boycott Halal. We propose a consumption demonization thesis to explain the commonalities across these exemplars. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jisc.v4n1a3

Meandry konsumpcji we współczesnym społeczeństwie: konsumpcjonizm versus dekonsumpcja

The characteristic discriminant of contemporary societies, particularly in economically developed countries, is, on the one hand, the expansion of consumerism in various spheres of economic and social life, while on the other hand, it is the attempt to restrict excessive consumption. The principal aim of this paper is the description of the chosen changes in consumption in contemporary society and their economic consequences. The author searches for answers to the following question: What orientations mark out the behaviour of consumers in the market? In the search for answers to this question, the orientation towards excessive consumption that is stimulated by the ideology of consumerism and deconsumption as a protest against consumerism have been placed under analysis. In analysing the ideology of consumerism, the main styles of consumerism have been indicated as follows: consumption of pleasures, compulsive consumption and symbolic consumption. In contrast to the behaviour associated with over-consumption, the behaviour in pursuit of the restriction of the consumption of goods indirectly connected with actual needs has been described, namely sustainable consumption and anti-consumption, as well as the voluntary simplicity movement in consumption.

The Slow Drift

The Slow Drift Yün Peng (bio) Song Hwee Lim. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 240 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3684-9. Slow films had been around since at least the 1960s, but slow cinema had its moment in the early 2000s. In a Guardian review that begins with an anecdote about watching Belá Tarr’s seven-hour Satantango, Jonathan Romney notes that “[i]n any period of cinema history, a director like Tarr would be an out right [sic] exception, but today his work represents a prodigy of dissidence.”1 For Romney, the emergence of a cinema that “downplays events in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality” signaled cinema’s ability to reinvent itself; but not everyone was as enthusiastic.2 In an April 2010 Sight and Sound editorial, Nick James took aim at the phenomenon, calling slow films “passive aggressive,” because “they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects.”3 The editorial set off heated debates among critics and film bloggers. Steven Shaviro similarly regretted that “the long-take, long-shot, slow-camera-movement, sparse-dialogue style has become . . . a sort of default international style,” a “profoundly nostalgic and regressive” cliché.4 On the other side, Harry Tuttle, who ran the blog Unspoken Cinema and preferred the term contemporary contemplative cinema (CCC) to slow cinema, wrote an outraged rebuttal accusing James of “anti-intellectual, pro-entertainment” banter. 5 In retrospect, the most significant outcome of the debates may be that they have revealed a set of assumptions about cinema that needs reexamination. As Dan Fox and Karl Schoonover observe, the debates revolved heavily around such oppositions as philistinism versus pretentiousness (Fox), and “time wasted versus time labored” (Schoonover, p. 67).6 Wherever one stands in the debates, then, slow [End Page 251] cinema is an excellent place to start rethinking these assumptions critically. Moreover, the debates also made clear that cinematic slowness remains inadequately theorized. The subjective nature of temporal experience is compounded by the fact that slowness is a value judgment. Even its defenders tend to define slow cinema negatively, in binary opposition to Hollywood, rather than in terms of its positive qualities.7 But elusive as it is, slowness is a defining feature in the cinematic pursuit of filmmakers as diverse as Belá Tarr, Chantal Akerman, Aleksandr Sokurov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, and, of course, Tsai Ming-liang. Song Hwee Lim’s book Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness promises a welcome change. It is the first systematic treatment of cinematic slowness and a full-length study of Tsia Ming-liang, a key figure of the slow canon. Lim is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), the first book-length study of queerness in Chinese cinemas. With Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness he accomplishes two intertwined tasks. The book offers an illuminating reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s films with slowness as the key, while simultaneously presenting a systematic examination of cinematic slowness incorporating theoretical and descriptive vocabularies fashioned from the reading of Tsai Ming-liang. The book is neatly organized, with an introductory chapter titled “Going Slow” and a concluding coda titled “Getting Lost” bookending four chapters titled “Slowness,” “Signature,” “Stillness,” and “Silence.” The introductory chapter situates cinematic slowness in the cultural context of late capitalism, where slowness is both deployed as a form of resistance to relentless speed and implicated in the capitalist ideology of consumption and globalization (think slow food movement, to which slow cinema is compared). The second chapter is a theoretical examination of cinematic slowness on a variety of registers: ontological (Gilles Deleuze’s time-image), material (continuity editing vs. the long take; art cinema as an institution and niche market; cinematic slowness and the repurposing of boredom and wasted time as labor), aesthetic (the production of a new temporal experience and new mode of subjectivity). The three chapters that follow offer an engaged look at Tsai Ming-liang’s works and their signature slowness...

