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"Konsumgesellschaft"
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The future of consumer society : prospects for sustainability in the new economy
\"There are growing indications that the system of mass consumption that blossomed in the United States and other countries during the decades following World War II is now eroding due to demographic ageing, increasing income inequality, political payalysis, and resource scarcity. At the same time, steady jobs that compensate employess on a salaried or hourly basis are being replaced by freelanding and contingent work. Such circumstances are making perpetuation of consumerist lifestyle difficult. The rise of the so-called sharing economy, the growth of do-it-yourself production, and the speading popularity of economic localization are evidence that people are striving to find new ways to ensure livelihoods for themselves and their families in the face of profound change. Historical experience points to the importance of mutual assistance during periods of transformational upheaval and this book describes the role that worker-consumer cooperatives could play during a period when government-sponsored initiatives are unlikely to be forthcoming.\"--Front flap.
Book
The Role of Price in the Behavior and Purchase Decisions of Compulsive Buyers
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► In this study, we evaluate compulsive and non-compulsive buyers’ response to price. ► In a national survey, 16 percent of the sample was categorized as compulsive buyers. ► We find that compulsive buyers tend to have a heightened response to price. ► They possess greater price knowledge, are more brand conscious and prestige sensitive. ► They derive greater transaction value from price deals and are price and sales prone.
The present research examines the relationship between consumers’ tendencies to buy compulsively and their response to price based on a survey of customers of an Internet clothing retailer. The research findings suggest that compulsive buyers possess greater knowledge of store prices and are more brand conscious and prestige sensitive in comparison with non-compulsive buyers. Moreover, compulsive buyers derive greater transaction value from price promotions and are more price conscious and sale prone than non-compulsive buyers.
Journal Article
Sustainable Consumption Corridors: Concept, Objections, and Responses
In this paper, we explore whether the idea of \"sustainable consumption corridors\", derived from concepts of a good life, can be a good starting point to define criteria of sustainable consumption. Such corridors would be defined by minimum standards, allowing every individual
to live a good life, and maximum standards, ensuring a limit on every individual's use of natural and social resources in order to guarantee access to a sufficient level of resources (in terms of quantity and quality) for others in the present and in the future. We first present the idea,
as it resulted from the process of integration within the focal topic From Knowledge to Action - New Paths towards Sustainable Consumption. We then outline potential objections to the idea. Such objections are the pluralists' objection, the liberalists' argument or the argument
of lacking acceptance. We show that there is no argument strong enough to utterly turn down the idea. We end by drawing conclusions with regard to future research and to possible strategies of implementation.
Journal Article
Brand Antarctica
Antarctica is, and has always been, very much \"for sale.\" Whales,
seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but
so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry
developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and
early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for
their endeavors. Their lectures, narratives, photographs, and films
were essentially advertisements for their adventures. At the same
time, popular media began to use the newly encountered continent to
draw attention to commercial products. These advertisements both
trace the commercialization of Antarctica and reveal how commercial
settings have shaped the dominant imaginaries of the place. By
contextualizing and analyzing Antarctic advertisements from the
late nineteenth century to the present, Brand Antarctica
identifies five key framings of the South Polar continent: a place
for heroes, a place of extremity, a place of purity, a place to
protect, and a place that transforms. Demonstrating how these
conceptual framings of Antarctica in turn circulate through our
culture, Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen challenges common assumptions
about Antarctica's past and present, encouraging readers to rethink
their own relationship with the Far South.
eBook
Secular satiation
Satiation of need is generally ignored by growth theory. I study a model where consumers may be satiated in any given good but new goods may be introduced. A social planner will never elect a trajectory with long-run satiation. Instead, he will introduce enough new goods to avoid such a situation. In contrast, the decentralized equilibrium may involve long run satiation. This, despite that the social costs of innovation are second order compared to their social benefits. Multiple equilibria may arise: depending on expectations, the economy may then converge to a satiated steady state or a non satiated one. In the latter equilibrium, capital and the number of varieties are larger than in the former, while consumption of each good is lower. This multiplicity comes from the following strategic complementarity: when people expect more varieties to be introduced in the future, this raises their marginal utility of future consumption, inducing them to save more. In turn, higher savings reduces interest rates, which boosts the rate of innovation. When TFP grows exogenously and labor supply is endogenized, the satiated equilibrium generically survives. For some parametrer values, its growth rate is positive while labor supply declines over time to zero. Its growth rate is then lower than that of the non satiated equilibrium. Hence, the economy may either coordinate on a high leisure, low growth, satiated \"leisure society\" or a low leisure, high growth, non satiated \"consumption society\".
Journal Article
Bought and Sold
Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the Soviet Bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. InBought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation's collapse into civil war in 1991.
Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders.
eBook
The Throwaway Society: a Look in the Back Mirror
Whilst public criticisms of an increasingly wasteful consumer society emerged already in late nineteenth Century, the specific concept of a “Throwaway Society” was first used in the early 1960s. This short communication sketches the passionate debate around planned obsolescence and oversaturated consumers and offers a short historical glimpse at a persistent, existential problem that still awaits effective solutions.
Journal Article
THE CULTURAL AND AESTHETIC ROOTS OF THE JOYLESS ECONOMY
Tibor Scitovsky’s The Joyless Economy (1976) is now regarded as a landmark publication in the combined fields of economics and psychology, with standard accounts of Scitovsky’s ideas emphasizing the influence of 1960s motivational psychology literature. While this encounter is all-important, Scitovsky’s ideas must at the same time be read in the context of the evolution of his critique of twentieth-century mass society. The present paper presents that critique and demonstrates its fundamental importance for Scitovsky’s diagnosis of an economy he termed “joyless.” Drawing upon his “Memoirs,” we show how Scitovsky’s ideas were initially shaped by the culture/aesthetics of his early years in Budapest, followed by his experiences of rising totalitarianism in interwar Europe, and further affected by his move to the consumption society of postwar America. The way he engaged with the writings of influential contemporary cultural commentators, including André Gide, Erich Fromm, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Lewis Mumford, and Bernard Rudofsky, was incisive. Close scrutiny also reveals resonances between Scitovsky’s cultural concerns and those of some of the Bloomsbury Group.
Journal Article