...Nowadays our society has a huge interest in American culture, the culture of progress, money and Capitalism. American culture, and western culture in general, may be characterized as the culture of Capitalism, or more specifically consumer Capitalism, and American society may be characterized as the society of perpetual growth. The following discussion treats exactly the topic of this thesis. The first part deals with Capitalism and the second one with consumerism. For most of us, American culture can’t be imagined without Capitalism, and it seems we got here on a way as determined as that of a tossed baseball. We are taught and come to believe that the head of the American economy is capitalist. It’s time to break out of that way of thinking. Let’s briefly think of the history of American Capitalism, only to get us out of this habit of thinking. When did American Capitalism begin? It is easy to forget that capitalism was born not so long ago, in the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took place, and entrepreneurs were creating new industries and wealth. In other words, capitalism came to be a “big thing” once it was already there. Capitalism effects people and created a consumerist society. Consumerist societies live by the influence of advertisements, and often buy things they do not need, and in most cases, they cannot afford it. This, in turn, leads to greater economic inequality, consumerists have a feeling of unfulfilled due to spending a lot of money yet having...
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...quo of a perfect and progressive American society—set with values such as separate but equal, social classes, consumer culture, and so on—through their respective essay and novel, the former dealing with the erasure of African American culture due...
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...The West’s Affect on the World Every nation is always in contention with one another. For every civilization that triumphs, others must suffer. For a majority of human history the strongest nations were comprised into a group known as the West. The west is home to the ideologies of democracy, capitalism, and consumerism. The idea of democracy has been forced upon many nations in the world by the Western states. Democracy however has been shown to be a very easily manipulated system. Capitalism has shown the need for expansion and exploitation over Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The west has always been in contention with other nations, along with contending with each other. Competition between western nations has led to a technological race and an arms race, which is now more apparent than ever in the United States. With military might came the need to take over other nations and thus the ideas of imperialism, and nation aristocracy. Africa, Latin America, and Asia has suffered and continues to suffer a great deal because of the triumph of the west through exploitation, expansion, and wealth, all major goals of capitalism and imperialism. The West has retarded the development in all facets for many countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia and thus led to the suffering of the world. One of the oldest ideologies from the west to the world is democracy. Democracy comes from the Greek words “demo” meaning people and “kratia” meaning rule, therefore rule of...
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...Culture betokens the whole involute of traditional demeanor which has been developed by the human race and is successively learned by each generation. A culture is less precise. It can betoken the forms of traditional deportment which are characteristics of a given society, or of a group of societies, or of a certain race, or of a certain area, or of a certain period of time. (Margaret Mead, 1951: p.17) Definition of the Cold War The Cold War is the denomination given to the relationship that developed primarily between the USA and the USSR after World War Two. The Cold War was a period of economic, political and military tension between the Coalesced States and Soviet Amalgamation from 1945 to 1991. Following the terminus of the Second World...
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...study of cultural development to determine the thoughts of the eighteenth-century North Americans. It was initiated by James Deetz in his first edition of In Small Things Forgotten (1977). The term encapsulates Deetz’s structuralism-based idea that the evident alteration within English material culture and landscape design was more than a change in style, but a universal change in human consciousness—from medieval to modern—and this extended across the Atlantic despite the colony’s increasing political distance from the homeland (Deetz, 1996: 62-63; 2003: 221). Deetz believed that shared artefact form reflected shared thought (2003: 220). The theory has enabled historical archaeologists to recognise a distinctive shift in many areas of material culture which subsequently encouraged a succession of scholars to further this idea by posing key questions: why did the worldview develop, where else was a Georgian worldview visible, how did it present itself in areas outside New England? In the quest for answers to these questions, archaeologists have developed the concept which accordingly shaped interpretations of the material discoveries of eighteenth-century North America. Deetz’s model for the cultural development of New England illustrates that following an interval (1660-1760) of limited English influence on North American material culture, the contemporary homeland culture—which had recently been influenced by the rationality of the Enlightenment—became influential...
