Book Description
Click the reviews tab at the left to see reviews of this book
For additional materials, please contact the author directly: www.mariekedemooij.com
"Marieke de Mooij shows that American theories of consumer behavior do not necessarily apply abroad. Her national consumption data are an unobtrusive measure of national cultures. She has made marketing students discover culture, and her work should make cross-cultural psychologists discover the consumer as an informant."
--Geert Hofstede, Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, the Netherlands
Consumers worldwide are not the same, and the differences in consumer behavior between countries are increasing. Because all aspects of consumer behavior are culture-bound, and not subject merely to environmental factors but integrated in all of human behavior, there is an increased need to identify and understand this integration and its impact on global marketing and advertising.
Consumer Behavior and Culture: Consequences for Global Marketing and Advertising is the first book to present an empirically based model for integrating culture with consumer behavior.
Consumer Behavior and Culture reviews the myths of global marketing and explores the concept of culture and models of culture. It provides empirical evidence of convergence and divergence in consumer behavior and covers various psychological and sociological aspects of human behavior used for explaining consumer behavior. The book reviews and discusses cultural variations of these aspects across the world.
reviews the myths of global marketing and explores the concept of culture and models of culture. It provides empirical evidence of convergence and divergence in consumer behavior and covers various psychological and sociological aspects of human behavior used for explaining consumer behavior. The book reviews and discusses cultural variations of these aspects across the world.
Key Features:
* A cultural exploration of the various psychological and sociological aspects of human behavior, such as concept of self, personality, group influence, motivation, emotion, perception, and information processing
* A discussion of consumer behavior theories and cultural variations from around the world
* Coverage of a number of consumer behavior domains, including explanations of differences in consumption and ownership, all based on empirical evidence
* In addition to anecdotal evidence, the consequences of branding and marketing communication strategy are presented and analyzed
Perfect for students and practitioners in marketing and advertising, this book is designed to meet the needs of those wishing to view consumer behavior from a global cultural perspective. It is also ideal for those emphasizing the role of minority groups as well as increased multicultural sensitivity in their marketing and advertising strategies.
Customer Reviews:
Handbook for global marketers.......2004-02-09
Consumer Behavior and Culture-Consequences for Global Marketing and Advertising is a handbook for all global marketers and the researches that did the cross cultural research especially in consumer behavior. As the author, Marieke de Mooij is the fellow of Hofstede, in this book therefore, mostly the Hofstede: Five Dimensions of National Culture is fully explained and utilized. De Mooij tried to explain every aspect in consumer behavior by these dimension, especially individualism vs collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance. For marketers, understand these three dimensions can understand the characteristic of the value, lifestyle and even the attitude towards the objects.
This book unlike other consumer behavior textbook, it does not only describe the basic consumer behavior theories and models but also have lots of application and more focus on culture aspects.
De Mooij also provides lots of examples and successful cases to illustrate the concept. And some positioning maps are also used especially the country positioning. She has tried to use the map to illustrate the culture feature in different countries, such approaches can help marketers to compare the distance among different countries and learn how to adjust and localize their strategies in specific market.
Moreover, the author specific designs some chapters for global marketers. In those chapters, marketers can learn the characteristic of that market customers, and how to base on that unique feature to design the marketing strategies i.e. brand, product and price and advertising strategies i.e. media.
For researcher, this is a good book, the author has described the research methodology for culture-comparison, other than that, she has collected lots of secondary data to support the new data, therefore, the knowledge provided is very comprehensive. In every category like clothing, coffee and automobile, she also mentioned some tips for researchers to do research in that specific area. Some limitations of existing research findings are raised, which help the researches to remind some major limitations and the room for future research.
Overall speaking, the content is very comprehensive, and the description and analysis are good enough for readers to understand the concepts. Moreover, the main points and the sub points are clearly defined, which bring lots of convenient to the readers.
In conclusion, Consumer Behavior and Culture is a handbook for marketers and researchers, and at this moment, there is no other books can substitute it.
