The problem with definitions is that they are either too narrow or too wide – and they always fall short of pinning down the concept. One example I came across recently is Adam Arvidsen’s (2010: 4) definition of the “ethical economy” as one ‘creating the values and norms that keep a particular web of social ...
I’ve always found the ease with which some who would count themselves towards the radical left take to Schmitt’s “critique of democracy” or Heidegger’s “critique of technology”. Johannes Thumfart highlights a very worrying example in die tageszeitung – English version at signandsight. Thumfart sums up the anonymous (and at least in France and Germany celebrated) ...
An excellent article by Alan Johnson on the world after Oslo in World Affairs Journal. Here is his conclusion: When the terrible news broke, I recalled the summers I spent at the British Labour Party Young Socialist summer camp in the beautiful Forest of Dean, working-class kids drowning in honey as surely as Evelyn Waugh’s ...
The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep.’ (Orwell 1990) Totalitarianism is en vogue again, it seems, as the internationally acclaimed philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek ...
http://www.tesco.com/books/product.aspx?R=9780415669368&bci=252%7CMarketing%20%26%20Advertising*23%7CComing%20Soon update May 2014 no longer works – the link used to refer to Tesco selling the volume Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism edited by Sam Blinkley and Jo Littler that also contains my “Consuming the Campesino” … ...
Looks like someone is sending me a subtle message…. ...
[Presentation at the Research Workshop “Emerging Issues in Uncertainty and Ethical Consumption”, 13th June 2011, University of Glasgow] pdf Why Fairtradeand Fear? When first encountering the concept of consumer anxiety in connection with fair trade I was sceptical: It seemed all too vague and not quite clear what consumers are afraid of. The uncertainties said ...
As this will sound like an all round defence of consumerism, I should start by saying that this is not my aim. So straightaway: consumer capitalism is a problem in terms of its ecological consequences and if those consequences can be mitigated by more social control over the production of consumer goods (aka socialism), I’m ...
Here’s my answer Health may well have become “our new salvation” (Williams 1998: 440), which we try to achieve through consumerist rituals that are imbued with magical powers. In this respect the healthy body has indeed become a major new religious territory. But there are important differences to traditional religiosity. The new consumerist self-religiosity of ...
Sometimes you can’t not have an opinion, however hard you try. One thing you can’t not have an opinion on if you’ve written about ethical consumption is Žižek’s denunciation of it. I’ve tried, but got asked so often whether I’ve seen his talk and what do I think that I now have taken the five or ...