Lifestyle & Consumption

O site Jovem Nerd se transformou em porta-voz do estilo de vida nerd no Brasil. Sua influência no consumo e comportamento destes jovens comprova a sedimentação deste estilo de vida e nicho de mercado. Este artigo faz parte de uma pesquisa que investiga a ressignificação do estereótipo do nerd, bem como os processos sociais que levaram a tal mudança. Esta análise está centrada no estudo da cultura do consumo e na constante catalogação, classificação e hierarquização de objetos na cultura nerd, seus elementos de disputa simbólica (BOURDIEU, 2007) e acumulação de capital subcultural (THORNTON, 1996). Serão observadas as várias formas como a cultura nerd se apropria dos textos da cultura da mídia a fim de produzir sentido, através da análise dos discursos presentes e sobre o site Jovem Nerd.

Since 1991, India is emerging as a key destination for marketers from across the globe. However, littlework of relevance has been undertaken to understand the Indian Consumers. It is believed that the Indian metropolitan consumers are fairly homogeneous in nature. In this paper, we report the results of a survey conducted amongst 560 respondents in the five metropolises. The objective was to segment the metropolitan consumers on behavioral aspects and to understand their onsumption pattern. The study, designed on the basis of VALS, uses cluster analysis to segment the Indian metropolitan consumers into six behavioral categories, namely Well Settled, Strugglers, Enjoyers, Conservatives, Self Concerned and Realist. The segments have been profiled in terms of their product ownership, Activities and Interests, Financial Investment avenues and Media habits. Implications for marketing and government policy have been discussed.

We address a largely neglected issue in contemporary research on cultural class divisions: economic capital and its associated lifestyles and symbolic expressions. Using qualitative interviews, we explore how adolescents from wealthy elite backgrounds, namely students at Oslo Commerce School (OCS), traditionally one of the most prestigious upper-secondary schools in Norway, demarcate themselves symbolically from others. They draw symbolic boundaries against students at other elite schools in Oslo, more characterized by backgrounds with high cultural capital, accusing them of mimicking a 'hipster' style. Within the OCS student body, we describe identity work centring on styles of material consumption and bodily distinctions. The most salient dividing line is between those who manage to master a 'natural' style, where expensive clothes and the desired bodily attributes are displayed discreetly, and those who are 'trying too hard' and thus marked by the stigma of effort. We also show some interesting intersections between class and gender: girls aspiring to the economic elite obey the 'rules of the game' by exercising extensive control over their bodies and adhering to demanding bodily norms for their weight and slimness. Such rules are less evident among the boys, where a lack of discipline, unruliness, hard partying and even fighting constitute parts of the lifestyle valued. This article contributes to the field of cultural stratification, highlighting the importance of the 'hows' of material consumption when expressing elite distinction. It also adds new insight to the research field of elite education by showing how a mastery of 'high-end' consumer culture is involved in fostering favourable dispositions at elite schools.

The paper focuses on celebrity chefs in Poland as a relatively new phenomenon. In the first part of the paper a synthetic review of the discussion about celebrity chefs in global foodscapes is given. In the second part an analysis of Polish version of cookery show MasterChef is presented. The program is interpreted as a carrier for the meanings about the formation of a new gastronomic field in Poland with celebrities of different scale as key actors. The show’s imitative character as well as its detachment from rather conservative eating habits of the majority of Poles is underlined. Polish MasterChef presents culinary capital as seemingly accessible to everyone, recruits smaller-scale food celebrities and stimulates a development of a new food culture connected to a global gastronomic field. This process is a part of larger lifestyle modernization in Poland: the show positively interprets biographical and cultural change, defines the relationship between passion and work, and promotes the specific idea of life success.

