Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  37. http://www.entrez-basel.roche.ch/; http://www.avroche.ch/; http://www.avroche.ch/_verguenstigungen/discountlist.php?print=1; see the AVR newsletters nos. 55 (June 1997), no. 65 (Dec. 2002) and 66 (May 2003): http://www.avroche.ch/_info-archiv/infos-archiv.php. For Boeing, see http://www.boeing.com/empinfo/discounts.html.

  38. Georges Mouradian, ed., L’Enfance des comités d’entreprise, de leur genèse dans les conditions de la défaite de 1940 à leur enracinement dans les années 1950 (Roubaix, 1997). Direction de l’Animation de la Recherche des Études et des Statistiques (DARES) and Institut de Recherches Économiques et Sociales (IRES), Les Comités d’entreprise: Enquête sur les élus, les activités et les moyens (Paris, 1998); and Conseil National du Tourisme, ‘Évolution des pratiques sociales des comités d’entreprise en matière de vacances’ (Paris, 2010), http://www.tourisme.gouv.fr/cnt/publications/evolution-pratiques-sociales.pdf.

  39. For this and the above: Conseil National du Tourisme, ‘Évolution des pratiques sociales des comités d’entreprise’. See also: ‘Les Activités sociales et culturelles des CE – Crise de sens’ in; Le Nouvel Économiste, 26 Jan. 2012.

  40. http://www.bits-int.org/fr/; http://www.reka.ch/.

  41. Hasso Spode, ‘Fordism, Mass Tourism and the Third Reich: The “Strength through Joy” Seaside Resort as an Index Fossil’, in: Journal of Social History, 2004: 127–55; and Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 2002).

  42. K. Nishikubo, ‘Current Situation and Future Direction of Employee Benefits’, in: Japan Labor Review 7, no. 1, 2010: 4–27; Toyota, sustainability report 2011, ‘Approaches to Stakeholders: Relations with Employees’; and Tamie Matsuura, ‘An Overview of Japanese Cafeteria Plans’ (NLI Research Institute, 1998), http://www.nli-research.co.jp/english/socioeconomics/1998/li9803.html.

  43. Seung-Ho Kwon & Michael O’Donnell, The Chaebol and Labour in Korea: The Development of Management Strategy in Hyundai (London, 2001); and Jim Barry, Organization and Management: A Critical Text (London, 2000), 113–16.

  44. S. Kikeri, ‘Privatization and Labour: What Happens to Workers When Governments Divest?’ World Bank Technical paper 396 (1998), World Bank, Washington, DC.

  45. Quoted in Joseph Raphael Blasi, Maya Kroumova & Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: The Privatization of the Russian Economy (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 112f.

  46. According to a survey of 404 mid-sized and large manufacturing firms: see Pertti Haaparanta et al., ‘Firms and Public Service Provision in Russia’, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition, BOFIT Discussion paper no. 16 (2003), Helsinki.

  47. Michael Heller, ‘Sport, Bureaucracies and London Clerks 1880–1939’, in: International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 5, 2008: 579–614.

  48. James E. Roberson, Japanese Working-class Lives: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Workers (London, 1998). The classic study of the salaryman is Ezra Feivel Vogel, Japan’s New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (Berkeley, CA, 1963).

  49. Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004).

  50. http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,3746,en_2649_33933_38141385_1_1_1_1,00.html.

  51. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Significant and Ecofys, ‘Collection of Statistical Information on Green Public Procurement in the EU’ (2009), at http://ec.europa.eu/environment/gpp/pdf/statistical_information.pdf. NHS Sustainable Development Unit, ‘England Carbon Emissions’ (Jan. 2009), 4, at: http://www.sdu.nhs.uk/documents/publications/1232983829_VbmQ_nhs_england_carbon_emissions_carbon_footprint_mode.pdf.

  52. P. A. Samuelson, ‘The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure’, in: Review of Economics and Statistics 36, no. 4, 1954: 387–9.

  53. Eurostat, ‘General Government Expenditure Trends 2005–10: EU Countries Compared’, in: Statistics in Focus 42/2011.

  54. Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi, ‘Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, esp. 30–2, 89–90.

  55. See Galbraith’s new Introduction to the Penguin fifth edition (1999) of this book and also Mike Berry, The Affluent Society (Oxford, 2013).

  56. See ‘Social Expenditure – Aggregated Data’ at OECD.StatExtracts: http://stats.oecd.org/Index. aspx?datasetcode=SOCX_AGG; W. Adema, P. Fron & M. Ladaique, ‘Is the European Welfare State Really More Expensive?: Indicators on Social Spending, 1980–2012’, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, no. 124,2011;http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2014-Social-Expenditure-Update-Nov2014-8pages.pdf.