Book Description
A follow-up to Grant McCracken's groundbreaking Culture and Consumption, this new book trades the usual platitudes about the consumer society for a more detailed, exacting anthropological treatment. Each section of the book pairs a brief essay with an academic article. The essay is designed for a quick, provocative glimpse of the topic; the article provides a deeper anthropological treatment. The book opens with a broadside against the now thoroughly conventionalized attack on the consumer culture. Essays follow on homes, cars, people, and social mobility; celebrities, consumerism, and self-invention; museums and the power of objects; the anthropology of advertising; and marketing, meaning management, and value. Like McCracken's previous volume, this new book is an engaging, informative, and eye-opening foray into modern consumer culture.
Book Description
Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza, Tsukiji--the world's largest marketplace for seafood--is a prominent landmark, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites: a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs, and a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists. Early every morning, the worlds of hi-tech and pre-tech trade noisily converge as tens of thousands of tons of seafood from every ocean of the world quickly change hands in Tsukiji's auctions and in the marketplace's hundreds of tiny stalls. In this absorbing firsthand study, Theodore C. Bestor--who has spent a dozen years doing fieldwork at fish markets and fishing ports in Japan, North America, Korea, and Europe--explains the complex social institutions that organize Tsukiji's auctions and the supply lines leading to and from them and illuminates trends of Japan's economic growth, changes in distribution and consumption, and the increasing globalization of the seafood trade. As he brings to life the sights and sounds of the marketplace, he reveals Tsukiji's rich internal culture, its place in Japanese cuisine, and the mercantile traditions that have shaped the marketplace since the early seventeenth century.
Customer Reviews:
Perfect Guide to a Tokyo Vacation.......2006-11-29
A fishing boat leaves from Barnegat Light, New Jersey
headed out for a week or more of long-line fishing for
swordfish, but two days later, it's back at the dock
meeting a refrigerated truck. What happened? Was their
trip cut short by mechanical failure? Bad ice?
No, they caught a giant bluefin tuna as a `bycatch'
and a buyer in Tokyo, notified by radio, sent a truck t
o pick it up and get it on the next plane to Japan.
At the heart of all this remarkable transport is
the soon-to-be closed Tsukiji, a giant market next
to the posh Ginza and tacky Shinbashi neighborhoods
that currently handles ten per cent of the world's
trade in fresh fish.
As a piece of social history, this book would be
fascinating and for the anthropologist concerned
with community and institution, it's a milestone.
But that's not why I am recommonding this book so
highly. I urge you to buy it because it's the key
to a particular kind of travel.
If you are going to Tokyo, there is a guidebook
and a list of recommended sights. You can even go
on a tour and have someone decide what you should
see. Or you can take the time to get familiar with
Tsukiji before you leave. You can spend your mornings
(it opens before dawn and is closed just after noon)
wandering the inner and outer market. You can have
the freshest, cheapest sushi you've ever tasted and
shop for sushi knives and other cutlery. You can
speak not a single word of Japanese and have the
time of your life.
Better yet, if you do this, it will change the way
you travel forever. You will no longer be content
to see what you've imagined seeing and what all your
friends have seen. In fact, the whole idea of `seeing'
a city will change. You'll want to taste it, hear it,
smell it and wake up with it too.
This splendid book is nicely written, Bestor has a good
touch with words, a quality not common among
anthropologists. There is also a visitors' guide to
the outer market. So whether your traveliing is ocean-spanning
or armchair-sprawling, Tsukiji is a delight.
--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and the forthcoming novel bang-BANG from Kunati Books. ISBN 9781601640005
This book is not just about fish.......2006-11-22
"If a maritime species can be consumed by human beings, in Japan, it almost certainly has been," writes Harvard anthropologist and sushi aficionado Theodore Bestor.
And the place to get it is Tsukiji at the mouth of the Sumida River in Tokyo, the world's biggest fish market, where millions of pounds of fish a day and billions of dollars worth of seafood a year are received, sold (usually more than once) and shipped. That's about five times bigger than New York's (lately extinct) Fulton Fish Market.
Although Tsukiji controls only a tenth of Japan's seafood business, the Japanese are so devoted to seafood and have so much money that fisheries around the world operate on Tsukiji's beat.
