Elizabeth Inchbald's farce The Mogul Tale: or, The Descent of the Balloon (1788) offered late eighteenth- century audiences the spectacle of three English travellers making a balloon journey. Blown off course, they find themselves in the land of the ‘Great Mogul’. On their arrival, they are overcome with panic – Fanny is afraid of being left alone ‘amongst tygers, land monsters, and sea monsters’ – although none of these entities makes an appearance, and the travellers are eventually permitted to depart unharmed. The notable point is that the travellers themselves are regarded with an equivalent fear by the inhabitants of India. The second lady of the seraglio, on seeing the balloon, exclaims that ‘I am afraid it is a great ravenous bird, coming to devour us.’

The literature of British India frequently represents British people as driven by the need to incorporate the material substance of India and / or Indians into themselves, while a contrapuntal narrative chronicles a fear of bodily disintegration or re- incorporation into the ‘other’, often depicted in fantasies of being consumed by the Indian landscape or its human or animal inhabitants. The dual portrayal of the British in India seen here in Inchbald's work (where the travellers are simultaneously potential consumers / predators and consumed / victims) has its origins in the political landscape of the second half of the eighteenth century. At this time, the question of Britain's role in India, with its accompanying stereotypes of India as simultaneously oppressed by British colonisers and a threat to them, was developed in the course of successive political debates, culminating in the impeachment of Warren Hastings on a variety of charges including those of personal and political corruption. The trial lasted from 1788 to 1795. Hastings was eventually acquitted of all charges, but the process focused public attention on the activities of the East India Company and its dealings with India, and aroused a rancorous debate carried out through the means of pamphlets and articles. The language of the debate about Hastings itself was steeped in tropes of predation, excess, and consumption, and, as I shall discuss below, its divided discourse of consumption spread throughout a wide range of literary forms in Victorian British India.

This chapter commences with a comprehensive overview of Australia’s legal framework on consumer credit. Subsequently, it considers the major obligations applied to Australian credit licence holders in this context, with a particular focus on licensing requirements, disclosure, responsible lending, best interests obligations and various consumer rights. Additionally, given the increased consumer access to high-cost payday loans facilitated by digitalisation, this chapter discusses the relevant issues and proposals for reform.

The main tasks of the economic theory of the firm are to determine why firms exist, how firms are established, and what functions firms perform. Firms are economic institutions whose objectives, decisions, and activities are the result of fundamental economic forces. To explain the economic role of firms, economic analysis must derive firms endogenously from initial conditions.

Take firms away from microeconomics and what is left? – consumers! This immediately suggests that the theory of the firm should begin with an economy in which there are only consumers. Starting with consumers as the givens of the model has a key implication. Consumers will establish firms if and only if doing so improves economic efficiency. The theory of the firm necessarily derives the existence of firms from fundamental assumptions about the characteristics of consumers who have exogenously given preferences and endowments. Therefore, consumers are the basic building blocks of the theory of the firm.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the characteristics of consumers and economic interaction between consumers. Consumers are defined by their preferences and endowments. Consumers own ideas, business methods, technologies, and other intellectual property. Consumers can engage in research and development (R&D) to find new technology. Consumers own production technologies and they can act as producers by operating the production technology themselves. Consumers obtain benefits from exchange with one another and incur transaction costs.

This chapter introduces the intermediation hypothesis. Firms play an economic role when intermediated exchange is more efficient than direct exchange.

