Search results for ""Author Laura J. Miller""
The University of Chicago Press Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption
Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail industries, has evolved from an arena dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. Yet unlike other retail industries, bookselling, many people believe, should be "above" questions of profit. In "Reluctant Capitalists", Laura J. Miller investigates what drives this belief and how it is affected by the changing retail environment. Miller argues that the independent/chain dynamic is not entirely new - it started a century ago when department stores began selling books and has culminated in the advent of Internet marketplaces. Miller uses interviews with bookstore customers and members of the book industry to explore how these changes have met resistance from book professionals and readers who believe that the book business should be ethically superior to market forces. In the process, she also teases out the meanings of retailing and consumption in American culture at large, underscoring her point that any type of consumer behavior is inevitably political, with consequences for communities as well as commercial institutions.
£26.96
The University of Chicago Press Building Nature's Market: The Business and Politics of Natural Foods
For the first 150 years of their existence, "natural foods" were consumed primarily by body-builders, hippies, religious sects, and believers in nature cure. And those consumers were dismissed by the medical establishment and food producers as kooks, faddists, and dangerous quacks. In the 1980s, broader support for natural foods took hold and the past fifteen years have seen an explosion everything from healthy-eating superstores to mainstream institutions like hospitals, schools, and workplace cafeterias advertising their fresh-from-the-garden ingredients.Building Nature's Market shows how the meaning of natural foods was transformed as they changed from a culturally marginal, religiously inspired set of ideas and practices valorizing asceticism to a bohemian lifestyle to a mainstream consumer choice. Laura J. Miller argues that the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the leadership of the natural foods industry. Rather than a simple tale of cooptation by market forces, Miller contends the participation of business interests encouraged the natural foods movement to be guided by a radical skepticism of established cultural authority. She challenges assumptions that private enterprise is always aligned with social elites, instead arguing that profit-minded entities can make common cause with and even lead citizens in advocating for broad-based social and cultural change.
£31.49