The author of The Overspent American outlines a strategy for addressing key ecological and financial challenges by changing perspectives on consumer goods, value and lifestyles, making specific recommendations for promoting sustainability without deprivation.

€ 21,00

Marketing targeted at kids is virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at Girl Scout meetings, slumber parties, and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, Juliet B. Schor, New York Times bestselling author of The Overworked American, examines how marketing efforts of vast size, scope, and effectiveness have created "commercialized children." Ads and their messages about sex, drugs, and food affect not just what children want to buy, but who they think they are. In this groundbreaking and crucial book, Schor looks at the consequences of the commercialization of childhood and provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children.

Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Born to Buy is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.

Oltre agli spot tradizionali, si sono diffuse forme di pubblicità occulta sempre più sottili nel cinema e nella televisione. Le aziende arruolano i bambini come "guerrilla marketer" per raggiungere i loro amici e le loro famiglie. Juliet Schor in questo libro analizza come un impegno di marketing enorme per dimensioni, campo d'azione ed efficacia, abbia creato una generazione di "bambini commercializzati". Raffinate strategie convincono bambini e ragazzi che i prodotti sono necessari alla loro sopravvivenza sociale. Le pubblicità non li influenzano solo per quello che vogliono acquistare, ma anche per quello che pensano di essere e per come si percepiscono. Schor rovescia la convinzione tradizionale: non è che i bambini con problemi abbraccino i valori del consumismo; sono i bambini che abbracciano i valori del consumismo che diventano bambini con problemi. Il libro è un'analisi ben documentata di quello che stanno diventando i nostri figli, sotto gli attacchi di un marketing spietato e privo di scrupoli; ma è anche un invito a genitori e insegnanti a reagire, con indicazioni positive. Quel che è in gioco è il benessere emotivo e sociale dei nostri figli.

"We live in what may be the most consumer-oriented society in history. . . .Once a purely utilitarian chore, shopping has been elevated to the status of a national passion."--Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American. A unique and definitive reader on our "national passion"--buying stuff--and its consequences for American society. We are citizens, owners and workers, believers and heathens, but today more than anything else we are consumers. How this came to be and its consequences for us all is the subject of this pioneering reader on the rise--and continued rise--of consumerism. The Consumer Society Reader features a range of key works on the nature and evolution of consumer society. It includes classics such as the Frankfurt School writers Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse on the Culture Industry; Thorstein Veblen's oft-cited writings on "conspicuous consumption"; Betty Friedan on the housewife's central role in consumer society; and John Kenneth Galbraith's influential analysis of the "affluent society." The book also includes much-discussed recent work by such leading critics as Pierre Bourdieu, Thomas Frank, bell hooks, Bill McKibben, and Janice Radway. A landmark in social criticism, The Consumer Society Reader is sure to become the standard book on the subject.

The Overspent American explores why so many of us feel materially dissatisfied, why we work staggeringly long hours and yet walk around with ever-present mental "wish lists" of things to buy or get, and why Americans save less than virtually anyone in the world. Unlike many experts, Harvard economist Juliet B. Schor does not blame consumers' lack of self-discipline. Nor does she blame advertisers. Instead she analyzes the crisis of the American consumer in a culture where spending has become the ultimate social art.