Stop smoking the Easyway:addiction, self-help and tobacco cessation

This article examines Easyway, a popular clinical and self-help method for the treatment of smoking addiction established by the late Allen Carr in 1984. It begins by addressing how smoking has come to be constituted as a neuropharmacological addiction and some of the issues and concerns raised against this in the social sciences. After situating its theoretical and empirical focus, the article then proceeds with an interpretative thematic analysis of a selection of Easyway self-help texts. The aims here are as follows: firstly, to show how Easyway, as a discourse, constitutes the problem of nicotine addiction in novel and distinctive ways; secondly, to elaborate how the Easyway texts seek to govern readers – paradoxically, through their free capacity for reflection, introspection and action – to overcome their situated addiction to smoking; and thirdly, to identify and locate the significance of the author’s implicit claims to charisma in underpinning his authority to know and treat nicotine addiction

Debt, consumption and freedom:social scientific representations of consumer credit in Anglo-America

The article explores a range of social scientific representations of credit and debt in the United States and Britain and how these have been organized around the problem of freedom. On the one hand, credit is projected as productive, embodying and securing liberal values of individual autonomy and self-determination. On the other, debt is portrayed as consumptive, ensnaring the individual, subverting her or his will and undermining the capacity for self-determination. The classic cultural injunction against consumer borrowing is captured under the rubric of the Puritan ethic which portrays indebtedness as contrary to the values of individual freedom and autonomy; however, it is shown here how the meanings attached to credit and debt have always been ambiguous in practice. Over the 20th century, and continuing today, a number of economic writers have attempted to legitimize the development of consumer credit by demonstrating how it contributes towards freedom and security. However, it is shown how these accounts shift in response to changing economic discourses as well as credit’s growing pervasiveness. In contrast, sociological writers have tended to criticize the accumulation of debt as damaging to both individual autonomy and societal welfare. Again, these accounts also manifest a notable change in emphasis over time in response to shifting constructions of the problem of social change. Finally, recent empirical work is drawn upon to demonstrate the ways in which freedom itself can be a contingent and contextual element in the production of consumer credit

The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America, 1880–1930

Review of the book "The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America, 1880–1930" by Cesare Silla

'Mastering the possibilities' : a sociology of credit, consumption, risk and identity in the United States

This thesis sociologically analyses the development of consumer credit within the United States and the forms through which it has been governed and regulated. It is demonstrated that, as the consumption of goods and services came to play an increasingly important role in the mediation of social life during the first half of the 20th century, consumer credit grew in scale and form, funded by mainstream finance capital. As articulated by economists, such credit was justified as ‘productive’, an essential element in the facilitation of mass consumption now seen as a fundamental corollary of mass production. The state, through legislation and new initiatives, sought to protect, direct and manage the market for credit in the interests of nurturing a wider social wellbeing. It is suggested that by the 1920s the instalment plan, underpinned by the ‘conditional sale’ contract form, represented a new, paradigmatic form of credit. With it, lenders channelled credit to consumers through carefully calibrated, bureau-legal processes which served to discipline and regulate credit use and repayments to prevent default losses. From the 1960s, with the cultural critique of mass society and the rise of new modalities of consumption concerned with lifestyle and self-identity, the widened size and scope of credit is demonstrated. Tracing the institutional development of the credit card, it is contended that this created a new paradigm of credit as a personalised, mobile resource to be drawn upon by individuals in the increasingly autonomous, market-derived living of their lives. Permeated by the political rationality of neo-liberalism, it is elaborated how the state’s regulation of credit has shifted on the basis of its perceived responsibility to promote this individualised, ‘enterprising’ mode of life

Smoke gets in your eyes:what is sociological about cigarettes?

Contemporary public health approaches increasingly draw attention to the unequal social distribution of cigarette smoking. In contrast, critical accounts emphasize the importance of smokers’ situated agency, the relevance of embodiment and how public health measures against smoking potentially play upon and exacerbate social divisions and inequality. Nevertheless, if the social context of cigarettes is worthy of such attention, and sociology lays a distinct claim to understanding the social, we need to articulate a distinct, positive and systematic claim for smoking as an object of sociological enquiry. This article attempts to address this by situating smoking across three main dimensions of sociological thinking: history and social change; individual agency and experience; and social structures and power. It locates the emergence and development of cigarettes in everyday life within the project of modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It goes on to assess the habituated, temporal and experiential aspects of individual smoking practices in everyday lifeworlds. Finally, it argues that smoking, while distributed in important ways by social class, also works relationally to render and inscribe it