Consumerist Values Research Articles

Globalization, Social Identities and Employment

On the basis of social identity theory, we predict various outcomes of current reactions against globalization which have important implications for the management of employees. Globalization and its associated developments have added impetus to two social trends: increases in inequality and in individualism. Inequalities have increased both between and within nations, whilst individualism is increasingly apparent in social life in general, and in organizational life in particular. It is argued that individualism has led to a preference for personal identities over social identities, but that these are not always satisfying because they are often based upon consumerist values. Moreover, inequalities have resulted in feelings of injustice. Consequently certain social movements have increased in popularity. The most important of these are religious fundamentalism, nationalism and single–issue politics.Increasing numbers of employees have at least one of these social identities central to their selves. Social identity and self–categorization theory suggest certain hypotheses about the likely implications for employment. First, to the extent that these social identities are salient for employees in the work situation, they will maintain the beliefs, values and norms associated with their identity at the expense of organizational beliefs, values or norms which are incompatible. Second, they will further the interests of their own category at the expense of other social categories of employee. Third, they will fail to differentiate between individuals within their own category, and between individuals within other categories. The implications of these hypotheses, if supported, for organizations are then explored. Finally, certain preventative strategies, also based upon social identity theory, are described.

Hoover, conservation, and consumerism: engineering the good life

Herbert Hoover rose to political leadership in the 1920s, just as consumer society became dominant in the United States. Although personally uncomfortable with the values of consumerism, he worked to strengthen the economy through policies of conservation and to find desirable occupations for the new leisure available to modern workers. He envisioned great voluntary programs to promote standardization and simplification in American industries that would permit companies to pay both high profits and high wages. And he sought opportunities for healthful, moral outdoor recreation to fill the leisure hours made possible by rising worker productivity. Kendrick Clements illuminates the influence of Hoover's broadly conceived ideas about conservation on virtually every economic policy of the Republican era, from the expansion of the National Park system by 40 percent to the attempt to eliminate radical swings in the business cycle. Locating the roots of Hoover's personal beliefs in his Quaker upbringing in Oregon and seeing his outlook on the natural world shaped by his frontier experience and education, Clements finds that this policy maker combined an interest in conserving the environment with an engineer's drive to rationalize the use of natural resources. He examines Hoover's difficult negotiation of the Colorado River Pact that permitted the construction of the dam that would bear his name as well as his efforts to create a St. Lawrence Waterway to link the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Hoover's relief efforts during the 1927 Mississippi River flood and his promotion of timber and oil conservation reveal other dimensions of his approach to conservation. Although Hoover was not a modern environmentalist, he pioneered some of the first broad environmental policies in the United States. The National Conference on Outdoor Recreation brought together wilderness advocates and urban planners, passage of the first federal law to limit oil pollution in navigable waters began an ongoing effort to control the effects of industrialization, and his advocacy of pleasant, affordable housing introduced the idea that the world we live in every day is our most important environmental concern. In a period most often seen as a wasteland by historians who have viewed Republican environmental policies of the 1920s as mistaken, ineffective, or corrupt, Clements proposes that Hoover's conservation efforts were an attempt to balance growth and conservation. This unparalleled examination of early-twentieth-century conservation speaks to ongoing debates about how best to protect the environment without ruining the economy.

Evangelism and Consumer Culture in Northern Tanzania

Ethnographic description of a revival camp in Northern Tanzania illustrates how the social idea of "youth as consumers" emerges in the context of government downsizing and expanding international markets. An evangelical message effects a link between religion and consumerism. It imbues decisions about what to buy with moral understandings of good and evil. At the same time, the interconnection of evangelism and consumerism gives rise to a paradox: that "youth" who are supposed to be Born Again, and as such, removed from the temptations of consumer culture, in many cases identify themselves as experts in consumption. Participants' descriptions of themselves as consumers point to the consumerist values that underlie revivalism. They also show how "youthful consumption" itself is influenced by alternative registers of value and understandings of personhood.

