‘THE MODERN SHOPPING EXPERIENCE’: KINGSWAY DEPARTMENT STORE AND CONSUMER POLITICS IN GHANA

Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca Murillo
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Older Employees ◽  
Kwame Nkrumah ◽  
Shopping Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Capitalism ◽  
Political Economic

ABSTRACTDespite the perception that department stores are a recent phenomenon in West Africa, modern indoor retail spaces have existed in its major cities since the mid-twentieth century. This article uses the history of Kingsway Department Store in Accra as a lens to understand emerging political, economic and social tensions in post-colonial Ghana. Drawing on United Africa Company (UAC) records, staff reports and inspection findings, as well as local newspapers, advertising and oral interviews, I demonstrate how legacies of colonial capitalism, struggles for political independence and negotiations over what constituted the ‘modern’ fuelled both local and foreign support of the project. For the UAC, investment was an opportunity to legitimize its activities in a newly independent Ghana and a means to shed its image as a colonial merchant firm. While local authorities were divided on whether large-scale retail developments should be part of an expanding post-colonial city, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah thought the store might provide a key component in constructing his vision of a new modern nation. However, the presence of white-collar working women, young managers supervising older employees, and the mixing of white expatriate and African shoppers exacerbated social conflicts – challenging local and colonial notions of authority based on race, gender and age.

Between Digestion and Desire: Genealogies of food in nationalist North India

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 1622-1643 ◽  
Author(s):  
RACHEL BERGER
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Food Preparation ◽  
North India ◽  
Food Advertising ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Indian Nation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Food Digestion ◽  
Political Economic

AbstractThis paper takes up the project of conceptualizing a new history of food in India through an exploration of conversations about food, digestion, desire, and embodiment that took place in Hindi-language publications in early-twentieth century North India. Through an exploration of cookbooks, guides to health and wellness, and food advertising spanning the 1920s to the 1940s, conversations about food preparation, consumption, and distribution come to be revealed as significant anchors of historical, political, economic, and cultural debates about the Indian nation in this period. The centrality of food to conversations that took up the reproduction and regeneration of the Hindu middle class helped to conceptualize an idealized Indian nation[A]. Subsequently, the focus on food advertising imagined the transformation of these citizens into consumers. Moving beyond the colonial fascination with native bodies and tropical constitutions, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the conversations that emerged out of a focus on food in popular culture did the work of envisioning new possibilities for post-colonial embodiment.

Understanding affective evaluation in retail: consumers perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-565
Author(s):  
Enrique Marinao-Artigas ◽  
Leslier Valenzuela-Fernández ◽  
Karla Barajas-Portas
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Reputation ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Management Strategies ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Structural Equations ◽  
Sample Survey ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Affective Evaluation ◽  
Shopping Experience

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of the consumer’s emotional shopping experience on the perception of benefits and on the corporate reputation of a department store. Design/methodology/approach This study was applied to a non-probabilistic sample survey proportionally distributed among the main department stores in Chile and Mexico. Findings The findings show for both countries that the functional and symbolic benefit perceived by consumers significantly influences the reputation of department stores. However, the hedonic benefit perceived by the consumer had a negative effect on the reputation of the store. Practical implications The companies could redirect their marketing and commercial management strategies based on the variables and relationships of the model proposed in this study. For instance, managers should implement strategies to improve the emotional experience of their clients. In addition, future studies also could use other variables inherent to the consumer’s purchasing behavior to evaluate their effects on the corporate reputation of the department store. Originality/value This research contributes with the proposal of an explanatory model for decision making, using structural equations that suggest that the affective evaluation of the shopping experience is a key antecedent of the functional, hedonic and symbolic benefits perceived by the consumer. Moreover, the emotional experience plays a key role as an antecedent for the corporate reputation of a company.

Comparing Tales of the Tribe

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-166
Author(s):  
Václav Paris
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
National Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment

This chapter compares two texts written in the same year, 1928, in very different geographical settings: Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Both works narrate, in peculiar allegorical form, the history of their nations embodied in one unusual hero. Macunaíma tells the story of Brazil’s modernization; Orlando begins in Elizabethan England and works its way up to the moment of composition. Although each is deeply idiosyncratic, they arrive at a similar set of conceits for national representation. Orlando famously changes sex halfway through Woolf’s narrative, while Macunaíma changes race, from black to white. To make sense of the contiguities between Macunaíma and Orlando, the chapter reads both as epics responding to the changing discourse of large-scale social Darwinism in the 1920s. In particular, it points out that both authors were aware of fascism’s increasingly rigid interpretations of evolution’s significance. Drawing out the similarities between Andrade and Woolf’s narratives, the chapter explains how Macunaíma and Orlando exemplify and expand this book’s methodology for reading modernist epic fiction comparatively against changing perceptions of evolution. It shows how such a bifocal reading allows us to see connections across traditional disciplinary borders of high and low, center and periphery, European and post-colonial.

scholarly journals Vertical Bazaars of Modernity: Western Department Stores and Their Staff in Istanbul (1889–1921)

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (S17) ◽  
pp. 91-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yavuz Köse
Keyword(s):  
Career Paths ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Ethnic Composition ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City ◽  
Late Ottoman

SummaryThis article examines Western department stores active in Istanbul between 1889 and 1921. It explores two aspects crucial for the department stores’ retail system: location and personnel. It goes on to demonstrate that Western department stores were situated not only in the Western districts of the city but also in traditional areas, such as the bazaar district. Rather than being exclusive they appear to have been closely connected with local business and aimed to appeal to the ethnically highly mixed customer pool. Equally, the workforce was heterogeneous, with the majority of local employees having diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Greek, Jewish, and Armenian, though rarely Muslim. Based on a large-scale sample drawn from the address registers of the Annuaire Oriental yearbook, the analysis of personal letters, and on Ottoman daily newspaper and journals, this study sheds light on the individuals who worked at a number of department stores, their ethnic composition, sex ratio, duration of employment, the job types they carried out, as well as their income situation, career paths, and domiciles. It hopes to contribute to the labour history of the late Ottoman Empire by exploring, for the first time, the employees of Western department stores, workers who have rarely attracted the attention of scholars so far.