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...Thursday, October 15, 2015 CMNS 130 - Week 6 Critical Theory and the Rise of the Culture Industries The Rise of the Cultural Industries - The Frankfurt School perspective, and the critical theory they developed, is different from that of the dominant paradigm (Frankfurt School = [and] Critical Theory) - Offers a response to, and critique of, the integration of mass communication into industrial capitalism • Media reinforced elites within capitalism societies • Mass Media enabled our domination - Before the advent of the mass communication system, culture was produced differently - Vaudeville theatre was popular before the rise of the culture industry • (Mass, Personal and Popular Media - Vaudeville is closer to popular) The Frankfurt School: Biography and Historical Context (Critical Theory) - Develops within the Institute for Social Research, based in Frankfurt in the 1920s (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer) - Their perspective was marked by German fascism and American consumer culture - Was interested in the “social contradictions” of capitalism - We are going to focus on their theory of mass media - “The Culture Industry” = the standardized production of cultural goods (that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity) The Enlightenment and its Perversion - The Enlightenment is a way of thinking about the world that emerges in the 18th and 19th centuries - It challenges traditional ways of seeing the world, including those of...
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...Textbooks and media in the past had told us that globalization was both inevitable and desirable. The main force that is propelled by globalization is in fact capitalism. Capitalism refers back to Adam Smith’s concepts in Wealth of Nations, which states that competitive advantage creates mutual benefits for each party engaged in the trade. At first, this trade happened on a local level, and as the world opens up through domination of capitalism and technological advances, the platform has enlarged at an alarming speed, creating the global village that we have today. Rewind the clock back a few centuries. In the past, Britain was still largely a class society, where everyone was born into what they do, and what they do determined what they wore, what they ate, what their children will do in the future. (Day, 2012). Imperialism reigned and the kings or queens decided what was good not only for their own country, but also for some faraway places across the globe. Colonialism, in fact, is a form of globalization in an uglier context, defined by unfairness and exploitation. It does, however, begin to link the world together. Out of individual interest, European empires built the very first network of global trade in its African and American colonies. From then on, it is much expected that globalization will continue to grow. As people gained knowledge of the mysteries outside the boundaries of their own land, the colonies realized that they were treated unfairly. There were...
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...international business will be considered, The paper also relates how political, legal, and cultural incidents or situations may become roadblocks to the smooth operation of business ventures in foreign countries. Misunderstandings and breakdown in communication often arise from differences in perception by executives who are not from the same cultural, legal and political background. International investors need to know what elements in a foreign culture have the greatest influence over consumption patterns in general and particularly the consumption behaviour to their specific product. By reflecting on the language, religion, demography, climate, values and beliefs, education, labour, roles of women, family, ethnic groups and other similar elements, the international business person will be able to, not only participate in the international economy with a better perception of the situation, but also be able to cater for the needs of the international buyers. Culture and International Business In everyday usage, the term culture refers to the finer things in life, such as the fine arts, literature, philosophy, and classical music. Under this very narrow definition of the term, the “cultured person” is one who prefers Handel to hard rock, can distinguish between the artistic styles of...
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...Kevin A Capitalism in United States What Kind of Capitalism does Americans want? First of all, I am going to show a quick overview of the unfolding of capitalism since the Great Depression, which I believe is vital in order to understand the capitalism that exists in the United States today and some of the problems to it. Then I will look at four different complex areas of free market capitalism in America compared with the Scandinavian government control capitalism. I will then talk about what kind of capitalism we want: We being different interest groups, such as the shareholders, the C.E.O.'s, the average worker and the poor. Finally I will talk about what values might be at stake in capitalism. In the United States, the 1930s Great Depression threatened to knock out the capitalism that had been gradually developing for the past 400 years and this led to abandoning the laissez faire capitalism and instead embracing the New Deal concept of government managed capitalism in order to control money supply and government expenditure, and in order to limit the increasing gap of inequality of income. The 1950s and 1960s were decades of equality, but the energy crises of the 1970s forced the government to kick start the economy imposing new taxation benefiting the rich and once again causing widening inequality. Today, capitalism is the most important economic system of the Western world, in its however various forms: In the United States a more free-market capitalism exists and...
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...A bigger world | The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/12080751/print World politics Print edition Business & finance Economics Science & technology Culture The World in 2012 Blogs Debate Multimedia Special report: Globalisation Globalisation is entering a new phase, with emerging-market companies now competing furiously against rich-country ones. Matthew Bishop (interviewed here) asks what that will mean for capitalism Sep 18th 2008 | from the print edition GLOBALISATION used to mean, by and large, that business expanded from developed to emerging economies. Now it flows in both directions, and increasingly also from one developing economy to another. Business these days is all about “competing with everyone from everywhere for everything”, write the authors of “Globality”, a new book on this latest phase of globalisation by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). One sign of the times is the growing number of companies from emerging markets that appear in the Fortune 500 rankings of the world’s biggest firms. It now stands at 62, mostly from the so-called BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, up from 31 in 2003 (see chart 1), and is set to rise rapidly. On current trends, emerging-market companies will account for one-third of the Fortune list within ten years, predicts Mark Spelman, head of a global think-tank run by Accenture, a consultancy. There has been a sharp increase in the number of emerging-market companies acquiring...