  57. (United States of America) Bureau of Economic Analysis/Department of Commerce, ‘Tables on Government Consumption Expenditure and Personal Consumption Expenditure’, at http://www.bea.gov/.

  58. See Robert Malcolm Campbell, Grand Illusions: The Politics of the Keynesian Experience in Canada, 1945–1975 (Peterborough, Canada, 1987), 78–9; I am grateful to Bettina Liverant for this reference. See now also: Bettina Liverant, ‘Strategic Austerity on the Canadian Home Front’, in: Hartmut Berghoff, Jan Logemann & Felix Römer, eds., The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Transnational Perspective (Oxford, in press), ch. 11. For the GI Bill and federal support in the United States, see Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, chs. 3–5.

  59. In 1960, private consumption made up 63% of GDP in industrialized countries. In 1976, it had fallen to 58%. In low-income countries the figures were 79% and 81%. World Bank, World Development Report (Washington, DC, 1978), tables 4 and 5, 82–5.

  60. See Lindert, Growing Public, 218.

  61. See OECD data. In addition to levying high indirect taxes, which hit ordinary consumers hardest, Scandinavian countries also impose substantial direct taxes and social security contributions on benefit recipients. In 2007, Denmark and Sweden clawed back more than a quarter of social transfers through such direct taxes; the OECD average is 9%. As Adema and colleagues show, the net total social spending in most OECD countries, including the USA and the United Kingdom, hovers somewhere between 22 and 28% of GDP: Adema, Fron & Ladaique, ‘Is the European Welfare State Really More Expensive?’ .

  62. R. Straub & I. Tchakarov, ‘Assessing the Impact of a Change in the Composition of Public Spending: A DSGE Approach. IMF Working Paper WP/07/168’, (International Monetary Fund, 2007).

  63. Interestingly, too, embattled Spain had seen a rise in public investment.

  64. See: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2014-Social-Expenditure-Update-Nov2014-8pages.pdf.

  65. Harold L. Wilensky, Industrial Society and Social Welfare: The Impact of Industrialization on the Supply and Organization of Social Welfare Services in the United States (New York, 1958/1965), xiiif.

  66. In the United States, the rich gave 7% of estates worth over £10 million to charity in 1922. Fifty years later it was 31%; Jaher, ‘The Gilded Elite, American Multimillionaires, 1865 to the Present’, 209f.

  67. In housing projects in New York City, all but 5% had a TV as early as the early 1960s, see Wilensky, Industrial Society and Social Welfare, xxx.

  68. ‘Historical Tables’, Budget of the United States Government, table 3.1, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/hist.pdf.

  69. J. P. Dunne, P. Pashardes & R. P. Smith, ‘Needs, Costs and Bureaucracy: The Allocation of Public Consumption in the UK’, in: Economic Journal 94, no. 373, 1984: 1–15.

  70. Adema, Fron & Ladaique, ‘Is the European Welfare State Really More Expensive?’; ‘other social services’ (childcare, home care for the elderly and similar services) make up a formidable 5% of GDP in Denmark and Sweden, but only 1% in the USA and Southern European countries.

  71. B. Booth, M. W. Segal & D. B. Bell, ‘What We Know about Army Families: 2007 Update. Prepared for the Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command’ (2007).

  72. K. J. Cwiertka, ‘Popularizing a Military Diet in Wartime and Post-war Japan’, in: Asian Anthropology 1, 2002: 1–30; and Katarzyna Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food,
Power and National Identity (London, 2006).

  73. Peter J. Atkins, ‘Fattening Children or Fattening Farmers? School Milk in Britain, 1921–1941’, in: Economic History Review 58, no. 1, 2005: 57–78; and James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

  74. This, and the following paragraph, are indebted to Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton, NJ, 2008).

  75. M. Clawson, ‘Statistical Data Available for Economic Research on Certain Types of Recreation’, in: Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1959: 281–309; and C. L. Harriss, ‘Government Spending and Long-run Economic Growth’, in: American Economic Review 46, no. 2, 1956: 155–70.

  76. T. Ståhl et al., ‘The Importance of Policy Orientation and Environment on Physical Activity Participation: A Comparative Analysis between Eastern Germany, Western Germany and Finland’, Health Promotion International 17, no. 3, 2002: 235–46

  77. Sigurd Agricola, ‘Freizeit, Planung, Paedagogik und Forschung’, in: Nahrstedt, Freizeit in Schweden, 78–102.

  78. Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm), Physical Activity: Context and Effects on Health (Paris, 2008).