T. C. Power & Bro.: The Rise of a Small Western Department Store, 1870–1902

1992 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 671-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry C. Klassen
Keyword(s):  
American West ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
The West ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Small Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Small Department

When studying retailing and its role in developing the American mass market, historians traditionally have focused their attention on large department stores. An analysis of the influence of small department stores in the growth of underdeveloped sections of the American West provides a different emphasis. The following article traces the history of T. C. Power & Bro.—a small, family-run department store in Montana—before the early 1900s. The article demonstrates that the firm's service was tailored to the economic and social needs of urban and rural settlers on the western frontier, helping to create a consumer society in the West.

Geographical space, social space, and the realm of the department store

Urban History ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Catherine Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Shopping Experience ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Urban Topography ◽  
Urban Institution

Over the past decade a number of scholars have examined the rise of the mass production and distribution of goods, and the concurrent emergence of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumer society or ‘culture of consumption’. This body of work has featured the department store prominently in several roles: as a venue for the distribution of consumer goods; as a material fantasyland in which women were encouraged to play out their dreams of conspicuous consumption; and as a place of white-collar employment for working-class clerks. Whatever their focus, these accounts generally view all department stores as homogeneous middle-class institutions, located in a similarly consistent ‘downtown’ in any (and all) large American and European cities. There are serious flaws in such a portrayal. Very real distinctions between department stores in a given city and the social implications of these differences in terms of social status and class are not addressed. Further, the contribution of the built environment and urban topography to the shaping of these status and class distinctions and, ultimately, women's shopping experience, is likewise overlooked. This article examines a set of surveys and marketing reports prepared in 1932 for the Higbee Company of Cleveland, Ohio, in order to situate more precisely one department store within its urban context. These sources document the relationship of the Higbee Company to the city's other department stores and in so doing reveal some of the ways in which stratification between and among classes was interpreted in terms of geographical and social space. Examination of the hierarchy of stores that existed in what was at the time the nation's sixth largest city provides a corrective to the image of the department store as a homogeneous democratic phenomenon, and thus provides an invaluable basis for a reinterpretation of the department store as an urban institution in early twentieth- century America.

scholarly journals Cathedrals of Consumption? Provincial Department Stores in England, c.1880–1930

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 810-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
JON STOBART
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Regional Distribution ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Small Samples ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Fantasy World ◽  
Shopping Experience ◽  
High Street ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Over Time

The department store is often seen as a revolutionary force: transforming retail practices, shopping experiences, and the high street. It is variously lauded for its role in the democratization of luxury, the introduction of price ticketing and unfettered browsing, and the creation of a fantasy world of goods. As is so often the case, reality is more complex than the image, especially when we move away from the bright lights of the metropolis and start exploring the high streets of provincial towns. Based on a thorough trawl of trade directories, I explore the regional distribution of stores in their 1930s heyday and examine how this distribution developed over time, pushing the discussion back to consider the varied origins of provincial department stores. I then turn to the spatial organization, selling practices, and shopping experience of small samples of stores, questioning the extent to which they formed a monolithic retail type.

scholarly journals "En gift i blodet": Følelsesøkonomier i de dansk-grønlandske relationer

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (125) ◽  
pp. 71-94
Author(s):  
Kirsten Thisted
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Uranium Extraction ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Financial Power ◽  
Email Correspondence

Inspired by Sara Ahmed, the article analyzes how long-established affective economies still dominate post-colonial relations between Danes and Greenlanders. Affective relationships between Greenlanders and Danes are embedded in historically inherited, asymmetric political, and financial power relations. While the political and economic conditions often are subject to analysis because data in these fields is relatively easy to access, it is much harder to access material that illuminates affective relationships. The article focuses on an email correspondence between two women, each of whom has a prominent place in the Danish-Greenlandic cultural debate. The two women know each other in advance and are both eager for the communication to succeed. It turns out not to be quite so simple. The analysis shows how the Dane, contrary to her own intentions, maintains the Greenlander in the role as the object of the Danish, evaluative and normative, gaze. The Greenlander protests against this and tries to renegotiate their positions so that the Greenlanders become subjects of their own actions and the history of Greenland. The article argues that it is not possible to understand the current political discussions, including debates on large scale projects, uranium extraction, and independence, unless these affects and their historicity are taken into account. A conversation about reconciliation must also begin here.

scholarly journals Gender parity in the foreign services of African countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Lubov Prokopenko ◽  
Tatiana Denisova
Keyword(s):  
African Women ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Foreign Ministers ◽  
Foreign Ministries ◽  
High Representation

The paper considers the gender situation in foreign ministries of African states. The authors investigate the history of gender changes in diplomacy in post-colonial Africa and the reasons for the high representation of women in foreign ministries and embassies of certain states, as well as policies for the recruitment of diplomatic personnel. The present paper pays special attention to the activities of foreign ministers and examines biographies and political careers of individual African women diplomats. The authors note the typical challenges the latter face in their work. Furthermore, the article broadens the understanding of the contribution of African women diplomats to the development of political, economic and cultural relations with Russia.

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