On The Origins of Self-Service
On The Origins of Self-Service

Author: Franck Cochoy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1317449746

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Most marketing scholars implicitly consider independent merchants as conservative and passive actors, and study the modernization of retailing via department stores, chains and supermarkets. In this innovative study, Franck Cochoy challenges this perspective and takes a close look at the transformation of commerce through the lens of Progressive Grocer, an American trade magazine launched in 1922. Aimed at modernizing small independent grocery stores, Progressive Grocer sowed the seeds for modern self-service which spread in small retail outlets, sometimes well before the advent of the large retail spaces which are traditionally viewed as the origin of the self-service economy. The author illustrates how this publication had a highly influential role on what the trade considered to be best practice and shaped what was considered to be cutting edge. By displacing the consumer and their agency from the centre of analytic attention, this innovative book highlights the complex impact of social, technical and retailing environment factors that structure and delimit consumer freedom in the marketplace. This detailed critical analysis of the origins of self-service will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars not only in marketing and consumer research, but also in business history, sociology and cultural studies.

Technologies of Consumer Labor
Technologies of Consumer Labor

Author: Michael Palm

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1317287193

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This book documents and examines the history of technology used by consumers to serve oneself. The telephone’s development as a self-service technology functions as the narrative spine, beginning with the advent of rotary dialing eliminating most operator services and transforming every local connection into an instance of self-service. Today, nearly a century later, consumers manipulate 0-9 keypads on a plethora of digital machines. Throughout the book Palm employs a combination of historical, political-economic and cultural analysis to describe how the telephone keypad was absorbed into business models across media, retail and financial industries, as the interface on everyday machines including the ATM, cell phone and debit card reader. He argues that the naturalization of self-service telephony shaped consumers’ attitudes and expectations about digital technology.

Beyond Piggly Wiggly
Beyond Piggly Wiggly

Author: Lisa C. Tolbert

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0820364444

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Patented in 1917, Piggly Wiggly was by far the most influential self-service store of the early twentieth century. Before 1940 it was the only self-service chain with a national distribution network, but it was neither the first nor the only version. Beyond Piggly Wiggly reveals the importance of Piggly Wiggly in the invention of self-service and goes beyond the history of a single firm to explore the role of small business entrepreneurs who invented the first self-service stores in a grassroots social process. During the 1920s and 1930s a minority of enterprising grocers experimented with a wide variety of (sometimes wacky) design ideas for automating shopping. They created specialized stores designed as enclosed retail systems that went far beyond open display techniques to construct unique physical and psychological advantages for automating salesmanship. Beyond Piggly Wiggly offers the first perspective on the national scale of experimentation and connects the southern Jim Crow origins of self- service to the national history of this mass retailing method. Empirical analysis of store arrangements demonstrates how small stores that have previously been overlooked or undervalued as quaint anomalies were integral to the creation of supermarkets. Ultimately, self-service was more than a business decision; it was a fundamentally new social practice.

The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store
The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store

Author: Gina Arnold

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 150138452X

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Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. Record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art. This book takes a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies? From women-owned and independent record stores, to Reggae record shops in London, to Rough Trade in Paris, this book takes on a global and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating record stores. It collects stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that not only re-centers the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives.

The Origins of Self
The Origins of Self

Author: Martin P. J. Edwardes

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2019-07-22

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1787356302

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The Origins of Self explores the role that selfhood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialisation and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Edwardes argues that other awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self.

Science Libraries in the Self Service Age
Science Libraries in the Self Service Age

Author: Alvin Hutchinson

Publisher: Chandos Publishing

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0081020341

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Science Libraries in the Self Service Age: Developing New Services, Targeting New Users suggests ways in which libraries can remain relevant to their institution. This book describes the myriad of new services and user communities which science librarians have recently incorporated into their routines. Where applicable, the book focuses on both researcher needs and the simple economics that emphasize the need for new service development. Science librarians will have to adapt to changing behaviors and needs if they want to remain a part of their organization's future. As this trend has hastened science librarians to develop new services, many of them aimed at audiences or user groups which had not typically used the library, this book provides timely tactics on which to build a cohesive plan. - Provides a list of practical, targeted services which science librarians can implement - Presents unified topics previously only dealt with separately (data management services, scholarly communication, digital preservation, etc.) - Considers economic and resource issues in developing new services - Written by an experienced librarian at a global institution

Transformations of Retailing in Europe after 1945
Transformations of Retailing in Europe after 1945

Author: Lydia Langer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1317007778

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After World War II, structures, practices and the culture of retailing in most West European countries went through a period of rapid change. The post-war economic boom, the emergence of a mass consumer society, and the adaptation of innovations which already had been implemented in the USA during the interwar period, revolutionized the world of getting and spending. But the implementation of self-service and the supermarket, the spread of the department store and the mail order business were not only elements of a transatlantic catch up process of 'Americanization' of retailing. National patterns of the retail trade and specific cultures of consumption remained crucial, and long term processes of change, starting in the 1920s or 1930s, also had an impact on the transformation of retailing in post-war Europe. This volume presents a series of case-studies looking at transformations of retailing in several European countries, offering new insights into the structural preconditions of the emerging mass consumer societies and also into the consequences consumerism had on the practices of retailing.

History of Intellectual Culture 3/2024
History of Intellectual Culture 3/2024

Author: Charlotte A Lerg

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-10-21

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 3111291383

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The third issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) devotes a thematic section to experimental spaces for knowledge production. The articles in this section investigate the role of experimental environments as sites for knowledge production during the long nineteenth century, thereby extending the scope beyond the confines of traditional academic institutions such as academies, laboratories, and universities. By focusing on intentional communities, colonial gardens, agricultural colonies, and artistic colonies as experimental spaces, the authors investigate the intertwined social, natural, and aesthetic aspects of environments. An overarching aim is to develop a distinct perspective rooted in the history of knowledge, wherein experiments are conceptualized both as a category employed by the historical actors and as a methodological concept. In addition, the third issue comprises several individual papers covering a wide range of topics, stretching from the U.S. patent system in the 1930s and anti-intellectualism in interwar Britain to the cultural translation of knowledge in the wake of the Holocaust and the circulation of economic knowledge in postwar Sweden. The issue also contains several theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions and reflections, including a conversation on decolonizing knowledge in academia and beyond.

Patterns of Management Power
Patterns of Management Power

Author: Russell McCalley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2002-05-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0313076901

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Management is helpless without the power to direct and control the pursuit of well-defined corporate goals. McCalley identifies six distinct patterns of power within organizations, arguing that management can and must use all of them creatively and ethically for the organization's benefit. Top-down position power is familiar, but not the only option. McCalley identifies others along with their sources, patterns of development, and common use—often abused—in recognizable management situations. Managers need to use their authority and power to drive the energy of dynamic organizations, asserts McCalley, but they must learn to do it without creating factionalism and conflict, and without subjugating subordinates. Surprising insights into the mystery of why otherwise competent managers often fail are mixed with practical wisdom for executives, teachers, and students who will one day assume positions of power. Among the book's special characteristics is McCalley's comprehensive discussion of the impacts that every type of power, authority, influence, and leadership can have, what their basic sources are, and how their structural and functional effects impact the ability to manage.

The Source of Self-Regard
The Source of Self-Regard

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0525562796

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR). These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.