Title: Marianne in the market: envisioning consumer society in fin-de-siècle France
Author: Tiersten, Lisa 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: European Studies | European History | Consumerism | French Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In the late nineteenth century, controversy over the social ramifications of the emerging consumer marketplace beset the industrialized nations of the West. In France, various commentators expressed concern that rampant commercialization threatened the republican ideal of civic-mindedness as well as the French reputation for good taste. The female bourgeois consumer was a particularly charged figure because she represented consumption run amok. Critics feared that the marketplace compromised her morality and aesthetic discernment, with dire repercussions for domestic life and public order. Marianne in the Market traces debates about the woman consumer to examine the complex encounter between the market and the republic in nineteenth-century France. It explores how agents of capitalism - advertisers, department store managers, fashion journalists, self-styled taste experts - addressed fears of consumerism through the forging of an aesthetics of the marketplace: a "marketplace modernism." In so doing, they constructed an image of the bourgeois woman as the solution to the problem of unrestrained, individualized, and irrational consumption. Commercial professionals used taste to civilize the market and to produce consumers who would preserve the French aesthetic patrimony. Tasteful consumption legitimized women's presence in the urban public and reconciled their roles as consumers with their domestic and civic responsibilities. A fascinating case study, Marianne in the Market builds on a wide range of sources such as the feminine press, decorating handbooks, exposition reports, advertising materials, novels, and etiquette books. Lisa Tiersten draws on these materials to make the compelling argument that market professionals used the allure of aesthetically informed consumerism to promote new models of the female consumer and the market in keeping with Republican ideals.   [brief]
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Title: The consumer revolution in urban China
Author: Davis, Deborah 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | China | Urban Studies | Consumerism
Publisher's Description: After decades of egalitarian, restricted consumption, residents of China's cities are surrounded by a level of material comfort and commercial hype unimaginable just ten years ago. In this first in-depth treatment of the consumer revolution in China, fourteen leading scholars of Chinese culture and society explore the interpersonal consequences of rapid commercialization.In the early 1980s, Beijing's communist leadership advocated decollectivization, foreign trade, and private entrepreneurship to jump-start a stagnant economy, while explicitly rejecting any notion that economic reforms would promote political change. However, by the early 1990s the reforms in the marketplace not only produced double-digit growth but also enabled ordinary citizens to nurture dreams and social networks that challenged official discourse and conventions through millions of daily commercial transactions. Using participant observation, contributors to this book describe and analyze a wide range of these changing consumer practices: luxury housing, white wedding gowns, greeting cards, McDonald's, discos, premium cigarettes, bowling, and more.   [brief]
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Title: Assembled in Japan: electrical goods and the making of the Japanese consumer
Author: Partner, Simon
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Japan | Media Studies | Technology and Society | Consumerism
Publisher's Description: Assembled in Japan investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, Simon Partner discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s.This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, Partner quickly turns his sights on the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products.Throughout, the author relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.   [brief]
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Title: Radio active: advertising and consumer activism, 1935-1947
Author: Newman, Kathy M 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: American Studies | History | Media Studies | Women's Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Radio Active tells the story of how radio listeners at the American mid-century were active in their listening practices. While cultural historians have seen this period as one of failed reform - focusing on the failure of activists to win significant changes for commercial radio - Kathy M. Newman argues that the 1930s witnessed the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between advertising and activism. Advertising helped to kindle the consumer activism of union members affiliated with the CIO, middle-class club women, and working-class housewives. Once provoked, these activists became determined to influence - and in some cases eliminate - radio advertising. As one example of how radio consumption was an active rather than a passive process, Newman cites The Hucksters, Frederick Wakeman's 1946 radio spoof that skewered eccentric sponsors, neurotic account executives, and grating radio jingles. The book sold over 700,000 copies in its first six months and convinced broadcast executives that Americans were unhappy with radio advertising. The Hucksters left its mark on the radio age, showing that radio could inspire collective action and not just passive conformity.   [brief]
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Title: The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 
