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This paper is part of a growing body of content under the New Economics banner. It incorporates an analysis based on research and new thinking around the need to reform our education policy and our economic thinking keeping self-sufficiency as a goal. It starts off with some philosophical questions on the meaning of life and highlights the ills of rampant consumerism. It encourages minimalist thinking towards personal gratification. It encourages introspection and spiritual exploration. It encourages a DIY culture and self-sufficiency. In this context, it talks of growing one’s own food using modern/intensive agricultural technologies that are DIY friendly. It also talks of building a house using earth and one’s own labour as a DIY project. It encourages treating self-sufficiency as a right. Towards this, it highlights the changes needed in education policy and economic policy, particularly with regards to agriculture and ruralisation, in the overall context of land-rich countries. The goals are self-sufficiency, sustainability and ultimately a deeper spirituality.

Buying is often considered to be need driven and demand focused, but over a period of time, things have changed due to increasing consumerism. Also, a thing that cannot be ignored is higher purchasing capacity backed by smart presentation of products by the organization. This not only affects the consumer thought process, rather sensitizes the conscious and subconscious mind to follow what marketers had been fed. That only leads to a known unplanned buying behaviour often termed as impulse buying behaviour. The present paper is an effort to understand the core concept of impulse buying and to uncover the topic by examining literature and compiling the same to develop more clarity of the domain.

By conducting a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the Communications White Paper 2000, this article demonstrates the processes by which the government has socially and discursively reconstructed the public service ethos of broadcasting and the relations between citizenship and consumerism. Focussing on the occurrences of the citizen- and consumer-signifiers, the analysis confirms the claims of critical social theorists that there has been a shift in the government’s conception of the public from citizens to consumers. However, by adopting a cross-disciplinary methodology to the analysis of the texts, the complex processes and tensions involved in this shift can be made manifest, and the ways in which the differences between public and private oppositions are rhetorically reduced – so that the consumer becomes an active agent, able to act collectively, while the citizen becomes a passive individual – can be demonstrated.

Despite its critique of Pop Art and western consumerism, the former GDR briefly promoted the “paper dress” as an attractive, fashion novelty for its youth, consistent with the tenets of “socialist fashion.” This essay explores the phenomenon of the paper dress, putting it in the context of GDR youth policy, the growing youth culture in the country, and Cold War ideology. It argues that the GDR’s brief embrace of the paper dress, after severe state restrictions on the importation of western youth culture, was part of a gradual liberalization of GDR society.

Widely referred to as the age of consumerism (and sometimes credited as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties), the 1920s saw a remarkable growth in marketing and particularly in advertising in the United States. Backing the needs and wants of customers with stunning advertising was becoming the priority for many companies. The opening of the first licensed radio station, the introduction of instalment payment plans, the first radio commercial, the adoption of protectionist tariffs, and the Hawthorne studies conducted at Western Electric were only a few of many events that shaped the 1920s American business setting (Mayo and Nohria, 2005: 71 and 78). Factories and small companies were transformed into large business organizations and giant corporations. Professional managers with vision were much in demand; and shared ownership became so popular and diversified that anonymous shareholders began to own companies, which led to new management problems. Nevertheless, issues related to customer needs, employee problems, and shareholder expectations were all on the agenda of chief executives, and most were already aware of the new business dynamics and gave priority to competition and the market.

