What does it mean to live a good life in a time when the planet is overheating, the human population continues to steadily reach new peaks, oceans are turning more acidic, and fertile soils the world over are eroding at unprecedented rates? These and other simultaneous harms and threats demand creative responses at several levels of consideration and action. Written by an international team of contributors, this book examines in-depth the relationship between sustainability and the good life. Drawing on wealth of theories, from social practice theory to architecture and design theory, and disciplines, such as anthropology and environmental philosophy, this volume promotes participatory action-research based approaches to encourage sustainability and wellbeing at local levels. It covers topical issues such the politics of prosperity, globalization, and indigenous notions of "the good life" and happiness". Finally it places a strong emphasis on food at the heart of the sustainability and good life debate, for instance binding the global south to the north through import and exports, or linking everyday lives to ideals within the dream of the good life, with cookbooks and shows. This interdisciplinary book provides invaluable insights for researchers and postgraduate students interested in the contribution of the environmental humanities to the sustainability debate.

Product Description: Deep reductions in energy use and carbon emissions will not be possible within political economies that are driven by the capitalist imperatives of growth, commodification and individualization. As such, it has now become necessary to understand the relationship between capitalism and the emergence of high energy habits...read more

Product Description: Sustainable consumption is a central research topic in academic discourses of sustainable development and global environmental change. Informed by a number of disciplinary perspectives, this book is structured around four key themes in sustainable consumption research: Living, Moving, Dwelling and Futures...read more

Product Description: The book explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires means, but these industries offered something else as well – they offered practical marketing devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor consumers...read more

Product Description: Pioneered by American economist Paul Samuelson, revealed preference theory is based on the idea that the preferences of consumers are revealed in their purchasing behavior. Researchers in this field have developed complex and sophisticated mathematical models to capture the preferences that are 'revealed' through consumer choice behavior...read more

Product Description: Death has never been more visible to consumers. From life insurance to burial plots to estate planning, we are constantly reminded of consumer choices to be made with our mortality in mind. Religious beliefs in the afterlife (or their absence) impact everyday consumption activities...read more

Product Description: Consumer vulnerability is of growing importance as a research topic for those exploring wellbeing. This book provides space to critically engage with the conditions, contexts and characteristics of consumer vulnerability, which affect how people experience and respond to the marketplace and vice versa...read more

Product Description: Success in the business world is not strictly reliant on producing valuable and in-demand products. Without a proper understanding of the consumers that a business markets and sells their products to, a companys accomplishments can quickly become failures...read more

Product Description: A witty, gracious, and charmingly illustrated anti-consumer manifestoLike most people, Sarah Lazarovic covets beautiful things. But rather than giving in to her impulse to spend and acquire, Sarah spent a year painting the objects she wanted to buy instead...read more

Product Description: Dance has proliferated in movies, television, Internet, and retail spaces while the spiritual power of dance has also been linked with mass consumption. Walter marries the cultural studies of dance and the religious aspects of dance in an exploration of consumption rituals, including rituals of being persuaded to buy products that include dance...read more

Product Description: The Legends in Consumer Behavior series captures the essence of the most important contributions made in the field of consumer behavior in the past several decades. It reproduces the seminal works of the legends in the field, which are supplemented by interviews of these legends as well as by the opinions of other scholars about their work...read more

Product Description: Making Money examines the interrelation between problem gambling, drug addiction and shopaholism on the one hand and contemporary capitalism on the other. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from neurobiological research to Marx's theory of surplus value and from Andersen's tale of "The Princess and the Pea" to interviews with drug addicts, the author dissects three key components of modern capitalism—money, the body and the commodity—in order to establish that the gambler, the drug addict and the shopaholic are, in the end, both a post-ideological avant-garde and a destitute waste-product of capitalism...read more

Product Description: The modern era of business has prompted an increased focus on the consumer and the responsibility of corporations to consider their ethical and social obligations to their customers. The rise of the consumerist movement has encouraged further research and development on the topic of consumerism, enabling business to succeed in a consumer-driven market...read more

The study of the desire, acquisition, use, and disposal of goods and services, consumption, has grown enormously in recent years, and has been the subject of major historiographical debates: did the eighteenth century bring a consumer revolution? Was there a great divergence between East and West? Did the twentieth century see the triumph of global consumerism? Questions of consumption have become defining topics in all branches of history, from gender and labour history to political history and cultural studies. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption offers a timely overview of how our understanding of consumption in history has changed in the last generation, taking the reader from the ancient period to the twenty-first century. It includes chapters on Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America, brings together new perspectives, highlights cutting-edge areas of research, and offers a guide through the main historiographical developments. Contributions from leading historians examine the spaces of consumption, consumer politics, luxury and waste, nationalism and empire, the body, well-being, youth cultures and fashion.The Handbook also showcases the different ways in which recent historians have approached the subject, from cultural and economic history, to political history and technology studies, including areas where multidisciplinary approaches have been especially fruitful.

Product Description: Buyographics follows eleven American families and explores how their life decisions impact consumer behavior. This is not just a data book, because each of these numbers - in datasets big and small - is a person. As you read their stories, trends come to life and provide a greater understanding of how to reach your target...read more

Product Description: While ethnic neighborhoods are usually associated with poverty, crime and social problems, they have also emerged as places of leisure and consumption, providing opportunities for numerous entrepreneurs and employees. Local and national governments and other regulatory actors, as well as the media, have started to see and promote these neighborhoods as urban attractions for tourists, city dwellers and others...read more

Product Description: Consuming Football in Late Modern Life explores the phenomenon of football (soccer) fandom as consumption in the age of late modernity. By centralising fandom within the sociology of consumption, the book examines how this phenomenon equates to a fluid series of consumption activities that are practiced in the course of everyday life...read more