Consuming Environments or Race Gender and Discrimination at Work

Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture

Author: Mike Budd

Whether we love it, hate it, or use it just to pass the time, most adults in the United States are watching more television than ever, up to four hours a day by some estimates. Our devotion to commercial television gives it unprecedented power in our lives. Advertisers and television executives want us to spend as much time as we can in front of our sets, for it is access to our brains that they buy and sell. Yet the most important effect of television may be one that no one intends-accelerated destruction of the natural environment.

Consuming Environments explores how, with its portrayal of a world of simulated abundance, television has nurtured a culture of consumerism and overconsumption. The average person in the US consumers more than twice the grain and ten times the oil of a citizen of Brazil or Indonesia. And people in less industrialized countries suffer while their resources while their resources are commandeered to support comfortable lifestyles in richer nations. Using detailed examples illustrated with images from actual commercials, news broadcasts, and television shows, and authors demonstrate how ads and programs are put together in complex way s to manipulate viewers, and they offer specific ways to counteract the effects of TV and overconsumption's assault on the environment.

Booknews

Explores how, with its portrayals of a world of simulated abundance, television has nurtured a culture of consumerism and overconsumption. Uses detailed examples illustrated with b&w images from actual commercials, news broadcasts, and television shows to demonstrate how ads and programs are put together in complex ways to manipulate viewers, and offers specific ways to counteract the effects of TV and overconsumption's assault on the environment. Budd is a professor of communication and director of the film and video program at Florida Atlantic University. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

Jackie Byars
From Jackie Byars, Wayne State University

Budd, Craig, and Steinman reach across the conceptual and methodological gulf between 'cultural studies' and 'political economy' to address the impact of commercialized television on our cultural and physical environments, highlighting the interconnectedness of the ostensibly discrete categories of culture, nature, and economics... But they do not stop there-they foreground the social movements seeking to engage and ameliorate the influence of corporate commercialism. Read this book. Ask your friends to read this book. It's important.

Robert W. McChesney
Robert W. McChesney, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Consuming Environments is an excellent introduction to the issue of commercial broadcasting, the peculiar culture it generates, and the political and environmental problems to which it contributes.

Ramona Curry
From Ramona Curry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This important book skillfully draws reader's attention to what goes on 'behind' the TV set as well as in front of it.

Book review: A Hazardous Inquiry or Happiness and Hardship

Race, Gender, and Discrimination at Work

Author: Samuel Cohn

In Race and Gender Discrimination at Work Samuel Cohns provides a fascinating, unorthodox account of the causes of discrimination at work. The book is packed with statistics, yet witty; rigorous, yet light. Cohn introduces readers to the fundamental realities of race and gender barriers in the workplace, and he goes beyond these as well by introducing startling new reinterpretations. Cohn is tactful enough to appeal to the conservative student, but honest enough to appeal to the feminist student. In the first several chapters, Cohn provides a description of the historical and current states of race and gender inequality and explains how employers persist in seemingly irrational actions, even in the face of more profitable alternatives. Cohn then turns to an introduction of the five primary social and economic theories of wages: marginal productivity theory, human capital theory, dual sector theory, union strength theory, and internal labor market theory. He follows with a review of the implications for pay differentials between blacks and whites. In subsequent chapters, he explores racial and gendered theories of wages for employment and unemployment. Finally, Cohn concludes with a review of the trends and causes of white male exclusionary attitudes towards blacks and women. This book is ideal for gender courses at all levels. Cohn's compelling, non-standard reformulations of traditional explanations of workplace inequalities make the book important for all serious scholars of gender studies.

Table of Contents:

1	Has the Problem of Inequality Gone Away?	1
	Some Introductory Definitions	3
	Recent Trends in Inequality	5
	Racial Inequality	6
	Gender Inequality	14
	Occupational Typing Versus Status Segregation	23
2	Discrimination and Market Competition	29
	The Becker Model: Core Assumptions	30
	The Becker Model: Operation	31
	The Feminist Gary Becker: Heidi Hartmann	34
	Decision Theory: Why Organizations Don't Behave So Rationally After All	36
	The Link Between Decision Theory and Discrimination: Buffering from Competition	40
3	What Determines If a Job Is Male or Female?	51
	The Myth That Women Exclude Themselves from Employment: Supply-Side Theories of Occupational Sex-Typing	52
	Demand-Side theories of Occupational Sex-Typing: Some Preliminary Dead Ends	62
	Demand-Side Theories of Occupational Sex-Typing: Buffering Models	68
	Empirical Studies of Buffering and Sex-Typing	73
4	Why Are Women Confined to Low-Status Jobs?	79
	Human Capital Theory	80
	Problems with Human Capital Theory	83
	Synthetic Turnover	88
	Differential Visibility Models	97
	The Simplest Theory: Employee Discrimination	105
5	Why Are Women Paid Less Than Men?	114
	The Overcrowding Hypothesis	115
	Human Capital Theory	122
	Comparable Worth Theory	126
	Production Constraint Theory	131
6	Why Are Blacks More Likely to Be Unemployed Than Are Whites?	140
	A Cartographic Analysis of Race and Employment	143
	Shiftlessness	150
	IQ and Human Capital	154
	Spatial Mismatch	159
	Employer Discrimination	161
7	Twenty-Six Things to Remember About Discrimination	166
	App. A: Glossary	171
App. B	A Socratic Guide to Race and Gender Discrimination at Work	174
App. C	Problems for Deeper Thought	183
	References	185
	Index	193