Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.
Consumerism is a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status. It emerged in Western Europe before the Industrial Revolution and became widespread around 1900. In economics, consumerism refers to policies that emphasize consumption. It is the consideration that the free choice of consumers should strongly inform the choice by manufacturers of what is produced and how, and therefore influence the economic organization of a society.
In sociology and in economics, the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical. In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury commodities specifically as a public display of economic power—the income and the accumulated wealth—of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, the public display of discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status.
In social behavior, downshifting is a trend where individuals adopt simpler lives from what critics call the "rat race".
In the fields of philosophy and of aesthetics, the term philistinism describes the attitudes, habits, and characteristics of a person who deprecates art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect. As a derogatory term, philistine describes a person who is narrow-minded and hostile to the life of the mind, whose materialistic and wealth-oriented worldview and tastes indicate an indifference to cultural and aesthetic values.
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
In economics and particularly in consumer choice theory, the substitution effect is one component of the effect of a change in the price of a good upon the amount of that good demanded by a consumer, the other being the income effect.
"Keeping up with the Joneses" is an idiom in many parts of the English-speaking world referring to the comparison of oneself to one's neighbor, where the neighbor serves as a benchmark for social class or the accumulation of material goods. Failure to "keep up with the Joneses" is perceived as a demonstration of socio-economic or cultural inferiority. The phrase was coined by a 1910s comic strip of the same name.
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise of economics and sociology, and a critique of conspicuous consumption as a function of social class and of consumerism, which are social activities derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor; the social institutions of the feudal period that have continued to the modern era.
Economic materialism can be described as either a personal attitude that attaches importance to acquiring and consuming material goods or as a logistical analysis of how physical resources are shaped into consumable products.
Consumption is the act of using resources to satisfy current needs and wants. It is seen in contrast to investing, which is spending for acquisition of future income. Consumption is a major concept in economics and is also studied in many other social sciences.
Super Size Me is a 2004 American documentary film directed by and starring Morgan Spurlock, an American independent filmmaker. Spurlock's film follows a 30-day period from February 1 to March 2, 2003, during which he claimed to consume only McDonald's food, although he later disclosed he was also drinking heavy amounts of alcohol. The film documents the drastic change on Spurlock's physical and psychological health and well-being. It also explores the fast food industry's corporate influence, including how it encourages poor nutrition for its own profit and gain.
Trickle-down fashion is a model of product adoption in marketing that affects many consumer goods and services.
Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. From 2010 to 2017, she studied the sharing economy under a large research project funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She is currently working on a project titled "The Algorithmic Workplace" with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Joan Hume McCracken was an American dancer and actress who became famous for her role as Sylvie in the original 1943 production of Oklahoma! She also was noted for her performances in the Broadway shows Bloomer Girl (1944), Billion Dollar Baby (1945) and Dance Me a Song (1950), and the films Hollywood Canteen (1945) and Good News (1947).
Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology. It has been described as "intentionally and meaningfully excluding or cutting goods from one's consumption routine or reusing once-acquired goods with the goal of avoiding consumption". The ideology is opposed to consumerism, being a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status.
In social science, foodways are the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food. Foodways often refers to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.
Grant David McCracken is a Canadian anthropologist and author, known for his books about culture and commerce. He was the founder and director of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum and was a member of Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He coined the term the Diderot effect. He lives in Rowayton, Connecticut.
The Possession is a 2012 American supernatural horror film directed by Ole Bornedal, written by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, and produced by Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert, and J. R. Young. It stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kyra Sedgwick, Natasha Calis, Grant Show, Madison Davenport, and Matisyahu. The story, based on the 2004 Los Angeles Times article "A Jinx in a Box?" by Leslie Gornstein, is about the allegedly haunted dybbuk box.
Chief Culture Officer (2009) is the eighth book by Canadian author and anthropologist Grant McCracken. The book looks at how modern business attempt to connect with culture. In the author's analysis he considers examples such as Dove's campaign for real beauty, and the I Love New York advertising campaign.
