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John Brewer (far right) gave the first public lecture on ‘The
Error of Our Ways’, 23 September 2003 at The Royal Society.
Comment was
provided by Professor Geoff Crossick (near left), chief executive of the
Arts and Humanities Research Board and Madeleine Bunting, Guardian columnist.
The event was chaired by Dr. Frank Trentmann, programme director of the
Cultures of Consumption Programme.
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Programme News
The Khat Nexus
Farm
cultivation of khat covers a far larger space than previously known. Khat
(catha edulis) is grown in South Africa, Israel, Afghanistan, Madagascar
and Morocco as well as areas in East Africa and Yemen more conventionally
associated with the drug. This is one of the findings of an international
research team with implications for the current debate about reforming
drug policy in the United Kingdom. Researchers have tracked shipment of
khat from Africa and the Red Sea to Europe. They have also followed the
growing call for the control of khat from community based organisations
in the United Kingdom. Public policy debate now needs to recognise a wider
pattern of production and consumption with deep historical roots.
For research
findings and papers contact David Anderson, St Anthony’s College,
Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6JF. Telephone: 01865 284735 or david.Anderson@sant.ox.ac.uk
Consumption
and Citizenship is the theme of a public policy/academic seminar
at HM Treasury, 22 April 2004 jointly organised by the Cultures of Consumption
programme and the National Consumer Council. The seminar will broaden
the discussion of public service reform by connecting it to new research
about cultural consumption and norms of citizenship. Speakers include
Wendy Thomson, Head of the Prime Minister's Office of Public Services
Reform, Sue Slipman OBE, Chair of the Policy Commission on Public Service,
David Marquand, Former Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, Colin Campbell,
Professor of Sociology, The University of York and members of the programme.
Children
and Consumption was the topic of discussion at a seminar covered
by the Cultures of Consumption programme together with the National Family
and Parenting Institute at The Royal Society, 20 February 2004. It presented
new research from Canadian studies about children’s media consumption,
new approaches to media literacy as well as emphasising the importance
of children as active consumers. Seminar papers are now available at www.consume.bbk.ac.uk Research
on the fashion consumption of children aged 6-11 is conducted by a team
at Leicester. The project examines children’s use of clothing
in relation to pleasure, desire, need and identity as well as to pressures
from design, advertising and marketing.
For more
information contact Chris Pole, Department of Sociology, University of
Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH. Telephone: 0116 252 2724
or cjp21@le.ac.uk
International
experts assess the future place of consumption
Sustainability Reinvented is the focus of Gerhard Scherhorn’s public
lecture at The Royal Society, on Friday 21 May 2004 at 6.30pm. Professor
Scherhorn has been at the forefront of European consumer politics for
the last 30 years. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors
to the Federal Government of Germany. He is now Co-director of the Research
Group on Sustainable Production and Consumption at the Wuppertal Institute
of Climate, Environment, Energy, Wuppertal.
On Monday 21 June
a roundtable will debate questions of ‘Consumption and the Good
Life?’ at The Royal Society. The roundtable will be chaired by
Evan Davis (BBC) and include Deirdre Hutton (Chairman, National Consumer
Council),
the leading sociologist Alan Warde (University of Manchester) and other
prominent guests.
Both events
are free and open to the public but space is limited. For tickets to
the Roundtable and Gerhard Scherhorn’s lecture please contact:
Stefanie Nixon, 020 7079 0601 / esrcConsume@bbk.ac.uk
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Research Focus: Consumers
and Citizens
1. Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Relationships and Identifications,
by John Clarke at the Open University.
Public services have been the focus for waves of reform, restructuring
and modernization. In these processes, relationships between states
and citizens
have been changing. One of the big ideas driving reform in recent years
has been ‘consumerism’: the view that we now live in a consumer
culture and that public services need to be remade to reflect the attitudes,
expectations and identities of a consumer society. Services are expected
to adapt to these new conditions – becoming more flexible, accessible,
and responsive to the demands of their consumers. Services should enable
choice and a project headed by John Clarke at the Open University asks
how
this big idea has developed and shaped the policy agenda of public
service reform. Case studies look at health care, social care and policing
analysing
how these different services are adapting to the challenges of consumerism.
