The Saturated Society: Governing Risk & Lifestyles in Consumer Culture / Edition 1

by Pekka Sulkunen

Overview

Detailed and thought-provoking discussion of lifestyle regulation and how preventive lifestyle policies need to be shaped with the 'saturated society' - a society of self-controlled, fully autonomous individuals - in mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761959410
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	05/07/2009
Series:	Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Pekka Sulkunen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki

Table of Contents

Introduction
Lifestyle and the Social Bond
The Good Order of Nature: Progress and Criticism in Adam Smith's Sociology of Modernity
Autonomy: the Contracting individual
Intimacy: the Romantic Self
The New Consumer Society and Its Critics
The Welfare State in the Consumer Society
From Pastoral to Epistolary Power
Inner-Directed or Other-Directed? Agency and Citizenship in Mass Society
Re-Inventing the Social Contract

Editorial Reviews

A provocative and stimulating intervention in a debate of key contemporary importance.
Chris Shilling
Professor of Sociology, University of Kent

Pekka Sulkunen offers a fresh look at the transition from industrial society to consumer capitalism. He asks important questions about how consumer desires are produced and regulated and what it means to attempt to regulate the way we live. This book is stimulating, erudite and important.
Sue Scott
Pro Vice Chancellor at Glasgow Caledonian University

'A wide-ranging and multidimensional book...Overall, this is an interesting, thought-provoking and challenging book, and there is much in the thesis of the saturated society that we might usefully reflect upon.'
Acta Sociologica September

'The Saturated Society is an erudite and well reflected analysis of the complexities

of current consumer culture in general as well as in relation to the handling of specific risk and lifestyle issues of consumption... indispensable for the consumption researcher who wishes to be provoked in relation to her/his own habitual analytical assumptions about consumer culture.'
Journal of Consumer Culture

From the Publisher