Shop ‘Til You Drop: Gender and Class in Consumer Society

Spring 1999

Instructor: Juliet Schor

office: Women's Studies/Warren House

phone: 495-9199, email: jschor@fas

office hours: Wednesday 1-2.30 and by appt..

Please schedule appointments with Michele O'Brien, x5-9199 or mobrien@fas

Teaching Fellows:

Erika Evasdottir (email:evasdot1@fas)

Danielle Egan (email: eganRH@tony.bc.edu)

 

Requirements: There will be an in-class midterm (20%), an 8-10 page
research paper (30%), a final exam (35%), and a "spending diary" (15%).
Attendance at weekly sections is expected.

Concentration Credit: WS 132 is cross-listed in Sociology and Anthropology

Readings: The following books are available at the Harvard Book Store on
Massachusetts Avenue. They have been ordered specifically for this course.
There is also a reading packet available from HPPS. Where readings are not
included in the packet, this is indicated on the syllabus. All course
readings have been placed on reserve at Hilles and Lamont and also at
Tozzier. In a few cases, readings may be downloaded from the course
website.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin)

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Penguin)

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(Harvard)

Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body (Routledge)

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (California)

Tricia Rose, Black Noise (Wesleyan)

Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately (Rutgers)

Andrew Ross, no sweat (Verso)

Adbusters magazine (Media Foundation)

Mahatma Ganhdi, Hind Swaraj (Greenleaf)

1998 Human Development Report (United Nations Development Programme)

 

Reading List

I. Introduction: Shopping and Consumer Society (Feb 4, 9)

William Leach, "Women and Department Stores," Journal of American History,
71(2):319-42, September 1984. (Not in reading packet)

Mary Douglas, "In Defense of Shopping" in Pasi Falk and Colin Cambell,
eds, The Shopping Experience, (Routledge) 1997, pp. 15-30. (Not in reading
packet)

John Fiske, Reading the Popular, ch. 2, "Shopping for Pleasure," in
Reading the Popular (Routledge), 1989, pp. 13-42. (Not in reading packet).

Dennis Rook, "The Buying Impulse," Journal of Consumer Research
14:189-199, September 1987.

Thomas O'Guinn and Ronald Faber, "Compulsive Buying: A Phenomenological
Exploration" Journal of Consumer Research, 16:147-157, September 1989.

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Science of Shopping," The New Yorker, (Not in
reading packet).

 

II. The Question of Consumer Society (Feb 11, 16)

Guest Lecture: John Kenneth Galbraith

Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1, section 4, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and
its Secret," pp. 163-177. (New York: Vintage)

Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120-167.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, esp. chs 9-12.

Juliet Schor, "The Insidious Cycle of Work and Spend," The Overworked
American, (Basic Books) 1991, ch 5, pp. 107-138.

Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth
Century, (Princeton University Press), 1993, ch 1, pp. 3-11.

Igor Kopytoff, "The cultural biography of things: commoditization as
process," in Arjun Appadurai, ed, The social life of things: commodities
in cultural perspective, (Cambridge University Press), 1988, pp. 64-91.

Human Development Report, ch. 2.

 

III. Class and Status (Feb 18,23,25)

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, chs I-VI, pp. 1-188
(Penguin edition)

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(Harvard University Press), 1984, chs 1-5.

Douglas Holt, "Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?"
mimeo, 1997.

Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption, (Indiana University Press),
1990, ch 2, pp. 31-43

 

IV. Women and the Feminization of Consumption (March 2,4)

Roland Marchand, "Keeping the Audience in Focus," in Advertising the
American Dream, (University of California) 1985, ch. 3, pp. 52-87.

Erika Rappaport, "A Husband and His Wife's Dresses," in Victoria de
Grazia, ed, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective, (University of California) 1996, pp. 163-187

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (Dell), 1983, chs 1-2, pp. 15-68.

Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements, (Harvard University Press), 1979.
(Out of print. On reserve)

Susan Fournier, "The Consumer and the Brand: An Understanding Within the
Framework of Personal Relationships," Harvard Business School Working
Paper 97-024, 1997.

 

First Hourly (March 9)

 

V. Commodification (March 11, 16,18,23,25)

A. The Commodification of Daily Life (March 11)

B. The Body (March 16, 18)

Guest Lecture: Kathy Davis

Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body.

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight, chs.

Kobena Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics," in Out There: Marginalization
and Contemporary Cultures, ed, Russell Ferguson et al, (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press), pp. 247-264.

C. Culture and Style (March 23)

Tricia Rose, Black Noise 

D. Childhood (March 25)

Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately

 

VI. Inequality (April 6,8)

Human Development Report, ch 3.

Carl Nightingale, On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and their
American Dreams, ch 5 (Basic Books), 1993, ch. 5, pp. 135-165.

Robin Girvan, "Ugly Chic," in Andrew Ross, no sweat, (Verso) 1997, pp.
263-274.

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Coolhunt," The New Yorker, March 17, 1997, pp.
78-88. (Not in packet)

Douglas Holt and Juliet Schor, "Consumer and the Underclass," mimeo 1998.
(click here to view on the Women's Studies website)

 

VII. Advertising and the Commercialization of Culture (April 13,15)

Guest Lecture: Ruth Wooden, President, The Ad Council

Raymond Williams, "Advertising: the Magic System," in Problems in
Materialism and Culture (Verso) 1980, pp. 170-195.

Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, (Basic Books) 1986,
ch. 8, pp. 234-243.

Thomas C. O'Guinn and L.J. Shrum, "The Role of Television in the
Construction of Consumer Reality," Journal of Consumer Research,
23:278-294, March 1997.

Film: Advertising and the End of the World

 

VIII. Globalization (April 22,27,29)

Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh, "Homogenization of Global Culture," in
Mander and Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy, (Sierra
Club Books), pp. 71-77.

Andrew, Ross, no sweat, pp.s 4-37, 95-134, 227-262.

Richard Wilk, "Miss World Belize: Globalism, Localism and the Political
Economy of Beauty," mimeo, 1993.

James Watson, ed, Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia (Stanford
University Press), 1997, chs 2-3, pp. 77-135.

David Howes, Cross-Cultural Consumption, pp. 1-16, 178-184.

Daniel Miller, The Young and the Restless in Trinidad, in Roger
Silverstone and Eric Hirsch, eds, Consuming technologies: Media and
Information in Domestic Spaces, (Routledge) 1992, pp. 163-182.

Alfred Gell, "Newcomers to the world of goods: consumption among the Muria
Gonds," in Arjun Appadurai, ed, The social life of things: commodities in
cultural perspective, (Cambridge University Press), 1988, pp. 110-138.

Alan Durning, How Much is Enough? Consumer Sociey and the Future of the
Earth (Norton) 1992, ch. 2, pp. 26-36.

Robert Goodland, "Growth has Reached Its Limit," in Mander and Goldsmith,
eds, The Case Against the Global Economy (Sierra Club Books), pp. 207-217

Human Development Report, ch. 4.

 

IX. Alternatives (May 4,6)

Adbusters

Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj

Juliet Schor, "The Downshifter Next Door," The Overspent American, (Basic
Books) 1998, ch4, pp. 111-142. (download from website)

Angela Robbie, "A New Kind of Rag Trade?" in Andrew Ross, no sweat, pp.
275-289.

Human Development Report, ch. 5.