Research
also asks: Do people think of themselves as consumers? What difference
does it make to treat people as consumers? What might be gained and lost
in the shift to a consumer or customer focus? Research is making visible
questions about the changing relationship between the people and the state.
John Clarke
will discuss these issues at a public event at The Royal Society on Thursday
22 April 2004 at 6.30pm.
For more
information on the research findings contact John Clarke, The Open University,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA. Telephone: 01908 654530 / john.Clarke@open.ac.uk
2.
Cultures of Consumption and Consumer Involvement in Public Services, by
Johnston Birchall, Stirling University.
A second project headed by Johnston Birchall at Stirling University, focuses
on the consumption and delivery of housing, social care and leisure services.
It is exploring the depth of involvement consumers have with each of these
services, and how consumers experience and evaluate the alternative ways
in which their views may be represented to service providers. We are interested
in why some people come along to groups whose aims include having some
influence over the planning and delivery of public services, why some
people use the channels available to them as individuals (such as feedback
systems and contacting elected officials), and why some people never express
their views at all. These matters are not currently well understood.
Local authorities
have a duty to consult with service users, but consultation can take a
number of different forms. This project asks service users about the choices
they make and how they want to be consulted. Many public service users
are interested at one time or another in making their views known. We
want to know if people think that some forms of involving consumers are
more effective than others, and to see if some forms of involvement work
better in one public service than another.
Research
findings shed new light, not just on what works, but why it works and
where it works. This will help users and providers to plan in the future
for more effective consultation and involvement strategies in the constantly
changing environment of today’s public services. For more information
contact: Johnston Birchall, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA. Telephone:
01786 467981 / Johnston.birchall@stir.ac.uk
3. Media
Consumption and the Future of Public Connection, by Nick Couldry, London
School of Economics.
There is widespread concern among politicians
and policymakers about the apparent decline of interest in the political
process. Most democracies’
working assumption remains that their members share a basic level of attention
to the public world - a basic level of ‘public connection’.
But can we be certain this holds any more? As a shared national media
landscape
has given way to multiple media formats, the possibilities grow for individuals
to ‘personalise’ their media landscape.
This
project headed by Nick Couldry at LSE, investigates both of these connected
assumptions: do they correspond any more with people’s everyday
lives and the sense, if any, they have of a public world? To approach
these difficult questions, research offers an in-depth look at the everyday
practices of 36 people across England, asking what the public world means
to them, and how, it is linked to the media they consume. In a second
stage emerging themes will be used to generate survey questions for a
nationwide survey. Research will produce an original account of the various,
perhaps incompatible, ways in which people understand their relationship
to the public world, and the role media play in sustaining their relationship
to that world.
Pilot research
is now available at: http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/working_papers
For more information contact Nick Couldry, LSE, Houghton Street, WC2A
2AE. Telephone: 0207 955 6243 / n.couldry@lse.ac.uk
4.
Towards a Participatory Consumer Democracy: Britain, 1937-1987, by Lesley
Whitworth at Brighton.
Consumer education is one theme in the research project directed by Lesley
Whitworth. This project follows the history of the Council of Industrial
Design founded in 1944, to promote the improvement of design in the products
of British industry.
Faced
with a complex task that also involved the reformation of design education
and the enlightenment of retailers, the Council strove for an essential
symbiosis: industry was to be encouraged to supply well designed goods
while the public would be trained to recognise and demand these goods.
Through its varied programme of product evaluation, labelling, and the
dissemination of texts, the Council of Industrial Design sought to influence
patterns of consumption. In the light of recent government assertions
about the value of active discriminating consumers, research will show
what may be learnt from the successes and failures of these earlier engagements
with consumer education.
