Shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women, Hoganson makes it clear that globalization did not... just happen beyond America's shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences.

From 1900 to 1960, the introduction and development of four so-called urbanizing technologies–the telephone, automobile, radio, and electric light and... power–transformed the rural United States. But did these new technologies revolutionize rural life in the ways modernizers predicted? And how exactly–and with what levels of resistance and acceptance–did this change take place? In Consumers in the Country Ronald R. Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and others who promoted these technologies and the farm families who largely succeeded in adapting them to rural culture.

Has consumer culture got out of hand? Are the costs of universal access and pollution too great to bear?This comprehensive, lively and informative book... will quickly be recognized as a benchmark in the field. It brings together a huge set of resources for thinking about consumer culture and examining its origins and consequences within a global context. Adept in handling a complex range of theories, Consumer Society scrupulously uses examples throughout to inform and enhance understanding. Smart writes with verve and feeling and has produced a book that simultaneously covers and enlarges our understanding of consumer culture. Clear, engaging and original, this book will be important reading for all those interested in our global culture of consumption including students of sociology, social geography and cultural studies.

Consumption has often been called America's true national pastime. From the earliest European explorers trading with Native Americans to today's... Internet shoppers, consumerism has driven American society. Until recent years, however, consumerism has received little serious attention from historians and other scholars.This welcome volume offers the most comprehensive and incisive exploration of American consumer history to date. The first book on this topic to span the four centuries from the colonial era to the present, and the first to propose theoretical frameworks, the volume brings consumer society to the center of American history. Indeed, its authors demonstrate the many ways their research enhances knowledge of a broad range of historical topics, such as politics, labor ideology, immigrant life, and race, gender, and class relations. By including types of consumer studies which are seldom linked, this volume offers both a basis for historical synthesis and a springboard for further inquiry.With contributions by Raymond Williams, Jean Baudrillard, Juliet B. Schor, Kim Moody, Jean-Christophe Agnew, and many others, plus the most comprehensive bibliographical essay ever produced on the historiography of American consumption, Consumer Society in American History will take its place as the definitive sourcebook for this emerging field.

This is the softbound supplement to Consumer Transactions, 5th with the text of federal and state statutes and regulations: Federal Odometer Statute and... Regulations, Federal Trade Commission Act, Federal Trade Commission Regulations, Telemarketing Statues and Regulations, Consumer Credit Protection Act and Regulations, Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and Regulations, State statutes covered: Deceptive Practices Acts (Massachusetts; New Jersey; Oregon; Uniform Consumer Sales Practices Act); Lemon Laws (Missouri; New York); Retail Installment Sales Act (New Jersey); Small Loan Act (Alabama); NAIC Credit Insurance Model Bill; Uniform Commercial Code; Uniform Consumer Credit Code.

An ideal casebook for students in consumer transactions courses. It contains extensive and systematic coverage of the federal and state statutes that... govern such consumer transactions as automobile sales and finance, home mortgages, predatory lending, and others. The text makes frequent use of problems as a teaching device.

Being a consumer is now integral to the human experience, something none of us can avoid. At the same time, many of the products that we buy come to us... with histories steeped in highly unethical practices, such as worker exploitation, animal suffering, and environmental damage. Consuming Choices considers the ethical dimensions of consumer life by exploring several basic questions: Exactly what sorts of unethical practices are implicated in today's consumer products? Does moral culpability for these practices fall solely on the companies that perform them, or does it also fall upon consumers who purchase the products made with such practices? And most importantly, do consumers ever have moral obligations to avoid particular products? To answer, David T. Schwartz provides the most detailed philosophical exploration to date on consumer ethics. He utilizes historical and fictional examples to illustrate the types of wrongdoing currently implicated by consumer products in this age of globalization, offers a clear description of the relevant moral theories and important ethical concepts, and provides concrete suggestions on how to be a more ethical consumer.

Consuming Citizenship investigates how Korean American and Chinese American children of entrepreneurial immigrants demonstrate their social citizenship... as Americans through conspicuous consumption. The American immigrant entrepreneur has played a central role in projecting the American ideology of meritocracy and equality. The children of these immigrants are seen as evidence of an open society. While it appears that these children have readily adapted to American culture, questions remain as to why second-generation Asian Americans feel compelled to convince others of their legitimacy and the way they go about asserting their citizenship status. Extending our understanding of such children beyond the traditional emphasis on assimilation, the author argues that their consumptive behavior is a significant expression of their paradoxical position as citizens who straddle the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion.

Drawing on case studies from around the world, a trans-national perspective allows the authors to look at the genealogy of the modern consumer and the... development of consumer cultures, from the porcelain trade and consumption in Britain and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to post Second World War developments in America and Japan, and the contemporary consumer politics of cosmopolitan citizenship.

This book is unique in applying a consumption approach to the study of ethnicity and nationalism, thereby challenging the usual 'top down' approach to... nation-formation. Contributors from a variety of disciplines examine the on-going consumption of minority and national cultures by looking at different forms of consumption, including a national lottery, theme parks, museums, cross-cultural handbooks, popular song and audio-visual media. Chapters span diverse parts of Asia--from Korea,Japan and China to Malaysia and Sri Lanka--imparting to the volume a rare comparative quality. It should appeal to anyone interested in Asian Studies, as well as in the sociology and anthropology of culture, nationalism and globalization.

Americans search for identity through a paradoxical pair of passions: spirituality and consumerism. On the one hand, we participate in religion or... practice spirituality and on the other hand we are keen consumers. But, as Tom Beaudoin's Consuming Faith makes clear, if we truly seek to put our spirituality into practice, we must integrate who we are with what we buy. How are we linked to the rest of the world through our purchases? What does faith have to do with what we buy? With a new updated preface by the author, this paperback edition invites us to think about how our purchases affect who we are as individuals and as members of a global community.

Sitting in the ruins of the Third Reich, most Germans wanted to know which of the two post-war German states would erase the material traces of their... wartime suffering most quickly and most thoroughly. Consumption and the quality of everyday life quickly became important battlefields upon which the East-West conflict would be fought. This book focuses on the competing types of consumer societies that developed over time in the two Germanies and the legacy each left. Consuming Germany in the Cold War assesses why East Germany increasingly fell behind in this competition and how the failure to create a viable socialist “consumer society” in the East helped lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the 1970s, East Germans were well aware that the regime’s bombastic promises that the GDR would soon overtake the West had become increasingly hollow. For most East German citizens, West German consumer society set the standards that East Germany repeatedly failed to meet.By exploring the ways in which East and West Germany have functioned as each other’s “other” since 1949, this book suggests some of the possibilities for a new narrative of post-war German history. While taking into account the very different paths pursued by East and West Germany since 1949, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competition and highlight the connections between the two German successor states, as well as the ways in which these relationships changed throughout the period. By understanding the legacy that forty-plus years of rivalry established, we can gain a better understanding of the current tensions between the eastern and western regions of a united Germany.