Book reviews

Abstract

This article examines the cultural field of fitness as a network of producers, consumers, products and practices that has developed around the care of the body through physical exercise. Drawing on a thematic text analysis of US exercise manuals, the paper focuses on how the commercial fitness field naturalizes associations between physical exercise and leisure, and between leisure and self‐work. In particular, the analysis examines three themes and their relevance to our broader understanding of leisure in contemporary consumer society: the management of leisure time; the use of leisure for self‐investment strategies; and the promotion of consumption as the framework for leisure and an accompanying notion of pleasure. The fitness field casts light on how leisure more generally is constructed as a sphere of obligations to make productive use of one’s time, to improve one’s body and self, and to do so through the wares of the consumer marketplace. The cultural imaginary of leisure as a time of freedom from work and responsibility is thus recast, in an age of individualization, as a time of freedom to accomplish the work of self‐production.     

Digitale Spaltung im Zeitalter der S?ttigung

Using Bourdieu??s Habitus-Capital theory and a representative dataset this study shows that social position influences internet use. The study is thus connected to the research about thedigital divide. A secondary analysis of the ACTA 2008 (n?=?7.623, representative of Germans between 14 and 64 years who use the internet) shows on the one hand that there are still gaps in internet usage (gender, generation, and education gap). On the other hand the results indicate acapital gap. Since the accumulation of capital in the internet is connected with education as well as economic status, there is a threat of a downward spiral: Those who have less capital (education, money) gather less internet knowledge. Since cultural capital influences a person??s social position, internet use enhances social inequality.     

The Taylor principle in a medium-scale macroeconomic model

We consider a medium-scale New-Keynesian model which combines features that have been shown to explain fairly well postwar U.S. business cycles. Our main result demonstrates that the determinacy properties of forward-looking interest rate rules resemble, at least qualitatively, the corresponding outcomes under current-looking rules. We explain how and why the empiri-cally relevant features of our model generate this novel result.