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...Protestant churches without interference. Slavery was beginning to be questioned during this period. Agrarian capitalists sought advantage and land for families in North Carolina. "Their desire," she writes, "to create communities based on strict moral values led evangelicals and radical Protestants to attempt to regulate the behavior of their fellow Christians." These groups "supervised family conduct in such areas as childrearing, courtship, and marriage, as well as deportment in politics and business" (113). This is a clear description of middle-class, Protestant American culture. Throughout the nineteenth century, white Protestant Americans, and indeed many free Protestant African Americans, would try with great success to make the entire country to keep their image. Such moral crusading, emphasis on good government, and material restraint was the very soil in which nineteenth-century American capitalist culture grew. The reality, for certain, was often quite different from the ideal, but the ideal continued to exist into the twentieth...
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...The following presentation will discuss So (2006) journal which is titled Asian Mail-Order brides, the threat of global capitalism, and the Rescue of the U.S. Nation-State. Christine So’s work focuses on Asian American Culture and economics. She has published in The Journal of Asian American Studies, Feminist Studies and MELUS . Christine So also has a book called, Economic Citizens: A Narrative of Asian American Visibility (So, 2007). She presents on similar topics such as “Race, Migration, and Representation”, “Asian Values: Asian American Literature as Cultural Capital on the Global Era.” and “The Politics of Nationalism and Transnationalism in Contemporary Asian American Literature.” This image is taken from an article published...
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...A New Work Ethic Seok Gil Hong Business Ethics - Business 309 Professor Mahari Belay April 29, 2012 Abstract This case study was about the evidenced work ethic of young people who are working in a fast food restaurant. A human resource manager, James Sheehy, goes undercover to work in the restaurant in order to observe the organizational culture and environment of the restaurant. What is discovered is that the employees have little regard or respect for the work, the employer, the customers or the product. The employees create an atmosphere that is evident of bullying and lacks an appropriate work ethic, but have little ownership of their own bad behavior. This report will answer the five questions posed in the assignment. Describe how typical the attitudes that Sheehy reports appear to be in work environments you have experienced. The typical attitudes that Sheehy identified were disrespectful and poor in nature. The employees had a very poor attitude about the work and one another. The employees did not seem to realistically care about their attitudes or their performance. They showed great disrespect for the work place, the business, the customers and their employer. This is very similar to the attitudes that I have seen in some of the places that I have worked. I once worked in a dollar store that employed a lot of high school students and this article exemplified their behavior very well. The employees felt that this was not a real job and they did not...
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...unification were; geographic fragmentation, repression by employers and government, weak national union structures, recurrent economic recessions and increased automation which allowed for unskilled labor replacement. Geographic fragmentation plays a large part in her explanation of the failure of labor unions in post WWI Chicago. By geographic fragmentation she means neighborhoods that were based on ethnicity. Workers during this period would live within neighborhoods that were comprised of their ethnic background, they would socialize and speak their native languages and practice native cultures, shopping and religious worship were also confined to ethnicity. This division allowed employers to exploit differences in order to combat unification. This was done by creating different pay scales for native Americans, immigrants, blacks and even woman. In the case of International Harvester only Native American citizens could hold office of a representative. Cohen also goes on to say that ethnic prejudice was rooted...
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...CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO GLOBAL MARKETING SUMMARY A company that engages in global marketing focuses resources on global market opportunities and threats. Successful global marketers such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Honda use familiar marketing mix elements – the four Ps – to create global marketing programs. Marketing, R&D, manufacturing, and other activities comprise a firm’s value chain; firms configure activities to create superior customer value on a global basis. Global companies also maintain strategic focus while pursuing competitive advantage. The marketing mix, value chain, competitive advantage, and focus are universal in their applicability, irrespective of whether a company does business only in the home country or has a presence in many markets around the world. However, in a global industry, companies that fail to pursue global opportunities risk being pushed aside by competitors. A firm’s global marketing strategy (GMS) can enhance its worldwide performance. The GMS addresses several issues. First is nature of the marketing program in terms of the balance between a standardization (extension) approach to the marketing mix and a localization (adaptation) approach that is responsive to country or regional differences. Second is the concentration of marketing activities in a few countries or the dispersal of such activities across many countries. Companies that engage in global marketing can also engage in coordination of marketing activities. Finally...
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