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This concluding chapter includes three parts. First, it addresses the questions raised in the Introduction. It elaborates how, on the one hand, Chinese concepts of life and death as shared ideas and beliefs produce public resistance to receiving life insurance as risk management and how, on the other hand, insurance practitioners mobilize local cultural symbols and practices to get around this resistance. Moving beyond the specifics of this case, it proposes a theoretical model that links the two manifestations of culture, one as a coherent meaning system and the other as a fragmented tool-kit, to the construction and adoption of a new economic practice. Second, this chapter includes a comparative analysis of the life insurance markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan to scrutinize the extent to which local cultures and agents wield the power to construct and maintain alternative models of capitalist practices. It maintains that the presence of competitive domestic players in the field is critical to strengthening the agency of the indigenous parties. Finally, this chapter reports on the changes in some insurance firms over the years, discusses how Chinese clients may change their attitudes toward risk management insurance, and offers projections about the market’s future development.

The life insurance business has been growing rapidly in China in recent years, despite complaints by insurance sales agents about the local public’s resistance to discussing death or misfortune. This empirical puzzle serves as a starting point for the book. The introductory chapter poses empirical and theoretical questions, lays out the analytical framework, presents the methodology, and highlights the academic values of the case. It discusses Viviana Zelizer’s insights about the role of cultural values in suppressing the development of American life insurance in the first half of the 19^th century, and addresses the questions left unanswered by her argument. In particular, it considers how modern enterprises originating in western contexts can expand to places with different cultural traditions, if cultural values can suppress a market from emerging. To address this question, an analytical framework that incorporates both the classical concept of culture (emphasizing values and ideas) and the tool-kit concept of culture (highlighting practicality), is proposed, laying the groundwork for the analysis in subsequent chapters.

Various features of consumer culture under East European communism—such as advertising and marketing—provoked long-lasting, heated, and rancorous internal debate. In contrast, the communist regimes viewed the establishment of large-scale retailing venues as largely unproblematic. Socialist planners and policymakers tended to treat the department store as simply a “system-neutral” form that could proliferate across socialist society with little or no threat to the political, economic, and cultural commitments of socialism. Looking at four of the most prosperous, consumer-oriented communist countries (the GDR, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia), Patrick Hyder Patterson demonstrates how the department store phenomenon played out in the socialist context: how the desires that were unleashed and the cultural values that were sustained through the use of the department store form in the end proved difficult to reconcile with the political goals of socialism and were thus subversive of communist control. This, in turn, Patterson argues, forces us to reconceptualize the nature of consumption and sales in the modern grand emporium, and to question what is truly “socialist” about commercial practices “under socialism” and, in the same vein, what is “capitalist” about commercial practices “under capitalism.”

This chapter presents an alternative view of transnational media consumption, studying two Egyptian performance communities that relate differently to both global and national trends. The first is the Cairene community of Muhammad 'Ali street, which largely exists outside the influence of global culture markets and has experienced both the state's favor and disfavor. The second community is Upper Egyptian, which is marginal within Egypt, and is precisely the kind of phenomenon that is favored in metropolitan “world beat” music which aims to present itself as an alternative to leading metropolitan trends.

This chapter examines the primary factors that shaped market culture in Yugoslavia, with particular emphasis on the role played by specialists in advertising, retailing, and marketing, and by media institutions such as television and the popular press. Beginning in the mid-1950s, advertising specialists gradually turned Yugoslavia into something without parallel in the world of state socialism: a place where, on a regular basis, ordinary citizens were bombarded with advertising messages. This chapter traces the rise of a domestic advertising industry amid socialist Yugoslavia's surprising and rapid transformation into a consumer society between 1950 and 1980. It also discusses the end of the Yugoslav Dream during the period 1980–1991, triggered in large part by country's economic decline.

This chapter examines the mainstream Marxist critique of the contradictions of consumerism in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was heading toward the creation of a capitalist-style “consumer society” by the late 1960s. However, the move toward consumerism did not go unchallenged. Instead, consumer culture and the advertising and marketing that propelled it encountered, early on, staunch and ardent resistance. This chapter considers the place of Marxism in issues surrounding commercial promotion and its role in fashioning popular culture. In particular, it analyzes the arguments of Marxist social critics that consumerism and market culture were among the most important “internal enemies” of Yugoslav socialism. It also discusses Marxist criticisms of the so-called Homo consumens and critics' sustained rhetorical campaign against consumerism. It shows that Yugoslavia's distinctive consumer culture and the commercial promotion that sustained it gave rise to a different sort of egalitarianism based on participation in a new Yugoslav Dream, one rooted in consumption.

