Contact Us

Volume 2: The Consumer Society

  1. Home
  2. >>
  3. Frontier Issues in Economic...
  4. >>
  5. Volume 2: The Consumer...

Volume 2: The Consumer Society

Edited by: Goodwin, Neva R.; Ackerman, Frank; Kiron, David

Series Editor: Neva R. Goodwin

Published by: Island Press, Washington, DC 1997

ISBN: 1-55963-486-3

  Authors of Original Articles
  Foreword for Volume 2
  Acknowledgments
  Volume Introduction

PART I
Scope and Definition

  Overview Essay
  Asking How Much Is Enough
  Consumption, Well-Being, and Virtue
  The Original Affluent Society
  Limits to Satisfaction: Examination
  Will Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All
  The Expansion of Consumption
  New Analytic Bases for an Economic Critique of Consumer Society
  Consumption: The New Wave of Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences

PART II
Consumption in the Affluent Society

  Overview Essay
  Traumas of Time and Money in Prosperity and Depression
   The Insidious Cycle of Work and Spend
  Work, Consumption, and the Joyless Consumer
  The Study of Consumption, Object Domains, Ideology, and Interests
  Toward a Theory of Consumption
  Notes on the Relationship Between Production and Consumption
  The Political Economy of Opulence
  The Increasing Scarcity of Time
  Social Limits to Growth: The Commercialization Bias
  Changing Consumption Patterns: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II

PART III
Family, Gender, and Socialization

  Overview Essay
  The Domestic Production of Monies
  Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker
  Gender as Commodity
  Gender and Consumption: Transcending the Feminine?
   Meanings of Material Possessions as Reflections of Identity
  Friendship or Commodities? The Road Not Taken: Friendship, Consumerism, and Happiness
   Playing with Culture: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing

PART IV
The History of Consumer Society

  Overview Essay
  The History of Consumption: A Literature Review and Consumer Guide
   Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800
  Pictorial Prints and the Growth of Consumerism: Class and Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Culture
  The Quaker Ethic: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture
   The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England
  Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution
  Learning to Consume: Early Development Stores and the Shaping of the Modern Consumer Culture (1800-1914)
  From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of Consumer Culture
  The Consumer’s Comfort and Dream

PART V
Foundations of Economic Theories of Consumption

  Overview Essay
  Materialism and Modern Political Philosophy
  The History of Economics from a Humanistic Perspective
  Capital, Labor, and the Commodity Form
  Institutional Economics and Consumption
  Keynes’ Economic Thought and the Theory of Consumer Behavior
  A Reformulation of the Theory of Saving
  Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers’ Demand
  The Standard of Living and the Capacity to Save
   The Imperatives of Consumer Demand (as published in the Consumer Society)
  The Dependence Effect (as published in the Consumer Society)

PART VI
Critiques And Alternatives in Economic Theory

  Overview Essay
  Alternative Approaches to Consumer Behavior
  The Separative Self: Androcentric Bias in Neoclassical Assumptions
  Economics, Psychology, and Consumer Behavior
  The Psychology and Economics of Motivation
  The Neglected Realm of Social Scarcity
  The Demand for Unobservable and Other Nonpositional Goods
  Change and Innovation in the Technology of Consumption
  Procrastination and Obedience

PART VII
Perpetuating Consumer Culture: Media, Advertising, And Wants Creation

  Overview Essay
  The Distorted Mirror: Reflections on the Unintended Consequences of Advertising
  Modern Consumerism and Imaginative Hedonism
  Social Comparison, Advertising, and Consumer Discontent
  Limits to Satisfaction: Diagnosis
  Goods as Satisfiers
  Introduction to Fables of Abundance
  Advertising
  The Emergence of American Television: The Formative Years
  Toward a New Video Order: The 1980s
  Television and the Structuring of Experience
  Theories of Consumption in Media Studies
  Household Debt Problems: Toward a Micro-Macro Linkage

PART VIII
Consumption And The Environment

  Overview Essay
  The Allocation and Distribution of Resources
  Market and Nonmarket Determinants of Private Consumption and their Impacts on the Environment
  Consumption: Value Added, Physical Transformation, and Welfare
  Creating the Affluent Society
  Natural Resource Consumption
  The Environmental Costs of Consumption
  Creating a Sustainable Materials Economy

PART IX
Globalization And Consumer Culture

  Overview Essay
  Development and the Elimination of Poverty
  Third World Consumer Culture
  Positional Goods, Conspicuous Consumption, and the International Demonstration Effect Reconsidered
   Advertising in Nonaffluent Societies: Galbraith Revisited
   The Culture-Ideology of Consumerism in the Third World
  The Culture-Ideology of Consumerism in Urban China
  Transnational Advertising: Some Considerations of the Impact on Peripheral Societies
  Transnational Corporations and Third World Consumption: Implications for Competitive Strategies
  Gross National Consumption in the United States: Implications for Third World Development

PART X
Visions Of An Alternative

  Overview Essay
  Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
   Alternatives to Mass Consumption
  Exiting the Squirrel Cage
   How to Bring Joy into Economics
  Qualitative Growth
  The Poverty of Affluence: New Alternatives
  A Culture of Permanence
  Living More Simply and Civilizational Revitalization


Boston University | ECI | Contact Us

Copyright Notification: The Social Science Library (SSL) is for distribution in a defined set of countries. The complete list may be found here. Free distribution within these countries is encouraged, but copyright law forbids distribution outside of these countries.