Chapter 14 Culture

Sacred Consumption

-Occurs when we "set apart" objects and events from normal activities and treat them with respect or awe.

A culture production system has three major subsystems

1.) Creative Subsystem - generates new symbols and products 2.) Managerial Subsystem - Selects, and makes tangible, produce and manage the distribution of new symbols and products 3.) Communications subsystem - gives meaning to the new product and provide it with a symbolic set of attributes.

The three distinct stages of the gift giving ritual

1.) Gestation - the giver procures an item to mark some event. 2.) Presentation - The process of gift exchange. The respondent responds to the gift and the gift giver evaluates the response 3) Reformulation - The giver and receiver redefine the bond between them (either looser or tighter) to reflect their new relationship after the exchange.

Three phases of a Right of Passage (from college kid perspective)

1.) Seperation: - He detaches form his original group or status as a high school kid and leaves home for campus. 2.) Liminality - iI the middle stage where he is in limbo between statuses 3.) Aggregation - He returns to society with his new status

Classic Fashion

A fashion with an extremely long acceptance cycle

Tipping Point

A few people use the product, but change happens rapidly when the process reaches the moment of critical mass referred to as the_______________.

Monomyth

A myth that is common to may cultures

Craft Product

A product we admire because of - the beauty with which it performs some function.

gift giving ritual

A ritual in which we procure the perfect object, meticulously remove the price tag, carefully wrap the object, and deliver it to the recipient

Ritual

A set of multiple, symbolic behaviors that occurs in a fixed sequence and is repeated periodically.

Fad

A short lived fashion

Dynamically Continuous Innovation

A significant change to an existing product

Culture

A society's personality. It includes both abstract ideas, such as values and ethics, and material objects and services, such as the automobiles, clothing, food, art and sports a society produces.

Myth

A story with symbolic elements that represents a culture's ideals. The story often focuses on some kind of conflict between two opposing forces, and its outcome serves as a moral guide for listeners.

Custom

A type of crescive norm that controls basic behaviors, such as divisions of labor in a household or how we practice particular ceremonies.

Continuous Innovation

Amodification of an existing product, such as when General Mills introduces a Honey Nut version of cheerios or Levi's promotes shrink-to-fit jeans. These innovations are generally just product extensions and are evolutionary not revolutionary. When a consumer adopts this new product they only have to make minor changes in their habits

Antifestival

An event that distorts the symbols we associate with other holidays, such as Halloween.

Art Product

An object we admire strictly for its beauty or because it inspires an emotional reaction in us.

Innovation

Any product or service that consumers perceive to be new. It may take the form of an activity (skateboarding), a clothing style, a new manufacturing technique, a new variation on an existing product etc.

Grooming Rituals

Are rituals that help us to transition form our private self to our public self, or back again.

Fortress Brands

Brands that we use to perform our rituals such as brushing our teeth.

Throughput Sector

Collectively social scientists refer to gatekeepers as the___________________

Discontinuous Innovation

Creates a really big change. This would be like the invention of the airplane or the personal computer

Conventions

Crescive norms that regulate how we conduct our everyday lives. These rules often deal with the subtleties of consumer behavior, including the correct way to furnish one's house, wear one's clothes, or host a dinner party.

Prestige-exclusivity effect

Describes how high prices can create high demand. (Part of the economic models of fashion)

Snob Effect

Describes how low prices can actually reduce demand. (Part of the economic models of fashion)

Profane Consumption

Describes objects and events that are ordinary or everyday; they don't share the "specialness" of sacred ones.

