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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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- Consumer Culture and Emotion (5)
- Authenticity (4)
- Health Care Discourse (3)
- Media and Nationalism (3)
- Choice (2)
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- Consumers (2)
- Cultural Production (2)
- Framing (2)
- Gender (2)
- Gender Performance (2)
- Greeting Cards (2)
- Nationalism (2)
- Citizenship (1)
- Collective memory (1)
- Commercialism (1)
- Commodity Frontier (1)
- Communication (1)
- Consumerism (1)
- Consumption (1)
- Cultural Capital (1)
- Cultural Industry (1)
- Culture Industry (1)
- Distinction (1)
- Emotion (1)
- Emotional labor (1)
- Emphasized femininity (1)
- Entertainment (1)
- Film (1)
- Greeting cards (1)
- Health Policy (1)
Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Consumer Subjectivity And Us Healthcare Reform, Emily West
Consumer Subjectivity And Us Healthcare Reform, Emily West
Emily E. West
Health care consumerism is an important frame in US health care policy, especially in recent media and policy discourse about federal health care reform. This paper reports on qualitative fieldwork with health care users to find out how people interpret and make sense of the identity of “health care consumer.” It proposes that while the term consumer is normally understood as a descriptive label for users who purchase health care and insurance services, it should actually be understood as a metaphor, carrying with it a host of associations that shape US health care policy debates in particular ways. Based on …
A Taste For Greeting Cards: Distinction Within A Denigrated Cultural Form, Emily West
A Taste For Greeting Cards: Distinction Within A Denigrated Cultural Form, Emily West
Emily E. West
Greeting cards are a denigrated product category in the United States, and yet consumers use them at high rates across taste formations. Consumers with relatively high cultural capital place a premium on originality in their self-expression, hence greeting cards present a consumption problem because they are a mode of expressing the self through mass-produced means. Based on interviews with 51 people, I show that consumers with higher cultural capital are more likely to prioritize card design over sentiment; select smaller, simpler designs and sentiments; prefer cards that are handmade, look handmade, or remind them of fine art; and are more …
Expressing The Self Through Greeting Card Sentiment: Working Theories Of Authentic Communication In A Commercial Form, Emily West
Emily E. West
As mass produced vehicles of sentiment, greeting cards draw attention to the use of socially constructed codes for communicating, even feeling, emotion. This paper describes the results of interviews with fifty-one greeting card consumers, focusing on what makes greeting cards ‘personal’ for them, despite their mass-produced nature. Consumers negotiate their relationships with pre-printed sentiments differently depending on whether their allegiance is stronger to an expressive individualist understanding of authenticity or a ritual perspective, and these allegiances tend to reflect cultural capital. Specifically, suspicion of pre-printed sentiments is common among people with higher cultural capital, while this is the feature of …
Reality Nations: An International Comparison Of The Historical Reality Genre, Emily West
Reality Nations: An International Comparison Of The Historical Reality Genre, Emily West
Emily E. West
When 1900 House (Hoppe, 2000) premiered in the UK in 2000, a hybrid television form was born that would spawn spin-offs and imitators over the next several years in several other countries. These series place people in historical settings, asking them to leave their 21st century lives behind, and live within the material and social constraints of the past for a period of three or four months. For this chapter I examine a sample of seven historical reality mini-series that aired between 2000 and 2005 in English-speaking countries, ranging from four to eight episodes each. As existing scholarship on the …
Doing Gender Difference Through Greeting Cards: The Construction Of A Communication Gap In Marketing And Everyday Practice., Emily West
Emily E. West
Greeting card communication reflects the highly gendered division of both emotional and domestic labor in American culture. It’s generally thought that American men do not take as much responsibility for sending greeting cards as women, or display competence in this mode of communication, and both survey data and field work with greeting card consumers confirm this overall pattern. For many women, greeting card communication is part of a feminized habitus that includes kinship work as well as routine provisioning for the household. For men, taking an interest in greeting cards can seem like discrediting behavior for heterosexual masculinity, and so …
Mass Producing The Personal: The Greeting Card Industry’S Approach To Commercial Sentiment, Emily West
Mass Producing The Personal: The Greeting Card Industry’S Approach To Commercial Sentiment, Emily West
Emily E. West
The greeting card industry manages the challenge of mass-producing images and texts for use in interpersonal communication through both specific production techniques and narratives that “make sense” of this seemingly paradoxical task. The mass production of the personal is negotiated in the processes of writing sentiments and creating designs, as well as in identifying sending situations for cards. At Hallmark, the approach to creating emotional, relational communication for anonymous others is captured by the phrase “universal specificity,” which suggests that people’s emotions are essentially universal, and that the industry can meet the nation’s social expression needs by customizing these core …