The powerful reverberations of Mary Wilkins Freeman's "The Revolt of 'Mother'" lasted for decades. (1) The story, which connected issues of gender, control of finances on the farm, and the role of the home in keeping the family united, was read in city and rural homes, high school and college classrooms, and was performed in public readings and amateur theatricals. It furnished a starting point for early twentieth-century discussions of the lives of farm women and inspired other stories about farm women's control of finances and improving the lives of rural families. One such story was Nina Sutherland Purdy's "Mothering: The Story of a Revolt" (1916), reprinted here. Nina (pronounced Nine-uh) Sutherland Purdy was born in Delaware County in rural New York in 1889, the year before "The Revolt of 'Mother'" was published. Her stories and articles appeared intermittently from 1915 through the 1940s in venues ranging from the elite, like the children's magazine St. Nicholas, to the popular. Her writings included two children's books, a 1916 antiwar story entitled "The Safety-Pin," a series of "Mandy" stories published in Woman's World (discussed below), a group of biographical articles in the 1920s for Everybody's Magazine, and pieces for pulp magazines like Love Story and All-Story Cavalier Weekly. Purdy also worked on at least one radio serial. Despite her range of venues, however, she seems to have published sporadically. She married three times and lived in New York City as a writer. Making her own compromise between rural and city life, however, she spent part of each year at the family farm in Downsville, dying nearby in 1952. Purdy's own movement between rural and city life as an educated woman with a BS and an MA was representative of larger trends of the time. These biographical details and the publication circumstances of both "Mother" stories illuminate the relationship between Mary Wilkins Freeman's 1890 "Revolt of 'Mother'" and its 1916 partial namesake. WOMAN'S WORLD, FARM WOMEN'S DISCONTENT, AND CONSUMERISM Purdy's five stories for Woman's World in 1915 and 1916 are about the forward-looking Mandy, head of the Benson Hollow Women's Neighborhood Improvement Society and a central character in "Mothering: The Story of a Revolt." Mandy encourages women around her to be more sympathetic mothers and to enjoy themselves. (2) Unlike an earlier generation of regional writers who were attentive to the specifics of their localities, Purdy created characters who speak a kind of all-purpose country dialect, as though to give them a rural tone but not to exclude readers who lived in different parts of the country. Characters in Mandy's Benson Hollow, for example, speak roughly the same dialect as do characters in "Honeymoon Overdue," a later story set among nineteenth-century southern New Jersey lumbermen. Purdy's stories, then, represent a new offspring of regionalism: ruralism without region. Sinclair Lewis's Main Street exemplifies such work, suggesting that the small town locale is representative rather than specific: "The town is, in our tale, called 'Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.' But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it he told Up York State or in the Carolina hills" (3). Although Purdy herself was from New York's Catskill Mountains, in "Mothering" and her other stories for Woman's World, Benson Hollow is located in indeterminate rural space, unanchored in specific landscape or history. Even its cows, hay, and strawberries could be raised nearly anywhere. Instead of regional specifics, the stories emphasize tension between the farm and the alluring city. This pull between rural and urban life was highly relevant in the 1910s, which saw the beginnings of a national discussion of farm life that focused on women. Theodore Roosevelt's 1908 Country Life Commission suggested that farm women be helped with their heavy workloads; a 1913 Department of Agriculture survey followed. …

Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte. Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. xv + 253 pp. Preface. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $18.95. Paper.Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World is a wonderful book The authors examine the specific case of Product RED, the co-creation of U2 lead singer Bono and the Global Fund, to analyze the new phenomenon of "Brand Aid," which "is the combined meaning of 'aid to brands' and 'brands that provide aid' (10). The book is not an analysis of the motivations of people who give aid or the perceptions of those who perceive it, but rather an analysis of what might be called philanthropic marketing and consumerism. Nevertheless, its short, well-written, and engaging chapters cover an amazing breadth of material.The first chapter develops the notion of the "aid celebrity"-a social actor who is given the authority to manage spectacles to promote both international good causes and his or her own brand. In "Band Aid to Brand Aid" they recount "celebrity activism from the 1960s onwards as a succession of waves'" (32). They demonstrate that the Product RED initiative should be considered the latest, a "fourth wave of celebrity activism that marks a fundamental break with the past" because, for the first time, "as celebrities are endowed with expertise, experts are reconfigured as celebrities" (33, 26). This is significant because aid celebrities are given the leeway to act as "emotional sovereigns" who intercede between politicians and "the people," and between Africa and the rest of the world. Aid (or AIDS) celebrities do this by what the authors call "treatment virtualism," wherein the celebrity mediates the relationship between consumer items and anti-re tro virais (ARVS) which equates dollars spent to pills bought. As they point out in chapter 2, Africa becomes a place the consumer can "know from a distance," while "the fundamental imbalance of power between the givers and the recipients, in this case the Western consumers and the women and children with AIDS in Africa, is not part of the problem to be solved" (57). As such, aid celebrities are not concerned with circumventing the system; rather, they are given license to form the system. "It is not that the celebrities must follow the rules, but that the institutions, the system must function like a celebrity to be considered credible by the general population" (47).This idea is further developed in the latter half of the book, which explains how the phenomenon of "aid celebrity" has transformed the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). …

