Buying Happiness
The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of British Columbia Press
Published:1st Nov '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Breaking new ground into the study of the emergence and development of consumer society in Canada, Buying Happiness connects changes in thought to changes in the economy and in behaviour.
Buying Happiness explores the different ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption, which shaped economic and social policy and influenced behaviour.
The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts.
Buying Happiness explores the ways public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption and consumer behaviours. Topics include the state’s creation of the first cost-of-living index in 1914–15, the development of consumer consciousness during the Depression, and the ways in which popular magazines encouraged an ethic of cautious consumerism in the postwar period.
Bettina Liverant’s fresh approach connects changes in consumer consciousness with changes in the economy and behaviour. As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination.
Liverant makes a complex and insightful argument for a deep but largely unmarked change of perspective. Her synthesis of recent work on consumerism in Canada is illuminating. In highlighting the role of intellectuals and historic publications in constructing and reconstructing the social narratives that Canadians rely on to think about and develop personal and national identities, she gently invites present-day writers to reconsider their impact, and a more general readership to question how and why certain stories are told.
-- V. Michael Roberts, economist and author of The Long Depression * Prairie History *Buying Happiness should be required reading for students of twentieth-century Canada. -- Katharine Rollwagen * The Canadian Historical Review *
The nearest dictionary to hand unhelpfully defines consumer as “one or that which consumes”. Bettina Liverant takes us beyond linguistic tautologies to give us a first-rate intellectual history of consumer society in Canada from late Victorian times to the post-war baby boom era.
-- James Hull, University of British Columbia-Okanagan * Canadian Business History Association *In that it looks at the idea of consumer society, Buying Happiness offers a welcome addition to the study of consumption. As such, Buying Happiness helps scholars recognize their own possible prejudices that they bring to the study of consumption.
-- Donica Belisle * American Review of Canadian StudiISBN: 9780774835145
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 460g
304 pages