New fisheries have been created just for Tsukiji, like the air-flown fresh Atlantic bluefin tuna business. Tuna is king at Tsukiji, to the point that conservationists fear the extinction of the Atlantic bluefin.
Bestor's "Tsukiji" is comprehensive, neatly fitting the market into both historical and present-day contexts, but his main interest is in what he calls intermediate wholesalers.
There are about 1,600 of them, narrowly specialized. They are proud of their alleged origin as supporters of the first ruling Shogun in Edo (now Tokyo), of their knowledge of fish (but, of course, the younger generation doesn't know what the old-timers think they should), of their hometowns, their high schools, their religious sodalities, family ties, festivals and staying power.
Staying power especially. Some dealers claim to be of the 17th generation. Tsukiji was the famous fish market of Nihonbashi until the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed it in 1923. Rebuilt in a new location, Tsukiji seems to have carried its history along with it successfully.
It is facing an uncertain future again, as usual, says Bestor. The challenges come from the market structure, which is shifting from auctions to direct, negotiated deals. And from the municipal government, which wants to move the cramped, decaying market.
It's within walking distance of Ginza, and many dealers worry that moving away will kill the market. It will almost certainly kill the "outer" market of little stalls and restaurants that congregates around the inner market. (Bestor provides a guide for tourists.)
All markets have, to anthropologists, a certain sameness, but Tsukiji has some uniquely Japanese features. Sakidori is the oddest, compared with American methods.
The auctions begin around 5 a.m., too late for supermarket chains that have to wrestle their purchases through Tokyo's traffic and also need extra time to clean, cut, wrap and price packages. Smaller local shops don't need so much lead time.
Sakidori allows the big guys to carry off whatever they want before the auction, which gives them an advantage in obtaining the best quality items. But the price is set by the smaller guys who stay later.
Another obvious difference between Tsukiji and American markets is the place of religious rites at Tsukiji. Japanese fishmongers may not be any more religious than American businessmen, but they are more likely to organize business matters in religious contexts, from parading at festivals to going as business groups to famous shrines.
Bestor has attempted to write a book for both academic anthropologists and for general readers, and cheerfully invites the general reader to skip some chapters.
It's worth the effort of reading it all. This book is not just about fish.
Detailed book on a fascinating subject.......2006-06-30
I've never seen the Tsukiji fish market in operation, but I'm quite sure that it's fascinating, and one of the best reasons I have for thinking that is this big and detailed book. Theodore Bestor is a professor of anthropology at Harvard, but unlike a stereotypical anthropologist, he doesn't study fossils or primitive tribes. He studies contemporary Japanese economic institutions.
The book is a serious work of academic scholarship but, happily, it's only a little less readable for that. Professor Bestor descends into opaque academic jargon only once and then pretty briefly. (It rather feels as though he does it once just to prove that he can.) Other that that brief bit, there's only a smattering of academic jargon in the book and most of it is perfectly understandable. Professor Bestor is occasionally a bit repetitive, and there are a few inelegant chapter introductions and summaries ("In this chapter I have..."), but there's very little here that hinders an interested lay-person's enjoyment. Besides, who but an academic would spend 15 years visiting and learning about a fish market? Anyone who has an interest in Japanese culture should be glad that Professor Bestor did because there's a lot to learn from reading the book.
Professor Bestor explains the market's history, its seventeenth-century origin in nearby Nihonbashi, its move to Tsukiji in 1923, its move into the current buildings in 1935, its closure during the second world war, its resurgence in the 1950s, and its likely future move to a new location across the Sumida river. In equally careful detail, he tells us about the market's mechanisms and its participants: the auctions and the seven auction-houses, the hundreds of wholesalers and how they do business, how the market changes in anticipation and reaction to consumers' changing preferences, and so on.
There's no question that there are a lot of interesting facts here. I'd never have guessed that sushi as we know it was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century. But, perhaps not surprisingly, Professor Bestor is at his best when he's interpreting and analyzing as an anthropologist. Economic transactions don't happen in a vacuum.
We get a wonderfully clear picture of the numerous overlapping formal and informal relationships among the market's participants and between them and the various parts of local and national government that license and regulate the market. We also get to see wholesalers changing their businesses, not just in response to short-term market changes, but also in response to larger-scale economic trends. While they were once exclusively family businesses, many are now becoming increasingly like ordinary corporations.
