Taste in appearance: self, cultivated dispositions, and cultural capital

The purpose of the study is to develop a theory about taste in appearance and to investigate if cultural capital, proposed by Bourdieu (1984), is a relevant concept in explaining appearance-related consumption. Taste has been studied in two disciplines. Philosophers defined taste as an aesthetic aptitude or capacity to discover beauty from works of art. Sociologists conceptualized taste as a cultivated disposition in the guise of an innate disposition in a broad range of cultural products. While philosophers endeavored to conceptualized taste in relation to beauty, sociologists associated taste with social acceptance or attractiveness.;Phenomenological interviews were conducted with 16 participants from upper-middle and middle class backgrounds who lived in three Midwestern cities. Information about participants\u27 demographic and family backgrounds was also collected. Participants were selected through a snowball sampling procedure to have varied background characteristics. A constant comparative approach to qualitative data analysis was conducted to find important themes and explore differences among participants related to their backgrounds (Strauss, 1987).;The content of the interviews indicated that taste in appearance is a cultivated disposition to direct consumption activities. Taste included preferences for putting together outfits as well as for particular aesthetic elements. Participants described taste in terms of how they related particular things to themselves (self-concept) and why they liked particular things (motives). Participants\u27 preferences indicated their struggle with ambivalence about how much they wanted to fit in but remain somewhat different from others and how much they wanted to keep their appearance up-to-date and in fashion. Taste was actualized through the exercise of appearance-specific motives and efficient appearance management strategies, including optimizing the use of given resources and negotiating conflicts among preferences and resources.;With respect to evaluation of taste, participants evaluated taste as a sum of the appearance and the consumption skills of a person, because taste was communicated through presentation of one\u27s appearance. Evaluation included judging how well appearance embodies an actor, how motives in clothing practice were successfully pursued and how an actor successfully managed constraints and balanced ambivalent factors.;Level of cultural capital possessed by the participants differentially shaped social actors\u27 experiences of appearance consumption. The resources of cultural capital, including upbringing, education, and occupation (Bourdieu, 1984), provided participants with an aptitude for involvement in appearance consumption, including sensitivity to dressing appropriately, capacity to construct and communicate meanings, and opportunities and refinement of dressing practices. Among the participants, about half had background characteristics indicating fairly high level of cultural capital, and the other half had a middle range of cultural capital. For those with higher level of cultural capital, manifested taste was constructed with a higher degree of complexity than among participants with a middle level of cultural capital. High cultural capital individuals showed greater evidence of aesthetic involvement through clothing practices.;The findings have practical implications for apparel marketers. Knowledge of levels of cultural capital of target customers will help define strategies for advertising, store layout and merchandise display. The findings have useful implications for marketing of products other than clothing

Toward a New Conception of Human Subjectivity for the Age of Globalization: Revisiting the Hegelian Vision of “Spiritual Subjectivity”

My major argument in this dissertation is that Hegelian spiritual subjectivity can and should serve as a philosophical basis for envisioning a new conception of human subjectivity for the age of globalization. Why, then, does globalization demand a new conception of human subjectivity at all? What constitutes the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity such that it is not only relevant and but also necessary to the contemporary, postmodern context of globalization? My dissertation largely addresses these two questions. As for the first question, it requires my critical analysis of the context in which we are living. We are living in an era of globalization whose primary driving force is globalizing capitalism. Among many challenges posed by capitalist globalization today, I claim, it most importantly challenges us to reflect deeply upon the anthropological question of “what it means to be authentically human.” The human being that capitalist globalization is eager to promote and produce is none other than a faithful global consumer who, without critical thinking, simply succumbs to one’s sensuous inclinations or desires in their sheer particularity, contingency, and arbitrariness, who is easily attracted to the external appearances and sensible images of commodities endlessly released onto the market, and who thus is always ready to buy them both online and offline. And I suspect that this anthropology of capitalist globalization seems to be justified philosophically by the contemporary intellectual movement known as postmodernism, particularly by its thesis of the “death of the subject” which argues that human subjectivity is merely an after-effect of the pre-subjective, extrinsic processes of language, culture, power, ideology, the unconscious, etc. In other words, postmodernist anthropology (the death of the subject), regardless of its real intent, may function as a philosophical basis and ideological justification for capitalist globalization’s disgraceful reduction of human beings to mere consumers who are, without subjectivity, subjected to the imperialism of a globalizing market. And this erosion of human subjectivity is all the more serious given that the contemporary globalizing world imperatively calls for our more ethical and political thoughts, sensibilities, and actions than ever before to orient it toward peaceful co-existence and co-prosperity for all. In this regard, I insist that we need a new conception of human subjectivity for this postmodern context of globalization, which includes following three important elements in their internal relations: self-transcending drive toward universality, self-determined or autonomous action, and solidaristic relationship with others—that is, a sort of cosmopolitan or global citizen who is constantly universalizing oneself through self-transcending, self-determined ethico-political actions in solidarity with others to advance the common good for all members of the global community. I argue that this new perspective and conception of human subjectivity for the age of globalization finds its philosophical archetype par excellence in Hegel’s philosophy of subjectivity as spiritual subjectivity. Here my second question is addressed: What constitutes the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity? Historically, Hegel’s philosophy of spiritual subjectivity is his critical response to the so-called modern turn to the subject. In opposition to the post-Cartesian tendency to characterize subjectivity as a self-identical, self-sufficient substance, defining itself from itself without reference to things other than itself, which is already given once and for all, Hegel puts forth a developmental view on the human subject that could, in turn, transcend the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity operative in the modern project. Namely, for Hegel, the human subject must be conceived not just as a substance but essentially as a “spirit,” i.e., as a dialectical movement of being-for-itself (self-conscious identity with itself; substantiality) and being-for-others (socio-historical relation to others; relationality) toward the Absolute (absolute universality; telos). And I find paradigmatically in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit how such Hegelian spiritual subjectivity actually emerges and develops gradually—from subjectivity-in-itself (subjectivity in the womb) through subjectivity-for-itself (the birth of subjectivity) to subjectivity-in-and-for-itself (the growth of subjectivity with its ultimate culmination in absolute subjectivity). By “absolute subjectivity” here Hegel means precisely the final stage in which the implicit, immanent telos of human subjectivity that has been present throughout all developmental forms of human consciousness becomes explicit and fulfilled, namely, in which the human subject becomes fully broadened or universalized and sees all beings as intrinsically interrelated in their distinctive otherness. Importantly, according to Hegel, this can be made possible only when the human subject conceives of God as Absolute Spirit, as absolute universality per se and thereby conceives of all beings as self-expressive moments of God in his trinitarian movement. In short, the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity can be defined as the dialectical movement of its three constitutive moments, i.e., the Absolute or God as absolute universality (the immanent telos), self-conscious identity (being-for-itself), and concrete historical relatedness (being-for-others), each of which is homologous with the above-mentioned three constitutive elements of my proposed new conception of subjectivity for the age of globalization respectively, i.e., self-transcending drive toward universality, self-determined or autonomous action, and solidaristic relationship with others. It is in this sense that I argue the current context of globalization crucially needs as a new anthropological vision the Hegelian spiritual subject that intrinsically thinks, wills, and acts for something greater than itself as it constantly relates itself to others not in a monological way but in a dialectical way

From Objects to Possessions: Development of Meaning in the American Wedding

Consumer socialization is defined as a process by which individuals develop consumerrelated skills, knowledge and attitudes within the marketplace to function as a consumer (Moschis & Churchill, 1978). Consumer socialization occurs at all stages in life, but is most commonly found when a consumer enters a new life stage. This study explores the consumer socialization in the context of an American wedding. Wedding is a unique life event that involves consumption practices including the location of ceremony, music, cake, and flowers, catering and photography. Wedding exposes people to consumption of various unfamiliar or risky products. For example, most male consumers are unfamiliar with engagement rings and brides perceive high level of risk in purchasing wedding dress

Delineation of high resolution climate regions over the Korean Peninsula using machine learning approaches

In this research, climate classification maps over the Korean Peninsula at 1 km resolution were generated using the satellite-based climatic variables of monthly temperature and precipitation based on machine learning approaches. Random forest (RF), artificial neural networks (ANN), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), and support vector machines (SVM) were used to develop models. Training and validation of these models were conducted using in-situ observations from the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) from 2001 to 2016. The rule of the traditional Koppen-Geiger (K-G) climate classification was used to classify climate regions. The input variables were land surface temperature (LST) of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), monthly precipitation data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43 product, and the Digital Elevation Map (DEM) from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The overall accuracy (OA) based on validation data from 2001 to 2016 for all models was high over 95%. DEM and minimum winter temperature were two distinct variables over the study area with particularly high relative importance. ANN produced more realistic spatial distribution of the classified climates despite having a slightly lower OA than the others. The accuracy of the models using high altitudinal in-situ data of the Mountain Meteorology Observation System (MMOS) was also assessed. Although the data length of the MMOS data was relatively short (2013 to 2017), it proved that the snowy, dry and cold winter and cool summer class (Dwc) is widely located in the eastern coastal region of South Korea. Temporal shifting of climate was examined through a comparison of climate maps produced by period: from 1950 to 2000, from 1983 to 2000, and from 2001 to 2013. A shrinking trend of snow classes (D) over the Korean Peninsula was clearly observed from the ANN-based climate classification results. Shifting trends of climate with the decrease/increase of snow (D)/temperate (C) classes were clearly shown in the maps produced using the proposed approaches, consistent with the results from the reanalysis data of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC)

Meaning of Wearing Faux Fur

The purpose of this study is to Understand meanings of consuming faux fur from the perspective of consumer culture theory

‘Guaranteed lowest prices: do they facilitate collusion?’: Revisited

We examine the effect of guaranteed lowest price clauses (G.L.P.). First, we correct the proof of Logan and Lutter’s main result that it is the unique equilibrium outcome for firms adopting G.L.P. to charge collusive prices in a simultaneous pricing game, if one uses the trembling-hand perfect equilibrium as the solution concept. Second, we extend their argument to a sequential pricing game in which one firm chooses its price before the other, given that both firms adopt G.L.P. We show that collusive prices is the unique equilibrium outcome in this game even without resorting to any stringent refinement like the trembling-hand perfect equilibrium

Strategic delegation and second mover advantage in duopoly

We consider a duopoly in which each firm has one owner and one manager playing a multi-stage delegation game. The decision of each firm consists of two stages. In the first stage, the owner offers his manager a contract based on profits and sales. In the second stage, the manager chooses its output or price. Several possible sequential games will be analysed, depending on the sequence of the strategic variables. In the first scenario in which firm 1 makes a contract decision and a producing decision sequentially, and firm 2 follows in the same fashion, we show that any delegation equilibrium in which both owners commit their managers to profit-maximising behaviour disappears. In the second scenario in which the firms first enter into the contract stage and then Stackelberg competition follows in the second stage, sales-based delegation occurs. If firms compete in quantities, second mover advantage appears if firms make simultaneous delegation contracts, while first mover advantage is recovered if they make sequential contracts. If firms compete in prices, the results are reversed