Consumer Society_ Critical Issues & Environmental Consequences - Barry Smart

Publication Date: March 25, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1847870503 | ISBN-13: 978-1847870506
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.


Review
The cultural contradictions of modern capitalism have never been deeper or more dramatic. These contradictions are also confusing. While governments tell citizens to spend in order to save capitalism, economists tell us that western consumers spend too much and Chinese workers, too little. Barry Smart's engaging contribution offers clear insights into the economic mysteries of modern consumption and production, providing in tandem an historical sociology of the rise of America as a consumer society - this is a timely sociological guide to the perplexed
Bryan S. Turner
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Barry Smart's Consumer society is the best study I have seen of contemporary features of the current stage of capitalism organized around consumption and commodities. The book's range is broad and synoptic and its research is highly impressive. The text is engaging and accessible and should be of interest to a wide range of readers
Douglas Kellner
UCLA, author of Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy

About the Author
Barry has worked at universities in Australia, England, Japan and New Zealand. He was at the University of Sheffield until 1988 and was then Associate-Professor at Auckland University before joining Portsmouth in 1995. Areas of research interest and expertise include classical and contemporary social thought, critical theory, fiscal sociology and economic transformation of modernity, cultural and economic analyses of consumption, environmental consequences of consumerism, as well as social and historical analyses of sport. He is also a member of the International Sociological Association.


Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd (March 25, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847870503
ISBN-13: 978-1847870506