Straight Edge Youth Movement: the Core Values and Cultural Practices

Subcultural issues were in marginal position in Soviet and Russian academic research for quite a long time. Youth subcultures and their social and cultural practices became the subject of Russian sociological analysis much later than it had happened in the European youth studies. The first Soviet researches on youth subcultures appeared only in the early 1980s. This situation dramatically changed in the 1990s due to the serious political and economic crisis, when the youth became one of the most important and visible social groups. During the last decade of the 20th century, the youth problems were studied in different dimensions and aspects. On the one hand, the researches mentioned a lack of political activism among the young people; on the other hand, there was a big attention to the youth as to an important part of the whole body of voters and as to a new emerging group of consumers. The first decade of the 21st century was marked by an intensification of the process of patriotic upbringing programs development; the officials were producing the programs of work with aggressive and extremist youth groups. In the modern political discourse, the youth is the most important object of analysis, research and control. In the modern socio-cultural and political context, Russian researches find it reasonable to investigate those youth subcultures, which have activist resources and a strict value system. This article deals with the straight edge subculture, which can be described as a classical subcultural formation with clear values and ideology, traditional identification practices, and which is known for its antisocial rhetoric and rejection of the consumer ideology. In the first part of the article, the origins and stages of straight edge value system formation are analyzed. In the second part, the author demonstrates structural heterogeneity of the subculture, distinguishing the softline and the hardline subdivisions inside the body of the straight edge subculture, and also examines the social and cultural practices of straight edgers (consuming practices, food practices, body practices, and communication and recreation practices). The third part of the article is devoted to the Russian straight edge community and its specificities.

Afropolitanism as critical consciousness: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's and Teju Cole's internet presence

Critiques of Afropolitanism that dismiss the concept because of its links to consumerism and commodification assume an unchallenging compliance of those considered as Afropolitans with dominant ideologies of consumption and the rule of capital. Considering Taiye Selasi's article ‘Bye-Bye Babar', this seems plausible, but it is also a reductive interpretation that effaces the transformative potential of Afropolitanism. The literary works and online presence in public discourses of writers labelled Afropolitan show that they challenge and revise the present world order in the way that Walter Mignolo and other theorists of decoloniality envisage in their concept of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole, for example, implement Afropolitanism as a critical assessment of global culture that defies a reduction of the concept simply to its commercial dimension. In their own ways, Adichie and Cole explore the affordances and the limitations of the internet, mobility and globalization.

”Ni är inte välkomna i vårt fina Malmö”

”You are not welcome in our lovely Malmo”: Conditions for belonging in mobilization against organized crime Several murders occurred in the Swedish city of Malmö between 2011 and 2012. Against this backdrop, the municipality and the police initiate a public campaign. The aim is to mobilize the city’s population against organized crime. In this study the ideology of the initiative is analysed. It is argued that the representation of organized crime as nurtured by the black economy can be read as an example of neoliberal revanchist city agenda, albeit an ambivalent one. The role of groups working in the low-price sphere of the economy becomes that of a threatening projection, while a consumption ideology regulates the boundaries of belonging

Shopping with violence: Black Friday sales in the British context

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as ‘extreme shoppers’ and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture.

Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation by LiAnne Yu (review)