Following the launch of her #1 New York Times bestselling cookbook, Magnolia Table, and seeing her family’s own sacred dishes being served at other families’ tables across the country, Joanna Gaines gained a deeper commitment to the value of food being shared. This insight inspired Joanna to get back in the kitchen and start from scratch, pushing herself beyond her comfort zone to develop new recipes for her family, and yours, to gather around. Magnolia Table, Volume 2 is filled with 145 new recipes from her own home that she shares with husband Chip and their five kids, and from the couple’s restaurant, Magnolia Table; Silos Baking Co; and new coffee shop, Magnolia Press. From breakfast to dinner, plus breads, soups, and sides, Magnolia Table, Volume 2 gives readers abundant reasons to gather together. The book is beautifully photographed and filled with dishes you’ll want to bring into your own home, including:

Mushroom-Gruyére Quiche
Pumpkin Cream Cheese Bread
Grilled Bruschetta Chicken
Zucchini-Squash Strata
Chicken-Pecan-Asparagus Casserole
Stuffed Pork Loin
Lemon-Lavender Tart
Magnolia Press Chocolate Cake

Being a young adult, at the most effective of times, can be a little bit of a roller coaster ride. There are differs hormonal agents that are running wild in the body. At this time in your life you need to make crucial decisions that might extremely well influence the remainder of your life in addition to your job. It is a time of life likewise when your social life is rolling.

Many people know of buy aloevera ghee as the 'shed plant' and also it has been thus for centuries. The primary major benefit of Aloe Vera is its anti-inflammatory buildings and has been used as a neighborhood medicine for years now.

This thesis examines the search for self in the context of lifestyle travellers. It has been suggested that maintaining a coherent sense of self has become problematic in late modernity as the socially constructed notion of a ‘true self’ has come to be regarded as concrete, whilst choice has increasingly replaced obligation or tradition as a basis in defining selves. Issues of self have been noted as especially important in the context of adopted lifestyles, as lifestyle can be a means through which individuals seek coherence in their lives. Furthermore, travelling to ‘find one’s self’ has a lengthy tradition in popular literature that has also been reflected in tourism studies where research has been conducted into backpacker and traveller identities.

Lifestyle travel is a post-traditional way of life wherein individuals are voluntarily exposed to an array of cultural praxes. Thus, the literatures on self, lifestyle and tourism point to lifestyle travel as a context where issues of self may be particularly relevant. Whilst there is a significant and growing body of research within tourism studies on backpackers, there is a dearth of information on individuals that travel as a lifestyle. Therefore, this thesis contributes to academic knowledge not only through its investigation into the search for self, but also by its conceptualisation of and empirical research into lifestyle travellers.

With criteria for defining lifestyle travellers based on of a fluid combination of self-definition of travel as one’s lifestyle and multiple trips of approximately six months or more, twenty-five semi-structured in-depth interviews were carried out by the researcher with lifestyle travellers in northern Indian and southern Thailand from July through September 2007. In keeping with the paradigmatic ideals of interpretivism, emergent themes were identified from within the qualitative material including meanings that the lifestyle travellers attached to the search for self, surrounding issues of avoidance and seeking that influenced why they travelled as a lifestyle and their future travel intentions.

Although there were multiple perspectives on how the search for self was conceived and approached, searching for self was voiced as a critical motivating factor for the majority of the lifestyle travellers. With a common view among most of the respondents of self as an internal object to be developed, many lifestyle travellers had been or were still on a Romantic modern quest of searching for their true self. Escapism, freedom and learning through challenge were identified as important themes surrounding the search for self, as lifestyle travellers described varying degrees of success in escaping their home societies and finding increased free space and time to learn about and challenge their ideas of self. Paradoxically, most of the lifestyle travellers sought to experience an inner self that dominant sociological views posit does not exist. The tension of searching for a unified sense of self in a world of relational selves is highlighted as not only problematic for the interviewees, but also for previous tourism studies that have premised their contributions on the existence of an inner self.

