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Over the last fifty years, British patients have been made into consumers. This book considers how and why the figure of the patient-consumer was brought into being, paying particular attention to the role played by patient organisations. Making the Patient-Consumer explores the development of patient-consumerism from the 1960s to 2010 in relation to seven key areas. Patient autonomy, representation, complaint, rights, information, voice and choice were all central to the making of the patient-consumer. These concepts were used initially by patient organisations to construct the figure of the patient-consumer, but by the 1990s the government had taken over as the main actor shaping ideas about patient consumerism. Making the Patient-Consumer is the first empirical, historical account of a fundamental shift in modern British health policy and practice. The book will be of use to historians, public policy analysts and all those attempting to better understand the nature of contemporary healthcare.
79 6 Consumer thrift: Keynes, consumer rights and the new thrifty consumers The Great Depression, thrift and consumer rights The previous chapter examined how thrift, as manifested through practices of consuming less, making do, or simply not consuming, was galvanised as a practice to aid the economic, and to some extent ideological, survival of nations. In contrast, this chapter shows how history very quickly came to employ a contrasting logic when it came to promoting action on the part of citizens. It explores an opposite form of thrift –that of being a
140 5 Halal consumers In this chapter we explore how Muslim consumers in the UK and Denmark understand and practice halal consumption in their everyday lives. Following on from Chapters 3 and 4, the specific focus is how consumers make sense of buying/eating meat and non-meat products. As in the previous chapter, another important theme explored is how Muslim consumers understand and practice everyday (halal) food consumption in the UK and Denmark. We build on but also move beyond existing research on halal consumption in the everyday lives of Muslims in a
108 4 Kosher consumers In this chapter we explore how Jewish consumers in the UK and Denmark understand and practice kosher consumption in their everyday lives. As we noted in Chapter 1, several studies deal with how diverse groups of Jews in the global diaspora negotiate kosher principles and practices. For example, dietary practices provide a common symbolic system through which the increasingly heterogeneous notions of Jewish identity in Denmark can be expressed, and one way to reinforce one’s Jewish identity is by keeping kosher (Buckser 1999). Similarly
1 Consumer and consumerism under state socialism: demand-side abundance and its discontents in Hungary during the long 1960s György Péteri1 Can consumption in state-socialist societies constitute a relevant field for the student of social issues related to overflow situations? So skeptical readers may wonder, and I cannot blame them. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about these societies is shortages rather than excesses, insufficiency rather than plenty, a lack of almost everything rather than abundance. Indeed, shortages and their
4 The consumer bond Perhaps the most obvious connection between James Bond and Playboy is the lifestyle that can be contextualised within the ascendance of male consumerism in 1960s Britain and America. I have already observed how, in the context of 1950s America, Playboy took inspiration from Esquire and targeted the male consumer to great success, and at the same time in 1950s Britain, Ian Fleming modernised aspects of the gentleman spy to give Bond a luxurious lifestyle based on sophisticated consumption. It has been noted that the post-war consumer boom was
5 ‘Consumers of their own productions’: popular radicalism and consumer organising Not all middle-class observers were implacably hostile to Chartism, though democratic talk was generally ignored. Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, offered a sympathetic if ultimately reductive representation of the effects of hunger on the labouring poor in Mary Barton (1848), her great ‘Condition of England’ novel that dramatised the Chartist ‘insurrection’ of 1842. His wits broken by ‘clemming’, John Barton, one of the book’s chief protagonists, is inexorably driven, along with
in the fumes from the burning coal gas. They can find coal debris in my body when I get check-ups done, so I get coughing fits and colds as well.’ This is, in other words, a debilitating, unhealthy, and unjust job, in which debt-bonded workers produce cheap bricks for citizens of some of the world’s wealthiest countries. Very few consumers would be willing to buy bricks that they knew were made in conditions like this, but identifying the source of bricks is far from easy. The brick supply chain runs through a long
10 Everyday driving – Mobile consumerism and commuting A s we have seen, buying a car was a key element in wealthier middle-class suburban life of the 1930s and it was, at first, mostly used for special journeys. For example, for the family weekend trip to the seaside and the countryside, and for driving at high speed, for the fun of driving in itself.1 These are the journeys that are recorded with great frequency in memoirs and in contemporary accounts because they were great fun and exciting. Photograph albums made in the 1930s often turn up at auctions
supplemented or even supplanted by a ‘post-subcultural studies’ that finds the distinction between mainstream and alternative very difficult to locate or maintain). Before assuming that tattoos have been entirely absorbed into the postmodern marketplace, however, a note of caution needs to be sounded. As Josh Adams and others argue, the ‘focus on the “new tattoo generation” of tattooed middle-class professionals’ sidelines the continuing role of tattooing within contexts outside the mainstream of consumer capitalism, for instance – at the risk of