Work, Consumption and Culture: Affluence and Social Change in the Twenty-first Century

Social scientist Ransome looks again at the increasingly popular idea that the lives of people now living in the industrialized West are determined much more by the way they consume things than by how they produce them, and that consumption has displaced production as the leading factor in shaping the kind of society people are now living in. An apparent decline in the importance of work for people and for society, he says, re-opens fundamental questions about why people engage in the activities they do, and the purposes or goals they hope to fulfill through those activities. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR