Cookbook choice a matter of self-identity

Cookbooks have long been recognised as more than instructional texts rather as a literary genre with narratives beyond the functional. This paper discusses the influences which guide choices of cookbook and cookery writer for a group of thirtysomethings with particular attention to the role that their narratives of self-identity play within this choice. In the sociology of consumption the role of self and identity is a recurring one particularly among those who view consumption as an act of integration between external objects and self, often through a process of personalisation. Whether food consumption can take on such significance is well debated but cook books in common with other forms of literature, this paper contends, become well used and take on increased symbolism for their owners. Cookbooks have a heterogeneity of style from the instructional owner manual style of Larousse through to the lifestyle led work of Oliver and Slater so that they can embody not only representations of contemporary culinary culture but also extend far beyond the kitchen to create aspirational cultural narratives. Utilising narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews this paper explores the narrative construction of self, drawn in part from attitudes towards food and cooking, outwardly manifest through choices of cookbook in order to add to understanding of symbolic consumption practice

Mirrors, Manipulation, and Me

Yesterday I was sick to my stomach. Literally. I tossed and turned all night, woke up and felt sick, and spent the first two hours of my day in bed trying to calm down while. I was worrying that I was a bad friend, student, and girlfriend. The hardest part was that I was criticizing myself for having these insecurities. It’s tough to get out of that cycle, but it’s what I need to do. [excerpt

Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office

In this paper we explore the notion of creating personally evocative collections of content from publicly available material. Compared to the personal media that we look at, reminisce over, or personalise our offices with, public media offers the potential for a different type of nostalgia, signifiers of an era such as entertainment, products, or fashions. We focus on an office environment, where the use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over protecting privacy and disclosing too much of one's identity, while keeping the existing benefits of office personalisation in terms of reminiscence, improving mood, and developing identity. After preliminary explorations of content and form, we developed a two-screen ambient display that cycled through 500 images automatically retrieved based on four simple user questions. We ran a two-week trial of the display with six users. We present qualitative results of the trial from which we see that it is possible to bring the delight associated with personal content into the workplace, while being mindful of issues of appropriateness and privacy. Images of locations from childhood were particularly evocative for all participants, while simple objects such as stickers, music, or boardgames were more varied across participants. We discuss a number of avenues for future work in the workplace and beyond: improving the chance of an evocative moment, capturing the mundane, and the crowdsourcing of nostalgia

Few determinants of compulsive buying of youth in Pakistan

Consumer compulsive buying has been an important area of study in consumer behavior research. The goal of this study was to determine the effect of factors like age, tendency to spend, post purchase guilt, drive to spend compulsively, feeling about shopping and spending and dysfunctional spending on compulsive buying behavior of youth in Pakistan. The primary data for this study was collected from questionnaire that was administered in Bahawalpur, Lahore and Islamabad. A convenience sample of three hundred and seventy one respondents was used in the study. Statistical techniques of correlation and regression were used for data analysis. The empirical findings show that the age has a significant but negative relationship with the compulsive buying behavior. However the factors tendency to spend, drive to spend compulsively, feeling about shopping and spending, dysfunctional spending and post purchase guilt are positively related to compulsive buying behavior.Compulsive buying behavior; Youth, Pakistan; Tendency to spend; Drive to spend Compulsively; Feeling about shopping and spending; Dysfunctional spending; Post purchase guilt; Age

To Buy or Not to Buy: Family Dynamics and Children's Consumption

This article draws on data from a qualitative study of children living in families with either low or high levels of household income and outlines the intrafamilial dynamics that surround young children's relationships to contemporary consumer culture. The motivation for parents to provide their children with particular commodities, how parents prioritised children's requests and the rationale they used to buy or not to buy certain items was much more complex than parents simply 'giving in' to pester power. In the main, parents were making very considered judgements based on a range of factors. Wider social changes were seen as being contributory to new forms of consumption and thus new experiences of childhood which meant parents having to deal with an aspect of their children's lives that was much more problematic than they had experienced in their own childhoods.Children, Consumption, Families, Inequalities, Pester Power

Elongated Intimacy: The intimate experience of owning / commissioning a craft object

‘How will you (craftspeople) make things that others will value, give a place in their intimate space and include in the rituals of their daily life?’ (Unger 2007) Little has been written in either social science or material culture research about the way contemporary craft objects are encountered and consumed and the meanings and values that they subsequently inherit. In my research as a silversmith and jeweller the made object embodies a set of intentions with symbolic significance and narrative agendas. Until now only anecdotal data existed to support whether the reception was equal to the intentions. This paper reports on the findings of primary empirical data gathered through intimate in-depth interviews. The respondents (unlike many studies) were invited to participate because they had purchased, commissioned or acquired an object created by the author. The complex results elicited knowledge about the life of the objects and the values and meanings they hold for those who own them. The findings are presented in the context of current critical debate in contemporary craft and describe how they inform creative practice.</p