The Birth of a Consumer Democracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-65
Author(s):  
Mark H. Lytle
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
American Industry ◽  
Economic Expansion ◽  
Look Back

This chapter surveys housing and suburbanization, autos, and television as three vital engines that drove economic expansion and mass consumerism. It opens with a discussion of Chester Bowles, wartime head of the OPA, and his emphasis on housing and homebuilding as a key to future prosperity. Technological innovation, the productivity of American industry, and the prosperity that followed brought all the former privileges of the wealthy classes within reach of the rapidly expanding American middle class. These factors help explain why so many Americans look back with nostalgia on the postwar decades as “Happy Days.”

New Technologies, New Work

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Job Market ◽  
The Public ◽  
Vital Component ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Gender

This chapter argues that towards the end of the nineteenth century in Spanish America the acceleration of technological innovation and the development of a middle class created new opportunities for middle-class women to enter the labor market. Although women increasingly worked outside the home, writers typically sent the message that women’s work is not valuable or important, that women should avoid work, especially paid work, as much as possible, and that men should help them stay out of the labor force and the capitalist job market. This chapter reads these statements as contesting certain discourses of modernity from the metropolis that privileged women’s entry into the public sphere via paid employment as a vital component of the modernizing project and as taking advantage of modernity’s newfound emphasis on domesticity. Technologies of transportation (trains) and communication (telephones) in Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s La novela del tranvía, the Chilean journals Zig-Zagand Familia, and the Guatemalan La Ilustración Guatemalteca. Depictions of work, consumer culture, and gender in Gorriti’s La oasis en la vida, César Duáyen’s Mecha Iturbe and Federico Gamboa’s Santa are also analysed.

Expresso Bongo and Make Me an Offer: The ‘Angry Young Musical’ in the 1950s

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Wells
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
British Society ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The 1950S

Following on from John Osborne’s infamous play Look Back in Anger of 1956, London’s stage saw the emergence of the ‘Angry Young Man’, realistic portrayals of working-class men in a difficult age. Expresso Bongo and Lily White Boys, works of the mid-to-late 1950s, demonstrate that the angry young man was also present in London’s musicals, previously an upper- and middle-class genre. Featuring the Soho district, gangsters, prostitutes and rock music, this unique era of musical theatre changed expectations of what musical theatre could and would offer to a jaded urban audience. These astonishing musical theatre works offer potent commentary on British society, British identity and particularly disenfranchised young British men, and offer insights into American and British relations, gender roles and expectations, and the complicated role of working-class men in the new Elizabethan era.

Technological Innovation and Marketing Management: Implications for Corporate Policy

1969 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
William V. Muse ◽  
Robert J. Kegerreis
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
New Products ◽  
New Product ◽  
American Industry ◽  
Product Analysis ◽  
Management Implications ◽  
Corporate Policy ◽  
Executive Behavior

Research and development expenditures by American industry are increasing; yet the percentage of successful new products marketed is still low and product failures common. What are some factors that explain this relationship? What can be done by management to improve the R&D payoff? The authors offer three managerial perspectives that might become an integral part of corporate policy concerning organization, executive behavior, product analysis, and planning in the important area of integrating R&D and new product development.

Growth: Direction Rather than Rate

1976 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
André van Dam
Keyword(s):  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Growth Direction ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Economic Expansion ◽  
Quantum Jump ◽  
The Past ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

Growth is in essence a process of metamorphosis rather than expansion, and of maturation rather than change. The author aruges that therefore we should be concerned much more with the purpose and direction of growth (including its moral and social dimensions) than with its speed. If in the past the world was driven by pure economic expansion and technological innovation, in the future it will require a quantum jump in its ethical and social maturation (van Dam, 1976). This transition, which in his opinion may be felt in all its depth in the 1980's, will be comparable to the Copernican revolution.

scholarly journals Neue Tendenzen in den Sozialstrukturen Lateinamerikas

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (170) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Boris
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Poverty Rate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Expansion ◽  
Recent Growth ◽  
Political Implications

The first part describes changes at the bottom of Latin American societies, especially the reduction of the poverty rate, the moderate decline of social inequality as well as the decrease of informal modes of labour. These changes are examined against the background of a strong economic expansion during the last decade. In the second part the recent growth of middle class-sectors in various countries is analyzed. In the last chapter the focus is on the ruling classes, who have come up with new forms of active internationalization. A brief discussion of the political implications of these tendencies concludes the article.

The Priorities of Patrons

2018 ◽  
pp. 203-248
Author(s):  
Steven Brint
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Financial Aid ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Power Centers ◽  
American Society

This chapter talks about the priorities that patrons expressed and the consequences of their largesse, focusing on the three giants of giving: the federal government, the fifty states, and million-dollar-plus donors. It argues that the priorities of patrons tended to favor fields that were closely aligned with power centers in American society—many connected to technological innovation—and their financial aid preferences tipped decidedly in the direction of support for middle-class and affluent college students. Less well-connected fields and financially needy students were not neglected by patrons, but support for them failed to keep pace. By contrast, most professors identified with the structures of academic professionalism, and a large proportion also supported the universities' aspirations for wider social inclusion.

Representing Space: A Look Back

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 57 (50) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Look Back
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