Vance Packard And American Social Criticism

Author : Daniel Horowitz
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 396 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2000-11-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780807862117

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Vance Packard and American Social Criticism by Daniel Horowitz Pdf

Vance Packard's bestselling books--Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), and Waste Makers (1960)--taught the generation that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the dangers posed by advertising, social climbing, and planned obsolescence. Like Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte, Jr., Packard (1914- ) was a journalist who played an important role in the nation's transition from the largely complacent 1950s to the tumultuous 1960s. He was also one of the first social critics to benefit from and foster the newly energized social and political consciousness of this period. Based in part on interviews with Packard, Daniel Horowitz's intellectual biography focuses on the period during which Packard left magazine writing to author his most famous works of social criticism. Horowitz traces the influence of Packard's education and early years in rural Pennsylvania, providing a deeper understanding of his thought and his later books. Packard's life, Horowitz contends, illuminates the dilemmas of a freelance social critic without inherited wealth or academic affiliation. His career also expands our understanding of how one era shaped the next, underscoring how the adversarial 1960s drew on the mass culture of the previous decade. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Author : Daniel Horowitz
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9798890866219

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Vance Packard & American Social Criticism by Daniel Horowitz Pdf

Author : Vance Packard
Publisher : Ig Publishing
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 097884310X

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The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard Pdf

A discussion of how modern advertising attempts to control our thoughts and desires in order to make us buy the products it produces. Exploring the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including subliminal tactics, this book shows how advertisers secretly manipulate mass desire for consumer goods and products. In addition, Packard also discusses advertising in politics, predicting the way image and personality rapidly came to overshadow real issues in the televised age.

Author : Vance Packard
Publisher : Ig Publishing
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1935439375

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The Waste Makers by Vance Packard Pdf

A pioneering work from the 1960s about how the rapid growth of disposable consumer goods degraded the environmental, financial and spiritual character of western society. It exposed the increasing commercialisation of American life, when people bought things they didn't need or want. It also highlighted the concept of planned obsolescence, the 'death date' built into products. This prescient study predicted the rise of consumer culture and features an introduction by bestselling author Bill McKibben.

Author : Vance Packard
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Social classes
ISBN : STANFORD:36105114564060

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American Social Classes in the 1950s by Vance Packard Pdf

This volume offers an abridgment of The Status Seekers, Vance Packard's influential and popular study of social status and stratification in 1950s America. An introductory essay places Packard and his book in their historical context and discusses the role that social criticism played during the nation's transition from '50s complacency to '60s turbulence. Also included are an album of cartoons, a chronology, question for consideration, a bibliography, and an index.

Author : Vance Packard
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1959
Category : Social classes
ISBN : STANFORD:36105047172924

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The Status Seekers by Vance Packard Pdf

Author : Timothy Melley
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2016-12-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501713002

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Empire of Conspiracy by Timothy Melley Pdf

Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"—an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear—including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory—Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory. Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.

Author : David Haney
Publisher : Temple University Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2008-01-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781592137152

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The Americanization of Social Science by David Haney Pdf

A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity. According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.

Author : Vance Packard
Publisher : New York : D. McKay Company
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 1964
Category : Liberty
ISBN : UOM:39015002732272

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The Naked Society by Vance Packard Pdf

Examines the invasion of privacy in the United States by government, business, and education. Describes surveillance techniques and tools of investigative experts.

Author : Liza Featherstone
Publisher : OR Books
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2018-02-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781682191071

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Divining Desire by Liza Featherstone Pdf

Over the course of the last century, the focus group has become an increasingly vital part of the way companies and politicians sell their products and policies. Few areas of life, from salad dressing to health care legislation to our favorite TV shows, have been left untouched by the questions put to controlled groups about what they do and don’t like. Divining Desire is the first-ever popular survey of this rich topic. In a lively, sweeping history, Liza Featherstone traces the surprising roots of the focus group in early-twentieth century European socialism, its subsequent use by the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue, and its widespread deployment today. She also explores such famous “failures” of the method as the doomed launch of the Ford Edsel with its vagina shaped radiator grille, and the even more ill-fated attempt to introduce a new flavor of Coca Cola (which prompted street protests from devotees of the old formula). As elites have become increasingly detached from the general public, they rely ever more on focus groups, whether to win votes or to sell products. And, in a society where many feel increasingly powerless, the focus group has at least offered the illusion that ordinary people will be listened to and that their opinions count. Yet, it seems the more we are consulted, the less power we have. That paradox is particularly stark today, when everyone can post an opinion on social media—our 24 hour “focus group”—yet only plutocrats can shape policy. In telling this fascinating story, Featherstone raises profound questions about democracy, desire and the innermost workings of consumer society.