Although the concept of lifestyle is gaining speed as a theoretical tool in the social sciences, it has not yet been used as a level of social analysis within the field of tourism. This presentation uses theory on lifestyle to conceptualise and subsequently empirically illustrate a tourism niche that has also received scant attention within the academe, that of lifestyle travellers. Lifestyle traveller is a social category representing individuals with extended engagement in corporeal mobility as a style of life, in this case through the mode of backpacking. I illustrate the practice of tourism as a lifestyle through empirical material drawn from ethnographic interviews carried out with backpackers in northern India and southern Thailand in 2007. The findings suggest that certain individuals move beyond the practice of backpacking as part of a transitional phase or time-out from ‘normal’ life and instead style their lives around an ongoing involvement with backpacker tourism. This practice of tourism as a lifestyle choice intersects with issues of identity and expressivity that come to the fore in late modernity. A theoretical implication of this research is that former related, but arguably outmoded, social categories within tourism, such as that of E. Cohen’s (1972) ‘drifter’, should be replaced by a contemporary description of lifestyle travellers.

Since 1991, India is emerging as a key destination for marketers from across the globe. However, littlework of relevance has been undertaken to understand the Indian Consumers. It is believed that the Indian metropolitan consumers are fairly homogeneous in nature. In this paper, we report the results of a survey conducted amongst 560 respondents in the five metropolises. The objective was to segment the metropolitan consumers on behavioral aspects and to understand their onsumption pattern. The study, designed on the basis of VALS, uses cluster analysis to segment the Indian metropolitan consumers into six behavioral categories, namely Well Settled, Strugglers, Enjoyers, Conservatives, Self Concerned and Realist. The segments have been profiled in terms of their product ownership, Activities and Interests, Financial Investment avenues and Media habits. Implications for marketing and government policy have been discussed.

Just few of the Hipster core values are creativity, nonconformism, ethical progressive eco-politics and local business supporting. In spite of it, the phenomenon is meant in its pejorative meaning amongst the public opinion. Even if the definition of Hipsterism is still blurred and uncertain, it seems that the contemporary hipsters are perceived regarding the implications of paradoxes and contradictions created by the turn of an individualistic attitude into a subculture.

By drawing on visual data ranging from printed advertisements to digital photography, this book provides a fine-grained social semiotic analysis of a full range of visual texts in terms of specified periods, offering a complex interpretation of what different social functions these texts realise in a semiotic artefact. Situated in the semiotic landscape of the city of Hong Kong, the current study demonstrates that the social context of meaning making is an important feature of a social semiotic visual analysis. For example, it shows that the widespread use of smartphone applications has a significant impact on the personal photography of Hong Kong females, leading to socio-cultural transformations that are reflected in the representational aesthetic practices of digital photographs for self-modelling as well as an emerging gendered identity within the community. In addition, the social semiotic analysis of printed advertisements in magazines on slimming products and services also offers deep insights into the media ideologies relating to female body idealisation, gender roles and stereotypes, providing a useful sociologically relevant analysis on the basis of analytical tools from social semiotics and further pointing to the need for combining social semiotics with sociological theory and beyond. The book also discusses how social semiotic analysis might attend to the broader discursive practices, as in the case of TV commercials focussed on personal loans and luxury property. The desire of a hedonistic lifestyle has been the driving force behind these discursive practices in which social actors are idealised through semiotic resources in such a way that their semiotically shaped identities in the advertising discourse become a site of ideology on the basis of which intertextuality and the broader discourse of social stereotypes could be analysed. This book will therefore be of interest to a very wide readership in various academic fields in arts and social sciences such as semiotics, visual studies, design studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

Beauty salon business is fast growing in line with the economic growth and changes in modern lifestyle. In such a situation, whereby market potential also rapidly advances, low lifetime sustainability of beauty salon industry prevails. Indicated by the shifting in customer requirements, beauty salon services orientation should adapt to the changes in the customer requirements in order to survive. This research was conducted to identify beauty salon customer requirements nowadays. A new requirement was identified, i.e. lifestyle besides the already existing marketing mix requirements. The expected final objective of this research is to define lifetime sustainability using correct marketing mix.