For more
information contact Lesley Whitworth, Design History Research Centre,
University of Brighton, BN2 0JY. Telephone 01273 643304 / l.k.whitworth@brighton.ac.uk
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Activities
‘Knowing Consumers’ was the theme of a
conference organised by Dr Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck) and Prof. Dr. Heinz-Gerhard
Haupt
(Florence) at ZIF (Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung/ Centre
for Interdisciplinary Research), Bielefeld (Germany) from 26-28 February
2004. The interdisciplinary meeting explored the different ways in which
consumers emerged as subjects in different settings, their identities,
and
their changing status in fields of knowledge and policy. For further information
and conference papers see: http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/knowconsumer.html
Dr Axel Klein presented research on ‘Khat
and Prohibition’ to the Drug Policy Alliance Biennial Conference
in New Jersey – the largest drug reform movement internationally.
First findings of Prof. Alan Warde’s large-scale
comparative research on the diffusion of consumer culture using time-use data from 1975 to 2001 were presented to the British Sociological
Association meeting in March 2004.
The Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection project headed by Dr Nick Couldry, held a seminar for policymakers, media
professionals and academics at LSE on 3 February.
Dr Bronwen Morgan (Oxford) has
produced a research briefing, “Water and
the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)”,
for Freshwater Action Network, an umbrella organisation of water-related
NGO’s whose secretariat is based at Wateraid, a British NGO.
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Publications
Michael Redclift’s Chewing
Gum: the fortunes of taste, is
published by Taylor and Francis (Routledge).
Christopher
Breward’s Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis,
has just appeared with Berg Publishers.
International
experts re-examine Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics
in the Modern World, is an interdisciplinary volume edited by Mark
Bevir and Frank Trentmann for Cambridge University Press.
In press:
‘Talking Together: Exploring Consumer Communities and Healthcare’
in Advances in Consumer Research, Vol.31 by Hogg, G; Laing, AW
and Newholm, TJ (2004).
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Links
The Cultures of
Consumption research programme seeks to facilitate dialogue between research
in academic and public bodies. On this page we will
provide
you with updates and links to work done elsewhere.
1. ‘Making
public services personal: A new compact for public services’
The independent Policy Commission on Public Services, set up by the
National Consumer Council (NCC) to examine consumer interests in public
services,
is launching its report on Monday 19 April. The report looks at people’s
experiences of using public services and tries to clarify the values
that must be adopted in order to deliver services with responsiveness
and consumer
choice at their heart.
The
commission has examined four crucial areas: health, education, social
care and neighbourhood renewal, and makes strong recommendation for change.
For further
information see: www.ncc.org.uk/pubs.htm
2.
‘Health Warning to Government’, Report by the Consumers’
Association
The
Consumers' Association has launched a fierce Health Warning to the Government,
on the back of new research which shows seven in ten consumers think the
Government should be doing more to promote what we should eat for a healthy
diet.
In its report, "Health Warning to Government" Consumers' Association
sets out twelve demands to tackle Government and industry inertia over
obesity
and diet related disease.
Three core
demands are:
- The Government
and Ofcom (the regulator for UK communications) must commit to restricting
advertising of all foods high in fat, sugar and salt during children's
TV viewing times;
- The Government
must commit to setting up a Nutrition Council, made up of representatives
from across Government and key stakeholders and experts.
- The big
four high street supermarkets must take the lead to develop a labelling
scheme that helps consumers easily identify foods high in fat, sugar
and salt which they should be cutting down on.
For more information
see: http://www.which.net/campaigns/food/nutrition/misc/healthwarning.pdf
3.
Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy
Research papers
on Sustainable Consumption and Development by the Wuppertal Institute
can be found at http://www.wupperinst.org/Sites/wp.html
4. Sustainable
Technologies Programme
Working papers on sustainable consumption in the Sustainable Technologies
Programme are now available at: www.sustainabletechnologies.ac.uk/projects.htm
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