Japanese Consumer Behaviour: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers

Description

What role does consumption play in Japanese lives that are more than study, work and shopping? How have those lives changed in the generations since World War II as Japan has wrestled with the meaning of white-collar careers, women spreading their wings, changing family values, a shrinking birth rate, an aging population? Japan's first think tank devoted to the study of consumer behaviour was created to answer these questions. In this book, an anthropologist reads its research, exploring Japan through the eyes of Japanese researchers and discovering patterns of change that are both uniquely Japanese and shared by consumers in other advanced industrial nations. 'This book succeeds as ethnohistory, popular culture, and management treatise. It plays to the most compelling of postmodern social scientific concerns as well: reflexivity and polyvocality. The content, organisation and style are all engaging. Local nuance is supremely well captured, and interpreted effectively in the author's 'wrap-around' treatment.- Professor John Sherry, Kellogg School of Management.