SUCH are the thoughts of Ed Roman, an elderly bank clerk from Shooter, Saskatchewan, as he wanders the deck of a cruise ship bound for Europe. He has just lost the money that he and his wife, referred to only as ‘Ma,’ have been saving to pay for a ‘wedding trip’ that, as Roman nears retirement, the couple can finally afford. Roman's shame over ruining the trip, combined with his fear of the gossip at home that his folly will provoke, have him contemplating suicide—an action that, the narrator bleakly informs us, he ‘lack[s] the courage’ to take (70). The Romans—their long years of scrimping and saving, their fantasies of how the trip would be, and the ease with which disaster overtakes them—raise questions about the significance of a journey abroad. The short story appeared in the 15 June 1925 issue of Maclean’s, and its latter pages were positioned within the Travel Section, so that it was framed by advertisements for cruises and hotels that romanticised travel as a ‘pilgrimage’ (White Star Line), a chance to ‘cool off’ (Canadian Pacific), or ‘trade dull routine […] for zestful enjoyment’ (Canadian National). The story thus reveals many cracks in the fantasy of fulfilment that travel companies were keen to generate, offering us a means of exploring the key questions of this chapter: what kinds of consumption, both material and cultural, were fundamental to travel, and what were the perceived benefits of spending money on such things?

Individuals are not the only actors becoming consumers of genetic testing. Other third-party intermediaries are increasingly becoming consumers by offering testing to their own consumers. This article focuses on a relatively new actors in this space–life insurers. Life insurers are becoming genetic consumers through both underwriting and through policyholder wellness programs. These uses in many ways mirror employers’ forays into the genetics sphere, through hiring and employee wellness programs. On the one hand, increase of such testing can provide access to preventive genetic information and encourage a healthier society. On the other, it increases risks of coercion, privacy violations, and discrimination. This chapter assesses the legal landscape surrounding insurer-initiated genetic testing. The laws regulating insurer use in underwriting are relatively clear-cut, albeit generally permissive and variable across states; however, there is much less clarity regarding how life insurer wellness programs could or should be regulated. This chapter puts forth several regulatory proposals to protect individuals from privacy and discrimination concerns. Without such protections, there is the very real potential for the data benefits to accrue to the testing and insurance companies while the underlying harms befall the individual–a weighty warning for those consuming genetics as an insurance consumer.

Introduction: New Labour and framing

‘The figure of the consumer’, Vidler and Clarke have written, ‘stands at the heart of New Labour's approach to the reform and modernisation of public services.’ Consumerism, that is, ‘the commitment to organising services around a public understood as consumers of services’, emerged after 2000 as the central motif in the Blair government's narrative, ‘a generic organizing principle for public service reform’ (Vidler and Clarke, 2005, pp 19, 20; see also Clarke et al, 2007). What were the main elements of New Labour's consumer narrative? Why was it adopted and so vigorously propounded? To what extent did it amount to a major break with past Labour (and traditional social democratic) thinking?

A key objective of this chapter is to elucidate New Labour's understanding of ‘consumerism’. In so doing it shall draw heavily on Schon and Rein's concept of the frame. Frames can be understood as analytical devices which supply order and intelligibility to a complex, ever-shifting and confusing world (Schon and Rein, 1994). The first part of the chapter, after a brief sketch of the concept of ‘framing’, consists of a discussion of what will be called New Labour's ‘diagnostic frame’; that is, the way it defined the problem of ‘modernising’ the public services (for reasons of both space and political saliency, we focus on education and healthcare). The next section considers New Labour's ‘prescriptive frames’; that is to say, its major policy prescriptions which emerged from this diagnosis, The final section explores ambiguities and problems within New Labour's consumerist narrative.

In this chapter I draw upon documentary research (government papers of various types and ministerial policy speeches) and a series of interviews conducted mainly between 2004 and 2007. The people interviewed include former government ministers, former government advisers and MPs, and clinicians. Some were on the record but most were off (for a list, see Shaw, 2007).

In this chapter, the focus shifts from recognizing that discard is foundational to being human, and thus unavoidable, to seeing how consumer discard, and acts of discarding, are baked in to many economies.

In this regard, I want to go beyond the largely theoretical accounts in the social sciences that see discard as an inevitable aspect of economic organization, particularly under capitalism. To be clear, I am not dismissing the power of these arguments. There is much that is of merit in them. Not least is that they establish key general principles that help explain why waste is an endemic part of capitalist economic activity. I begin the chapter, therefore, by outlining these approaches and how they see waste, before going on to show why these accounts are less helpful to understanding consumer discard.