The Rhetoric of Culture: Some Notes on Magazines,Canadian Culture and Globalization

Through an examination of the government's most recent attempt to defend the Canadian magazine industry (Bill C-55), this essay considers the politics of defending Canadian culture in the era of globalization. It argues that the defence of Canadian culture cannot be taken as synonymous with the defence of ways of life that are opposed to the profit-driven logic of global capitalism. Rather, struggles over Canadian culture can impede our understanding of Canada's place in globalization by distracting us from the real issues. This is shown in the defence of the Canadian magazine industry on the grounds of its importance to national culture. Magazines are exemplary mass cultural commodities whose form and content both express the consumerist values of contemporary capitalism. This paper argues that worries about Canadian content are often articulated at the expense of a more general examination of the function of culture within capitalism and of the implicit politics of the forms of mass culture.

Web Forum: Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists

Web Forum: Apocacide, Apocaholics and Apocalists

Postmodern attitudes about health: a population-based exploratory study

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of the prevalence of postmodern attitudes about health. In a region of southeastern Australia structured telephone interviews with a random sample of 209 participants. Responses suggesting postmodern attitudes to health were prevalent: the majority of respondents appear to hold a holistic view of health, believe in individual responsibility for achieving health, reject medical authority, hold consumerist values, prefer natural products over chemical drugs, think most prescription drugs have side effects, do not believe all illnesses require medication from doctors and hold anti-technology sentiments. However, results reveal that most people have much faith in science. Attitudes prevalent among the public in south eastern Australia are congruent with the philosophy of most complementary therapists. This may be one reason for the growth of complementary medicine.

Theories of Regulation and the History of Consumerism

The “economic” (Chicago School) theory of regulation fails to explain many important features of regulatory history in the USA, such as the periodicity of regulatory innovation, the role of the organized consumer movement, and the roots of reform, including deregulation. J.Q. Wilson′s political theory of regulation accounts for these phenomena when interpreted in historical context. The widely‐held social values of Wilson′s theory are identified with the values articulated by the consumer movement. This theory suggests that regulation can indeed serve the public interest as understood from the perspective of consumerist values.

NTQ Checklist No. 5: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini was an extremely unorthodox dramatist. A cult figure in the ‘sixties for his controversial art films, he cultivated notoriety as a rebel who challenged (and was persistently persecuted by) Italy's cultural and political establishment. ‘This hid the fact that, as well as being a successful film-maker, he was an innovative novelist and consummate poet, a tireless essayist, and a provocateur in cultural and social matters, as well as an expert critic and compiler of dialect poetry – a cultural entrepreneur in the fullest sense. The year he wrote the bulk of his theatre, 1966, marked the beginning of his last phase: self-consciously, he assumed both cultural and sexual heterodoxy as an act of defiance against the ‘horrendous universe’ of neo-capitalist Italy and the intolerance of its consumerist values. In Britain, he has been almost entirely neglected except as a film-maker, and much of his work – the entire corpus of theatre and most of his essays – has still to be translated into English. This checklist by Russell Williams will thus hopefully serve as an introduction to the work of an entirely original and provocative playwright. It is followed by a more extended study by Paolo Puppa of perhaps Pasolini's best-known piece for the theatre, Affabulazione.

Technology and the social regulation of fertility

Fertility patterns are rooted in a society's culture and social structure, and in the economics of childbearing that is thereby set up. Technological change affects the demand for children, and hence for fertility regulation, both by directly altering the expected benefits and costs of children to parents and by influencing the cultural and social structural underpinnings of that economic calculus. Routes of that influence include the demand for education generated by competition for modern sector employment, the consumerist values and lifestyles conveyed by communications media, and the erosion of community and kin pressures on individual behavior in a more mobile and more commercialized society. Such forces for behavioral change, it is argued, are more powerful factors in fertility decline than either the “social technology” of contraceptive service delivery (family planning programs) or improvements in the technology of contraception itself.