Breaking down silos
Paul M.W. Hackett, Christopher M. Hayre in Handbook of Ethnography in Healthcare Research, 2020
As part of this user-centric and interdisciplinary turn within the fields of innovation, design and business strategy is an increasing focus on the value of social situatedness in everyday life. Moreover, the development seems closely linked to the rise of consumer culture and popular culture, both within academic disciplines as well as within corporate contexts where the power of the consumer has become ever more present. To understand society, we must understand the consumer. As Mike Featherstone points out in Consumer Culture and Postmodernism:To use the term ‘consumer culture’ is to emphasize that the world of goods and their principles of structuration are central to the understanding of contemporary society. This involves a dual focus: first, on the cultural dimensions of the economy, the symbolization and use of material goods as ‘communicators’ not just utilities; and second, on the economy of cultural goods, the market, principles of supply, demand, capital accumulation, competition and monopolization which operate within the sphere of lifestyles, cultural goods, and commodities [… .] The concern with lifestyle, with the stylization of life, suggests that the practices of consumption, the planning, purchase, and display of consumer goods and experiences in everyday life cannot be understood merely via conceptions of exchange value and instrumental calculation.(1991: 82–84)
Understanding your organisation
John Wattis, Stephen Curran, Elizabeth Cotton in Practical Management and Leadership for Doctors, 2019
Another way at looking at cultures in healthcare is to examine the development of health services in the UK in the last century. Before the NHS there was a market culture, supplemented by various forms of insurance and the individual charitable donation of time to ‘the poor’ by some doctors and organisations. The early NHS was predominantly a top-down organisation with strong elements of role culture but with clinicians relatively free to function independently. We have called this a ‘service culture’. Then, under the influence of economic and political theorists, the internal market was introduced, here described as the ‘commissioner-provider’ culture. This was designed to remedy the so-called ‘producer capture’ where the ‘workers’ of public service industries were (somewhat insultingly) seen as running the business for their own benefit. Gains in efficiency were also predicted (though the long-term efficiency of markets must now be in some doubt). Finally, running alongside this evolution, we have the wider phenomenon of the consumer culture. Table 3.2 gives a simplified account of the characteristics of these different cultures. As the English NHS evolves, the consumer model, as presented here, is essentially a market model with service commissioners acting as moderators and purchasers of service on behalf of consumers.
Policy and governance
Pamela Mason, Tim Lang in Sustainable Diets, 2017
Academics have played a role in this policy evolution. Over time, they have demonstrated to policy makers the complexity of the sustainable diet challenge and collectively pushed policy makers towards multi-criteria thinking. Climatologists wanted action on greenhouse gas emissions. Health specialists wanted dietary transformation.259 Biodiversity specialists pointed to the fact the planet is now in its sixth phase of mass extinction.260 Social scientists highlighted the gross inequalities and maldistribution of consumer culture.120 There might have been tensions between those with a farm or land focus compared to those with a food focus, and between those who look to technical rather than societal solutions. Gradually they realised the common interest expressed as sustainable diets. The reality is that a food system or sustainable diet perspective joins these discrete issues up.
When Better Becomes Worse
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2019
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
The Edsel, worthless and obsolete for decades, has reemerged as a design object valued precisely for its obsolescence, for its out-of-placeness. The Edsel’s use value has shifted in the two generations from 1958 to 2018, when I saw its wheel-less and fashionably distressed rusted out carcass, with its signature front grill giving an open-mouth coy sigh, bedecked with palms and ferns sprouting with intentional carelessness from its windows and open roof, functioning as a retro planter in an upscale funky garden shop in San Francisco. High-end vintage consumer culture has appropriated obsolescence by revaluing obsolete products. Because genetically edited future persons cannot be updated, their social value decreases rapidly, potentially making them obsolete even before they’re born. One can speculate, however, on whether genetically obsolete people might take on retro value like the Edsel in the plant shop or perhaps like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Betty White, whose images are precious in media culture in part because they are rare and temporally out of place. Yet the scale of a human lifetime restricts any widespread opportunity for genetically obsolete people to be revalued in the 60 years it took for the Edsel to reappear in the garden shop.
Body satisfaction of lesbian and bisexual Brazilian women: Indicators of self-esteem, physical appearance perfectionism, and identity processes
Published in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2023
Ana Karina Robinson, Damião Soares de Almeida-Segundo, Adolfo Pizzinato
For some time, research on topics related to body image was almost exclusively dedicated to associating body dissatisfaction with eating disorders (Meneguzzo et al., 2018; Troop et al., 2003). While this is a significant concern given the severity and level of morbidity involved, other psychosocial factors are negatively affected by dissatisfaction with physical appearance, such as mental health and well-being (Burnette et al., 2019; Cash & Smolak, 2011; Da Silva & Branco, 2019). Among the psychological processes related to body image, there is evidence that overall self-esteem is directly related to levels of body satisfaction and perfectionism (Meneguzzo et al., 2021). This is especially true for the domains of self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism, the latter highly stimulated by hedonistic consumer culture (Kholmogorova et al., 2018; Yang & Stoeber, 2012).
Safer Sex Practice Among Female Chinese College Students and Its Antecedents: A Culture-Centered Approach
Published in International Journal of Sexual Health, 2020
Yi Mou, Yingyan Wu, Jilong Wang, Yuheng Wu, Zhipeng Li, Yuanye Cui
The findings of this study extend our understanding of the culture-centered approach to health communication. Culture is neither static nor unified, as the structure, context, and agency associated with culture are constantly evolving. Maoist China attempted to eliminate the gender differences rooted in Confucianism and promoted gender equality through state construction in alignment with the socialist agenda of development (Manning, 2010). However, since the reform and opening up in 1978, female sexuality has dramatically shifted with the rise of consumer culture against the backdrop of globalization (Altman, 2004). Chinese views on femininity, physical beauty, sex, and pleasure have greatly changed, and these changes have occurred within just a few decades, which probably explains why a variety of female gender role values co-exist. The “hodgepodge” of these values surely impacts young females’ sex-related choices, and their agency and capacity in dealing with sexual issues.