Mass Consumer Society Research Articles

J. Walter Thompson and the Creation of the Modern Advertising Agency

This article traces the J. Walter Thompson Company's rise to prominence in the advertising industry against the backdrop of the growth of the American advertising industry, American big business, and the emergence of a mass consumer society. Furthermore, the article looks into the internal records of the J. Walter Thompson Company to highlight how the advertising agency itself defined "advertising" and explained some of its practices. It begins by providing a historical overview of the emergence of the modern advertising agency. In addition to examining the business history of the early advertising industry and how the J. Walter Thompson Company became the world's largest agency by the middle of the 20th century, the article also explores the economic and social roles of the advertising agency.

The Cultural Economy of Development in Egypt: Economic Nationalism, Hidden Economy and the Emergence of Mass Consumer Society during Sadat's Infitah

The article presents a new overview on economic transition in Egypt, emphasizing the role of culture in shaping its recent economic history. Since partial independence, and culminating in the heyday of the Nasserite regime, ‘economic nationalism’ became a predominant national identity mark and a concept central to a local sense of authenticity. The article discusses the meaning of economic nationalism and why it turned such a powerful symbol of Egyptianness. The prevalence of this idea slowed down a transformation to an alternative economic regime when the development effort associated with economic nationalism partially failed. Instead, a huge and unregulated (‘hidden’) economy emerged, together with a corollary local consumer society. Fiercely resisted in a public discourse captivated by an older economic imagination, both have still shaped the Egyptian economy ever since.

Purpose and object of anti-consumption

A counter movement of anti-consumption runs from the very beginning of mass-consumption societies. Four distinct types of anti-consumers, simplifiers, global impact consumers, market activists, and anti-loyal consumers, have emerged in recent years. The primary focus of anti-consumption research has been on market activists and anti-loyal consumers. This article focuses on the other two groups (i.e., the simplifiers and global impact consumers). The authors address the need for scale development to measure the general anti-consumption attitudes of these two groups. The goal is to improve the ability to identify anti-consumption attitudes and to gain a better understanding of how anti-consumption relates to other key constructs such as self-consciousness, self-actualization, and assertiveness.

Branding the Riders: "Marlboro Country" and the Formation of a New Middle Class in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey

In this article, we use the metaphor of "Marlboro Country," and Philip Morris's real-life effort to promote it, to discuss the shaping of new middle classes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in an age of newfound wealth and economic liberalism. We show how Marlboro Country was localized to fit each environment, reflecting an implicit dialogue (through market research) between this multinational company and potential consumers. We argue that in Marlboro Country a new kind of global citizen-consumer was envisioned, together with his modern, universal, urban, and young life-style, albeit with a touch of localism. This citizen-consumer's global aspirations for American-style standards of living were harnessed, packaged and sold in the dream of Marlboro Country, but without the cultural or political baggage of Americanism. Documentation based on company archives allows an insider gaze into Philip Morris's global selling strategy, local brand adaptations, and its interaction with social transition in the emergence of mass consumer societies in the Middle East.

Consumption, Leisure and the Middle Class in Transwar Japan

The rise of a mass consumer society and the spread of commercialized leisure are aspects of global modernity in the 20th century. In Japan, these phenomena emerged to prominence in the transwar decades from the 1920s through the 1960s. This essay argues that the ascendance of middle-class lifeways, consumption and leisure prominent among them, took place through a process that involved the transposing of difference as much as the diffusing of sameness. It identifies a causal dynamic in ‘transwar’ history, which extends the concept beyond political economy and beyond the simple claim that continuities stretch across the purported break of World War II.