Searching for and selling real estate in Australia and worldwide changed this century with the proliferation of web and mobile platforms for real estate, now often known as Realtech. These platforms offer enticing images of homes as commodities, emphasising desirable lifestyles and opportunities for renovation and capital gains. In comparison with previous advertising media, real estate platforms powerfully mediate spatiality, mobilising attraction images that intensify the experience of house hunting. Maps and floorplans, photos and videos, drone shots and 3D walkthroughs, algorithms and interaction design present buyers with complex but not unified impressions of space and place. This article provides a critical history of these changes in the cultural field of real estate in Australia with the rise of the platforms Domain and realestate.com.au. It connects these sociotechnical and industry changes with the influence of neo-liberal ideology and the framing of homes as commodities. Through a textual, visual, spatial, and content analysis of online real estate advertising in three contrasting suburbs in Sydney, Australia it observes the intensification of three dominant strategies for promoting real estate: the lifestyle image, the opportunity image, and the attraction image. It shows how these images vary across geography, class and subculture.

This article examines the growing entanglements between the
digital and the world of food while suggesting that food is a
particularly generative space through which to understand the
evolving but often hidden role of the digital in our everyday lives.
The article starts by examining food photography on social media
before discussing the role of ordinary people as participants in
online food culture via video-sharing platforms such as YouTube.
Mapping the shift from web 2.0’s dreams of creativity and sharing
to the monetisation of digital food communities, section 3 focuses
on food politics, and ‘the antinomies of connectivity’. The final
section discusses big food players and their use of social media in
an era of dataveillance and big data. It argues that ‘food citizens’
need to have an awareness of the commercial logics that support
the communicative ecologies in which we increasingly engage with
food and lifestyle practices.

An introduction to the problem of greenwashing, this presentation was given in March 2015 at the Eastern Sociological Society's Annual Conference in Boston, MA. It seeks to answer 5 questions:

1. What is greenwashing?
2. How do we identify greenwashing?
3. Who is doing the greenwashing?
4. Are our indicators adequate?
5. How do we improve our measurement?

This is preliminary work on research that will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.

A ‘rites of passage’ movie set in the USSR of the 1950s, Valery Todorovsky’s film Stilyagi (2008) tells the story of the transformation of the hero Mels from loyal member of the Komsomol to stilyaga. For many critics, Todorovsky’s stilyagi are the very embodiment of anti-conformism. And yet to read the film in this way is to overlook one of its key elements - consumption. For in order to acquire their clothes and other accessories, the stilyagi need money. Zooming in (literally) on the financial transactions that these young people engage in with such astonishing regularity, Todorovsky reminds us that without money, there can be no ‘style’, and consequently, no stilyagi. Seen in this light, the stilyagi are not at all subversive, but in fact highly conformist precursors of today’s post-soviet shoppers. It is this paradox at the heart of the stilyagi and their ‘revolt’ as presented by Todorovsky which will be the subject of our article.

Permaculture presents a powerful critique of the neo-liberal world order, and its techniques may support self-sufficiency and practical sovereignty. Nevertheless, two factors limit its radical potential: its practical flexibility, and the need for educational and economic capital to apply it. Following a detailed description of permaculture and of its conceptualisation of social change, the permaculture community in Turkey is examined as a case study which demonstrates these limitations. Examining rural projects proving the approach’s viability and lifestyle activism in urban centres, I discuss these spaces of action in terms of permaculture’s currently unrealised potential for larger social change.

This Master's thesis investigates recently emerging spatial cultures that seek to re-make vacant spaces in post-growth Tokyo as sites of alternative social relations. The burst of the economic bubble in the early 1990s and population decline since the 2000s has led to an erosion of real estate prices and a rapid increase in vacant buildings in Japanese cities. This thesis considers how new cultural movements of renovation, sharing, and rural migration use these spaces to enact alternative lifestyles and social relations outside of the dominant market logic of the city. Investigation through observation and interviews with actors appropriating vacant spaces reveals new ways of co-producing social space, conceiving of the self in relation to the city, and imagining livelihoods and community amid the indeterminacy of the post-growth present. Drawing on critical theories of space rooted in the work of Henri Lefebvre, I suggest that the spread of vacancy opens spatial horizons to imagine a city and social relations after growth, but realizing the potential for an urbanism beyond the market requires an active culture of bottom-up re-appropriation and re-use of space.

