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This chapter builds on Georges Bataille’s analysis of waste as a constitutive element of social life. We argue that two separate but intertwined dimensions included in the idea of waste, waste as sacrifice and waste as competition, can enhance our understanding of the role of the lavish wedding in contemporary consumer society. We suggest four categories of waste as constitutive of the meanings of the wedding universe: pure waste, lavish waste, simulated waste and anti-waste.

We use a combination of netnography and long interviews to explore notions of waste in Danish weddings. The netnography was conducted in a Danish wedding forum, where informants for the long interviews were also recruited among the members.

We find that the four dimensions of waste suggested in our theorization are indeed found in the way consumers plan and enact their weddings. In particular, the notion of sacrificial expenditure – what we call “pure waste” in our context – is indeed present in contemporary weddings.

This research is undertaken in a Danish context, which represents a particular historical and cultural framing of the wedding ceremony and its types of expenditure. We encourage research in other cultural contexts to elaborate on our findings.

Without denying the fundamental symbolic character of consumption activities, we argue that, more generally, a Bataillean perspective on consumption and waste can further our understanding of the limits of the symbolic character in consumer research, since it underlines the more corporeal experience of certain consumption rituals.

Purpose – This study examines the meaning of shopping for Taiwanese students visiting England. It asks how this activity takes place, what purposes it serves for the students, and how the resulting purchases make meaning for the students once they return to Taiwan.

Methodology/approach – The study is ethnographic, involving observation and interviews in England as well as visual elicitation and interviews with the students once they returned to Taiwan and also some time later.

Findings – Shopping for souvenirs in England is found to be part of the process by which young Taiwanese tourists come to understand cultural differences. It is also a part of the process by which these students fulfill social obligations to those family members who have largely funded their trips. It is also a way of engaging with locals through the medium and excuse of shopping. Both the items selected and the memories they encode form thesomewhat stereotypical condensations of the experience of going abroad to “The West.”

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – Those studied represent a young group with limited prior travel experience. Their retrospective recollections are subject to some distortion, although this is a part of the normal process of remembering.

Practical implications (if applicable) – For those planning foreign educational exchange programs, the critical role of shopping in this process should not be neglected.

Originality/value of paper – The researcher accompanied the students on their trip to England and also followed up with them once they returned home to Taiwan. This produced a rare insight into the process of tourist meaning-making during and after their trip abroad.

Media has been crucial to development of economic, political, social, and cultural spheres at the local, national, and global levels. Media through different means has remained not only the source of information and entertainment but it has been able to produce and disseminate information, ideas, beliefs, values, ways of thinking, and narratives which can help us to understand and follow the socio-cultural happenings around the world. In India, television along with internet has become the main source of social media. In fact, television is the most powerful source of social media which covers both urban areas and rural areas. Approximately 47.2 per cent of population in India has access to television. Many researchers are of the opinion that television advertisements present idealized images of appropriate behavior and role for women, making television advertisement an important factor that shapes desired and appropriate behaviors and roles of each sex in developing nations. Some studies mention that changing portrayal of women in advertisements has been the result of increased number of educated women working outside the home. In contrast, entrepreneurs recognize that consumption is related to the creation and production of sense of self. The greater is an association with the sense of self, the greater will be the capacity to buy products for consumption. This paper posits that media, and especially television programs, promote images that appeal to traditional gender role to support economic enterprise of sale of traditional women’s apparel.

This chapter examines the issue of the “astructural bias” critique of symbolic interactionist theory and research practice by reconsidering the conception of structure in light of work within the French social theoretical tradition that reflects upon this concept. Proceeding through the work of Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Marshall Sahlins, the chapter examines the evolving theorization of symbolic structures. Bataille’s theory of the “general economy” and the “labyrinth” provides an initial expansion of the concept of structures and formulating symbolic practices as fundamental to the structuring of the social order. Baudrillard expands this work on symbolic structures with his analysis of symbolic exchange and seduction, taking Bataille’s initial work into a more nuanced analytical perspective and applies it to a range of cultural practices, including fashion, an area of particular interest to symbolic interactionism. Marshall Sahlins, directly influenced by Baudrillard, refines much of this thinking through his theorization of cultural reason, and provides anthropological field research to illustrate some of this theory, taking this thought into more conventional social scientific territory and offering examples of its methodological possibilities. The chapter suggests that symbolic interactionists can move from a defensive position regarding the presumed astructural character of their work to a more positive case for its status as a particularly acute form of engagement with a range of social structures.