Class, Cohort, and Consumption: The British Experience of the Third Age

This study examines the relative effect of historical and social class location on engagement in consumerism within two different cohorts of retired people in the United Kingdom. With use of self-reported data from the retired members of a nationally representative survey, an index of consumption was constructed. Its internal reliability was analysed and analyses of variance performed to examine the impact of class of origin, cohort, and class at exit on levels of self-reported "consumerism." The index demonstrated sufficient internal reliability to provide an operational measurement of "consumerism" within this retired population. Analyses of variance confirmed that class at exit and cohort but not class of origin contributed significantly to variation in levels of consumerism. These effects were not mediated by cohort differences in health. Occupational standing immediately before retirement was associated with "consumerism" after retirement. This is unsurprising. The results also show that birth cohort exercised a stronger historical influence on current consumption in later life than did class background (i.e., paternal social class). This supports our thesis that the limited but increasing immersion in mass consumer society of successive cohorts who were born and grew up earlier in the 20th century continues to be reflected in levels of "consumerism" in retirement.

Early Spanish television and the paradoxes of a dictator general

On 18 July 1936, a large contingent of the Spanish armed forces rose in rebellion against the legally established government of the Spanish Republic. Something the rebels had conceived of as a military coup and which often occurred in 19th-century Spain, developed into a civil war, lasting for almost three years, until April 1939. The military Junta commanding the rebel military government promoted General Francisco Franco as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and Head of the State on 1 October 1936. Francisco Franco was known as the ‘Generalissimo’ or ‘Caudillo’ of Spain ‘by the grace of God’ in the dictatorship's rhetoric. He did not relinquish power until his death in 1975. The Francoist dictatorship lasted for 40 years, during which Spain underwent a series of changes. An essentially agricultural country with limited nationwide communications and a degree of illiteracy beyond European parameters became, above all during the second half of the 1960s, an emergent mass culture and consumer society of predominantly middle-class citizens. It was also the recipient of a continuous flux of millions of tourists, who spent their holidays on the Spanish beaches and merged their habits and idiosyncrasies with those of the Spanish people. One could say that Spain, during the last 10 years of Francisco Franco's life (1965–1975) was no doubt the first dictatorship in the world where its citizen's lack of freedom ran parallel to the initial creation of a mass-consumer society. During that particular period in time Televisión Española (TVE), the Spanish Public Television monopoly, became the principal cultural industry in Spain and the preferred leisure activity of the citizens. However, TVE was unique within the European context for decades as it was a hybrid station, the only state-owned network not financed by TV licensing or taxpayers, but through advertising profits. This article is divided into four sections, which outline the relationship the Spanish dictator maintained with television. The first section outlines Franco's encounters with the beginnings of television in Spain in the 1950s; the second reflects Franco's thoughts about television, above all in the 1960s; the third part focuses on television as one of the dictator's leisure activities, mostly in the 1970s, and the last section points to some of the iconographic problems Francisco Franco's television image underwent.

Indigenous Voice and Vision as Commodity in a Mass-Consumption Society: The Colonial Politics of Public Opinion Polling

Indigenous Voice and Vision as Commodity in a Mass-Consumption Society: The Colonial Politics of Public Opinion Polling

Spectacle and the Staging of Power in Brazilian Neo-Pentecostalism

New technologies of communication and a reconfigured global, political, and economic system at the turn of the twenty-first century undoubtedly alter the conditions and contexts in which religions have traditionally operated. In Brazil, urbanization, the retrenchment of the state, and the consolidation of a society of mass consumption are also part of this changing landscape, as are the social exclusion and violence that have intensified and accompanied this process. Secularization, including that of the Brazilian state, proceeds unabated, and the ranks of those without swell with every decade. More than the issue of its relevance to modern life, however, religion in contemporary Brazil contends with the problem of communication in a thoroughly media-dominated society. Over the past two decades, television in Brazil has emerged as an innovative arena for religious entrepreneurship and, in the slow erosion of Roman Catholicism as the dominant faith, is helping redefine the role and significance of religion in the public realm. This article foregrounds the drama and discourse of exorcism in Brazilian Pentecostal churches against the changing landscape of religious institutions and globalized social transformations. Along with the rise of religious broadcasting, exorcism, a thriving practice in many of the newer Pentecostal Christian denominations that preach a gospel of prosperity promising instant wealth and health, has gained importance in many churches. As spectacle and visible display, exorcism links ideas about self-transformation and empowerment with the universe of popular religious discourse. At the same time, the staging of power through this proselytic medium draws on and reworks a set of images that grounds Christian selfhood in the enactment of material and territorial connections of the church to the Holy Land. Exorcism is part of a broader project of evoking the universal transhistorical and deterritorialized power of Christian dominion in terms that speak directly to local cultural