  79. Lamartine Pereira da Costa & Ana Miragaya, Worldwide Experiences and Trends in Sport for All (Oxford, 2002). See now also: Thomas Turner, ‘The Sports Shoe: A Social and Cultural History, c.1870–c.1990’, PhD thesis, Birkbeck College/University of London, 2013.

  80. David Richard Leheny, The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure (Ithaca, 2003).

  81. Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–1989 (London, 1990).

  82. Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde, Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung, ‘Freizeit und Freizeitnutzung junger Arbeiter und Schüler in der Wartburgstadt Eisenach’ (Sept. 1977), pp. 15–20, 60–5.

  83. Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland, Datenreport 2002, 152.

  84. Directorate General Internal Policies of the Union, ‘Financing the Arts and Culture in the European Union’, IP/B/CULT/ST/2005_104 (30 Nov 2006), quoted at 17, and for below.

  85. Eurostat, Cultural Statistics, 2011 edition (Luxembourg, 2011), figure 8.7,171. In 2006, 50% of Danes went between one and six times to such live performances and 5% went seven to twelve times. In Italy, the respective figures were half these. The suggested correlation between spending and attendance is reinforced by Orian Brook, ‘International Comparisons of Public Engagement in Culture and Sport’ (UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Aug. 2011), 21–2.

  86. Eurostat, Cultural Statistics, fig. 9.1, 201.

  87. UK Department of Trade and Industry, Modern Markets: Confident Consumers (London, 1999).

  88. Tony Blair, quoted in Guardian, 24 June 2004, 1. See further: Blair, The Courage of Our Convictions: Why Reform of the Public Services is the Route to Social Justice and his ‘Progress and Justice in the Twenty-first Century’, Inaugural Fabian Society Annual Lecture, 17 June 2003.

  89. Lawson, All Consuming: How Shopping Got Us into This Mess and How We Can Find Our Way Out.

  90. Wendy Thomson (Head of the Prime Minister’s Office of Public Services Reform), ‘Consumerism as a Resource for Citizenship’, seminar on consumers as citizens, HM Treasury, 22 April 2004.

  91. See 154–60, 286–9 above.

  92. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Boston, MA), Speech Files, JFKPOF037-028, special message to Congress on protecting consumer interest, 15 March 1962; WH-0800-03; to listen to the audio file: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-080-003.aspx.

  93. Alain Chatriot, Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel & Matthew Hilton, eds., The Expert Consumer: Associations and Professionals in Consumer Society (Aldershot, 2006); see further the special issue ‘Verbraucherschutz in internationaler Perspektive’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1, 2006; Iselin Theien, ‘Planung und Partizipation in den regulierten Konsumgesellschaften Schwedens und Norwegens zwischen 1930 und 1960’, Comparativ 21, no. 3, 2011: 67–78.

  94. For this and the following, see Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization (Ithaca, NY, 2009); and Stephen Brobeck, ed., Encyclopedia of the Consumer Movement (Santa Barbara, CA, 1997).

  95. Anon., ‘Consumer Protection Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations’, in: Journal of Consumer Policy 16, no. 1, 1993: 97–121.

  96. Smith Institute Is Free Trade Fair Trade? (London, 2009). For a view from the North at the time, see the British National Consumer Council, The Uruguay Round and Beyond: The Consumer View (London, 1994).

  97. R. A. H. Livett, ‘Modern Flat Building’, in: Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 61, no. 2, 1940: 48–57, 57.

  98. Greater Manchester County Record Office, Housing Committee, Minutes, 5 Nov. 1953.

  99. Central Housing Advisory Committee Housing Management Sub-committee, Councils and Their Houses (London, 1959).

  100. Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1963, quoted in I. A. N. Greener and M. Powell, ‘The Evolution of Choice Policies in UK Housing, Education and Health Policy’, in: Journal of Social Policy 38, no. 01, 2009: 63–81, at 66.

  101. Manchester and Salford Housing Association, 1973, quoted in Peter Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture (Manchester, 2007), 171 and ch. 6 for the above.

  102. Shapely, Politics of Housing.

  103. Malcolm L. Johnson, ‘Patients: Receivers or Participants’, in: Keith Barnard & Kenneth Lee, Conflicts in the National Health Service (London, 1977), 72–98.

