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Posted 98 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: consumerism, consumer culture, consumption, sociology / 0 Comments
Shopping: meaningful or meaningless? It is the activity on which we in the rich nations spend most time after work and sleep, and the favourite soft target for the commentariat who regularly argue that shopping is more than emblematic of a ‘hollowed out’ society and is actually destroying the social fabric of modern ‘consumer’ societies.
Modern societies are consumer societies, as well as producer ones,and as they are also urban societies - self sufficiency is not an option.
Written against the grain of a social critique which cannot distinguish between shopping and consumerism this book shows how the activity of shopping holds us together physically, socially, psychologically, and as a community. As a ‘practice’ shopping is a mainstay of everyday life.
Shopping, the book, is essential for second and third year courses in the sociology ofeveryday life and will soon earn a place in courses in economic sociology; consumer behaviour; the life course; material culture; psycho-social studies; business studies; gender studies; cultural studies; and practical ethics.
Based on the premise that shopping is both more and less than buying, Shopping argues that to understand the activity we have to understand the meanings made and remade through it, and this can lead us to see shopping also as a‘practice’ as understood and commended by social philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
Still, shopping is not normally seen in this way and Shopping explores why shopping has a ‘bad name’, how it ‘fell from grace’ and instead of being associated with thrift and good housekeeping became synonymous with being a spendthrift. Our attachment to shopping is not all selfishness, frivolity and indulgence,and going shopping is not how we spend most of our money.
Shopping explains why early shopping memories are so lasting, why we have a deep attachment to certain shops, what we learn from shopping, how it tracks us and nudges us along the life course, and why old people are culturally ‘absent’ from the high street.
Examining shopping is a way of examining culture, thus in how we shop, where we shop, why we shop, and whether we profess to like or dislike shopping, are part of the way we express ourselves but also our nationality, our class and our gender.
Shoppingchallenges many everyday assumptions about shopping as well as the popular discourse about it as the epitome of meaninglessness, before concluding with a bold and radical account of the meaning of shopping as based on a ‘deep structure’ formed from the unconscious meanings and processes evoked by the activity.
Perceptive and penetrating, imaginative and interdisciplinary, Shopping is not a text book, but makes its readers think. It is completely original, there is nothing else like it on the market and it will be controversial.
Posted 174 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: sociology, Dying, Death, America / 0 Comments
As we write this blog we are coping with the aftermath of the tragedy in Haiti. The latest count is an estimated 230,000 deaths and rising. Haiti happened too late to be included in our book but it reflects its scope--trying to understand and explain who dies, how we die, what 
happens after we die, and how do we cope with death. We clearly saw the social implications of death in Haiti, as the poor died by the tens of thousands, where the medical care was makeshift and minimal, where the survivors had nowhere to find shelter and no food to eat, and the dead were buried in mass graves.
We use three central themes in this book. First, we look at death and dying at the macro level, how many people have died and the social structure in which the deaths occurred, and the micro level, the individual instances of death. Second, we relate the patters of social inequality that are institutionalized at the societal level to the corresponding patterns inequality at the individual level of dying. Third, we outline the topics of consumerism and commercialism that link life and death in late capitalist American society.
We divide the book in four parts. In Part I we examine the demographic aspects of death, who dies according to gender and race in United States and how it compares to other nations. We also examine the cultural changes in perceptions of death in the western world from the Middle Ages to the present and how death is intertwined with the nature of health care in today’s America. In Part II we discuss where death takes place, increasingly away from home and into medical establishments. We then turn to the dying itself and examine the controversial topics of euthanasia and assisted suicide. We end the section in surveying the various types of funeral practices, such as the movement away from traditional burial toward cremation and more recent green modes of burial—chemical free and in biodegradable containers. In Part III we look at the individual death of children and then review death and destruction on a large scale, from war to natural disasters such as Katrina. In the final section, Part IV, we turn to the professionals who have to tell the ‘bad news’ to the dying or the families of the dead. This topic is followed by the different ways in which we grieve when someone dies and then we move on to discuss the various beliefs (or lack thereof) from religious to philosophical in immortality. We conclude that death is a mirror of the way Americans live, increasingly highly expensive and consumeristic, continuing to privilege the rich over the poor and still trying to deny its coming by wrapping it in ribbons and glitter.