Privatization of Security as Governance Problem: Gated Communities in the San Diego Region

Americans were concerned about the threat to personal freedom posed by the conformism and homogeneity inherent in mass-consumption society. They longed for connection in their pursuit of suburban affluence. --New York Times, May 2002 In the Western world, the half-century between 1930 and 1980 was a period of public-sector expansion. From the crisis measures in the 1930s and the wartime economy of the 1940s to the egalitarian 1960s and the finishing touches of the affluent 1970s, the welfare state expanded in different national forms. From the 1980s on, the movement has been clearly in the opposite direction: wave after wave of attempts at reducing the public sector, through the transfer of ownership as well as the introduction of private-sector elements--market mechanisms, governance and management methods--in the public sector. This is a two-pronged movement of privatization: privately owned organizations taking over public functions and private-sector methods entering public organizations. The greatest wave of privatization has been in the delivery of collective services, transportation, power, and communication, especially. The arguments for such service privatization have been mostly pragmatic: an expectation of increased efficiency through the use of market mechanisms. Yet privatization has gone further than service provision: the core public function of maintaining peace and providing security is also being partially privatized. This would come as a great surprise to the classical theorists of the state. In the words of Adam Smith, it is the wisdom of the state only, which can render the trade of the soldier a particular trade separate and distinct from all others. (1) Security privatization takes several forms. They vary between societies and groups: security services can be purchased by states that employ private armies and by citizens who rent security guards; security goods, from alarms to Alsatians, likewise, constitute a growing market. (2) This article looks at one specific form of private security, a combination of goods and services, perhaps a security lifestyle: communities. In large parts of the United States, a considerable amount of new residential construction takes such a form. Gated communities can be defined as multi-unit, master-planned developments where resident owners must be members of a homeowner association and share ownership of common facilities, including a surrounding fence with a gate. (4) Gated communities exist not only in the United States: they are also found in a number of Third World countries, where pockets of wealthy citizens are fencing themselves off from the general squalor. (5) In the wealthy countries, however, only the United States has any significant number, and there is no doubt that they are not only a sign of social inequality and cultural distance but also a cause of growing inequality. Apart from a few prototypes, they began to develop in Florida, where a growing population of wealthy pensioners felt threatened by the increasing group of poor, restless people coming in from Latin America, particularly Cuba. Pensioners have been the driving force in much of later development, but they are far from the only customers for private residential protection. Although the most spectacular developments are still for pensioners (e.g., the Leisure World and Sun City developments; like most U.S. consumer goods, some of these built communities are mass-marketed and sold as brand names), the movement is broader. In California, around one-half of all new residential building involves gated communities, and upwards of 40 percent of the more recent construction may already be behind fences. (6) Gating is a broad and powerful trend. In this article, which takes the San Diego region as an example of a strong tendency toward gating and fencing, I discuss the consequences of building gated communities in terms of the governance of public safety. …

Rethinking Design Policy in the Third World

October 01 2004 Rethinking Design Policy in the Third World Sulfikar Amir Sulfikar Amir Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sulfikar Amir Online ISSN: 1531-4790 Print ISSN: 0747-9360 © 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2004 Design Issues (2004) 20 (4): 68–75. https://doi.org/10.1162/0747936042311995 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Sulfikar Amir; Rethinking Design Policy in the Third World. Design Issues 2004; 20 (4): 68–75. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/0747936042311995 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsDesign Issues Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

