Raising Consumers

Download or read book Raising Consumers written by Lisa Jacobson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-17 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the present electronic torrent of MTV and teen flicks, Nintendo and Air Jordan advertisements, consumer culture is an unmistakably important—and controversial—dimension of modern childhood. Historians and social commentators have typically assumed that the child consumer became significant during the postwar television age. But the child consumer was already an important phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The family, traditionally the primary institution of child socialization, began to face an array of new competitors who sought to put their own imprint on children's acculturation to consumer capitalism. Advertisers, children's magazine publishers, public schools, child experts, and children's peer groups alternately collaborated with, and competed against, the family in their quest to define children's identities. At stake in these conflicts and collaborations was no less than the direction of American consumer society—would children's consumer training rein in hedonistic excesses or contribute to the spread of hollow, commercial values? Not simply a new player in the economy, the child consumer became a lightning rod for broader concerns about the sanctity of the family and the authority of the market in modern capitalist culture. Lisa Jacobson reveals how changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways Americans understood the virtues and vices of boy and girl consumers—and why boys in particular emerged as the heroes of the new consumer age. She also analyzes how children's own behavior, peer culture, and emotional investment in goods influenced the dynamics of the new consumer culture. Raising Consumers is a provocative examination of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produced and ultimately legitimized a distinctive children's consumer culture in the early twentieth century.

Download or read book Raising Consumers written by Lisa Jacobson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the present electronic torrent of MTV and teen flicks, Nintendo and Air Jordan advertisements, consumer culture is an unmistakably important--and controversial--dimension of modern childhood. Historians and social commentators have typically assumed that the child consumer became significant during the postwar television age. But the child consumer was already an important phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The family, traditionally the primary institution of child socialization, began to face an array of new competitors who sought to put their own imprint on children's acculturation to consumer capitalism. Advertisers, children's magazine publishers, public schools, child experts, and children's peer groups alternately collaborated with, and competed against, the family in their quest to define children's identities. At stake in these conflicts and collaborations was no less than the direction of American consumer society--would children's consumer training rein in hedonistic excesses or contribute to the spread of hollow, commercial values? Not simply a new player in the economy, the child consumer became a lightning rod for broader concerns about the sanctity of the family and the authority of the market in modern capitalist culture. Lisa Jacobson reveals how changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways Americans understood the virtues and vices of boy and girl consumers--and why boys in particular emerged as the heroes of the new consumer age. She also analyzes how children's own behavior, peer culture, and emotional investment in goods influenced the dynamics of the new consumer culture. Raising Consumers is a provocative examination of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produced and ultimately legitimized a distinctive children's consumer culture in the early twentieth century.

Download or read book Raising Consumers written by Lisa Jacobson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the present electronic torrent of MTV and teen flicks, Nintendo and Air Jordan advertisements, consumer culture is an unmistakably important--and controversial--dimension of modern childhood. Historians and social commentators have typically assumed that the child consumer became significant during the postwar television age. But the child consumer was already an important phenomenon in the early twentieth century. The family, traditionally the primary institution of child socialization, began to face an array of new competitors who sought to put their own imprint on children's acculturation to consumer capitalism. Advertisers, children's magazine publishers, public schools, child experts, and children's peer groups alternately collaborated with, and competed against, the family in their quest to define children's identities. At stake in these conflicts and collaborations was no less than the direction of American consumer society--would children's consumer training rein in hedonistic excesses or contribute to the spread of hollow, commercial values? Not simply a new player in the economy, the child consumer became a lightning rod for broader concerns about the sanctity of the family and the authority of the market in modern capitalist culture. Lisa Jacobson reveals how changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways Americans understood the virtues and vices of boy and girl consumers--and why boys in particular emerged as the heroes of the new consumer age. She also analyzes how children's own behavior, peer culture, and emotional investment in goods influenced the dynamics of the new consumer culture. Raising Consumers is a provocative examination of the social, economic, and cultural forces that produced and ultimately legitimized a distinctive children's consumer culture in the early twentieth century.

Download or read book A Consumers' Republic written by Lizabeth Cohen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.

Download or read book Consuming Kids written by Susan Linn and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2005 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the way corporations and advertisers target children as a profitable demographic, as well as their methods for getting past parental safeguards to make products of all kinds appeal directly to even the youngest children.

Download or read book The Concise Encyclopedia of Communication written by Wolfgang Donsbach and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise volume presents key concepts and entries from the twelve-volume ICA International Encyclopedia of Communication (2008), condensing leading scholarship into a practical and valuable single volume. Based on the definitive twelve-volume IEC, this new concise edition presents key concepts and the most relevant headwords of communication science in an A-Z format in an up-to-date manner Jointly published with the International Communication Association (ICA), the leading academic association of the discipline in the world Represents the best and most up-to-date international research in this dynamic and interdisciplinary field Contributions come from hundreds of authors who represent excellence in their respective fields An affordable volume available in print or online

Download or read book Inside Marketing written by Detlev Zwick and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intensification of marketing activities in recent years has led the public to become much more aware of its role as consumers. Yet, the increased visibility of marketing materials and associated messages in everyday life is in contrast with the often little understood inner workings of the marketing profession itself, despite the widespread recognition of marketers as key agents in shaping the face of global capitalism. Inside Marketing offers a theoretically informed critical perspective on contemporary marketing practice and its growing cultural, economic, and political influence worldwide. This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of business, history, economic sociology, and cultural anthropology, to analyse the inner workings and outer effects of marketing as a material social practice, an ideology, and a technique. Their work raises some important and timely questions. How has marketing transformed the pharmaceutical industry and what are the consequences for our lives? How does marketing influence the way we think of progress and modernity? How has marketing changed the way we think of childhood? And how does marketing appropriate the creativity of consumers for profit? This book offers scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners a theoretical and conceptual understanding of how marketing works as a cultural institution and as an ideology.