Posted 226 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: sociology, globalization, climate change, Copenhagen / 0 Comments
The Sociology of Globalization discusses dimensions of globalization from media and identity to migration and social movements, from history to theories. It also argues that environment, economics and politics are things that any sociologist who aspires to understand society needs to pay attention to. These dimensions affect society. They are not outside it.
Recent developments such as the Copenhagen climate talks and the financial crisis raise possible conclusions about globalization: 1) they appear to demonstrate the reality of global interdependency; 2) they suggest a crisis for the neoliberal type of globalization that seems to have been behind such problems; and 3) they show the need for global governance to tackle climate change and regulate the economy.
Interdependency – global but uneven
It’s true that climate change and financial crisis demonstrate global interdependency. But they also involve great unevenness. The financial crisis was global. Events in one small part of the world had global repercussions. But how global was it? It had origins at a local level, in the US sub-prime mortgage market and in irresponsibility and lack of political regulation in US lending. Some countries have been more affected and taken longer to come out of recession, like the UK and Spain because of their financial bias or housing markets. Other parts of the world were less affected. China and Brazil are two significant economies that experienced less upheaval. Or areas have been affected differently - for instance through the impact being on exports or aid rather than finance. Countries also responded differently. Some like the US and UK poured money into their economies. Others, like Germany, were more cautious.
So, global interdependency has been shown in the economic crisis - but with local differences in its origins and effects, more than homogenisation or evenness. Similarly climate change has effects across the world. But these are greater in some areas, such as African countries and low-lying islands, whose carbon emissions are often quite low. At the same time, out of nearly 200 countries in the world just two – the USA and China - produce 40% of the world’s carbon emissions. The effects and origins of climate change are also uneven.
A crisis for neoliberal globalization?
Has the credibility of neoliberal globalization been damaged by climate change and the financial crisis? Many say these were caused by individualism, lack of regulation, short-termism and risk – all characteristics of neoliberal types of capitalism in the Anglo-American world. During the economic crisis, economies that are more regulated, state-interventionist and social, of a German or Japanese type, gained the edge in arguments about how organise capitalism. For some, globalization is the spread of neoliberalism. So if the credibility of neoliberalism is damaged this also means that globalization is under threat.
Opinion polls show that the public is appalled by the greed and irresponsibility of bankers, and to be paying the price for this with cuts to their jobs and public services. If neoliberalism is to be challenged in favour of more social and regulated types of capitalism there is no better chance than in the context of climate change and financial crisis. However public criticism has been personalised, aimed at greedy bankers, irresponsible borrowers and weak politicians rather than structures or systems. Politically there has been no systematic attempt to shift away from neoliberalism. Governments have bailed out capitalism with big injections of finance, rather than reconstructing it. Banks are determined to continue paying bonuses that encourage risky and individualistic behaviour. There was no greater opportunity to challenge neoliberal capitalism than the financial crisis, but it has survived intact.
Towards global governance?
Both climate change and the financial crisis appear to have shown the need for global governance. They are global problems, which require the combined action of many governments rather than just national solutions. However this hasn’t happened. The financial crisis was tackled by reflation at a national level, rather than regulation globally. And this was effective, bolstering the credibility of nation-state politics.
The crisis was linked to the irresponsibility of finance and deregulation. Common taxes and regulations on finance could have been introduced across nations by global agreements, but governments didn’t pursue this. If this crisis didn’t provide a basis for more global governance, in pursuit of the responsibility of capital to society, it’s difficult to see what will.