Author : Douglas Charles Rossinow
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 023111057X

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The Politics of Authenticity by Douglas Charles Rossinow Pdf

In the 1960s a left-wing movement emerged in the United States that not only crusaded against social and economic exploitation, but also confronted the problem of personal alienation in everyday life. These new radicals - young, white, raised in relative affluence - struggled for peace, equality and social justice. Their struggle was cultural as well as political, a search for meaning and authenticity that marked a new phase in the long history of American radicalism.

Author : John S. Gilkeson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2010-09-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781139491181

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Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965 by John S. Gilkeson Pdf

This book examines the intersection of cultural anthropology and American cultural nationalism from 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany for the United States, until 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was established. Five chapters trace the development within academic anthropology of the concepts of culture, social class, national character, value, and civilization, and their dissemination to non-anthropologists. As Americans came to think of culture anthropologically, as a 'complex whole' far broader and more inclusive than Matthew Arnold's 'the best which has been thought and said', so, too, did they come to see American communities as stratified into social classes distinguished by their subcultures; to attribute the making of the American character to socialization rather than birth; to locate the distinctiveness of American culture in its unconscious canons of choice; and to view American culture and civilization in a global perspective.

Author : Tobias Wolff
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2007-12-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780802198600

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This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff Pdf

The PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir. This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility. Praise for This Boy’s Life “Wolff writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, [and] creates suspense around ordinary events, locating the deep mystery within them.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “[This] extraordinary memoir is so beautifully written that we not only root for the kid Wolff remembers, but we also are moved by the universality of his experience.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A work of genuine literary art . . . as grim and eerie as Great Expectations, as surreal and cruel as The Painted Bird, as comic and transcendent as Huckleberry Finn.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Wolff’s genius is in his fine storytelling. This Boy’s Life reads and entertains as easily as a novel. Wolff’s writing and timing are superb, as are his depictions of those of us who endured the 50s.” —The Oregonian

Author : Giles Slade
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780674043756

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Made to Break by Giles Slade Pdf

Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Author : Lawrence R. Samuel
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2011-06-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812204872

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Freud on Madison Avenue by Lawrence R. Samuel Pdf

What do consumers really want? In the mid-twentieth century, many marketing executives sought to answer this question by looking to the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. By the 1950s, Freudian psychology had become the adman's most powerful new tool, promising to plumb the depths of shoppers' subconscious minds to access the irrational desires beneath their buying decisions. That the unconscious was the key to consumer behavior was a new idea in the field of advertising, and its impact was felt beyond the commercial realm. Centered on the fascinating lives of the brilliant men and women who brought psychoanalytic theories and practices from Europe to Madison Avenue and, ultimately, to Main Street, Freud on Madison Avenue tells the story of how midcentury advertisers changed American culture. Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, James Vicary, Alfred Politz, Pierre Martineau, and the father of motivation research, Viennese-trained psychologist Ernest Dichter, adapted techniques from sociology, anthropology, and psychology to help their clients market consumer goods. Many of these researchers had fled the Nazis in the 1930s, and their decidedly Continental and intellectual perspectives on secret desires and inner urges sent shockwaves through WASP-dominated postwar American culture and commerce. Though popular, these qualitative research and persuasion tactics were not without critics in their time. Some of the tools the motivation researchers introduced, such as the focus group, are still in use, with "consumer insights" and "account planning" direct descendants of Freudian psychological techniques. Looking back, author Lawrence R. Samuel implicates Dichter's positive spin on the pleasure principle in the hedonism of the Baby Boomer generation, and he connects the acceptance of psychoanalysis in marketing culture to the rise of therapeutic culture in the United States.