WHITE, Terry, ed., THE SIBLING SOCIETY: Papers Presented at the Robert Bly Colloquium. Lanham. MD: University Press of America. 2000, 216pp., $36.00 hardcover.Nearly a decade ago poet Robert Ely's The Sibling Society (1996) offered a critique of contemporary adulthood informed by a somewhat idiosyncratic reading of recent social history and a thoughtful critique of society's social ills. Similar critiques have been made by others but few with the depth and bite of Bly's writing. The sixteen essays presented in The Sibling Society: Papers Presented at the Robert Bly Colloquium, each nicely written, interesting and well researched, reflect the reasons his thesis remains compelling.In The Sibling Society (1996) Bly argued that adults of the late post-war generation had come to be ruled by consumerism, professional and personal self interest, and narcissism. Nor had the rest of their emotional development faired well. The end result was that emotionally stunted or "half-grown adults", intent on their own agendas, were incapable of fulfilling their parental, nurturing, and leadership obligations, to the next generation. Whether in Toronto, Vancouver, or New York, this generation was not inclined to look up to past generations for leadership, guidance, and tradition, nor would they look down to the next generation seeking direction, encouragement, and approval. To Bly, this is a generation dominated by horizontal rather than vertical thinkers, concerned most about themselves. They have left a leadership and parenting vacuum in North American culture, Bly would argue.Papers Presented at the Robert Bly Colloquium is divided into four sections, each reflecting a different perspective on Bly's thesis. The first four essays examine Sibling Society itself, important for those less familiar with Bly's work. We are asked to consider whether Sibling Society is fully capable of transmitting culture across generations, whether parents casting themselves as friends and confidants can take the place of authoritative parents, and whether the adultification of the young through relentless media programming, negative and contemptuous of adults and parents, encourages the young to aspire to adult roles. A forth essay points to the growing numbers of impoverished and developmentally challenged children as an indication of the profound ambivalence of adults toward children. The three remaining sections address the psychological impact, the self, and metaphors and myths, of Sibling Society. These essays indicate the richness of Bly's ideas, both in exemplifying North America's cultural ills, as well as in offering readers ways to positively address troubling issues.If Bly's original thesis is in some respects flawed, he has gone well beyond William F. Ogburn's (1986-1959) decline of the family thesis, first presented in 1933.* Ogburn's still influential view was that modernity, technology, and urbanization, left the family increasingly bereft of its cohesive functions. …

