Notions Of Consumption Research Articles

Consuming Desire in Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin is a Gothicized science fictional narrative about sexuality, alterity and the limits of humanity. The film’s protagonist, an alien female, passing for an attractive human, seduces unwary Scottish males, leading them to a slimy, underwater/womblike confinement where their bodies dissolve and nothing but floating skins remain. In this paper, I look at the film’s engagement with the notions of consumption, the alien as devourer trope, and the nature of the ‘other’, comparing this filmic depiction with Michael Faber’s novel on which the film is based. I examine the film’s reinvention of Faber’s novel as a more open-ended allegory of the human condition as always already ‘other’. In Faber’s novel, the alien female seduces and captures the men who are consumed and devoured by an alien race, thus providing a reversal of the human species’ treatment of animals as mere food. Glazer’s film, however, chooses to remain ambiguous about the alien female’s ‘nature’ to the very end. Thus, the film remains a more open-ended meditation about alterity, the destructive potential of sexuality, and the fear of consumption which lies at the heart of the Gothic’s interrogation of porous boundaries.

Entrepreneurship and values in a democratic and pragmatic economics: commentary on 'A transactional view of entrepreneurship'

Entrepreneurship cannot be explained by any economic theory that isolates innovation from ongoing social processes or locates creativity in a space of given, fixed values. Unfortunately, mainstream economics has committed these mistakes, rooted in instrumentalist and antidemocratic notions of consumption and rationality that permits reasoning only about means toward given ends. Genuine innovation is, on Dewey's pragmatic approach to values, the intelligent modification of both means and ends for experimental action. When joined to an appreciation that consumption is just a phase of production, innovation can be properly seen as productive value-creation. Entrepreneurship is democratic experimentation in the economic realm.

What's the Big Idea? Production, Consumption and Internet Regulatory Discourse

The internet is most often described in technical terms — as a combination of network protocols, infrastructure and access devices. However, rather than reduce the internet to a technical specification, it is more useful to understand it as an assemblage of technology, people and ideas. The dominant idea informing the internet has been one of openness —embracing a desire for freedom of information and the cultural potential of new communicative possibilities. This ‘meme’ of freedom is predicated on expanded notions of consumption, production and distribution of information, Internet technologies open up a space of possibility that allows for innovative options for information creation and dissemination. This article considers the possibilities of consumption and production that the internet has so far allowed, and suggests that the imposition of new limitations on those activities is indicative of a reconfiguration of the dominant idea of the internet — a reconfiguration that is currently being contested, but one that threatens its ultimate shape. Some suggest — deterministically — that the internet is a technology of freedom, and that openness is embedded in its design. I argue that, far from being intrinsic to the technology. the ‘idea’ of openness is merely one of several competing ideas which might define the internet. Recent constraints on internet consumption and production are evidence that a less open network is not merely possible, but central to the more recent imaginings of government and corporate actors.

THE EFFECT OF REGIONAL SPECIALIZATION ON LOCAL ECONOMIC ACTIVITY: A STUDY OF CHILE

Recent concern with increasing disparities between rich and poor nations has been paralleled by attention to differences in living standards among regions within nations. Accelerated development of lagging regions has been advocated both to meet pressures from the lagging regions themselves and as a means to promote national interests, for example, through the expansion of markets. While in richer countries the means to promote regional development are often available, this is usually not the case in poor countries where, given limited resources and possible conflicts between national and the particular interests of lagging regions, the promotion of regional development is a delicate and complex issue. However, it is our contention that hidden potential for regional growth lies in many poor regions themselves, and that national policy should be designed to build on such potential. Though most theorists emphasize the efficiency conflict between development of poor, outlying regions and development of the nation, and others defend programs for backward areas only with equity arguments [4, 7, 9, 10, 15, 20, 21, 22, 29], a few have contended that the development of backward regions may be nationally efficient, too. Rahman notes, for example, that if savings rates vary from region to region, then national income growth may not be maximized by concentrating investment in the country's most productive region [32]. Vietorisz shows, by similar arguments, that if coefficients describing savings behavior, capital absorption capacity, and productive characteristics of competing regions are allowed to shift, then optimal growth considerations may dictate heavy investment in initially inefficient, underdeveloped regions [40]. Though these arguments for investment in backward regions are difficult to test, when they are combined with notions of consumption as a productive investment (producing changes in health, skills, etc.) and notions of shifting institutions [3] they can be quite persuasive. One can also look at regional development from another direction, to consider the importance of local economic activity for welfare, for local development,