Author: Biernacki, Richard 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Sociology | Labor Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life.   [brief]
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Title: Battling for American labor: wobblies, craft workers, and the making of the union movement
Author: Kimeldorf, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | History | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In this incisive reinterpretation of the history of the American labor movement, Howard Kimeldorf challenges received thinking about rank-and-file workers and the character of their unions. Battling for American Labor answers the baffling question of how, while mounting some of the most aggressive challenges to employing classes anywhere in the world, organized labor in the United States has warmly embraced the capitalist system of which they are a part. Rejecting conventional understandings of American unionism, Kimeldorf argues that what has long been the hallmark of organized labor in the United States - its distinctive reliance on worker self-organization and direct economic action - can be seen as a particular kind of syndicalism.Kimeldorf brings this syndicalism to life through two rich and compelling case studies of unionization efforts by Philadelphia longshoremen and New York City culinary workers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He shows how these workers, initially affiliated with the radical IWW and later the conservative AFL, pursued a common logic of collective action at the point of production that largely dictated their choice of unions. Elegantly written and deeply engaging, Battling for American Labor offers insights not only into how the American labor movement got to where it is today, but how it might possibly reinvent itself in the years ahead.   [brief]
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Title: France at the Crystal Palace: bourgeois taste and artisan manufacture in the nineteenth century
Author: Walton, Whitney
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Whitney Walton approaches the nineteenth-century French industrial development from a new perspective - that of consumption. She analyzes the French performance at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to illustrate how bourgeois consumers influenced France's distinctive pattern of industrial development. She also demonstrates the importance of consumption and gender in class formation and reveals how women influenced industry in their role as consumers.Walton examines important consumer goods industries that have been rarely studied by historians, such as the manufacture of wallpaper, furniture, and bronze statues. Using archival sources on household possessions of the Parisian bourgeoisie as well as published works, she shows how consumers' taste for fashionable, artistic, well-made furnishings and apparel promoted a specialization unique to nineteenth-century France.   [brief]
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Title: The children of NAFTA: labor wars on the U.S./Mexico border
Author: Bacon, David 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.   [brief]
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Title: Reorganizing the Rust Belt: an inside study of the American labor movement
Author: Lopez, Steven Henry 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | Economics and Business | Labor Studies | Public Policy | Anthropology | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: This gripping insider's look at the contemporary American trade union movement shows that reports of organized labor's death are premature. In this eloquent and erudite narrative, Steven Henry Lopez demonstrates how, despite a hostile legal environment and the punitive anti-unionism of U.S. employers, a few unions have organized hundreds of thousands of low-wage service workers in the past few years. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been at the forefront of this effort, in the process pioneering innovative strategies of grassroots mobilization and protest. In a powerful ethnography that captures the voices of those involved in SEIU nursing-home organizing in western Pennsylvania, Lopez illustrates how post-industrial, low-wage workers are providing the backbone for a reinvigorated labor movement across the country. Reorganizing the Rust Belt argues that the key to the success of social movement unionism lies in its ability to confront a series of dilemmas rooted in the history of American labor relations. Lopez shows how the union's ability to devise creative solutions - rather than the adoption of specific tactics - makes the difference between success and failure.   [brief]
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Title: Gender differences at work: women and men in nontraditional occupations
Author: Williams, Christine L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Nurses and marines epitomize accepted definitions of femininity and masculinity. Using ethnographic research and provocative in-depth interviews, Christine Williams argues that our popular stereotypes of individuals in nontraditional occupations - male nurses and female marines for example - are ent . . . [more]
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Title: Labor and imperial democracy in prewar Japan
Author: Gordon, Andrew 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Politics | Asian History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy.Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.   [brief]
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Title: Workers against work: labor in Paris and Barcelona during the popular fronts 
Author: Seidman, Michael (Michael M.)
