This is the first book to explain how the fundamentals of marketing strategy must change in response to this broad-based increase in wealth The authors specifically addresses how to fine tune a mass marketing approach that captures the value created from greater consumer affluence. After years of expensive and largely ineffective attempts at one-to-one marketing and other complex varieties of microsegmentation, the business environment is ripe for a switch back to the relative simplicity of a mass marketing mindset Flouts conventional wisdom: the authors in-depth research uncovered that today's moneyed masses are completely different than the mass market of decades past in terms of how much they have to spend and what they are willing to spend it on. Reveals the mass marketing strategies a range of companies have already successfully used to hit pay dirt with products ranging from oral care to laundry detergent to exotic automobiles.

Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.

This work presents an evangelical theology of the child nurtured in the context of American evangelicalism and affluence. It employs an eclectic theological-critical method to produce a theological anthropology of the affluent American-evangelical child (AAEC) through interdisciplinary evangelical engagement of American history, sociology, and economics. Sims articulates how affluence constitutes a significant impediment to evangelical nurture of the AAEC in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Thus, the problem he addresses is nurture in evangelical affluence, conceived as a theological-anthropological problem. Nurture in the cultural matrices of the evangelical affluence generated by technological consumer capitalism in the U.S. impedes spiritual and moral formation of the AAEC for discipleship in the way of the cross. This impediment risks disciplinary formation of the AAEC for capitalist culture, cultivates delusional belief that life consists in an abundance of possessions, and hinders the practice of evangelical liberation of the poor on humanity's underside. The result is the AAEC's spiritual-moral lack in late modernity. Chapter 1 introduces the problem of the AAEC. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a diachronic lens for the theological anthropology of the AAEC through critical assessment of the theological anthropologies of the child in Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, and Lawrence Richards. Chapters 4 and 5 constitute the synchronic perspective of the AAEC. Chapter 4 presents an evangelical sociology of the AAEC, drawing upon William Corsaro's theory of interpretive reproductions, and chapter 5 constructs an evangelical theology of the AAEC through critical interaction with John Schneider's moral theology of affluence. Chapter 6, Whither the AAEC?, concludes with a recapitulation of the work and a forecast of possible futures for the AAEC in the twenty-first century.

By any measure, the affluent sector is growing exponentially, and is far more diverse (in terms of ethnicity, education, location, and professional background) than any time in the past. This market represents lucrative opportunities for companies that understand how these customers think, act, and make purchasing decisions. Applying primary research, including demographic and economic data, and expertise developed from decades of studying, teaching, and consulting in marketing and consumer behavior, Ronald Michman and Edward Mazze present a comprehensive approach to analyzing the affluent consumer—and creating, promoting, and selling innovative products and services to them. Illustrating their principles through dozens of examples, including Armani, Mercedes Benz, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus, Merrill Lynch, Tiffany, and even discounters, such as Target and Wal-Mart, the authors deconstruct how a complex market segment works. Dispelling popular myths and misconcpetions about the composition and behavior of this segment, they provide not only a practical guide for marketers and students of marketing, but a fascinating glimpse into a culture driven by materalism, status, and aspirations to luxury. By any measure, the affluent sector is growing exponentially, and is far more diverse (in terms of ethnicity, education, location, and professional background) than at any time in the past. In 2004, there were 8.2 million households in the United States with net worth over $1 million, excluding primary residence. Meanwhile, between 1995 and 2001, the number of families filing tax returns for income exceeding $200,000 doubled. This market represents lucrative opportunities for companies that understand how these consumers think, act, and make purchasing decisions.

Long before today's electronic media made us aware of articulate "world opinions" across the globe, there were other dramatic international com munications. One current of opinion was expressed by the many gener ations of different nationalities who "voted with their feet" and settled down in North America. To them and to many others, the hallmark of the United States since the beginning of the republic was the freedom of choice for common people. This image was inspiring enough to build up the free institutions which together with the country's open frontiers broke the hold of mass poverty. So, options brought to the masses are America's trademark in human civilization. Nowadays, when advanced industrialization and electronic media are penetrating the world and opening new frontiers everywhere, the chal lenge from the optional society - often called "Americanization" - be comes a source of global competition, imitation or opposition and shapes the profile of our time. What is the character of this new optional society so early displayed in the United States but today emerging in many other countries and com municated wherever nations confront socio-economic problems of their own? Can analysis of its economics and communications reveal its inter national message? More than two decades of research in those fields and our experience as Americans by choice have made us try.

Beginning in the late 19th century this study examines the historical developments of Japan's contemporary political economy paying particular attention to the changes that have taken place from the bottom up

A book of essays in Stanley Cohen's honor that examines the main themes he has explored and developed, which are: crime, social control, and human rights.

A surprising and revealing look at how today’s elite view their wealth and place in society From TV’s “real housewives” to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on “easy street”? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers—from hedge fund financiers and artists to stay-at-home mothers—to examine their lifestyle choices and understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us.

Robert Reiner has been one of the pioneers in the development of research on policing since the 1970s as well as a prolific writer on mass media and popular culture representations of crime and criminal justice. His work includes the renowned books The Politics of the Police and Law and Order: An Honest Citizen's Guide to Crime and Control, an analysis of the neo-liberal transformation of crime and criminal justice in recent decades. This volume brings together many of Reiner's most important essays on the police written over the last four decades as well as selected essays on mass media and on the neo-liberal transformation of crime and criminal justice. All the work included in this important volume is underpinned by a framework of analysis in terms of political economy and a commitment to the ethics and politics of social democracy

Wiefek presents evidence of a link between individual-level economic concerns and political opinion. Conceptualizing economic anxiety by applying social psychological theory to the distinct characteristics of the new American economy, she presents evidence that this postindustrial economic anxiety shapes beliefs and policy opinions, above and beyond ideology, partisanship, and income. Journalists and political commentators have written extensively on the political consequences of the strains created by the transformation of the U.S. economy over the last thirty years. Yet, the individual-level anxiety accompanying America's transition to a postindustrial, globalized economy has not been explored in any systematic way. In fact, what clear empirical evidence we do have strongly suggests that citizens do not link their personal fortunes to their political opinions. Wiefek argues that the way in which political scientists normally go about looking for these connections misses what citizens experience in their daily lives, particularly their emotional reactions. The measures commonly used by political scientists do not tap the specific features of America's post-1973 economic transformation or the anxiety, insecurity, and fear it engenders. Wiefek presents a conceptualization of economic anxiety that draws upon psychological, sociological, economic, and political science theories and findings, and the distinct nature of the new economy. Using data from a mail survey, she estimates the impact of economic anxiety and presents strong evidence of its predictive power on political opinion. She concludes with a discussion of the political implications of these findings and argues that the progressive political potential of shared anxieties will require reversing the anti-government bias endemic to our current public dialogue.