This chapter examines how, beginning as early as the 1950s, the representatives of Yugoslavia's commercial trades went about legitimizing the appeal of (and to) market culture and consumerist values as they sought to “sell” the new consumer orientation to government authorities, party politicians, business leaders, and ordinary consumers. Yugoslavia's departure from Stalinism gave rise to new attitudes toward commercial promotion, but those in positions of authority typically did not treat advertising and marketing as “natural” elements of the country's commercial life. This chapter looks at specialists' efforts to naturalize advertising and marketing activities in line with the distinctive ideology of Yugoslav self-management socialism. More specifically, it considers the ways that these specialists tried to establish the legitimacy of advertising and marketing as essentially system-neutral and even value-neutral techniques of economic progress in general and of abundance in particular. It also discusses the problematic nature of the idea of “socialist advertising”.

This chapter examines the commodification of popular culture in Japan as well as the capacity of the domestic market to manufacture and export anime, movies, video games, television programs, music, and manga. It first considers the structure of Japan's cultural industries and the process of cultural commodification based on examples from music, television, and manga in order to provide a broad picture of the Japanese popular culture markets. It then discusses the main features of popular culture production and the capacity of Japan's cultural industries for production, consumption, and export. It also explores the role of “freeters” and “otaku” in Japan's popular culture production, along with the Japanese government's involvement in the production and export of popular culture and its initiatives to support the sector. It argues that the structure and size of the domestic market and the experience of Japan's cultural industries at home have fostered the competitiveness of Japanese popular culture products abroad.

This book has investigated the political economy of Japanese popular culture in East Asia as well as the role of Japanese popular culture in the construction of the East Asian region. By analyzing the expansion of Japanese cultural industries into East Asian markets since the late 1980s, the book has demonstrated how Japan's popular culture products, agents, and industries contribute to the regionalization of East Asia. This final chapter summarizes the book's main findings and discusses its implications. It first explains why Japanese popular culture has been successful in East Asia and how that success has affected popular culture markets and governments in the region. It then considers how expansion of Japanese cultural industries is likely to affect the regionalization process in East Asia in both the short and long terms before concluding with some analytical and theoretical insights about the relationship between popular culture and the process of regional formation.

This chapter examines how Josip Broz Tito and Yugoslavia's state authorities responded to the capitalist-style consumer society that emerged in the late 1960s. Socialist critics challenged the new Yugoslav culture of commercialism and the promotional activities that were driving it. However, the Yugoslav political-administrative establishment had produced surprisingly little in the way of official or even quasi-official rules or guidelines regarding these phenomena. This absence of concrete governmental measures to restrict market culture and check the perceived excesses of consumer culture is one of the most noticeable and distinctive features of the political history of consumption in Yugoslavia. This chapter argues that the state authorities' response to consumerism often did not match the intensity of the public debate, tending instead toward a pattern of fitful accommodation and resistance, with remarkable toleration punctuated by occasional ideological assaults for the purposes of discipline and restraint.

This chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about market culture and popular protest in Great Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth century. The chapters deal with the marketing and provision of foodstuffs, focusing on the question of what we may learn from popular protests against market changes to help us understand the development of social, economic, and political relations in the eighteenth century. They reflect the tensions occasioned by threats to the cultural norms and values that surrounded commodity exchange.

This chapter examines the significance of popular culture to the regionalization process in East Asia. It first considers the main characteristics of the East Asian region and shows that East Asian regionalization is essentially market-driven and overwhelmingly focuses on urban centers with large populations of middle-class residents, rather than on nation-states as a whole. It then explains major concepts related to “regionalism” and “regionalization” in East Asia and goes on to describe a regional paradigm for analyzing Japanese cultural industries. It also discusses the ways in which popular culture draws East Asia's cities and their inhabitants closer together, the impact of regional media alliances on East Asian popular culture markets, and the role of piracy in promoting regional confluences of popular culture. The chapter argues that a dynamic East Asian popular culture market has already been in the making for the past two decades and has greatly contributed to the regionalization process.