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Social Science | French Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Why did a revolution occur in Spain and not in France in 1936? This is the key question Michael Seidman explores in his important new study of the relations between industrial capitalists and working-class movements in the early part of this century. In a comparative analysis of Paris during the Popular Front and Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution, Seidman examines the strengths and weaknesses of the bourgeoisie in these two cities and traces workers' resistance to, and acceptance of, work. His emphasis on the continuing refusal to work challenges the dominant views of labor historiography and contributes to a general theory of revolutionary workers' control.Seidman illuminates three crucial issues that have broad implications for the history of the twentieth century. His comparative approach delineates the nature of class confrontation in societies with different kinds of bourgeoisies or capitalist elites. He also shows how the differences between these elites affected the labor movements in France and Spain, and he demonstrates how rank-and-file workers actually responded to the revolutionary situation in Barcelona and to the advent of the reformist government in Paris.A social history of acceptance and rejection of work, this book offers a new conceptualization of wage earners and a critique of work itself.   [brief]
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Title: Manufacturing militance: workers' movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985
Author: Seidman, G
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies | African Studies | Labor Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Challenging prevailing theories of development and labor, Gay Seidman's controversial study explores how highly politicized labor movements could arise simultaneously in Brazil and South Africa, two starkly different societies. Beginning with the 1960s, Seidman shows how both authoritarian states promoted specific rapid-industrialization strategies, in the process reshaping the working class and altering relationships between business and the state. When economic growth slowed in the 1970s, workers in these countries challenged social and political repression; by the mid-1980s, they had become major voices in the transition from authoritarian rule.Based in factories and working-class communities, these movements enjoyed broad support as they fought for improved social services, land reform, expanding electoral participation, and racial integration.In Brazil, Seidman takes us from the shopfloor, where disenfranchized workers organized for better wages and working conditions, to the strikes and protests that spread to local communities. Similar demands for radical change emerged in South Africa, where community groups in black townships joined organized labor in a challenge to minority rule that linked class consciousness to racial oppression. Seidman details the complex dynamics of these militant movements and develops a broad analysis of how newly industrializing countries shape the opportunities for labor to express demands. Her work will be welcomed by those interested in labor studies, social theory, and the politics of newly industrializing regions.   [brief]
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Title: Passions of the cut sleeve: the male homosexual tradition in China
Author: Hinsch, Bret
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: The first detailed treatment of the Chinese homosexual tradition in any Western language, Passions of the Cut Sleeve shatters preconceptions and stereotypes. Gone is the image of the sternly puritanical Confucian as sole representative of Chinese sexual practices - and with it the justification for the modern Chinese insistence that homosexuality is a recent import from the decadent West. Rediscovering the male homosexual tradition in China provides a startling new perspective on Chinese society and adds richly to our understanding of homosexuality.Bret Hinsch's reconstruction of the Chinese homosexual past reveals unexpected scenes. An emperor on his deathbed turns over the seals of the empire to a male beloved; two men marry each other with elaborate wedding rituals; parents sell their son into prostitution. The tradition portrays men from all levels of society - emperors, transvestite actors, rapists, elegant scholars, licentious monks, and even the nameless poor.Drawing from dynastic histories, erotic novels, popular Buddhist tracts, love poetry, legal cases, and joke books, Passions of the Cut Sleeve evokes the complex and fascinating male homosexual tradition in China from the Bronze Age until its decline in recent times.   [brief]
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Title: Land, labor and the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 1882-1914
Author: Shafir, Gershon
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but t . . . [more]
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Title: The state and labor in modern Japan
Author: Garon, Sheldon
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Asian Studies | History | Asian History | Politics | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In this meticulously researched study, Sheldon Garon examines the evolution of Japan's governmental policies toward labor from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and he substantially revises prevailing views which depict relations between the Japanese state and labor simply in terms of . . . [more]
