Vol. 9, No. 2, May 2008

Books of Note

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2007. Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship.  Durham: Duke University Press.
A detailed study of the rise of the first all children’s cable television network in the U.S. through the lens of consumer citizenship. 

Clavé, S. Anton. 2007. The Global Theme Park Industry. Oxfordshire, UK: CABI.
A comprehensive look a the global theme park industry examining both the ways in which theme parks allow consumers to escape from their everyday lives through commodified experiences and the way such parks figure into land development schemes in various local and national contexts.

Cook, Daniel Thomas (ed.). 2008. Lived Experiences of Public Consumption: Encounters with Value in Marketplaces on Five Continents. Houndmills: Palgrave.
In eleven original chapters drawn from ethnographic study on five continents, the contributors take the experiences, practices and embodiments of everyday actors in marketplaces to reveal how, in market-commercial contexts, economic value never stands alone but is always accompanied by and enfolded into exquisite human specificity.

Lash, Scott and Celia Lury. 2007. Global Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity.
A theoretical excursus in the cultural studies tradition which conceptually and historically deconstructs and addresses the notion of a culture industry so as to extend and supersede the long-standing approach of the Frankfurt School.

Mariampolski, Hy. 2006. Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion.
London: Sage.
Describes ways that marketers can use ethnographic ideas and techniques and demonstrates ways that social scientists can make ethnography useful to new product development.

Schechter, Danny. In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts. New York, NY: Globalvision, Inc., 2007. 98 minutes. DVD
A timely and disturbing analysis of the political economy of the global debt economy, replete with descriptions of collusions among those in the financial industries.

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