Corporate Narratives of Information Society: Making Up the Mobile Consumer Subject

The purpose of the article is to study how corporate actors participate in the cultural construction of the Information Society. By means of a case study, the article explores how a multinational corporation is involved in forming consumer identities—making up the subjects of consumption—by shaping the interpretive repertoires and cultural practices that are available for consumers as members of the emerging information society. The article elaborates on the ways in which the corporation invokes a discourse of shareholder value in its visionary strategic narrative entitled Mobile Information Society, and how this discourse operates to mobilize consumer conduct in particular ways, by making up, framing and formatting the consumer as a mobile subject of the global economy. The article’s aim is to contribute to the empirical bases of policy debates about the roles and responsibilities of different market actors in the production of the information society.     

Consumer Heterogeneity in the Willingness to Pay for Local and Organic Food

Due to growth and changing distribution channels for organic food in Germany, there is some concern that organic food is losing authenticity. Contrarily, local food production is seen as a new trend and is gaining market share. This article analyzes whether those alternative concepts of organic and local food production rather support or threaten each other in consumers’ choice. Results of a Bavarian survey, including a choice experiment for bread, beer, and milk on the attributes price, brand, local, and organic, are analyzed using a mixed logit model. Willingness-to-pay estimations confirm the importance of local production to the surveyed consumers, especially in interaction with organic production, leading to the conclusion that the two production methods can support each other in achieving price premiums. The estimated standard deviations show significant heterogeneity of the parameters for all three products for most attributes.     

New initiative,old problem: classroom assistants and the under‐valuation of women's work

Centred on classroom assistants in Scotland, this article examines the process by which an occupation dominated by female workers becomes under‐valued. The qualitative data reveals the cognitive errors made by the key actors—government, employers and unions in this process.     

Aus-und Weiterbildung für Journalistinnen und Journalisten

This article gives an overview of the historical development and the state of training of journalists in Austria. Political (and especially media political) conditions and diverging interests of the actors involved in media development have led to a journalism training better characterized by breaks than by continuities on the one hand, and to academic training gaining ground more slowly than in Germany and Switzerland on the other. A complete survey of the situation of training for journalism in the spring of 1999 not only shows the diversity in duration and quality of different tracks in training, but also the severe shortcomings and the small interest of governments and media companies to provide an adequate theoretical and practical education for the new generation of journalists.     

Micro and macro elasticities in a life cycle model with taxes

We build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work. We find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of work. Moreover, we find that there is no inconsistency between this result and the empirical finding of small labor elasticities for prime age workers. In our model, micro and macro elasticities are effectively unrelated. Our model is also consistent with other cross-country patterns.     

On the informational efficiency of simple scoring rules

We study information aggregation in large elections. With two candidates, efficient information aggregation is possible (e.g., Feddersen and Pesendorfer [5], [6] and [7]). We show that this result does not extend to elections with more than two candidates. We study a class of simple scoring rules in voting games with Poisson population uncertainty and three candidates. No simple scoring rule aggregates information efficiently, even if preferences are dichotomous and a Condorcet winner always exists. We introduce a weaker criterion of informational efficiency that requires a voting rule to have at least one efficient equilibrium. Only approval voting satisfies this criterion.     

Motivational complexity of green consumerism

This paper elaborates on the motivational complexity of green consumerism using a simple model of motivation as an analytical tool. The objective is to provide insights into the challenges that environmentally concerned ‘green consumers’ may face in the markets, as well as to illustrate the limitations of framing and targeting environmental policy measures in terms of individual motivation and morally responsible decision making. On the whole, the paper argues that as a private lifestyle project of a single individual, ‘green consumerism’ is much too heavy a responsibility to bear. Therefore, the author joins the growing number of scholars who argue that in environmental policy the focus on individual consumers is limited and thus needs to be problematized.     

Changing Directions in Consumer Bankruptcy Law and Practice in Europe and USA

The consumer bankruptcy or, rather, consumer debt adjustment, is a fairly recent phenomenon in continental Europe. In the nineties, a number of European countries introduced judicial institutions in order to alleviate an excessive debt burden carried by consumer debtors. In addition to the court proceedings, the European jurisdictions often provide the debtor with debt counselling services, supervision, and payment requirements. In the United States, on the other hand, discharge of debt has been an established principle of bankruptcy law since the late 19th century, and bankruptcy is frequently used by consumer debtors. However, in the US, as well as in Canada, debtors are increasingly encouraged to opt for a payment plan. There seems to be a certain convergent trend between the two different legal cultures. Paradoxically, at the same time scholars have pointed out that the variance in local cultures seems to be a main factor in explanations of how debtors choose either a direct discharge or a payment plan. This finding gives us reason to consider the interplay of counselling and other pre-trial measures and its effect upon the rights and duties of debtors.