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Title: Male colors: the construction of homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan
Author: Leupp, Gary P
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Asian Studies | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Tokugawa Japan ranks with ancient Athens as a society that not only tolerated, but celebrated, male homosexual behavior. Few scholars have seriously studied the subject, and until now none have satisfactorily explained the origins of the tradition or elucidated how its conventions reflected class structure and gender roles. Gary P. Leupp fills the gap with a dynamic examination of the origins and nature of the tradition. Based on a wealth of literary and historical documentation, this study places Tokugawa homosexuality in a global context, exploring its implications for contemporary debates on the historical construction of sexual desire.Combing through popular fiction, law codes, religious works, medical treatises, biographical material, and artistic treatments, Leupp traces the origins of pre-Tokugawa homosexual traditions among monks and samurai, then describes the emergence of homosexual practices among commoners in Tokugawa cities. He argues that it was "nurture" rather than "nature" that accounted for such conspicuous male/male sexuality and that bisexuality was more prevalent than homosexuality. Detailed, thorough, and very readable, this study is the first in English or Japanese to address so comprehensively one of the most complex and intriguing aspects of Japanese history.   [brief]
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Title: Cinderella dreams: the allure of the lavish wedding
Author: Otnes, Cele
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Women's Studies | Consumerism | United States History
Publisher's Description: The fabulous gown, the multitiered cake, abundant flowers, attendants and guests in their finery. The white wedding does more than mark a life passage. It marries two of the most sacred tenets of American culture - romantic love and excessive consumption. For anyone who has ever wondered about the meanings behind a white dress, a diamond ring, rice, and traditions such as cake cutting, bouquet tossing, and honeymooning, this book offers an entertaining and enlightening look at the historical, social, and psychological strains that come together to make the lavish wedding the most important cultural ritual in contemporary consumer culture. With an emphasis on North American society, Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck show how the elaborate wedding means far more than a mere triumph for the bridal industry. Through interviews, media accounts, and wide-ranging research and analysis, they expose the wedding's reflection - or reproduction - of fundamental aspects of popular consumer culture: its link with romantic love, its promise of magical transformation, its engendering of memories, and its legitimization of consumption as an expression of perfection. As meaningful as any prospective bride might wish, the lavish wedding emerges here as a lens that at once reveals, magnifies, and reveres some of the dearest wishes and darkest impulses at the heart of our culture.   [brief]
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Title: Urban revolt: ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement 
Author: Hirsch, Eric L 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Urban Revolt is a careful, incisive reexamination of the most highly mobilized urban revolutionary force in American history - the late nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. By documenting the importance of ethnic origins in accounting for political choice, Eric L. Hirsch completely reconceptualizes the dynamics of urban social movements.Hirsch links the industrialization of Chicago to the development and maintenance of an ethnically segmented labor market. Urbanization, he argues, fostered ethnic enclaves whose inhabitants were channeled into particular kinds of jobs and excluded from others. Hirsch then demonstrates the political implications of emergent ethnic identities and communities.In the late nineteenth century, Chicagoans of German background - denied economic power by Anglo-Americans' control of craft unions and excluded from political influence by Irish-dominated political machines - formulated radical critiques of the status quo and devised innovative political strategies. In contrast, the Irish revolutionary movement in Chicago targeted the oppressive British political system; Irish activists saw no reason to overthrow a Chicago polity that brought them political and economic upward mobility. Urban Revolt gives a new perspective on revolutionary mobilization by de-emphasizing the importance of class consciousness, social disorganization, and bureaucracy. In his original and provocative focus on the importance of ethnicity in accounting for political choice, Hirsch makes a valuable contribution to the study of social movements, race, and working-class politics.   [brief]
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Title: Flesh wounds: the culture of cosmetic surgery
Author: Blum, Virginia L 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | Gender Studies | Film | Psychology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Sociology | Anthropology | Television and Radio | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity. For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.   [brief]
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