大泉一貫著『大衆消費社会の食料・農業・農村政策』

大泉一貫著『大衆消費社会の食料・農業・農村政策』

Phenix: a ousadia do renascimento da subjetividade cidadã

Este é um projeto de Pesquisa-intervenção vinculado à Universidade Estadual de Maringá (UEM). Enquanto projeto de Pesquisa-intervenção (Thiollent, 1981 e Brandão, 1981 e 1984) pressupõe a práxis como o lócus da produção do conhecimento e critério de verdade. A população com a qual interagimos é atendida pelo Núcleo Social Papa João XXIII, localizado na periferia de Maringá/PR/Brasil. A nossa inserção neste agrupamento humano está sustentada na premissa-denúncia de Martín-Baró (1987 e 1989) de que vivemos sobre o "império da desvalorização da vida humana", forjado pelo autoritarismo socioeconômico do capitalismo e da sociedade de consumo de massas por ele engendrada (Caniato, 1997; Martin & Schumann, 1999 e Beinstein, 1999). Seus reflexos excludentes são escamoteados pelos discursos demagógicos e ideológicos dos regimes políticos democráticos atuais. Partimos dos ensinamentos de Theodor Adorno (1965) em A Personalidade Autoritária de que tendências preconceituosas, nem sempre conscientizadas pelos indivíduos, dão sustentação subjetiva a formas de organização conduzentes à barbárie. Trilhando pelos estudos de Adorno, em especial agrupados em suas obras Dialética do Esclarecimento... (1985) e Educação e Emancipação (1995) - interagimos desde outubro de 2000 com a população do Núcleo Social, atravessando com eles o sofrimento psicossocial decorrente da banalização da violência (Arendt, 2000), e da injustiça (Dejours, 1999) sociais e de certas formas de inserção social marcadas pelo fatalismo e pela alienação psicossocial (Martín-Baró, 1987 e Chauí, 1993). A coordenação e os acadêmicos do Curso de Psicologia da UEM participantes deste projeto interagem, semanalmente, com a população do Núcleo Social, levantando questões-demanda que vêm estando vinculadas, principalmente, a sua situação de excluídos. Estas questões são estudadas teoricamente pelos integrantes do projeto e voltam a ser discutidas com a população, não se perdendo de vista a análise contextual e das condições concretas de vida daqueles indivíduos sob as quais estas demandas de compreensão emergiram. Nesta oportunidade é ampliado o conhecimento que nós-eles obtivéramos anteriormente e, assim, ocorre sucessivamente em novos encontros. Pudemos constatar nesta convivência com este grupo, a imersão destes indivíduos nos valores imputados pela sociedade de massa e até certa resistência em estar exercendo a verdadeira cidadania. Como a "consciência do povo daqui é o medo dos homens de lá...", é somente a partir do desenvolvimento da consciência crítica, principalmente, das denominadas "populações de risco" que haverá a ação transformadora da realidade psicossocial (Martín-Baró, 1987).

The Rise of Mass Consumption Societies

This paper studies mechanisms behind the rise of mass consumption societies. The development process depicted follows the Flying Geese pattern, in which a series of industries take off one after another. As productivity improves in these industries, each consumer good becomes affordable to an increasingly large number of households, which constantly expand the range of goods they consume. This in turn generates larger markets for consumer goods, which leads to further improvement in productivity. For such virtuous cycles of productivity gains and expanding markets to occur, income distribution should be neither too equal nor too unequal. With too much equality, the economy stagnates in a poverty trap. With too much inequality, the development stops prematurely.