When You Care Enough To Defend The Very Best: How The Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism, Emily West
When You Care Enough To Defend The Very Best: How The Greeting Card Industry Manages Cultural Criticism, Emily West
Emily E. West
The American greeting card industry, in particular industry leader Hallmark Cards, makes substantial efforts to deflect cultural critiques in its communications with the public, demonstrating how culture industries actively manage their negative associations with mass culture as well as the public’s fears of an advancing ‘commodity frontier’ (Hochschild, 2003: 30). Hallmark frames its cultural production as creative while de-emphasizing its industrial nature, and whenever possible, aligns itself with the legitimating cultural categories of art and the folk to counter the idea that greeting cards are false, manufactured sentiment. Hallmark also argues that the consumer is sovereign in order to contradict …
Cheerleading And The Gendered Politics Of Sport, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Cheerleading And The Gendered Politics Of Sport, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Emily E. West
Cheerleading occupies a contested space in American culture and a key point of controversy is whether it ought to be considered a sport. Drawing on interviews with college cheerleaders on coed squads as well as five years of fieldwork in various cheerleading sites, this paper examines the debate over cheerleading and sport in terms of its gender politics. The bid for sport status on the part of cheerleaders revolves around the desire for respect more than official recognition by athletic organizations; cheerleaders recognize the prestige associated with sport, a function of its historic association with hegemonic masculinity, and they claim …
Mediating Citizenship Through The Lens Of Consumerism: Frames In The American Medicare Reform Debates Of 2003-2004, Emily West
Emily E. West
Access to health care is an issue that challenges the imagined boundary between being a ‘consumer’ and being a ‘citizen’. This is especially true in the United States where market-based solutions to providing health care have historically been favored over care organized through government. In the recent debate over how to organize prescription drug coverage for seniors in the United States, stakeholders quoted in the press were more likely to position health care as a consumer issue rather than as an issue of basic rights that accompany citizenship. As scholars such as Lizabeth Cohen (2003) have illustrated, being a ‘consumer’ …
Scolding John Q.: Articulating A Normative Relationship Between Politics And Entertainment, Emily West
Scolding John Q.: Articulating A Normative Relationship Between Politics And Entertainment, Emily West
Emily E. West
The 2002 hostage drama John Q. triggered a discussion among journalists, the public, and the policy community about the proper relationship between politics and entertainment. In this debate the criteria for good journalism and good political discourse were frequently invoked to evaluate this Hollywood film. This discussion, which spilled out of the film criticism pages into news and commentary pages, shows how public sphere models of political discourse are privileged even though they may not be a good fit for fictional media. John Q.’s success in triggering public discussion and awareness about health policy issues seems to illustrate DeLuca & …
The Press As Agents Of Nationalism In The Queen’S Golden Jubilee: How British Newspapers Celebrated A Media Event, Claire Wardle, Emily West
The Press As Agents Of Nationalism In The Queen’S Golden Jubilee: How British Newspapers Celebrated A Media Event, Claire Wardle, Emily West
Emily E. West
The press coverage in anticipation of and during Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in Britain in June of 2002 illustrates Dayan and Katz’s (1992) theory that the media frequently adopt a “priestly” role when it comes to media events. The unexpected popularity of the Jubilee events caused the press to proclaim the Jubilee’s success as evidence of the nation’s continued strength, suggesting that their previous obsession with potential Jubilee failure was borne out of a sense of national insecurity. The coverage of the Jubilee as a whole points to the press’ role in promoting and celebrating patriotism.
Selling Canada To Canadians: Collective Memory, National Identity, And Popular Culture, Emily West
Selling Canada To Canadians: Collective Memory, National Identity, And Popular Culture, Emily West
Emily E. West
Two media endeavours, the Heritage Minutes and the CBC documentary Canada: A People’s History, hope to serve as a corrective to Canadians’ lack of interest in their history and to bolster national identity. However, the producers do not want to appear propagandistic in a country where there is conflict about what the shape of the nation should be. They accomplish this by appealing to the “on the spot” authority of journalistic representation and the emotional immediacy of dramatic story-telling. They also emphasize the multi-cultural and multi-perspectival nature of Canada’s past. However, ultimately these efforts exist within a larger narrative about …