The Sympathetic Consumer

The Sympathetic Consumer PDF Author: Tad Skotnicki
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503627748
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
When people encounter consumer goods—sugar, clothes, phones—they find little to no information about their origins. The goods will thus remain anonymous, and the labor that went into making them, the supply chain through which they traveled, will remain obscured. In this book, Tad Skotnicki argues that this encounter is an endemic feature of capitalist societies, and one with which consumers have struggled for centuries in the form of activist movements constructed around what he calls The Sympathetic Consumer. This book documents the uncanny similarities shared by such movements over the course of three centuries: the transatlantic abolitionist movement, US and English consumer movements around the turn of the twentieth century, and contemporary Fair Trade activism. Offering a comparative historical study of consumer activism the book shows, in vivid detail, how activists wrestled with the broader implications of commodity exchange. These activists arrived at a common understanding of the relationship between consumers, producers, and commodities, and concluded that consumers were responsible for sympathizing with invisible laborers. Ultimately, Skotnicki provides a framework to identify a capitalist culture by examining how people interpret everyday phenomena essential to it.

The Sympathetic Consumer

The Sympathetic Consumer PDF Author: Tad Skotnicki
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503627748
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book

Book Description
When people encounter consumer goods—sugar, clothes, phones—they find little to no information about their origins. The goods will thus remain anonymous, and the labor that went into making them, the supply chain through which they traveled, will remain obscured. In this book, Tad Skotnicki argues that this encounter is an endemic feature of capitalist societies, and one with which consumers have struggled for centuries in the form of activist movements constructed around what he calls The Sympathetic Consumer. This book documents the uncanny similarities shared by such movements over the course of three centuries: the transatlantic abolitionist movement, US and English consumer movements around the turn of the twentieth century, and contemporary Fair Trade activism. Offering a comparative historical study of consumer activism the book shows, in vivid detail, how activists wrestled with the broader implications of commodity exchange. These activists arrived at a common understanding of the relationship between consumers, producers, and commodities, and concluded that consumers were responsible for sympathizing with invisible laborers. Ultimately, Skotnicki provides a framework to identify a capitalist culture by examining how people interpret everyday phenomena essential to it.

The Sympathetic Medium

The Sympathetic Medium PDF Author: Jill Galvan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with séances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted—in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in séance parlors—by women. In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers a richly nuanced and culturally grounded analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the century. Examining a wide variety of fictional explorations of feminine channeling (in both the technological and supernatural realms) by such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and George Du Maurier, Galvan argues that women were often chosen for that role, or assumed it themselves, because they made at-a-distance dialogues seem more intimate, less mediated. Two allegedly feminine traits, sympathy and a susceptibility to automatism, enabled women to disappear into their roles as message-carriers.Anchoring her literary analysis in discussions of social, economic, and scientific culture, Galvan finds that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of mediated communication reveals the challenges that the new networked culture presented to prevailing ideas of gender, dialogue, privacy, and the relationship between body and self.

Selling Mrs. Consumer

Selling Mrs. Consumer PDF Author: Janice Williams Rutherford
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820327271
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This first book-length treatment of the life and work of Christine Frederick (1883-1970) reveals an important dilemma that faced educated women of the early twentieth century. Contrary to her professional role as home efficiency expert, advertising consultant, and consumer advocate, Christine Frederick espoused the nineteenth-century ideal of preserving the virtuous home--and a woman's place in it. In an effort to reconcile her desire to succeed in the public sphere of modernization and consumerism with the knowledge that most middle-class Americans still held traditional beliefs about gender roles, Frederick fashioned a career for herself that encouraged other women to remain at home. With the rise of home economics and scientific management, Frederick--college-educated but confined to the drudgery of housework--devised a plan for bringing the public sphere into the domestic. Her home would become her factory. She learned how to standardize tasks by observing labor-saving devices in industry and then applied this knowledge to housework. She standardized dishwashing, for example, by breaking the job into three separate operations: scraping and stacking, washing, and drying and putting away. Determined to train women to become proficient homemakers and efficient managers, Frederick secured a job writing articles for the Ladies' Home Journal. A professional career as home efficiency expert later expanded to include advertising consultant and consumer advocate. Frederick assured male advertisers that she knew women well and promised to help them sell to "Mrs. Consumer." While Frederick sought the power and influence available only to men, she promoted a division of labor by gender and therefore served the fall of the early-twentieth-century wave of feminism. Rutherford's engaging account of Christine Frederick's life reflects a dilemma that continues to affect women today--whether to seek professional gratification or adhere to traditional family values.

Body of Truth

Body of Truth PDF Author: Dan Hill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780471444398
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In Body of Truth, Dan Hill, PhD, explores the rational approach to marketing and market research, using the latest findings on human cognition and communication to help marketers tap into consumers’ real needs and wants. Hill backs his argument with new technology such as biofeedback and facial coding to measure and record consumers’ true sensory responses to products and advertisements, providing a framework for developing marketing initiatives that elicit the optimal emotional response.

Diana Thater

Diana Thater PDF Author: Giuliana Bruno
Publisher: Prestel
ISBN: 9783791354736
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Published in conjunction with the exhibition Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (November 22, 2015-February 21, 2016)"-- Colophon.