Edmund Abaka. Kola Is God's Gift: Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives and the Kola Industry in Asante and the Gold Coast c. 1820-1950. Athens: Ohio University Press/Oxford: James Currey/Accra: Woeli Publishing, 2005. xv + 173 pp. Maps. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $44.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. The kola nut has been a major commodity in West African markets for many centuries, beginning long before its distinct taste provided inspiration for several soft drinks. The nuts are considered a mild stimulant, an important reason the common folk chewed it at naming ceremonies, weddings, funerals, and other social occasions. For the wealthy, kola constituted a luxury and served as a sign of their hospitality and affluence. In the nineteenth century, a vast interlocking grid of commercial networks in the forest and savanna regions facilitated the exchange of large amounts of kola. States that emerged in the forest regions derived revenue from kolarelated activities, while individuals earned their income from engaging in its production and trade. Edmund Abaka's Kola Is God's Gift gives us an account of the Asante-Gold Coast aspect of the kola industry-the expansion of its production, trade, and consumption-between 1820 and 1950. In the introduction, Abaka proposes to examine the "transformation of kola nuts from an uncultivated indigenous tree to a major cash crop during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (1). Throughout the book he reminds us that the history of kola, like that of other psychoactive substances, is a complicated subject, all the more so because it exists at the crossroads of several disciplines: agricultural history, botany and pharmacology, anthropology, economic development, nutrition, and labor history, to say nothing of Asante-Gold Coast cultural studies and political economy. As Abaka says, "kola has multiple histories." He raises the reader's expectations when he promises in the next sentence that his study will explain "some of the changing patterns in consumerism of kola and kola products in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America..." (3). This is a bit misleading, however, since this book is not a comprehensive account of the place of kola outside of Africa. Chapter 2 deals with kola's agronomy: the varieties of kola, soils where it thrives, and its propagation, crop yields, methods of harvest, and preservation techniques. In chapter 3 the author successfully debunks what he calls the "wild tree crop theory," a persistent myth that Africans made no conscious effort in the expansion of the tree crop. Kola's dispersion, Abaka argues, was a deliberate act. He offers a critique of the theory of nature, favoring a story of culture in which the Asante state and traders expanded production in response to increasing demand from the Muslim areas of West Africa and emergent markets in Brazil, Europe, and North America. …

In the last decade, apparel companies mainly focused on achieving the best FOB (freight on board) price, the best quality, and the shortest lead time for their products in order to achieve commercial success. As a result they sourced globally to optimise their costs. However, there arose a growing awareness of different sourcing criteria in the textiles and apparel industry. For instance, human rights issues and environmental requirements emerged as crucial factors in the selection of business partners. Addressing consumer concerns has recently become a very important strategy for apparel companies. They are therefore more concerned about products sourced from the Third World whose manufacture violates human rights and causes environmental damage. As a result, ethical and green consumerism will become the trend in the future. An increasing number of people prefer to buy products and services from companies that are socially responsible, and they are willing to pay a premium for them. Concurrent with the changes in individual purchasing behaviour under the influence of ethical and green consumerism will be the increasing collective consumer pressure on producers of goods and services to produce ecologically friendly products using ecologically friendly materials and processes which do not violate human rights or use child labour. The increased awareness of these issues has forced apparel companies, especially those with brands, to develop specific guidelines or a code of conduct to ensure that their business partners comply with these newly established requirements. In the research under discussion, an industry survey was carried out to identify the essential criteria for selecting and evaluating business partners. Subsequently, evaluation models were derived for the selection of business partners. Feedback from the industry highlighted the fact that there is a need for a standardised, recognised evaluation method to be developed. If such a method were widely adopted, ethical standards would be raised and ultimately the quality of life of the communities in which garments are manufactured, sold and worn would be improved.

With the title The Development of the British Welfare State readers might be surprised to learn that this history essentially begins in 1945. The book is a political and social history of the welfare state since the 1940s with one chapter devoted to the early-twentieth-century ideologies which led to the idea of a welfare state. The first part of the book chronicles the politics and history of the successive administrations. Part II has chapters on the welfare state services while there is a short concluding section which looks at current trends and prospects for the future in which Sullivan discusses the implications of markets and consumerism for the welfare state idea.

In the early twentieth century, as city councils throughout the South began passing Jim Crow segregation laws, African Americans began organizing streetcar boycotts. These boycotts, aimed at the racist new laws which required African Americans to sit in the back of the streetcar, were organized in more than twenty-five southern cities, and some lasted over a year. In some cases the boycotts were so well organized they spawned alternative transportation companies which were owned and run by African Americans. Although the boycotts failed to reverse the tide of Jim Crow legislation, the participants displayed a sophisticated understanding of their own consumer power, as well as a willingness to use that power to transform their political situation. As one African-American activist in Lynchburg, Virginia, explained the logic behind their streetcar boycott in 1906: “Let us touch to the quick the white man's pocket. 'Tis there his conscience often lies.”