Marxist and neo-Marxist readings of economy recognize that all primary and manufacturing processes involve transformations of the material world brought about by (human) labour, and that they also entail material transformations. But, just like the firms they analyze, mostly these accounts focus on the end point of the production process: the commodity. This is because here, labour (and the commodity that is the result of production) is seen to be the means to value creation for capitalist firms. Yet, in highlighting the overarching significance of commodities, these accounts also flag the relative insignificance to many capitalist firms of the inevitable material leftovers and residues of production processes – or the stuff that, while integral to production processes, never realizes the commodity form. They also flag that residues have mostly been seen as waste, that is, as stuff of zero value. This helps to explain why the history of how firms have dealt with residues is characterized by ‘dump and disperse’, and never mind the consequences. When stuff is seen to be of zero value, it is but a short step to that stuff being discarded, and discarded as waste. Examples of the residues of economic activity that over time have been dumped in this way include the tailings that come from mining operations and ore preparation; the husks, shells, skins, stones and pips that are stripped from agricultural crops prior to their becoming an agricultural commodity; and an array of remainders from the various chemical and industrial processes that produce basic feedstocks for core areas of manufacturing.

Contemporary consumer researchers are increasingly faced with studying and understanding complex market and consumption phenomena impacting not just a sole individual or household, but whole communities, countries, and societies. These intricate phenomena cannot be understood through positivist experimental approaches conducted in a lab, but rather using qualitative research methods and a broader sociocultural lens. This chapter provides a concise and synthesizing overview of the developments in consumer culture research from the last decade. Specifically, it first unpacks the role of consumer identities, emotions, communities, technology, brands, politics, time, and space in consumer culture. Next, it discusses the qualitative methods typically utilized to conduct this type of research. Finally, it concludes with specific future directions for scholars interested in pursuing consumer culture research.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.

Foucault describes the power over life that is biopower as a ‘great bipolar technology’. He calls the first pole anatomo-politics of the human body, ‘centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimisation of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’. The second he calls biopolitics of the population, regulatory controls ‘focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis for the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity’ (1978: 139). Together, they constitute both biopower and one another, but we can consider them separately to describe two different aspects of biocapitalism. In the next chapter, we will see what biopolitics of the population means. In this chapter, we will look at anatomo-politics, which shares the economic and mechanical impetus of the second-order simulacrum.

To do so, we will examine Eric Garcia's biopunk novel The Repossession Mambo (2009) and Miguel Sapochnik's film Repo Men (2010). The two texts illuminate different aspects of biocapitalistic consumption and biopolitical existence, describing a complex system of circulating biocapital, and the social life of biocommodities – artiforgs (artificial organs). Together and against each other, they grasp Foucault's anatomo-politics, and understand what Baudrillard means when he suggests that consumption has emerged as a form of control.

In the third chapter of The Ambassadors (1903), Strether, Waymarsh and Maria Gostrey go window-shopping. While Strether finds that the beguiling Chester displays make him ‘want more wants’, finds indeed, that he desires ‘things that he shouldn’t know what to do with’, Waymarsh limits his interest to ‘the merely useful trades’, piercing with ‘sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers’. The friends’ respective approaches to consumption indicate their different relations to puritan asceticism, but also summarize the unprecedented commercial developments that occurred during James’s lifetime. Whereas Waymarsh’s attitude at this point can be identified with capitalism’s industrial phase, in which the emphasis was on production and the procurement of goods was predominantly a matter of necessity, Strether belongs to the new consumer age in which shopping has become a leisure activity and the locus of multiplying desires. During the second half of the nineteenth century the first department stores appeared and proceeded to expand steadily, both in size and range of merchandise, and the strategies of selling became increasingly sophisticated and omnipresent. Lambert Strether – whose adventure of self-exploration begins with uneasiness and dissatisfaction before a hotel mirror, allayed only by the thought of opportunities for acquisition that await him in London – is one illustration of James’s acute apprehension of the significance of consumption in the construction of national, social and gender identities, and in the formation of modern subjectivities.