Contemporary yoga is popularly represented in various media by a fit, white woman. Yoga Journal is a magazine recognized by many as an industry cornerstone and an institution in and of itself. It represents the distinctive face of yoga. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the Yoga Journal magazine covers, from its first issue in 1975 to issue 313 (January 2020), we describe the produced and consumed portrait of yoga. By focusing on the cover themes, together with the objects and persons depicted, we recognize three phases of development that have contributed to the understanding of the changing image of yoga in the media. While, in the initial phase, yoga was represented as a mystical and mysterious spiritual discipline that originated in the Orientalized East, in the later phase, it was depicted first as a global and universal phenomenon and then as a mainstream everyday fitness regime. Yoga’s depiction in the last phase is compatible with the scholarly representation of contemporary yoga as posture and body centered, but not with its earlier depictions. We found that in its mature phase, the yoga body, which is criticized for its lack of inclusiveness, emerged to become omnipresent. We conclude that the newly formed face of yoga is problematic, both for its female readers, who are encouraged to conform to a unique body type, and also for the yoga community, which encounters an appearance-based restriction of access.

Suggested reference:
Wittich, A., McCartney, P. Changing Face of the Yoga Industry, Its Dharmic Roots and Its Message to Women: an Analysis of Yoga Journal Magazine Covers, 1975–2020. DHARM (2020). 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42240-020-00071-1

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42240-020-00071-1

ISSN: 2522-0934

"Scholarship on backpackers speculates some individuals may extend backpacking to a way of life. This article empirically explores this proposition using lifestyle consumption as its framing concept and conceptualises individuals who style their lives around the enduring practice of backpacking as ‘lifestyle travellers’. Ethnographic interviews with lifestyle travellers in India and Thailand offer an emic account of the practices, ideologies and social identity that characterise lifestyle travel as a distinctive subtype within backpacking. Departing from the drifter construct, which (re)constitutes this identity as socially deviant, the concept of lifestyle allows for a contemporary appraisal of these individuals’ patterns of meaningful consumption and wider insights into how ongoing mobility can lead to different ways of understanding identities and relating to place.

Keywords: lifestyle consumption; backpacker; mobility; drifter; identity"

Transatlantisch importierte Populärkultur, in erster Linie solche, die vom Establishment aller Arten bekämpft wurde, spielte eine hilfreiche Rolle bei Prozessen der Demokratisierung in den Nachkriegsjahrzehnten. Das lag nicht an besonderen epublikanischen Qualitäten, die Musik, Tänze, Kleidungsstile und Körpersprache aus den USA gehabt hätten. Vielmehr  beleuchtet dieser Beitrag Veränderungen in drei Dimensionen . Erstens: In Prozessen der Demotisierung konnten vor allem Jüngere erreichen, dass meist aus dem englischsprachigen Raum stammende Massenkünste für viele zugänglich wurden, deren einschlägige Rezeptionskompetenzen sich damit vergrößerten. Zweitens wurden Genres und Stile der Populärkultur zu breitenwirksamen Symbolen für Ziele und Werte, die aus heutiger Sicht dazu beitrugen, nach der NS-Zeit demokratische Verhältnisse und Verhaltensweisen in der Bundesrepublik einzuwurzeln. Ausgelöst wurde solche „demokratische Aufladung“ von Massenkunst zumeist durch Bemühungen ihrer Gegner, derartige Angebote als Bedrohung etablierter Ordnungen zu stigmatisieren und zu marginalisieren. Drittens erwiesen sich viele mit Populärkultur verbundene Praktiken ihrer Nutzer als Medien der Informalisierung, die alltagsnahe Machtbalancen zugunsten schwächerer Gruppen verschoben.

To break away from techno-institutional lock-in in climate change and in other sustainability problems, many have focused on innovation in technological 'niches'. The destabilisation of the incumbent 'regime' has been neglected and external 'landscape' pressures under-analysed. With this in mind, this article examines the factors of regime destabilisation and forms of regime resistance in past technological transitions in energy and transport. It analyses 23 energy (electricity, heat & chemicals) and 11 transport (drive chain, networks, fuels & land planning) transitions pre-1990. Furthermore, in order to properly frame these results and make any "lessons from the past" applicable to the present, this article includes an assessment of current sustainability trends.

