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Brands are introduced into the lives of consumers from an early age. Even before they start school, they can recognise brand names and ask for brands by name. The meaning of brands to children can vary dramatically with age. As with other aspects of consumer socialisation, children’s initial orientation towards brands occurs at a superficial level because their level of cognitive development does not allow them to understand deeper-seated symbolic meanings of brands.
This book examines these processes and how they evolve over the different stages of childhood. It considers specific models of cognitive development and how they inform what we know about the way children engage with brands. It also examines the way brands have adopted new promotional platforms in the digital era and in consequence the ways in which they have taken on new forms that often disguise their true purpose.
While children can begin the understand the nature and purpose of advertising from well before their teen years, when advertising is less overt and more subtle – as it often is in the promotional techniques used by brands in online social media and virtual environments – this can impede a child’s ability to recognise what is going on. This book examines these phenomena and considers their implications for the future regulation of brand promotions.
Beautyscapes explores the rapidly developing global phenomenon of international medical travel, focusing specifically on patient-consumers seeking cosmetic surgery outside their home country and on those who enable them to access treatment abroad, including key figures such as surgeons and facilitators. Documenting the complex and sometimes fraught journeys of those who travel for treatment abroad, as well as the nature and power relations of the transnational IMT industry, this is the first book to focus specifically on cosmetic surgery tourism. A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Beautyscapes draws on key themes in studies of globalisation and mobility, such as gender and class, neoliberalism, social media, assemblage, conviviality and care, to explain the nature and growing popularity of cosmetic surgery tourism. The book challenges myths about vain and ill-informed travellers seeking surgery from ‘cowboy’ foreign doctors, yet also demonstrates the difficulties and dilemmas that medical tourists – especially cosmetic surgery tourists – face. Vividly illustrated with ethnographic material and with the voices of those directly involved in cosmetic surgery tourism, Beautyscapes is based on a large research project exploring cosmetic surgery journeys from Australia and China to East Asia and from the UK to Europe and North Africa.
Drawing on materials from the medieval period to the twenty-first century, Reading: a cultural practice explores how concepts of reading change according to historical and social context. Combining a history of reading with insights drawn from critical theory, the book argues that reading is always implicated in ideology, and that reading is especially linked to religious and educational structures. Examining a variety of texts and genres, including books of hours, Victorian fiction, the art and literature of the Bloomsbury Group, and contemporary social media sites, the opening chapters give an overview of the history of reading from the classical period onwards. The discussion then focuses on the following key concepts: close reading, the common reader, reading and postmodernism, reading and technology. The book uses these areas to set in motion a larger discussion about the relationship between professional and non-professional forms of reading. Standing up for the reader’s right to read in any way that they like, the book argues that academia’s obsession with textual interpretation bears little relationship to the way that most non-academic readers engage with written language. As well as analysing pivotal moments in the history of reading, the book puts pre-twentieth-century concepts of reading into dialogue with insights derived from post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. This means that as well as providing a history of reading, the book analyses such major preoccupations in reading theory as reading’s relation to visual culture, how reading is taught in schools, and feminist and queer reading practices.
The book reports on a major mixed-methods research project on dining out in England. It is a re-study of the populations of three cities – London, Bristol and Preston – based on a unique systematic comparison of behaviour between 2015 and 1995. It reveals social differences in practice and charts the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out.
It addresses topics including the changing frequency and meaning of dining out, patterns of domestic hospitality, changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with eating out. It shows how the practice of eating out in the three cities has evolved over twenty years. The findings are put in the context of controversies about the nature of taste, the role of social class, the application of theories of practice and the effects of institutional change in the UK.
The subject matter is central to many disciplines: Food Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Hospitality and Tourism Studies, Media and Communication, Social History, Social and Cultural Geography. It is suitable for scholars, researchers, postgraduate students and advanced undergraduate students in the UK, Europe, North America and East Asia. Academic interest in the book should be accentuated by its theoretical, methodological and substantive aspects. It will also be of interest to the catering trades and a general readership on the back of burgeoning interest in food and eating fostered by mass and social media.