Japanese social structures are famously opaque to outsiders and Professor Bestor has done a fabulous job learning about and explaining a fascinating place. And his descriptions are good enough that you can almost smell the fish. There's also a useful guide to to visiting the market at the end of the book.
Hope you're good at skimming..........2005-01-10
A great subject, tackled by a writer who has a nice sense of language -- but please, somebody take a red pen to this book! This isn't a dissertation anymore (I assume it once was -- it certainly reads like one). Every point is belabored. Most of what needs to be cut are repetitive descriptions of the anthropological grounding for his approach to the fish market... but then, there are passages like the one I will take the liberty of quoting below, which truly strain the limits of credulity. Here, from pages 77 and 78 of the hardback version, is an actual description of how to play rock-paper-scissors:
"From time to time, bidders break a tie by a quick round of the child's game of jan-ken (rock-paper-scissors). Two or more people -- on the count of jan, ken, po! -- simulatenously thrust out a hand: a fist to represent a rock, an open palm for paper, or two fingers extended for scissors. Each of the three objects can be defeated by one of the others and can in turn defeat the third: rock smashes scissors (and rock wins); paper covers rock; scissors cut paper. It is a simple mechanism for deciding among ties as long as the group is not too large; this and related hand games are commonplace legacies of Edo's popular culture.
There's the book in a nutshell: the author makes an interesting observation, then beats you over the head with it.
An essential reference for for food lovers going to Tokyo.......2004-10-22
I am not an anthropologist or a foodie who is steeped in the industry. But I did go to Tokyo for 4 days with some friends to find excellent sushi. Having seen Tsukiji in a couple of television specials and worked in a much smaller market in the past I thought it would be interesting to see the real thing. Perhaps I should blame Dr. Bestor for the fact that I ended up spending two half-days engrossed in Tsukiji market but once I read the book and got over the initial shock of the place I felt like I had an inside edge and couldn't pull myself away. The book does an excellent job of balancing personal insights and experiences with objective accounts of the market's history and statistics and provides a behind the scenes understanding of supply and distribution activity as well as the multigenerational, family-run stalls. It's one thing to see the tuna auctions; it's another to have an understanding of how the fish got there, who buys them, how they are sold to the supply and distribution chains, the role of the vendors, the history of the building and other details that give it depth. In the end, after four days of tramping around Tokyo to sample great sushi and other foods, we agreed that the best sushi we had was at a tiny restaurant in the outer market. And my visits to Tsukiji - which is sadly be being replaced by a more modern facility that can better meet the needs of a city that has grown since the facility was built - were the most fascinating part of my visit thanks largely to Dr. Bestor's book.
Book Description
Luxury isn't just for the rich, says James B. Twitchell. Today you don't need a six-figure income to wear pashmina, drink a limited-edition coffee at Starbucks, or drive a Mercedes home to collapse on the couch in front of a flat-screen plasma TV. In Living It Up, sharp-eyed consumer anthropologist Twitchell takes a witty and insightful look at luxury -- what it is, who defines it, and why we can't seem to get enough of it.
In recent years, says Twitchell, luxury spending has grown much faster than overall spending -- and it continues to grow despite the economic recession. Luxury has become such a powerful marketing force that it cuts across every layer of society, spawning a magazine devoted to spas, cashmere bedspreads on sale at Kmart, and a dazzling array of bottled waters.
Twitchell says that the democratization of luxury has had a unifying effect on culture. Luxury items tell a story that we want to identify with, and more people than ever aspire to the story of Ralph Lauren's Polo or Patek Philippe. Shopping itself is no longer a chore but a transcendent experience in which we shop not so much for goods as for an identity.
Sharply observed and wickedly funny, Living It Up is a revealing and entertaining examination of why we are all part of the cult of luxury.
Customer Reviews:
A glorious state of denial.......2006-01-16
This deserves three stars, at least, for its wit. Even as I disagreed with Twitchell, I found myself wanting to read more.