Cigarette Butts and the Building of Socialism in East Germany

Since the nineteenth century, cleanliness and hygiene have played an integral role in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and notions of self-governance in Europe. Drawing on this reservoir of potential signification, the spread of a mass consumer society in the twentieth century has capitalized on commodified images of health, hygiene, and cleanliness, while the maintenance and representation of clean bodies for modern men and women became virtually inseparable from consumption. The Nazis both accelerated and gave a racial spin to the idea of a clean, healthy body as the symbol of racially superior, socially productive, and sexually virile Aryans. Whether commodified and sexualized under consumerism or channeled into a murderous project under the Nazis, hygienic and healthy bodies became the object of pleasure and a signifier of superior social and racial identity. When these considerations are taken into account, it is important to inquire into the problems faced by the founding fathers of the GDR with regard to questions of health and consumption. The vision of the socialist “New Man” and the ideal of pure and healthy living that were so frequently invoked in the early years of the GDR must be seen as attempts to forge a positive identity for the new socialist state while avoiding the twin ideological dangers posed by the memory of Nazi racial policies and the implicit connections made between health, consumption, and freedom in the pluralistic consumer society to the west.

Brightening Country Lives: Selling Electrical Goods in the Japanese Countryside, 1950–1970

In the aftermath of World War II, Japanese companies looked to the United States as a model of middle-class, consumer-driven prosperity. Although living conditions in Japan were very different from those in the United States, Japanese companies imported product technologies and management techniques that helped them realize their vision of a mass consumer society. For electrical goods companies, the countryside represented a special challenge, as conservative values and traditional family structures hindered sales. In time, however, electrical goods companies were able to overcome these obstacles, and in the process they became major players in the transformation of peasants into consumers.

SPECTACLES OF ETHNICITY: FESTIVALS AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF ETHNIC CULTURE AMONG LOUISIANA CAJUNS

Drawing on the example of the Louisiana Cajuns, an ethnic group that has been enjoying a wave of popular revival in recent years, this study suggests that changes in the perception of an ethnic identity are related to socioeconomic transformation. We identify the festival as a key aspect of the Cajun revival since the 1960s. An examination of the history, activities, and contemporary spatiotemporal organization of festivals reveals similarities to other aspects of a society of mass consumption. Niche marketing , the structuring of recreation around the modern work week, and the establishment of personal identity through the purchase of symbolically rich commodities are all embodied in present - day Cajun festivals. At the same time, the consumption of ethnic commodities is linked by the consumers with a sense of tradition and descent from a mythic past. The festivals of southwestern Louisiana are, in this sense, invented traditions and, paradoxically, a measure of the assimilation of this particular ethnic group into American culture.

The Stranger and Social Theory

The literature on ‘the stranger’ usually recognizes Simmel’s authority in formulating a sociology of strangerhood. Occasionally this literature provides a reformulation of the stranger through specific types of actors. For example, the Simmelian stranger has been the basis for Park’s ‘marginal man’ (1928), Wood’s (1934) and Schutz’s (1944) ‘the newcomer’, Siu’s ‘the sojourner’ (1952) and Stonequist’s notion of ‘the cosmopolitan individual’ or ‘the international mind’ (1937).1 Recent revisionist literature draws on, but moves beyond, the Simmelian stranger and its presuppositions. The category of the stranger has thus experienced a renaissance in contemporary social theory (Dessewffy, 1996; Harman, 1988; Stichweh, 1997; Tabboni, 1995). In particular, Zygmunt Bauman has been at the forefront in developing a social theory of strangerhood and his recent publications have contributed further to this intellectual project. In Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998a) and Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998b) Bauman is concerned with the constitution and treatment of the social and cultural Other in the west, especially those who have been excluded from an increasingly globalized and mass consumer society. Bulent Diken, in Strangers, Ambivalence and Social Theory (1998), draws on Bauman’s theory of strangerhood and its relationship to modernity and formulates an ‘ambivalent social theory’. In devising such an ambivalent social theory, Diken utilizes ethnographic data on Turkish immigrants in Denmark to reveal the exclusionary and oppressive practices latent in the public discourse of immigration. In their explication of the phenomenon of strangeness, Bauman and Diken highlight some of the recurrent themes in contemporary social theory: identity politics;

Assembled in Japan: electrical goods and the making of the Japanese consumer

This book investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, it discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, the book quickly turns its sights to the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products. It relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.

Alternatives to the Mass Consumption Society

Alternatives to the Mass Consumption Society