Completing the Circuit: Routine,Reflection, and Ethical Consumption

Efforts to explain why some people incorporate ethical concerns into everyday shopping for food and household goods, while many do not, have so far left significant variation in “ethical consumption” unexplained. Seeking to move beyond explanations that rely mainly on differences in consumers' social class, gender, and political engagement, I draw on concepts associated with “practice theory” to argue that ethical consumption is closely tied to people's willingness and ability to spend time, while shopping, on distinct activities associated with breaking old routines and establishing new ones. The central insight of practice theory is that most consumption is the product of unconscious routine. And it is precisely because consciously departing from routine is, according to my study, a fundamentally time‐consuming process, that lack of time emerges as a crucial obstacle to translating abstract ethical concerns into concrete action as a consumer.     

绿色建材“竹材”的跨区域使用——以北方城市邯郸为例

绿色低碳、节能减排已成为各国共识.竹这种绿色建材在现代建筑中的应用可展现建筑独特的风格,表达绿色环保的理念,在未来有广阔的发展前景.如何将竹这种具有中国独特韵味的南方建材引入北方是需要探讨的问题.     

Curation: a theoretical treatment

Curation is a key mechanism of sociality in a digital era. With an abundance of information, sifting, sorting, selecting, hiding, and standing out become laborious tasks. While researchers have diligently documented people’s curatorial strategies, digital curation remains undertheorized in its own right. I therefore theorize digital curation by disentangling productive curation from consumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that they share, and that which they consume. I embed these agentic curatorial practices within structural bounds, both social and technological. In doing so, I offer a basic theoretical model that captures a dynamic relationship between individual curators, their social networks, and technological design.     

企业推进消费文明的路径探索

应对＂消费—生态＂悖论,缓解生态危机,促进消费文明走向生态文明,企业应提高企业家和员工的生态道德素质,加强企业伦理建设,从而牢固树立生态消费理念,践行＂合度＂、＂合宜＂、＂合道＂的客观要求,实现经济合理性、生态合理性、伦理合理性的价值诉求,遵循环境友好,可持续发展,以人为本等基本原则,实施绿色、低碳的生态化模式,推进消费文明的发展。     

Job quality,industrial relations and the crisis in Europe

This paper reports results from recent Eurofound research on the impact of the crisis on industrial relations and working conditions in Europe, based on the output of Eurofound's European Working Conditions Observatory and European Industrial Relations Observatory and data from the European Working Conditions Survey. Overall, the crisis – even if it is sometimes difficult to separate the effect of the crisis from megatrends in working conditions and industrial relations – seems to have had an impact on both domains. With reference to industrial relations, the impact of the crisis has influenced actors, processes, and outcomes. Regarding working conditions, the results appear to be in line with the literature on the topic, which relates the crisis to an increase in job insecurity, a decrease in work intensity, in working hours, and in anti-social working time arrangements, and a general improvement in terms of health risks and related outcomes.     

Ethical living: relinking ethics and consumption through care in Chile and Brazil

Mainstream conceptualizations of ‘ethical consumption’ equate the notion with conscious, individual, market‐mediated choices motivated by ethical or political aims that transcend ordinary concerns. Drawing on recent sociology and anthropology of consumption literature on the links between ordinary ethics and ethical consumption, this article discusses some of the limitations of this conceptualization. Using data from 32 focus groups conducted in Chile and Brazil, we propose a conceptualization of ethical consumption that does not centre on individual, market‐mediated choices but understands it at the level of practical outcomes, which we refer to as different forms of ‘ethical living’. To do that, we argue, we need to depart from the deontological understanding of ethics that underpins mainstream approaches to ethical consumption and adopt a more consequentialist view focusing on ethical outcomes. We develop these points through describing one particular ordinary moral regime that seemed to be predominant in participants’ accounts of ethics and consumption in both Chile and Brazil: one that links consumption and ethics through care. We show that the moral regime of care leads to ‘ethical outcomes’, such as energy saving or limiting overconsumption, yet contrary to the mainstream view of ethical consumption emphasizing politicized choice expressed through markets, these result from following ordinary ethics, often through routines of practices.     

Housing hardship and energy insecurity among native-born and immigrant low-income families with children in the United States

The costs for rent and utilities account for the largest share of living expenses, yet these two critical dimensions of material hardship have seldom been examined concurrently in population-based studies. This paper employs multivariate statistical analysis using American Community Survey data to demonstrate the relative risk ratio of low-income renter-occupied households with children experiencing ‘rent burden', ‘energy insecurity', or a ‘double burden’ as opposed to no burden. Findings suggest that low-income households are more likely to experience these economic hardships in general but that specific groups are disproportionately burdened in different ways. For instance, whereas immigrants are more likely to experience rental burden, they are less likely to experience energy insecurity and are also spared from the double burden. In contrast, native-born African Americans are more likely than all other groups to experience the double burden. These results may be driven by the housing stock available to certain groups due to racial residential segregation, decisions regarding the quality of housing low-income householders are able to afford, as well as home-country values, such as modest living and energy conservation practices, among immigrant families. This paper also points to important policy gaps in safety net benefits related to housing and energy targeting low-income households.     

解码“中国经济增长”

消费是人类经济增长最初也是最终的目的，单纯为了经济增长速度、为了增加就业、为了出口创汇等，可能脱离经济发展的消费目的，未必有利于真正的经济增长。新时期中国理想的经济增长必须考虑以下六个制约因素，即居民增长的消费需求、资源的供给、环境容量、国际竞争力、科技创新和制度。关键是突出消费作为增长的目的，抛弃狭隘的速度思维，将环境保护放在首位，以分配公平为前提，建立有责任约束的经济增长机制。     

家电下乡政策的消费效应评估——基于全国221个村庄的4年跟踪调查

以全国221个村庄所获得的4年调查数据作为研究基础,对"家电下乡"政策的消费效应予以评估和分析。调查表明,家电下乡政策消费效应的最大特征是农民消费需求的释放,其中包括全国消费总额的上升,户均消费额增幅达到8成,全国各地消费总量和户均消费数量的增加。但家电下乡政策的消费效应在实践中也遇到了持续性疲软的难题,如农民收入的限制作用,农民购买下乡产品比重偏低,政府补贴额和补贴程序不足,政策宣传和解说不到位。为了使家电下乡政策的消费效应持续起效,必须不断完善政策,使家电下乡政策的实惠真正落实到农民身上。     

我国企业品牌定位的五层次研究

近年来中国企业的品牌建设取得了可喜的成绩,出现了许多优秀品牌,这些品牌凭借独特、合适的定位取得了成功。但企业在品牌定位方面存在许多误区,如把品牌定位看作产品定位、品牌定位模糊,缺乏差异性和明确的核心价值、品牌盲目延伸导致定位混淆等问题。因此,产品品牌定位必须树立正确的定位理念,应用正确的品牌定位方法。正确的品牌定位方法可分为产品特征定位、物质利益定位、情感利益定位、个性定位以及价值观定位共五个层次。