Living in style: Marketing,media,and the discovery of lifestyles.

详细信息   

• 作者：Wehner ; Patrick T.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2000
• 导师：Tullos,Allen,eadvisor
• 毕业院校：Emory University
• ISBN：9780599890183
• CBH：9982499
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：10339980
• Pages：265

文摘

An interdisciplinary American Studies project combining media studies,business history,and the sociology of culture,"Living in Style" traces the emergence of "lifestyles" as a way for marketing and media decisionmakers to imagine social life in the United States. Using materials like trade journals,business texts,and personal memoirs,the dissertation explores how the notion of "lifestyles" has been defined within the professional spheres of business and journalism since the end of the Second World War. The first chapter,"Containing Multitudes," examines the classifications employed by early twentieth century newspaper managers to better understand their society. The chapter considers the relationship between evolving concepts of the audience and the appearance of special categories of content,including the newspaper "womens pages." Chapter Two,"The Rise of an Entrepreneurial Class" documents how "lifestyles" were introduced to marketing. Responding to an "society of abundance" that made earlier models of consumption suspect,the first generation of professional consumer researchers promoted class and "life-styles" as classifications for dividing the marketplace and making its workings understandable. But many of these researchers also regarded themselves as championing creativity and warding off suburban conformity. Chapter Three,"Across the Great Divide," describes how lifestyles became a standard feature of the news. In particular,the chapter examines the decision by editors to replace their womens sections with "lifestyle" coverage beginning in the late 1960s. In what was perceived as an era of change,"lifestyle" sections helped address fears that newspapers were out of touch with the daily lives of readers. By the 1970s,however,these sections were being employed to promote an upscale,cosmopolitan audience. The final chapter,"Living in Style" suggests a shared model of identity has further blurred the boundaries between marketing and the media. As lifestyle databases have developed into a multi-million dollar industry,these same classifications have emerged as a standard means of evaluating media audiences. Like the dissertation as a whole,this chapter proposes that despite,or even because of its ambiguity,the notion of "lifestyles" remains at the center of a pervasive and inherently political way of seeing our world today.