There are several things terribly wrong with his argument, such as his ignoring the mindlessness of much consumption. He thinks consumers are aware, but that doesn't hold water, or advertisers would not make or spend so much to influence everyone, and they would not be so successful.
The real trouble I have with this book is that Twitchell never, ever connects the growing consumption of "unnecessary" luxury goods with the incredible destruction they are causing all over the world. Even a passing acknowledgment of the environmental catastrophe related to our consumption would make this a better book. At least he could admit he's only interested in luxury as a construct, as something to play with philosophically.
Still, it's definitely worth a read.
Terrible.......2005-01-11
The author has no familiarity with his subject and routinely provides the reader with incorrect information.
A Guilty Gordon Gekko.......2005-01-01
Living it Up starts with the premise that consumption--even overconsumption--is good for the economy and good for your community. Twitchell makes a coherent argument that those who pay ridiculous prices for things they don't need make it possible for the rest of us to pay lower prices for the same things. Then, what used to be a luxury to one generation (indoor plumbing, cars, computers) becomes a necessity for the next.
But somehow, Twitchell seems guilty about all this. He even quotes Gekko (from the movie Wall Street), a bit sheepishly. He praises "first-users" (those who buy the first VCRs, etc. at high prices) while sneering at the stereotypical yuppie with all his toys. Professor Twitchell mocks the voluntary simplicity movement by picking the most hypocritical example he can find, of a back-to-nature advocate who buys acres of her neighbor's land. But he ignores such aspects as not spending more than you have, reducing the amount of stuff you own, enjoying the occasional luxury rather than shopping as a habit.
Interesting reading if you are fascinated by our consumer culture, but a bit confusing as the professor tries to decide where he stands on over-consumption.
Luxury, a new religion analyzed.......2003-08-31
This is a landmark book. The author analyzes in very detail the mechanisms behind selling luxury to the public, including the religious attributes affixed to those products.
"Probably it shouldn't get into the hands of consumers", because they might find out they are spending too much money for ordinarily manufactured goods with high status affixed by advertising. On my trips to the US, I wondered how big, luxury only shopping malls could survive, this book tells the reason why. Europe is still more conservative with luxury spending.
I wanted to give it 5 stars, but the language used is very difficult to read. To exclude most luxury spenders?
Posh LUST.......2003-02-26
Entertaining book, well written, thought provoking, ultimately absolving us of our sins of posh LUST.
Book Description
What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives.
Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.
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Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History
ASIN: 0199251908 |
Book Description
Why and how has the business corporation come to exert such a powerful influence on American society? The essays here take up this question, offering a fresh perspective on the ways in which the business corporation has assumed an enduring place in the modern capitalist economy, and how it has affected American society, culture and politics over the past two centuries. The authors challenge standard assumptions about the business corporation's emergence and performance in the United States over the past two centuries. Reviewing in depth the different theoretical and historiographical traditions that have treated the corporation, the volume seeks a new departure that can more fully explain this crucial institution of capitalism. Rejecting assertions that the corporation is dead, the essays show that in fact it has survived and even thrived down to the present in part because of the ways in which it has related to its social, political and cultural environmental. In doing so, the book breaks with older explanations ground in technology and economics, and treats the corporation for the first time as a fully social institution. Drawing on a variety of social theories and approaches, the essays help to point the way toward future studies of this powerful and enduring institution, offering a new periodization and a new set of question for scholars to explore. The range of essays engages the legal and political position of the corporation, the ways in which the corporation has been shaped by and shaped American culture, the controversies over corporate regulation and corporate power, and the efforts of minority and disadvantaged groups to gain access to the resources and opportunities that corporations control.
Book Description
The "modern times" of the early twentieth century saw the rise of the assembly line and the belief that standardization would make the world a better place. Yet along with greater production efficiency came dehumanization, as the division of labor created many jobs requiring mindless repetition rather than conscious involvement with work.
