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An overview of the social, economic, cultural and political development of the petite bourgeoisie in modern Europe is provided here. This study brings together both primary research and secondary literature to assess the group's role in European social history.
While the social identity of women in medieval society hinged largely on the ritual of marriage, identity for men was derived from belonging to a particular group. Knights, monks, apprentices, guildsmen all underwent a process of initiation into their unique subcultures. As From Boys to Men shows, the process of this socialization reveals a great deal about medieval ideas of what it meant to be a man—as distinguished from a boy, from a woman, and even from a beast. In an exploration of the creation of adult masculine identities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, From Boys to Men takes a close look at the roles of men through the lens of three distinct institutions: the university, ...
Shopping as an Entertainment Experience explores the ways in which shopping has become a significant entertainment feature in our daily lives. Dr. Mark H. Moss examines the department store, the mall, and the e-store to demonstrate how shopping is often the most common leisure experience that people indulge in to occupy themselves. This unique book focuses on the historical evolution of shopping environments into contemporary entertainment or cultural zones. Through a phenomenological framework, Moss analyzes the way stores, outlets, and restaurants in malls mingle and merge aspects of consumption and merchandising. Shopping as an Entertainment Experience appeals to sociologists, cultural theorists, and those interested in popular culture.
Situated at the crossroads of visual culture and consumerism, this essay collection examines visual merchandising as both a business and an art. It seeks to challenge that scholarly ambivalence that often celebrates the spectacle but denies the agenda of consumerism. The volume considers strategies in the imaging of selling from the mid nineteenth century to the present, in terms of the visual interaction that occurs between the commodity and the consumer and between body and space. Under the categories of Promotion, Product and Place, contributors to the volume examine the strategies in the presentation of retail goods and environments that range from print advertising to product design to store display and architecture. Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling is located directly at the nexus of business practice and cultural myth, where the spectator never loses sight of their status as buyer and the object of desire is always still a commodity.
This book examines the Cockney phenomenon of the late Romantic period - the new metropolitan art and literature of the 1820s and 1830s.
Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912) was a typical Victorian journalist, working in one of the largest sectors of the periodical press, provincial newspapers. His diaries, written between 1862 and 1912, lift the veil of anonymity hiding the people, processes and networks involved in the creation of Victorian newspapers. They also tell us about Victorian fatherhood, family life, and the culture of a Victorian town. Diaries of nineteenth-century provincial journalists are extremely rare. Anthony Hewitson went from printer’s apprentice to newspaper reporter and eventually editor of his own paper. Every night he jotted down the day’s doings, his thoughts and feelings. The diaries are a lively accoun...
A good social history of Europe has yet to be written though, given the developments over the last few decades, this seems more urgent than ever before. This volume presents an important step forward in that it brings together eight internationally known social historians from Europe and Israel, each of whom offer an overview of some key themes in European history during the last two centuries. While dealing with the great changes of this period, the authors reveal the commonalities that link European societies together but also important differences at a national level.
Non-manual workers are fast becoming the largest occupational category in Western capitalist countries. This is the first book to present a detailed socialist analysis of this much discussed change in the class structure of contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the class position of managerial and supervisory workers, Robert Carter takes as his starting-point the inadequacy of both orthodox Marxist and Weberian models of class relations. Rather, he concurs with recent structuralist theorists of class who maintain that there exists between capital and labour in the process of producing a new middle class. He parts company from the work of these theorists, however, in his insistence that the or...
Legal historians have analysed the characteristics of merchant guilds and nationes (i.e., associations of foreign merchants), as well as the political clout of merchants, including foreign ones. However, how the legal status of citizens related to the merchant class and how its contents were influenced by trade remains largely unclear.
The eighteenth century represents a critical period in the transition of the English urban history, as the town of the early modern era involved into that of the industrial revolution; and since Britain was the 'first industrial nation', this transformation is of more-than-national significance for all those interested in the histroy of towns. This book gathers together in one volume some of the most interesting and important articles that have appeared in research journals to provide a rich variety of perspectives on urban evelopment in the period.