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newsletter designer
Emerson University
Dan Cook
editor
University of Illinois-Champaign
Nalini Kotamraju
webmaster
University of California-Berkeley
George Ritzer
all-around great guy
University of Maryland-College Park
Todd Stillman
listserv manager
University of Maryland—College Park
Statement
of Purpose
The organizing
group for Consumers, Commodities and Consumption seeks to foster dialogue
and debate among those who are interested in and concerned about the place
of goods and commodities in social life. These interests and concerns
may range from the poetics of micro/personal identity formation to the
identity politics of gendered, raced and classed display, from historical
work on the rise of consumer culture to a critique of Nike advertising,
from investigations of typical places of consumption to the study the
dynamics of globalization and urban areas. Individuals affiliated with
Consumers, Commodities and Consumption desire to bring to the fore, in
their own ways, the depths to which commodities and a market logic have
come to pervade virtually all forms of social life and social interaction.
The primary goal is to begin to engage in an interchange.
Contact
the CCC:
Contact
the Consumers, Commodities and Consumption Special Interest Group at the
American Sociological Association.
Write to Dan Cook, CCC Newsletter
103 Gregory Hall
810 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
phone: 217-265-5509
fax: 217-244-3348
email: dtcook@uiuc.edu
Have something to say? Send in essays, comments, letters, reviews, observations
for the next Newsletter.
Visit
our Web site
by
Dominique Desjeux
University
of Paris V, Sorbonne
and
Zheng Lihua
University
of Foreign Languages of Guangdong, Guangzhou, China
Walking to our next interview in a neighborhood near the West Station in Guangzhou, we came into a dark, narrow passage between high-rise buildings that looked like public housing, where we could see four old people playing mahjongg. The apartments were linked by an apparent tangle of electric wires. The windows were all protected by wrought iron bars. Most of the balconies were decorated with flowers. Clothes were drying on long sticks outside the windows. Nothing very conspicuous at first glance. No exotic vision of China. Only the ordinary course of daily life could be seen.
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Lunchbox
Hegemony
by Dan
Cook
University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
dtcook@uiuc.edu
If you want to catch a glimpse of the gears of capitalism grinding away in America today, you don't need to go to a factory or a business office.
Instead, observe a child and parent in a store. That high-pitched whining you'll hear coming from the cereal aisle is more than just the pleadings of a single kid bent on getting a box of Fruit Loops into the shopping cart. It is the sound of thousands of hours of market research, of an immense coordination of people, ideas and resources, of decades of social and economic change all rolled into a single, "Mommy, pleeease!"
Call
for Papers:
Society and Consumption
Attention graduate students and untenured faculty:
The Berkeley Journal of Sociology (BJS) invites submissions of well-researched, theoretically interesting papers on issues relating to consumption for Volume 49, 2005. We are particularly interested in research that explores perspectives on consumption as a social experience and consumers as social actors.