Reviewed by: Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation by LiAnne Yu Doris Duangboudda LiAnne Yu, Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. 176 pp. China has experienced profound political and socioeconomic changes in the last few decades. Within the past few years, however, consumption has dominated the frenzied pace of change, impacting social life immensely. LiAnne Yu’s insightful book, Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology is Shaping the Nation, is an engaging account of everyday consumption practices currently taking shape in the country. Through interviews and home visits, as well as drawing from more than 20 years of visits to and extended time spent in the country as an independent anthropologist and consumer insights strategist, Yu focuses on consumers mainly in the cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Beijing who are considered symbols of the country’s growing wealth. Having gone through decades of dearth under Mao, and then decades more of transition to a market economy after reforms began in the late 1970s, people now have considerable expendable income and myriad goods from which to choose. Long gone are the austerity and anti-bourgeois ideas of Maoism. The state now encourages domestic consumption and, along with it, promotes very different values that are transforming multiple dimensions of social life. Consumption in China examines these transformations, with each chapter centered around a theme: “Spaces,” “Status,” “Lifestyles,” “Commodification,” and “Awareness.” These five chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion, can be read in any order. This book complements Karl Gerth’s 2011 book on consumption, As China Goes, So Goes the World, and the author notes she is inspired by Thorstein Veblen (1899), Michel de Certeau (1984), and Mark Liechty (2003), especially the latter’s [End Page 841] ideas of treating class as a set of processes that are continually renegotiated. The ends of the five core chapters each contain a section called “Theoretical Considerations,” which summarizes the main points of the chapter and draws out key lines of conceptual inquiry. “Spaces” examines the experiences people have in physical spaces specific to consumption, such as restaurants and malls, as well as virtual spaces, and shows how these spaces allow for both individuals and families to express social distinction. Because grandparents and parents have had very different experiences with consumption in previous decades, young people learn how to be good consumers from spaces outside the family. Yu distances herself from those who study the Internet as what it could be, often in the frame of economic development and political freedom. Instead, she focuses on what it is, namely, “a dynamic space of consumer experimentation, discovery, and sharing” (50) that “has become the center of China’s consumer revolution” (59). Understanding the Internet’s role in consumer experience is critical, as China has nearly 200 million online shoppers (compared to the 170 million in the US) (50). She coins the term “virtu-real” to signify consumer behavior that moves seamlessly between virtual and physical spaces. In one salient example, a young office worker relates to Yu how she planned an outing with coworkers over social media: the group agreed on the restaurant over QQ (a form of social media), downloaded coupons onto their phones, followed map directions, posted food photos, and received friends’ comments on their profiles about the pictures. Since virtual spaces like QQ and other social media, and the Internet in general, are so critical to the consumer experience in China today, it seems Taobao (an online marketplace) could have received much more attention as it is one of the main venues for online shopping. Yu spends little time on this and other Internet sites, which is unfortunate given her claim in the introduction that online services in China are in many ways more advanced than online services in the West (16). I would agree with her statement, and have my own ideas for why they might be more advanced, but explicating these processes would help readers better understand how dominant the Internet is in consumers’ lives in China. In “Status,” Yu shows how Chinese consumers communicate social distinction through conspicuous...

More data, please: comments on Eric Schweickart’s ‘Ideologies of consumption: colonialism and the commodification of goods in 18th-century Virginian and Lowland Scottish rural households’

Archaeologists have long recognized mass-produced ceramics as one of the sure indicators of the gathering industrial and maritime muscle that propelled England’s expansion into international market...

Media Bias, Political Polarization, and the Merits of Fairness

We present a model of the market for news with rational consumers and profit-maximizing media outlets in which media bias arises endogenously in equilibrium. Our model relaxes assumptions commonly made in the literature that restrict the number of signals a media outlet can communicate to their consumers and the number of news sources accessible by the latter. This leads to novel behavioral implications on the part of the consumers, which, in turn, provides new insights into how media bias depends on the industrial organization of the market for news and the effects of government imposed fairness standards that restrict the degree of bias of individual news sources. Our model is consistent with findings by recent empirical studies that establish relationships between media bias, consumer ideology, and news consumption patterns. It also provides an explanation for documented historical variation in media bias in the U.S. market that is based on changes in the news consumption costs and the intensity of competition. Our policy analysis demonstrates the perverse effects government imposed fairness standards may have when media outlets are profit-maximizing. Specifically, such policies can lead to Pareto inferior outcomes for consumers and can cause some consumers to consume overall more biased bundles of news reports.

ETHICS AND BUSINESS ETHICS, AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS. ABOUT AXIOLOGY AND BUSINESS: HISTORY OF SLAVERY IS LIKE A CIRCLE

Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE Trabalho enviado em 08 de outubro de 2014. Aceito em 22 de janeiro de 2015. Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/rqi.2015.15355 Abstract The papers acquaints the readers with problems of ethics and business ethics in context of the financial crisis. The article is to underline a role of ethics in business. An ethical approach is incredibly important in the economy and the business activity. There is no good economy and market without axiology in social order. There is no economy and economic activities without much deeper foundations based on moral universal values such as honesty or transparency or dignity. We should go back to papal teaching and classics of moral philosophy. I believe that we can create the real axiology including such the values. The global financial crisis is rather an axiological crisis than strictly economic because the foundations and real reasons of the financial crisis have strictly moral character. Greed, profit, fraud, misinformation, new morality of homo economicus created the new world of consumers and the structurally and institutionally hermetic world of the markets and the corporations. It is a sad but more realistic view of the corporations and economy. History of slavery is like a circle: free people became stupid consumers; free people working in corporations became its cynical or ordinary slaves, the honest became the dishonest; free people became dishonest businessmen and businesswomen, without heart, mercy and reason. The system we live is rotten (politics, law, business, media, consumerism ideology), requiring changes. We should start with moral education to make ordinary people, the citizens, who create the commonwealth, really more responsible, competent and free in choices. Keywords: morality, ethics, business ethics, axiology, values, financial crisis, slavery, freedom, moral philosophy, law, social order, consumerism, rotten system Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE Resumo No presente artigo há a tentativa de familiarizar o leitor com problemas de ética e ética nos negócios, em um contexto de crise financeira. O artigo procura delinear o papel da ética como fator atuante no mundo dos negócios. Uma abordagem ética é extremamente importante na economia e na atividade empresarial. Não há economia ou atividade econômica louvável se não houver axiologia, um fim social. Não há economia e atividade econômica sem fundamentos muito mais profundos, com base em valores universais morais como honestidade ou transparência ou dignidade. Devemos voltar ao ensino papal e ao estudo da filosofia moral clássica. Eu acredito que nós podemos criar a axiologia real, incluindo esses valores. A crise financeira mundial é também uma crise axiológica e não estritamente econômica, porque os fundamentos e as razões reais da crise financeira tem caráter estritamente moral. A ganância, o lucro, a fraude, a desinformação e a nova moralidade do homo economicus criaram o novo mundo dos consumidores e do mundo estruturalmente e institucionalmente hermético dos mercados e das corporações. É uma visão triste, mas mais realista sobre as corporações e a economia. A história da escravidão é como um ciclo: o homem livre se tornou um consumidor estúpido; o trabalhador livre se tornou um escravo das corporações; o honesto se tornou desonesto; pessoas livres se tornaram desonestos homens e mulheres de negócios, sem coração, misericórdia ou razão. O sistema em que vivemos está podre (política, direito, economia, mídia, ideologia consumista), exigindo mudanças. Deviamos começar melhorando a educação moral, a fim de que o homem comum, o cidadão, aquele que cria a comunidade, torne-se de fato mais responsável, competente e livre em suas escolhas. Palavras-chave: moral, ética, ética nos negócios, axiologia, valores, crise financeira, escravidão, liberdade, filosofia moral, lei, ordem social, o consumismo, o sistema podre. Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE Trabalho enviado em 08 de outubro de 2014. Aceito em 22 de janeiro de 2015.

‘Labels or love’: The problem of the white wedding in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Sex and the City: The Movie

Abstract This article looks at the failure of the white ‘fairy-tale’ wedding in both a protofeminist and a post-feminist text (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Sex and the City: The Movie, respectively). It suggests that the pressure put on brides by the wedding and fashion industries – to have a lavish ceremony and an expensive designer dress – threatens the independence and identity of both Jane Eyre and Carrie Bradshaw. This threat is exacerbated since both women are marrying men who have been married before. The failure of their lavish wedding ceremonies is due to problems that arise from consumerist bridal ideals; the threat to female identity can only be eliminated by a second, ‘quiet’ ceremony that allows Jane and Carrie to enter into marriage outside of the consumerist ideology behind traditional weddings. The article concludes that the representation of ‘fairy-tale’ weddings and bridal fashion in the popular print media constitutes an ongoing feminist problem since the eighteenth century until today: there appears to be a continued consumerist push towards ‘spectacular’ ceremonies, which forces brides to choose between ‘labels or love’, and threatens the authenticity of marriage.

From practical idealism to the ideology of the market: Whitehall, Westminster and higher education 1963–1983

Drawing predominantly on Cabinet and departmental papers in the National Archives, the article reviews ministers’ and civil servants’ changing perceptions of the objectives of higher education in the decades between the Macmillan and Thatcher administrations. It gives an overview of two major reports, the 1963 Robbins Report on Higher Education and the 1971 Ormrod Report on Legal Education and suggests that some unresolved dichotomies are contained within their predominantly humanistic philosophy. It concludes with an examination of the launch of the Thatcher administration's embrace of an overtly market-based ideology in the early 1980s. A key document is a report prepared in 1983 for Prime Minister Thatcher by the Cabinet Office's Think Tank, the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS). The Report on Higher Education is in a series of files titled ‘Responsiveness of Higher Education to Market Forces and Employment Needs'. The commissioning of the Report, newly released under the thirty year rule, suggests that Thatcher took a keener personal interest in higher education than historians had hitherto appreciated. Universities and colleges were early targets for the implementation of market-based reforms in public institutions. The article concludes by arguing that official reticence in addressing the theoretical underpinnings of concepts of the public good from the 1960s onwards contributed to making higher education all the more vulnerable to the inroads from the neo-liberal consumerist ideology articulated in the CPRS Report.

Yu, LiAnne: Consumption in China. How China’s New Consumer Ideology Is Shaping the Nation

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