Springer eBooks, 2022

For the Mozambican and Angolan worker-trainees who came to East Germany, their involvement in producing East German goods, and how they consumed what East Germany had to offer, was central to their experience and their understanding of their migration. Consumption and production are often discussed as two separate spheres, and consumption tends to be associated with consumer society, affluence, choice, and variety, all connected to market economies. However, if we look at the essential unity of people's lives, we see that this distinction is an artificial one. It is one of the many strengths of the oral histories that make up this book that we can see historical actors as both producers and consumers, often simultaneously. Communism held the promise of uniting production and consumption. 1 Companies-in East Germany the VEBs, Volkseigene Betriebe, publicly owned enterprises-were to be places not only of work but also of entertainment and education, consumption and production. Through their experience of both, the worker-trainees transcended stereotypical Cold War simplifications of Western consumption and Eastern production. The specifics of their experiences as producers and consumers were bound up with the status as foreigners and Africans, and their memories of both are heavily influenced by their experience after returning to Africa. This aspect of the dual experience of a socialist economy, and its contrast with economies of the global South both during and after the

The misfortune of Soviet consumers vividly characterizes later Soviet daily life, but the fight of the consumers against the injustice of Soviet retailing remains in the dark. The most important official way of defending the interests of citizens in Soviet society was to complain to various authorities. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev official petitions for help in solving consumer's problems were extremely popular. The peculiarities of the Soviet system of consumption defined the special strategies used by consumers, which will be explored and analyzed in this article.

Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Studia Territorialia 1, 2020

In Germany, as in other parts of Europe, workers faced social and political challenges in the process of industrialization. Consumer cooperative societies, or coops, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as an answer to these challenges. As self-help organizations of workers, they developed into a stable pillar of the German labor movement. In 1932 they counted four million members. After 1945, under Allied supervision, "denazified" coops helped to reconstruct Germany, which was then divided into two opposing political camps. After the war, former victims of the Nazi regime, perpetrators of Nazi crimes, and bystanders all preferred to avoid discussing the Nazi past. Reconstruction in both German states focused on rapidly restoring the war-damaged economy, while ignoring the other burdens of the Nazi past. Most of today's discussion of coops' postwar reconstruction in Germany centers on economics. Due to various historical interrelations, critical discussion of the burdensome past remains buried. In this paper, I reflect on the transformation of the consumer cooperatives during and after the Second World War, based on archival sources documenting the denazification of the Hannover Consumer Cooperative Society in the British occupation zone and the restitution of property it lost under Nazi rule. I argue that despite the nearly complete demise of German consumer cooperatives after reunification in 1990, the buried history of how they handled the Nazi past should come to light. https://stuter.fsv.cuni.cz/index.php/stuter/issue/view/56

Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 2021

Just as the social categories of class, gender, and religion became unstable during the “age of fracture” (Daniel Rodgers), the idea that we are all consumers was consolidated. The emergence of societies in which the consumer became a pivotal figure during the second half of the twentieth century constitutes a distinct phase in the history of consumption, which impacted the politics of consumption. This article expands the view of political consumption by looking at the institutionalization of the consumer in Dutch political system. In the course of the postwar period, an abstract notion of the consumer became widely accepted. This view was emancipatory, negating existing differences through unifying consumer policies. Focusing on the entanglement of the consumer with other social roles and categories in these negotiations, the article demonstrates that political consumption is not an anomaly, but the result of such entanglements.

In the opening ceremonies to the Sochi Olympic Games in 2014, intricately choreographed dance routines depicted an idealized view of Russian life, from the lyricism of a tsarist ball to the throbbing tempo of rapid industrialization. A celebration of cosmonaut Yury Gagarin's 1961 space flight was followed by a parade of vintage cars and brightly clad stiliagi (hipsters) dancing in the street. These images of happiness, abundance, and fashion offer a romanticized portrayal of rising living standards in the Soviet Union during the post-World War II period. In reality communism, in both theory and practice, had a thorny and ambivalent relationship with consumerism. This is the topic explored in Communism and Consumerism: The Soviet Alternative to the Affluent Society, edited by Timo Vihavainen and Elena Bogdanova. In several framing chapters, Vihavainen grapples with the question of consumption in Marxist theory and Communist Party documents, while Olga Gurova, Larissa Zakharova, and Bogdanova consider how Soviet citizens shopped and acquired goods by other means, how they thought about their role as consumers, and how they expressed their dissatisfaction with the products and services available.

American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2013

This article probes the evaluative frameworks applied to the consumption and consumers in a large corpus of texts written between 1920 and 2000. Scrutinizing English-language texts dealing with the virtues and shortcomings of market capitalism, the analysis first dissects the representation of consumption and consumers and the consequential post-WWII transition from a conceptualization based on purchasing power to one based on the idea of consumer choice and consumer well-being. The article then explores the increasing centrality of consumption and consumer choice in the debates between market-critical progressives and the advocates of laissez-faire capitalism. It is only after the decline of neoconservatism and the rise of the consumerist libertarian stance that consumption comes into its own as the central point of contestation between progressives and those who pushed for a more laissez-faire brand of capitalism. Once the theme of consumption took center stage, it allowed the marketcritical progressives and their laissez-faire adversaries to meet each other in a common thematic arena. When consumerist libertarianism began to dominate on the right-wing side of the debate, the contest between critics and proponents of expansionary market capitalism metamorphosed into a genuinely ideological struggle over the significance and meaning of consumer choice and consumer well-being.

Journal of Cold War Studies, 2008

International Review of Social History, 2000