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Hazel Kyrk’s recognised contributions include a shift in analytic focus from production to consumption, pioneering work to measure household production as part of family income, empirical studies of family behaviour, and contributions to policy. But her account of ‘wise’ consumption and its intersection with ‘high’ living standards is not well understood. The three aims of this chapter are to explain ‘wise’ consumption across Kyrk’s three major books, to consider its role in Kyrk’s empirical studies, and to explain why it fell into oblivion. Tackling what Wesley Mitchell described as the ‘most baffling of difficulties’, Kyrk explained what constitutes a family’s ‘good’ in a manner that was critical of mere emulation. Her 1923 book required that wise consumption include new and personal elements. Her 1929/1933 book detailed five qualitative criteria (balance between interests, full and varied experiences, originality, rational sources of satisfaction, and the use of scientific information). But her 1953 book weakened this normative language, reflecting Margaret Reid’s view that Kyrk’s account was too demanding. Although Kyrk felt wise consumption avoided paternalism, her peers disagreed (Hoyt, 1938/1945; Reid, 1938/1945). We close with some problems with Kyrk’s account and a brief consideration of its continuing relevance.

Over the past 15 years or so, a very large proportion of the forensic economics literature has been devoted to research concerning better ways of estimating damages in cases involving personal injury and wrongful death (PI/WD). This is probably not surprising since the largest fraction of consulting income for forensic economists (at least those in the National Association of Forensic Economics, NAFE) comes from such cases.

How do people with few material resources manage their consumption lives? We address this question by investigating the consumption practices and processes of 27 subsistence consumers in South Africa. These individuals are economically active, underserved consumers who either had in the past or have today few resources in terms of income, employment, and education; most of these consumer–informants grew up in and/or live in urban townships populated by poor black South Africans. Our interpretation is based on family systems theory and centers on analyses showing that subsistence consumers enact strategies to cope with the chronic stress of resource allocation needs for the family that outpace resource generation. The repertoire of strategies includes: (1) adhering to resource generation opportunities, (2) accessing new resources, (3) talking to family members, (4) trying and striving, (5) sacrificing, and (6) risking. These strategies are discussed in light of family systems theory, consumer behavior research, and marketing to subsistence consumers.

Purpose – In this chapter, we seek to explore the collective responsibilities undertaken by the family as a whole in maintaining familial bonds through meal consumption. We draw on work which examines the role of gift giving (Ruskola, 2005), sharing (Belk, 2010) and sacrifice (Miller, 1998) in consumption. We take an original approach which does not look at the family meal in isolation but rather focuses on the patterning of meals and the relationships between them.

Methodology – The ethnographic study draws on interviews with 18 families and follows up mealtime observations with 15 families.

Findings – The analysis reveals a mealtime patterning involving collective participation in saving (in the form of consuming ordinary and thrifty meals during the week) and spending (in consuming extraordinary meals at weekends). Even if in the women and mothers in the household tend to sacrifice themselves more than other family members, the consumption of thrifty or ordinary meals implies a process of sacrifice involving the entire family. In viewing the meal as gift, we also observe a process of reciprocity in operation with family members obliged to both share in, and contribute to, the meals that have been cooked for them.

Social implication – Our analysis reveals discordances between the aspirations of family members (which are arguably largely based on cultural ideals), and their everyday experiences of family mealtimes.

Originality/Value – The chapter show how these micro experiences of family mealtimes have implications for a macro understanding of the idealised and culturally loaded construct of the family meal.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

In this paper, we provide a practical example of how ethnographic insight is obtained in the field. In so doing, we demonstrate multiple ways in which ethnographic approaches can be adapted during on-going research processes to develop rich and multiple emic/etic perspectives.

This paper is based upon the first author’s reflective experience of undertaking ethnographic field work. The discussion draws from a multi-method, longitudinal and adaptive ethnographic research design, which aimed to capture the process of new family identity formation in Sri Lanka.

Existing research gives us excellent insight into various methods used in contemporary ethnographic research and the kinds of insight generated by these methods. With few exceptions, these studies do not give significant insight into the specifics of the ethnographic research process and the adaption practice. Thus, we provide a practical example of how ethnographic insight is obtained in the research field.

Our discussion elaborates the ways in which we integrated multiple research methods such as participant observations, semi-structured in-depth interviews, informal sessions, Facebook interactions, adaptations of performative exercises and elicitation methods to overcome complexities in cultural, mundane and personal consumption meanings. We also discuss how closer friendships with informants emerged as a consequence of the ethnographic research adaption practice and how this influenced trust and confidence in researcher-informant relationship, presenting us with a privileged access to their everyday and personal lives.

The purpose of this paper is to revitalize consumer socialization as a topic of study by presenting a critical review of the concept. The aim is to advance our current understanding of conceptual issues and to outline issues and directions for future research. Consumer socialization can be better understood by studying its multidisciplinary roots and by critically reviewing its definition and meanings. It is suggested that the scope of consumer socialization be expanded to encompass life-long consumer socialization, different life events and spheres of consumption, dialogs, negotiations, and translations, as well as the socio-cultural context in which socialization occurs. In order to capture the complexity of consumer socialization and to maintain the field of consumer socialization as a vital research area, there is a need to rethink both the theories and the methods used. Researchers are encouraged to expand the use of socio-cultural theories and ethnographic methods. Interdisciplinary research is also recommended, allowing a multifaceted pluralism in the study of consumer socialization.

Contrary to the implications of economic theory, consumption inequality in the United States did not react to the increases in income inequality during the last three decades. This paper investigates if a change in the type of income inequality – from permanent to transitory – or a change in the ability to insure income shocks is responsible for this. A measure of household consumption is imputed into the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to create panel data on income and consumption for the period 1980–2010. The minimum distance investigation of covariance relationships shows that both explanations work together: the share of transitory shocks increases over time, but the capability to insure against permanent and transitory income shocks also improves. Together, these phenomena can explain the lack of an increase in consumption inequality.