In our own modern times, a comparable revolution has been wrought by information technology. In Our Modern Times, Daniel Cohen traces the roots of this revolution back to the uprisings of 1968, when the youth of the industrialized world rejected the bourgeois values of their parents and the general situation of the workers. Students raised in the anti-establishment culture of the 1960s were able to shatter the world of standardization created by their parents. By the end of the twentieth century, information technology had created decentralized work structures that encouraged autonomy and personal initiative. But with this greater flexibility came the psychic stress and burnout of "24/7." Cohen explores the many ways that the new technology has changed our work and personal lives, our very conceptions of family and community. He argues compellingly that the present era represents a revolution that will be completed only when the importance of human capital is no longer overshadowed by the cost-saving efficiencies demanded by financial capital.
Book Description
In Thailand, a $4 billion per year tourist industry is the linchpin of the modernization process called the "Thai Economic Miracle". And what is Thailand's main attraction? Sex for hire. Year after year young women are lured to Bangkok to staff the teeming brothels, massage parlors, and sex bars that cater to male tourists from the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, the Gulf States, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Developed from Lillian S. Robinson's article in The Nation,
Night Market traces the historical, cultural, material, and textual traditions that have combined in unique ways to establish sex tourism as an integral part of the developing Thai economy. It explores international sex tourism from the perspectives of economic-development planning, forced labor market choices, international sexual alienation, and textual traditions that have constructed sexual "Other" cultures in Western imagination.
Customer Reviews:
Five Things I Learned from Reading This Book.......2006-12-09
1. Travel is by nature exploitative of the environments and indigenous cultures of the places visited. Best just to stay home.
2. It's irresponsibly hedonistic to desire a good meal, a glass of fine wine or a swim on a tropical beach. Again, it's best to stay home. And at home you should stick to steamed vegetables from your garden, filtered tap water and cold showers.
3. It's possible to write and publish a book that is ostensibly about the anthropology and political economy of Thailand when you are unfamiliar with either discipline (both authors have doctorates in literature) and know little about the country or its language. All you need is a pile of travel guides, vacation brochures and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. If you can spout meaningless pap like "the bar-girl subjectivity" to uncomprehending interview subjects, so much the better. (A better title for this book would have been: "Sexy Thailand: The View from an MLA Convention." In fact how this book ever got published in the first place is beyond me; I guess someone at Routledge thought sex would sell, but that's a matter between the Routledge editors and their own personal deities.)
4. Both that the personal is political and the political is personal. (See work cited by authors: "Riflessioni liguistiche sul personale e sul politico," which, by the way, is one of several works in European languages listed in a bibliography that does not mention even one article in Thai or any other Asian language.)
5. Although western culture has irredeemably objectified, exoticized and fetishized Asian women, it's o.k. for a White American Male (WAM) to marry a "LBFM," but only if she's from a "good" (i.e., wealthy) family, as co-author Bishop says in the book that he has done. Bishop makes his reason for writing the book explicit on page 1, where he says that when he traveled around Thailand with his Thai wife everyone assumed she was a prostitute. At restaurants, Thai men at neighboring tables would make disparaging remarks, and "not even my rebukes in Thai could silence their tongues." He might have tried being diplomatic or even improving his Thai, which the rest of the book proves is a language that he knows barely at all. Instead he co-wrote this book, so much as to say, look, I wrote a book published by a fancy academic press that shows what idiots you all are, so shut up! (If you think this comment is too personal, see number 4, above. And also note that Bishop--who at the time the book was published was "Visiting Assistant Professor" at SMU--now works at a university in Singapore, a city whose expat residents enjoy a lifestyle that more closely approximates that of high colonialism than any other place on earth. At least we can be thankful that he's not writing articles about the "subjectivity" of his domestic help. Although "Night Market" is on his c.v., his list of current research interests does not mention anthropology, economics, sex, or even Thailand.)
Greatly informative.......2003-03-30
Lillian Robinson has explored the "economic miracle" of Thailand with great detail and care. That she is passionate about her subject and cares for the women and girls who are exploited in the Thai tourist sex market is at once refreshing and needed in our culture which increasingly accepts the commodification of women's bodies.
Pseudo-intellectual garbage.......2002-09-02
A lot of hype and nonsense showing how feminists extremists view the night life scene in Bangkok. From their fanatical point of view only. And of course when one of their own disagrees with them, such as, Cleo Oldzer, rather than question themselves, they dump on her. These people remind me of the academics in the play Equus, who had no hope of enjoying life. A very boring book in which they love to babble about "tropes." Well, sweetiepies, trope THIS.
