It was Veblen who coined the term ‘consumer society. So what is wrong about such a society? Surely if a person works hard and earns money than they should have the right to spend that money as they wish and as Susman (2003) says, to express their personalities. Perhaps, though, the social scientists are being too deep in their analysis? After all, people have shopped throughout human history.
Thus demonstrating interdependency between the affluenza of consumerism culture and capitalistic economic growth. Response It is an accepted assumption that Consumerism (a social fascination with the acquisition of commercial goods) is a cornerstone of Capitalism. Just as Clive Hamilton suggests in the title of his institutional critique of the neo-classical assumptions of consumer sovereignty and rationality, Consumer Capitalism, he argues that the economic system is dependant on consumerist practices. Similarly Robert Heilbroner’s classical political economic analysis of the Ideology of Capital, via Marxist framework, demonstrates that a change in attitudes toward the ‘acquisition’ of capital and commodities is what allowed the bourgeoisie to realise themselves to be the dominant class and thus spur the development of a socio-economic system based on commodification to emerge. However other economists and socialists argue that the desire to consume an ever-increasing amount of commodities is one of man’s intrinsic values rather than the base of an economic system, it is his ‘hedonism unchained’ (Megone 2007).
Throughput is the rate at which the system generates money through sales while inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell. And operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. In traditional meaning, throughput is defined as the rate at which the system generates money through production whereas inventory includes the direct labour cost invested on the products and operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughout. I found the new definition is useful because it eliminates the confusion over whether the money spent is an investment or an expense . 2.
The cornerstone of this section, and in many ways the course, is Carl Menger’s theory of the origin of money. Menger argues that money arose as an unintended consequence of barter exchange, rather than as the conscious product of human design. The use of money in exchange has enabled us to form money prices and dramatically increase the productivity and complexity of the economy. Money prices play an important role in economic coordination, and Hayek’s paper explicates this role more
Karl Marx was one of the founders of sociology. He focused on the effects of capitalism. He thought that the economic system of the society determined the beliefs and values of that society. Marxists believe that the most important force in society is class conflict. In capitalist societies, workers are employed to produce goods which are sold by their employers at a profit.
According to Marx, this economic system which he termed capitalism created an exploitative relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, since the proletariat had little or no control over the distribution of profits and the labour which they provided (Giddens 2001:12). For Marx, capitalism is not only seen to be an unjust and oppressive system of economic production, but also one that exploits, one that limits man from his full capability, separates man from the products of his labour, and
1. What is meant by Capitalism? Capitalism is an economic system where things (property for example) are owned by people or individual not by the government or communities. People have to work for money so they can buy things they need or want, such as food. Capitalism mostly has free market economy, which means that people buy and sell things by their own judgment.
* * Karl Marx divided people into two distinctive groups, which are bourgeoisie and proletariat and he believed that social classes are distinguished according to the means of production (Joyse, 1995). That is bourgeoisies are those who buy working forces, while proletarians are those who sell in order to survive. Each class acts in the way to benefit themselves and their own interests, thereby resulting in conflict, which in turn, lead to limited social mobility. Therefore, Marx argues that social mobility is exceedingly limited and depends on luck or chance (Crompton, 1993). In other words, dominant social groups oppress or control lower ones, and it is extremely problematic to change social class and status.
According to Max Weber, “class”, or what he termed as “class situation”, was characterized by the following: “(1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chance, insofar as (2) this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets.”(161). In this case, the “specific casual component” that Weber is referring to is wealth, which then results in the ownership of property. Consequently, giving the wealthy an opportunity to gain “capital” and acquire control over the least fortunate. Weber did a good job at providing examples to show how this came about. He mentioned traders not being able to hold on to their goods so they were able to negotiate better prices.
The services provided by welfare states differ from country to country, some have highly developed systems than others (Giddens, 2009). In most societies, poverty and social exclusion at the bottom are alleviated by the welfare states. This essay is therefore going to discuss how these welfare states use ideological state apparatus to secure legitimacy of continued inequalities in capitalist societies. Ideology can be defined as shared ideas or beliefs which serve to justify the interests of dominant groups” Giddens (1997:583). Its relationship to power is that it legitimizes the differential power that groups hold and as such it distorts the real situation that people find themselves in.