Meme Theory

Describes the process of the rapid spreading of a product or idea with a medical metaphor. In this view, memes spread among consumers in a geometric progression just as a virus starts off small and steadily infects increasing numbers of people until become an epidemic. (Part of the Medical Model of Fashion)

Fashion System

Includes all the people and organizations that create symbolic meanings and transfer those meanings to cultural goods

Cultural Gatekeepers

Many judges or tastemakers have a say in the products we consider, they filter the overflow of information as it travels down the funnel

Cultural Formula

Many popular art forms, such as detective stories or science fiction, follow a ________ where familiar roles and props occur consistently

Binary Opposition

Many stories involve _____________________ which represents two opposing ends of some dimension (e.g., good versus evil, nature versus technology)

Crescive norms

Norms that are much more subtle and that we discover as we interact with others. There are three types of these norms: - A custom - A more ("mor-ay") - Conventions

Enacted Norms

Norms that we explicitly decide on such as a green light means go.

Reciprocity Norm

Obliges people to return the gesture of a gift with one of equal value.

Reality Engineering

Occurs when marketers appropriate elements of popular culture and use them as promotional vehicles.

Sacrlization

Occurs when ordinary objects, events, and even people take on sacred meaning.

Objectification

Occurs when we attribute sacred qualities to mundane items (such as smelly socks)

Desacralization

Occurs when we remove a scared item or symbol from its special place or duplicate it in mass quantities that it loses is specialness and becomes profane.

Trickle-down theory of fashion

One of the most influential sociological perspectives on fashion. It states that two conflicting forces drive fashion change: 1.) subordinate groups adopt the status symbols of the groups above them as they attempt to climb up the ladder of social mobility. Dominant styles thus originate with the upper classes and trickle down to those below 2) People in those subordinate groups keep a wary eye on the ladder below them to be sure followers don't imitate them. When lower-class consumers mimic their actions they adopt new fashions to distance themselves form the mainstream. This creates the cycle of change we see

Ritual Artifacts

Refer to items we need to perform rituals such as wedding rice, birthday candles etc.

Rites of Passage

Refer to rituals we perform to mark a change in social status

Norms

Refer to rules that dictate what is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable

Cooptation

Refers to a process in which outsiders transform the original meaning of cultural products.

Diffusion of Innovations

Refers to the process whereby a new product, service or idea spreads through a population.

Collecting

Refers to the systematic acquisition of a particular object or set of objects

Innovators

Represent just 2.5% of the market but marketers are eager to identify them These people are always on the lookout for new products or services and they re the first to try them.

Late Adopters

Represent the mainstream public. They are interested in new things, but they do not want them to be too new. In some cases they wish to wait to adopt an innovation because they think the company will improve it at some point.

Early Adopters

Share many of the same characteristics as innovators. An important difference is their high degree of concern for social acceptance, especially in regard to expressive products such as clothing and cosmetics

Laggards

The about 1/6th of the population that is very slow at adopting new products.

Acceptance Cycles

The amount of time it takes for a fashion to make its way through the stages of acceptance and decline.

Product Placement

The insertion of real products in fictional movies, TV shows, books and plays.

Ideology

The mental characteristics of a people and the way they relate their environment and social groups. This relates to the idea of a common worldview. Members of a culture tend to share ideas abut principles of order and fairness One of the functional areas of culture

Fashion

The process of social diffusion by which some group(s) of consumers adopts a new style.

Contamination

The process whereby objects we associate with sacred events or people become sacred in their own righ

Culture Production System (CPS)

The set of individuals and organizations that create and market a cultural product

Ecology

The way a system adapts to its habitat. The technology a culture uses to obtain and distribute resources shapes its ______________. One of the functional areas of culture

Social structure

The way people maintain an orderly social life. This includes domestic and political groups that dominate the culture (e.g., the nuclear family over the expended family, representative government over dictatorship) One of the functional areas of culture

Hoarding

Unsystematic collecting

Cultural Selection

When we select certain alternatives over others our choice actually is only the culmination of a complex filtration process. Many possibilities initially compete for adoption most of them drop out of the mix as they make their way down the path form conception to consumption. This process is called ___________________

More ("mor-ay")

is a custom (an type of crescive norm) with a strong moral overtone. It often involves a taboo of forbidden behavior, such as incest or cannibalism