This chapter sets out to explore consumer-centred experiential luxury from the perspective of a human body. We focus on the various practices related to a yoga retreat holiday experience in luxury hotel premises, such as encounters with hotel facilities, employees, nature and atmosphere besides yoga practice. Attention to bodily practices and affectivities on a yoga retreat holiday experience enables discussing intangible luxury beyond the traditional debate of luxury as related to product or brand features or experiential luxury focused only on the cognitive multisensory perceptions. The autoethnographic approach supports unwrapping the subtle affectual sensations building individual luxury in the experience setting. The data are gathered along with the first author's fieldwork during her three yoga retreat holidays in Thailand. The embodied investigation of tourist practices inducing luxury in the premises of a luxury hotel enriches the discussion of the co-creation between human bodies and the experience setting. It draws attention to the dynamic, situational and sensitive nature of luxury in the contemporary touristic experience of a yoga retreat holiday. It also advances the existing research on the body, practice and knowing by featuring the way luxury is emerging within the practice of yoga retreat holiday. By challenging the paradigm of luxury sensed only through our five external senses, our findings on the being, doing and moving body deepen the understanding of the co-creation and sensitiveness, affecting the subjective, transparent and embodied understanding of luxury experience.

This chapter discusses the origins of social entrepreneurship and the history. It sets this within our understanding of the current world, postmodern breaks with the norms of the market and definitions and redefinitions of community within society. It discusses a number of features and theories which may explain the way such enterprises have become more significant with society and have permeated the globe. In doing so, this chapter acts as an introduction to this volume and sets the scene for the extended discussions which comprise the remaining chapters in this volume.

Films focusing on girls and women with anorexia have not found major producers and distributors in Hollywood, yet movies on subjects such as suicidality and bipolar disorder have been showcased. Eating disorders affect approximately 30 million people in the United States alone, and it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, so this invisibility seems incongruous. The authors theorize that Hollywood avoids this subject because of ontological anxiety. Movie plots are schemas and young females are inextricably associated with fertility and futurity. An anorexic’s appearance contradicts and nullifies this symbolic role because anorexia often leads to infertility and death. Psychological studies and philosophical arguments claim that a belief in an afterlife and the regeneration of humankind create coherence and meaning for individuals. An anorexic’s appearance and behavior represent images of self-destruction – images that inflame the viewer’s unconscious and primordial fears about the annihilation of the species. By avoiding the topic of anorexia, Hollywood defends against its symbolic fears of mortality but diminishes the importance of the subject through its absence; it ignores its place in women’s social history and erases its place in American history. Because of Hollywood’s social reach and because greater visibility is correlated with a reduction in stigma, the authors conjecture that a film on this subject would inspire necessary attention to women’s roles, public mores, public policies, and the social good.

Since Karl Marx fashioned his theory of capitalism in the nineteenth century, scholars have continually updated Marxian theory to capture the pervasiveness of commodity relations in modern society. Influenced by Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, the members of the French avant-guard group, the Situationist International (1957–1972), developed an intransigent critique of consumer capitalism based on the concept of the spectacle. In the spectacle, media and consumer society replace lived experience, the passive gaze of images supplants active social participation, and new forms of alienation induce social atomization at a more abstract level than in previous societies. We endeavor to make two theoretical contributions: First, we highlight the contributions of the Situationist International, pointing out how they revised the Marxian categories of alienation, commodification, and reification in order to analyze the dynamics of twentieth century capitalism and to give these concepts new explanatory power. Second, we build a critical theory of consumer capitalism that incorporates the theoretical assumptions and arguments of the Situationists and the Frankfurt School. Today, critical theory can make an important contribution to sociology by critically examining the plurality of spectacles and their reifying manifestations. In addition, critical theorists can explore how different spectacles connect to one another, how they connect to different social institutions, and how spectacles express contradictions and conflicting meanings. A critical theory of spectacle and consumption can disclose both novelties and discontinuities in the current period, as well as continuities in the development of globalized consumer capitalism.