This chapter examines the unorthodox socialist critique of consumer culture developed by a group of revisionist Marxists skeptical of—and even openly antagonistic toward—the market-oriented premises (and promises) of self-management socialism in Yugoslavia. More specifically, it considers the disapproval that issued continually from a circle of critics aligned with Praxis, a sociologically oriented journal that functioned as a major outlet for left-wing Marxist-humanist thought. The chapter first discusses the Praxis critique of capitalism, and especially consumerism and its hedonistic-utilitarian culture. It then considers the journal's position regarding the threat of consumerism to socialism, with particular emphasis on its critique of market culture and self-management. It also assesses the implications of the New Left critique of consumerism and the Praxisrevisionists' indictment of consumer society, which it argues could also be seen as a challenge to the fundamental direction of Yugoslav society and the legitimacy of those in power.

This chapter focuses on international law’s relationship with culture and law and development. It gives reasons why law and development avoids critical appraisal of cultural norms. and makes the case for a culturally informed law and development framework, arguing that law and development must part ways with the acultural roots of international law. It discusses scholarly disciplines that establish a link between cultural norms and economic development. The chapter looks at how social capital and cultural resources may be used to facilitate economic development through rotating credit associations and ethnic economies. The chapter then focuses on ways cultural and ethnic resources have been deployed to facilitate market development. It also explores the relationship between culture and human rights, specifically, women’s rights. The chapter canvasses international human rights and feminist approaches to culture to demonstrate that culture cannot be severed from issues related to women’s equality.

This chapter explores what the movement toward consumerism meant for the making and unmaking of the Yugoslav experiment in reformist socialism and multiethnic comity. It shows how consumerism gave rise to a new New Class whose membership was predicated upon participation in a modern style of mass consumption, a complex of behaviors, tastes, and attitudes that in many respects resembled those seen in the classic Western sites of contemporary consumer society. It also considers how popular consumer culture, paired with the market culture cultivated by the new business elites, became a defining feature of Yugoslav daily life. Finally, it examines the nature of the consumerist New Class and its implications for the final stage of downturn and disillusionment in Yugoslavia caused by the contradictions of consumerism and the end of the Yugoslav Dream.

The capitalist market embodies and accentuates key elements of modern culture: it endorses human exceptionalism, treats people as autonomous individuals, discounts the future, fragments and commodifies nature’s parts, overlooking ecological interconnections and most life forms; denies human ignorance and sensory limits, strips market participants of moral responsibility, and equates normative goodness with the satisfaction of individual preferences, By rewarding aggression and risk-taking the market provides incentives to misuse nature and by dividing people into their individual roles saps the community as such of power. This system needs reform, not because markets are inherently destructive, but because of the ways today’s market capitalism entrenches these cultural attitudes. Reform of the economy is thus not rightly thought about as a separate undertaking (as a push for a new economy); it must be part of a larger campaign of cultural change. The chapter ends by noting how the campaign for such cultural reform will bear little resemblance to the ongoing push for gay rights or marriage equality—a typical civil right campaign that sought change in one aspect of modern culture while leaving the vast bulk of it unaltered, including all elements relating to humans and nature.

This chapter shows that ordinary Yugoslavs often really were “sold” on what the Yugoslav system promised to deliver: they loved their consumer culture and they celebrated their chance to participate in it. Many, if not most, ordinary citizens of Yugoslavia were neither especially disturbed by market culture nor much concerned about its potentially harmful effects. For the Yugoslav “man on the street,” and, just as important, his female counterpart, the polemics launched against consumerism never seem to have had the profound chastening effect that critics desired. This chapter examines how the critique of consumerism triggered a serious and uncompromising backlash against critics, as well as the role of mass media, including television, in showcasing the public mood toward questions of consumption and consumer wealth. It also considers public opinion regarding the culture of abundance associated with consumerism.

Johnson Jones Hooper and Joseph Glover Baldwin have probably never met, but they were in some ways very much alike. Hooper and Baldwin typified a special group of young men who left their homes in the east during the 1820s and 1830s — an émigré generation of displaced youth. Neither planter-rich nor common white, these men were often the second or third sons of respectable families in Virginia or the Carolinas, some of whom had fallen on hard times after the Panic of 1819. Hooper and Baldwin took on market culture directly. Whatever their focus, all explored the peculiar interstice between tradition and modernity that made identity — especially male identity — so contested on the frontier.