imperviousness to economic pressures, it is unsurprising that social media has not yet transformed Ireland’s traditional media. Moreover, the small size of constituencies and the continued importance of candidates mean that Ireland has yet to have an election where social media would be truly influential. Nonetheless, it is remarkable to discover, as we did, that social media has had virtually no impact on coverage of Irish elections. Actually, rather than a change in the economics of the media, which it is as a bare minimum, social media appears more as an exogenous factor
Recently in Bristol, the rights and liberties of LGBT+ communities have collided with the traditions and beliefs of, predominantly, faith communities. On social media the narrative has quickly become polarised. At a time when strong leadership feels critical yet absent, politicians and programmers point to one another to take responsibility for regulation. The discourse continues to play out in the everyday and communities who look to statutory and sector agencies for clarity have been left confused, frustrated and wanting. Using scenarios that have arisen within our inner-city community arts centre as case studies, this chapter explores the everyday challenges of intersectionality approaches in defining and defending free speech. Drawing on influences including programmer and activist Richard Stallman’s distinction between ‘free’ and ‘open’, we seek to establish a set of ‘Free Speech Principles’ to assist in navigating intersectional contradictions of the Equality Act 2010. Analysing examples of ‘free speech’ within today’s political and social media landscape and comparing these to historical examples of civil rights movements that have disrupted traditional power structures, it asks if today’s weaponisation of free speech is free at all and explores what might be missing of the human among the law and the algorithm. Finally, it refines the principles of our programmers and lawmakers to provide greater clarity for everyday discourse, hoping to develop a simple toolkit for clarifying how organisations and programmers might respond in order to uphold our collective freedom of expression.
Critical theory and demagogic populism provides a detailed analysis of the relevance of the Frankfurt School’s work to understanding contemporary populism. It draws on the research that the Institute for Social Research conducted concerning domestic demagogues during its period of ‘exile’ in the USA. The book argues that the figure of the demagogue has been neglected in both orthodox ‘populism studies’ and in existing critical approaches to populism such as that of Ernesto Laclau. Demagogic ‘capture’ of populist movements and their legacies is thus a contingent prospect for ‘left’ and ‘right’ populist movements. An account of ‘modern demagogy’ is thus detailed, from the Institute’s own dedicated demagogy studies through to their dialogue with Weber’s work on charismatic leadership, the US liberal critique of demagogy and Freud’s group psychology. The Institute’s linkage of ‘modern demagogy’ to the culture industry speaks to the underestimation in ‘populism studies’ of the significance of two other ‘modern phenomena. The first is ‘cultural populism’ – the appeal to a folkloric understanding of ‘the people’ and/or ‘their culture’. The second is the pivotal role of modern means of communication, not only in the recent prominence of social media but demagogic exploitation of all media since the rise of literacy and the widening of the suffrage in the nineteenth century. The dialectical dimensions of these processes are also highlighted in reconstructing the Institute’s work and in extending these analyses through to the present. The book so concludes by weighing up potential counter-demagogic forces within and beyond the culture industry.
A new concept, White Mindfulness, encapsulates the convergence of multiple social forces that shape ‘secular’ mindfulness in the West. Informed by whiteness, neoliberalism, postracialism, and a drive for meaning, the Mindfulness Industry is exploding through social media, apps, digital and print materials, as well as research and the psy-disciplines. White Mindfulness spans numerous institutions and sectors in service of reducing stress and improving wellness. Its presence is amplified by pedagogies that train educators in its image. Yet the pillars of White Mindfulness reveal institutions and pedagogies troubled by race and cultures that emphasise hyper-individualism, consumerism, and self-regulation in contrast to community, cooperatives, and co-regulation. The industry sits shoulder to shoulder with tenets of late capitalism steeped in growing inequities and deep social chasms. Originally envisioned as a public health service, engulfed by the invisibilisation of whiteness, its present composition is elitist, commodified, White, and middle and upper class. Unveiling the roots of the dominant narratives and social norms that infuse White Mindfulness and shape its social trajectory, this book reveals how it comes to reflect the power structures of the societies in which it takes root in the West. Examination of mindfulness institutions shows a predominantly elite White male leadership. But the race-gender dynamic is not confined to structures and leadership. It ripples through US-Eurocentric approaches to ownership, conceptualisation, pedagogy, and community engagement. Using concepts like People of the Global Majority and embodied justice to decentre whiteness, this book explores the decolonisation of White Mindfulness through a growing movement that stands outside its remit.
constitutes performance or performativity ( Leeker et al. 2017 , Gabriel 2014 ), it is important to note that social media constitute a vital site for both. Social media could be viewed in many ways as medieval maps or “performative itineraries that reproduced the knowledge learned in and through practice” ( Pouliot 2008 , 260). If regular people can shift and subvert cultural norms and IR literature has
This chapter analyses how hiloni millennials have experienced what has been called religionization of the Israel Defence Forces over the past 20 years. It argues that for this generation, serving as IDF conscripts and reservists during and after the 2005 Disengagement, two things have become clear. First, that army service during this period has helped shape both millennial hiloni and Jewish identity post-Oslo. Second, despite bitter recriminations between political left and right on social media, the frequency of wars post-Oslo has reinforced Jewish national solidarity, across religious lines. It provides new interview data with young hilonim as well as teachers in mechinot (pre-army colleges), speaking about Jewish identity education in the IDF.