The failure of global agreement at Copenhagen, meanwhile, has been blamed on weak-willed leaders. But it was caused by structures as much as personnel. One typical problem in global governance is that it involves many actors with conflicting interests. At Copenhagen 195 countries seated round a table couldn’t find a common position. Another problem is that powerful actors can wreck the whole thing by their recalcitrance. In the past on climate change this has been the USA. We are told that this time it was China. These problems are as much to do with this kind of structure as with individual leaders.
Before Copenhagen countries like Australia said there was more chance of national governments finding solutions and enforcing them than of this happening globally. National levels are where agreements can be made and sanctions are enforceable. At the same time, agreements on economic issues, carbon emissions, and disarmament, for instance, need to be made above national levels. But the lack of a basis for this in global governance, means that above-national but below-global arrangements may have to be where this happens
Pre-Copenhagen President Obama sought bilateral agreements on climate change with countries like China and India. After Copenhagen commentators argued that solutions need to start at local and national levels, where there are people pursuing carbon reductions, or with enough in common with others to make agreements with them. Such below-global attempts to pursue alternatives nationally and in international alliances have also been pursued by politicians like President Chavez of Venezuela.
So, in the case of two major crises that seem to call out for global regulation, below-global and bottom-up seem as effective approaches as global and top-down. Copenhagen and the economic crisis have left us with an unevenly globalised world, with neoliberalism over a crisis which it seemed could have defeated it, and with national and bilateral government as important as global governance.
Posted 226 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Peace, Conflict Resolution, sociology, globalization / 0 Comments
Over fifty people were killed in the Johannesburg area in 2009. This seems unsurprising given that it considered the murder capital of the world. The fifty or so people to whom I refer, however, are different: they were economic migrants from neighbouring states, drawn to South Africa by its status as rainbow nation and by the prospect of work. The display of very magnanimous forgiveness South Africans showed each other after the collapse of apartheid and the evident stability of its new non-racial political system makes it appear odd that strangers should be viciously attacked. South Africa’s peace process has been universalised and its processes of reconciliation, truth recovery and memory management have been championed as examples for other societies undergoing a democratic transition to peace. A sociological approach to peace processes, however, identifies the weaknesses in South Africa’s transition. The peace process was an elite compromise at the top, in which Black people felt everything would change because they now held political power and Whites felt nothing would change because they retained control of the economy. This is no conundrum. South Africa’s peace process has essentially been about the introduction of good governance structures to deliver institutional reform. This approach to peace processes is the dominant one in the West and argues that the introduction of democratic politics, human rights law and free market economics is the way either to eliminate conflict or allow its reproduction in non-violent ways. We might call this a political approach to peace processes. It is based on the naïve assumption that once problematic politics are resolved, social healing, reconciliation and restoration follow on naturally. South Africa – and all other political peace processes – illustrate that they do not. Underlying the political peace process is a social one; the social peace process is about societal healing, forgiveness, the restoration of social relationship and the like. Good governance approaches neglect the social peace process or take it for granted. A sociological approach to peace processes, however, prioritises it, taking for granted that institutional reform is essential and must proceed in parallel. For all the institutional reform in South Africa, there has been very little societal healing. Frustrated economic expectations, fierce competition for economic resources and huge unemployment spilled over into attacks on strangers. The incidents offer no better demonstration of the need for a sociological approach to peace processes: of the need to address issues of justice, fairness and social redistribution in addition to ending the killings; of the need for good governance institutional reform to be introduced in a context in which issues of victimhood are also dealt with, where public policies are forged to manage the problem of social reintegration for ex-combatants or assist with the empowerment of women, the deconstruction of violent masculinities amongst ex-combatants, or which deal with the management of emotions, introduce spaces for hoping and forgiving, assist in bottom-up truth recovery and forms of memory work that help in the re-remembering and re-memorialisation of the past. These are the topics that go to define the sociology of peace processes.