The key lessons from past energy transitions are that regime outsiders with the right ideology and influence on the market can destabilise the energy sector, which has traditionally had strong incumbents. As incumbents are weakened, past transport transitions show that further change may come from emphasising the Health and Lifestyle benefits of sustainability transitions.

Recommendations presented to a Directors’ Dialogue on ESG Strategy for the Board on the theme of turning rhetoric into reality in a VUCA world with international participation and organized by India’s Institute of Directors. ESG strategies are about opportunity and responsible innovation, enterprise and capitalism. Boards should encourage the offering of new options and choices for stakeholders and wider communities to live and operate more sustainably and in harmony with the natural world.

Scadenza: 18 luglio 2022.
Il convegno mira a esplorare l'ipotesi generale del progetto PRIN Transatlantic Transfers: The Italian Presence in Post-war America, secondo cui l'impatto del cosiddetto Italian style – cioè uno stile moderno, riconoscibile e associato a prodotti, icone e immaginari Made in Italy – abbia caratterizzato gli scambi culturali fra Italia e Stati Uniti tra gli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta, affermandosi come segno di distinzione nella formazione dell'identità di una classe media americana benestante e cosmopolita.

Il progetto PRIN Transatlantic Transfers: The Italian Presence in Post-war America (1949-1971) è sviluppato dall'Università Roma Tre insieme al Politecnico di Milano (responsabile nazionale), l'Università di Scienze Gastronomiche di Pollenzo e l'Università del Piemonte Orientale.
Sito web: transatlantictransfers.polimi.it

The main purpose of this book is the sociological questioning of the Lisbon city continuous population decrease. The presented thesis, sustains that one of the major dynamics transforming, in the last decades, the Lisbon city-region, and its most important urban centre, is the gentrification of a part of its territory. The reverse of the resident population decrease in the country’s capital has been the intensification, in the last two decades, of gentrification processes in its urban and social fabric. The major urban centre of Lisbon, instead of following the background idea of loss of centrality on those dynamics, maintains a crucial structured role in the urban life of the city-region. It presents a distinctive character in what concerns the morphology, functionality, social fabric, diversity and growing cosmopolitanism of lifestyles, which allows sustaining the hypothesis of the city in transition as a city that follows the path of a new urban cycle, shaping a process of re-urbanization. The book arguments are exposed on the following grounds: (i) discussing the main drivers of the current societal change (chapter 1); (ii) discussing the key possibilities concerning the current urban changes, and the patterns of city that are emerging from them (chapter 2); (iii) analysing the nature of change subsumed on the gentrification processes (chapter 3); (iv) analysing what could be in course, in the contemporary social changes concerning the lifestyles sphere.

This book addresses the challenge posed by J.K. Galbraith over fifty years ago to make a constructive contribution to a different style of economic analysis - the economics of abundance. It identifies a system of abundance inhabited by the 'people of plenty' and illustrates that the driver of growth in this system is spending by affluent consumers. The book provides essential heterodox economic theory to explain this spending and explore its key drivers and constraints. The greatest threat to this system is under-consumption. The book explains how the system spontaneously responds by creating the institution of marketing, which amplifies the drivers of spending and relaxes the constraints. However, all this has implications for the way in which markets work. The author expertly builds on themes first identified by J.K. Galbraith to introduce a new conceptual framework - that of corporate-guided markets for branded products. Written in a comprehensive style, this book will prove a valuable resource for academics in various fields including: economic and social history, sustainability, sociology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, marketing and cultural studies.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents: Preface 1. Abundance, Scarcity and Sufficiency 2. The Institution of Marketing 3. Socio-Cultural Consumption 4. Subjective Consumption 5. Cognitive Consumption 6. The Role of Markets 7. Implications
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Economics-Abundance-New-Directions-Modern/dp/1843766701/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281622193&sr=1-4