Chronic Pain

Chronic Pain PDF Author: Hooshang Hooshmand
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 9780849386671
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The most misunderstood and complex subject in medicine is the hyperpathic pain of sympathetic dystrophy. More common than previously thought, it comprises between 10 and 20 percent of chronic pain patients. Understanding this self-perpetuating pain -- which "never stops" -- requires unbiased knowledge of physiology and pathology. Chronic Pain: Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, Prevention, and Management is devoted to the subject of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD). The book classifies the different stages of RSD and describes the qualitative and quantitative differences between natural endorphins and synthetic narcotics. Included are long-term follow-ups on sympathectomy patients. This important reference explains why sympathectomy fails, but nerve block and physiotherapy is successful in the treatment of RSD. In addition, the mechanism of development of RSD is clarified through an extensive collection of drawings and anatomical pictures as well. Other topics include thermographic methods for the diagnosis of RSD, the role of ACTH in the management of chronic pain, and comparisons between the effects of ACTH and those of corticosteroids. Features Classifies the different stages of RSD Features the most comprehensive coverage of the literature on RSD and its related aspects Describes qualitative and quantitative differences between natural endorphins and systemic narcotics Examines the role of ACTH in the management of chronic pain Clarifies the mechanism of development of RSD through an extensive collection of drawings and anatomical pictures Explains why sympathectomy fails, but nerve block and physiotherapy is successful in the treatment of RSD

Sympathetic Vibrations

Sympathetic Vibrations PDF Author: K. C. Cole
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 9780553342345
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


New Age Capitalism

New Age Capitalism PDF Author: Kimberly J. Lau
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512820016
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
The pursuit of health and wellness has become a fundamental and familiar part of everyday life in America. We are surrounded by an enticing world of products, practices, and promotions assuring health and happiness—cereal boxes claim that their contents can reduce the risk of heart disease, bars of aromatherapy soap seek to wash away our stresses, newspapers celebrate the wonders of the latest superfoods and herbal remedies. No longer confined to the domain of Western medicine, suggestions for healthy living often turn to alternatives originating in distant times and places, in cultures very different from our own. Diets from ancient or remote groups are presented as cures for everything from colds to cancer; exercise regimens based on Eastern philosophies are heralded as paths to physical health and spiritual wellbeing. In New Age Capitalism, Kimberly Lau examines the ideological work that has created this billion-dollar business and allowed "Eastern" and other non-Western traditions to be coopted by Western capitalism. Extending the orientalist logic to the business of health and wellness, American companies have created a lucrative and competitive market for their products, encouraging consumers to believe that they are making the right choices for personal as well as planetary health. In reality, alternative health practices have been commodified for an American public longing not only for health and wellness but also for authenticity, tradition, and a connection to the cultures of an imagined Edenic past. Although consumers might prefer to buy into "authentic" non-Western therapies, New Age Capitalism argues that the market economy makes this goal unattainable.

Buying Power

Buying Power PDF Author: Lawrence B. Glickman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226298663
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
A definitive history of consumer activism, Buying Power traces the lineage of this political tradition back to our nation’s founding, revealing that Americans used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies long before the word boycott even entered our lexicon. Taking the Boston Tea Party as his starting point, Lawrence Glickman argues that the rejection of British imports by revolutionary patriots inaugurated a continuous series of consumer boycotts, campaigns for safe and ethical consumption, and efforts to make goods more broadly accessible. He explores abolitionist-led efforts to eschew slave-made goods, African American consumer campaigns against Jim Crow, a 1930s refusal of silk from fascist Japan, and emerging contemporary movements like slow food. Uncovering previously unknown episodes and analyzing famous events from a fresh perspective, Glickman illuminates moments when consumer activism intersected with political and civil rights movements. He also sheds new light on activists’ relationship with the consumer movement, which gave rise to lobbies like the National Consumers League and Consumers Union as well as ill-fated legislation to create a federal Consumer Protection Agency.

Consumer Neuroscience

Consumer Neuroscience PDF Author: Moran Cerf
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262341611
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
A comprehensive introduction to using the tools and techniques of neuroscience to understand how consumers make decisions about purchasing goods and services. Contrary to the assumptions of economists, consumers are not always rational actors who make decisions in their own best interests. The new field of behavioral economics draws on the insights of psychology to study non-rational decision making. The newer field of consumer neuroscience draws on the findings, tools, and techniques of neuroscience to understand how consumers make judgments and decisions. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of consumer neuroscience, suitable for classroom use or as a reference for business and marketing practitioners. After an overview of the field, the text offers the background on the brain and physiological systems necessary for understanding how they work in the context of decision making and reviews the sensory and perceptual mechanisms that govern our perception and experience. Chapters by experts in the field investigate tools for studying the brain, including fMRI, EEG, eye-tracking, and biometrics, and their possible use in marketing. The book examines the relation of attention, memory, and emotion to consumer behavior; cognitive factors in decision making; and the brain's reward system. It describes how consumers develop implicit associations with a brand, perceptions of pricing, and how consumer neuroscience can encourage healthy behaviors. Finally, the book considers ethical issues raised by the application of neuroscience tools to marketing. Contributors Fabio Babiloni, Davide Baldo, David Brandt, Moran Cerf, Yuping Chen, Patrizia Cherubino, Kimberly Rose Clark, Maria Cordero-Merecuana, William A. Cunningham, Manuel Garcia-Garcia, Ming Hsu, Ana Iorga, Philip Kotler, Carl Marci, Hans Melo, Kai-Markus Müller, Brendan Murray, Ingrid L. C. Nieuwenhuis, Graham Page, Hirak Parikh, Dante M. Pirouz, Martin Reimann, Neal J. Roese, Irit Shapira-Lichter, Daniela Somarriba, Julia Trabulsi, Arianna Trettel, Giovanni Vecchiato, Thalia Vrantsidis, Sarah Walker