An overblown effort.......1999-12-02
While the subject of this book is very interesting and deserves further study, the authors were very pretensious. The book did offer some new insights into Thai economics and how the tourism and prostituion industries interact, but one gets the feeling the authors wanted to rail against the "Farangs" that travel to the kingdom. Two items particularly irritated me. The first was how the authors referenced documents from a navigator on Christopher Columbus' first voyage to America to describe how foreigners feel about Thai prostitues. How a document written about a voyage before there was a Thailand (or U.S.A. for that matter) pertains to Bangkok massage parlors, I'll never know. The second "documentation" concerned a Thai Air advertisement. The ad featured a stewardess smiling at a white airline traveler. The authors try to convince the reader that this is proof that Thai industries are actively promoting the sex trade. If this is true, nearly every commercial on American television is an active promotion of prostitution in the U.S. There is a need for a serious study of the socio-economic impact of the sex trade in Thailand, but this is not it. This is nothing more than a tirade against prostitution and the foreign travelers who venture to Thailand. How prostitution destroys young Thais is truly a sad story, but the authors should devote a little more effort in researching their subject, rather than blindly grasping at obtuse concepts to prove a predjudicial viewpoint.
At least one 5-star review is an author.......1999-03-05
The turgid, confused prose is a dead give away. So is the overblown praise for this poorly written book. The 5 star review from "the United States of America" has to be one of the authors. If so, then the call for "objective" reviews from a postmodernist is ironic, as well as amusing. Also ironic is the book's theme of exploitation---by relying on a dated, superficial review of scholarly research, as well as sleazy pop culture, the book itself appears to be a work of Western exploitation. Except this time, it's the arrogant academics exploiting prostitutes, rather than their male customers. This harsh, intensely narcisistic diatribe may be good vita fodder, but it is not worthwhile reading.
Book Description
When did mass culture first appear in the United States? How was it conceived, produced and disseminated? Who were the main players in its manufacture? Richard Ohmann argues persuasively that the pivotal juncture came at the turn of the twentieth century when magazines began to reach large audiences and to depend heavily on advertising revenues. Mass circulation of magazines, combined with the rise of brand name products, facilitated the emergence of a homogenized mass culture (one produced by the few for the many in the name of profit) for the first time. This epochal change in the making of culture took place through the energy and innovations of diverse agents - publishers, readers, ad men, merchandisers -- acting to achieve disparate but compatible goals. Ohmann shows how their efforts succeeded because they answered to the needs of big business at a time when industrial capitalism's greatest achievements had led to its deepest crisis. Knitting together social and economic history with literary criticism and cultural theory, Ohmann develops a powerful new account of consumer society and of the social class in which it first took root.
Customer Reviews:
Ohmann is a genius, though this is not his best book........1998-09-16
Some critics consider this to be Ohmann's best work, which is odd...a little like praising Isaac Newton for his religious writings rather than gravity or calculus. Richard Ohmann is the genius who wrote "Shaw, the Style and the Man." This landmark book contains a new method for analysing style (all style, not just Shaw's) which lends itself to immediate application in the teaching of composition and rhetoric. The Shaw book is an exciting and useful book, not the usual academic cant. Every teacher of english should commit murder if necessary to acquire it.
A lackluster piece full of superfluous language........1998-09-15
This man writes a lot, but says nothing.
Book Description
Goods are imbued with meanings and uses by their producers. When they are exported, they can act as a means of communication or domination. However, there is no guarantee that the intentions of the producer will be recognized, much less respected, by the consumer from another culture.
Cross-Cultural Consumption is a fascinating guide to the cultural implications of the globalization of a consumer society. The chapters address topics ranging from the clothing of colonial subjects in South Africa and the rise of the "hypermarket" in Argentina, to the presentation of culture in international tourist hotels.
Through their examination of cultural imperialism and cultural appropriation of the representation of "otherness" and identity, Howes and his contributors show how the increasingly global flow of goods and images challenges the very idea of the "cultural border" and creates new spaces for cultural invention.
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