  104. Dr Owen, interview with The Times, 9 Feb. 1976, 1.

  105. Chris Ham, ‘Power, Patients and Pluralism’, in: Barnard & Lee, Conflicts in the National Health Service, 99–120; Martin Blackmore, ‘Complaints within Constraints: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Citizen’s Charter Complaints Task Force’, in: Public Policy and Administration 12, no. 3, 1997: 28–41; A. Mold, ‘Patient Groups and the Construction of the Patient-Consumer in Britain: An Historical Overview’, in: Journal of Social Policy 39, no. 04, 2010: 505–21.

  106. The official figure is 45%, but some experts calculate it as high as 60%: S. Woolhandler & D. U. Himmelstein, ‘Paying for National Health Insurance – and Not Getting It’, in: Health Affairs 21, no. 4, 2002: 88–98.

  107. Danish Finance Ministry, Frihed til at vælge (Copenhagen, 2004); and Nancy Tomes, ‘Patients or Healthcare Consumers? Why the History of Contested Terms Matters’, in: History and Health Policy in the US : Putting the Past Back In, eds. R. A. Stevens, C. Rosenberg & L. R. Burns, (New Brunswick, NJ, 2006), 83–110. In 1994, the World Health Organization published its ‘Principles of the Rights of Patients in Europe’. Five years later, an International Alliance of Patient Organizations was formed: A. van der Zeijden, ‘The Patient Rights Movement in Europe’, in: Pharmacoeconomics 18, no. Supplement 1, 2000: 7–13.

  108. S Jägerskiöld, ‘The Swedish Ombudsman’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 109, no. 8, 1961: 1077–99; P. Magnette, ‘Between Parliamentary Control and the Rule of Law: The Political Role of the Ombudsman in the European Union’, in: Journal of European Public Policy 10, no. 5, 2003: 677–94; Frank Stacey, The British Ombudsman (Oxford, 1971); and Glen O’Hara, ‘Parties, People and Parliament: Britain’s “Ombudsman” and the Politics of the 1960s’, in: Journal of British Studies 50, no. 3, 2011: 690–714.

  109. Ed Mayo, investigation report for Consumer Focus (UK), Aug. 2012; Citizens’ Advice Bureau (UK), Access for All (2011).

  110. Eurostat, Consumers in Europe (Luxembourg, 2009), fig. 1.65, 104. In Britain, Energywatch alone received 109,578 complaints in 2002–3 – almost half were about billing. Elsewhere in the European Union, mobile phones and postal service top the list. National Audit Office, ‘Benchmarking Review of Energywatch and Postwatch’ (March 2004), 11f.

  111. See www. complaintschoir.org. Finland finally won
Eurovision in 2006.

  112. Although complaining remains uneven and, indeed, has been falling in recent years in some services notorious for poor standards (like trains); http://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/displayreport/report/html/6870b367-965b-4306-819b-8eafdbacdd7a.

  113. For this and the following, see: Michelle Everson, ‘Legal Constructions of the Consumer’, in: Trentmann, ed., Making of the Consumer, 99–121; Jim Davies, The European Consumer Citizen in Law and Policy (Basingstoke, 2011); and Stephen Weatherill, EU Consumer Law and Policy (Cheltenham, 2005).

  114. Summary of Judgement, Case C-372/04, Watts v Bedford Primary Care Trust and Sec. of State of Health: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:62004J0372:EN:HTML.

  115. EESC, ‘On the Consumer Policy Action Plan, 1999–2001’, cited in Davies, The European Consumer Citizen in Law and Policy, 41.

  116. NCC, ‘Consumer Futures’ and ‘Consumer: What’s in a Name?’ (2007).

  117. The above barely skims the surface of a very large literature and research. See esp. John Clarke et al., Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services (London, 2007), quoted at 132; R. Simmons, J. Birchall & A. Prout, ‘User Involvement in Public Services: “Choice about Voice” ’, in: Public Policy and Administration 27, no. 1, 2012: 3–29; Yiannis Gabriel & Tim Lang, The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentations (London, 1995); Mark Bevir & Frank Trentmann, eds., Governance, Citizens and Consumers: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics (Basingstoke, 2007); Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone & Tim Markham, Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (Basingstoke, 2007); M. Micheletti, D. Stolle & M. Hoogh, ‘Zwischen Markt und Zivilgesellschaft: Politischer Konsum als bürgerliches Engagement’, in: Zivilgesellschaft – national und transational, eds. D. Gosewinkel et al. (Berlin, 2003), 151–71.

  CHAPTER 13

  1. Since the 1990s, the official name and label has been ‘Fairtrade’. For literary convenience, and to accommodate earlier spellings, I have used separate words unless when specifically referring to the organization.