Shinobu Majima

Have There Been Culture Shifts in Britain? A Critical Encounter with Ronald Inglehart

This paper critically examines Ingleharts argument that there is a predictable shift from materialist to post-materialist values, using the British case as our focus. Using the 1981, 1990 and 1999 data for the British part of World Values Surveys, we criticize the distinction between materialist and post-materialist values. Using multiple correspondence analysis, we visualize how different attitudes are related to each other by portraying them in a multiple-dimensional space. We show that the organization of cultural values is complex, and is not easily summarized by the materialist/post-materialist dichotomy.We prefer to recognize the more politically loaded nature of attitudes by distinguishing between libertarian and authoritarian values, and between conformist and rebellious citizens. We show that there is little evidence of major change between 1981 and 1999, and indeed Britons, and especially young people, are moving slightly away from post-materialism, becoming increasingly rebellious and conscientious.

Fashion and frequency of purchase: womenswear consumption in Britain, 1961‐2001

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to model the relationships between womens outerwear consumption, frequency of purchase and consumer profiles, and to analyse historical changes in particular, using repeated cross‐sectional data on household expenditure.Design/methodology/approach – A sample of over 20,000 female spenders, aged between 16 and 54 were extracted from UK Family Expenditure Survey (FES). Tobit model, “two‐part” model and pseudo‐panel model were used to estimate consumer demand for womens outerwear, taking infrequency of purchase into account.Findings – The importance of “fashion” in clothing consumption has risen by two‐fold since the 1960s, measured by purchase probability. Clothing have transformed from durable goods to consumables. Youth, class and womens employment are found to be significantly related to fashion consumption, controlling for the rise in income.Research limitations/implications – The findings are limited to UK female consumers and to the demographic data that are a...

Contesting Affluence: An Introduction

The idea that Britain was becoming an ‘affluent’ society came to be central to debates in the later 1950s and the 1960s about the nature of social change. With the end of rationing in 1954, haltingly at first, people witnessed small changes in mundane living. These were later claimed as decisive moments of social change. Harold Macmillan’s famous ‘we never had it so good’ speech in Bedford 1957 and the Labour Party’s response—‘should have had it a whole lot better’—in its 1964 manifesto, testify to this new sense of emerging social change. There are telling signs of this change in the papers of this special issue. In 1954, an American parent firm which for years had been sending food parcels to a ration-stricken branch in London finally stopped its aid (Nixon, this issue). In Liverpool in 1956 the local council ventured into slum clearance and sent university sociologists to investigate whether poverty continued (Todd, this issue). In London in 1961 the Central Statistical Office began inscribing standards of living in the weekly Family Expenditure Survey, which became a key part of new governmental machinery (Majima, this issue). Sociologists such as John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood went to the suburban town of Luton to discover affluent workers in 1962, while others went to urban slums to rediscover poverty. Affluence was thus felt, measured and questioned in the decade after the end of rationing. Even trade unions came to deploy the concept of the affluent society by the mid-1960s. In Coventry in 1967 union officials argued for earlier finishing times to allow workers the convenience of evening entertainment (Whiting, this issue). These anecdotal episodes ushered in major discussions—about the decline of social class, the end of absolute poverty as a major social problem and the view that economic necessity was being eclipsed by new, expressive, personal concerns. Affluence appeared to reconfigure social relations, through elaborating a new relational, comparative, conception of society. This point was noted by commentators at the time like Fred Hirsch who argued that the satisfaction to be gained from, say, owning a car

Financing Japan's World War II Occupation of Southeast Asia

This article analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the market-purchased transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. Occupation was financed principally by printing large quantities of money. While some Southeast Asian countries had high inflation, hyperinflation hardly occurred because of a sustained transactions demand for money and because of Japans strong enforcement of monetary monopoly. Highly specialized Southeast Asian economies and loss of Japanese merchant shipping limited resource extraction.

Elite consumption in Britain, 1961-2004: results of a preliminary investigation

In a magisterial survey, Daloz (2007) demonstrates the lack of a satisfactory theoretical account of elite consumption. Most sociological approaches offer partial analyses, being residual deductions from more general theories of consumption which pay insufficient attention to the specificities of the behaviour of the rich and powerful. On the basis of comparative empirical observation Daloz demonstrates that the markers of elite distinction vary greatly between societies and may be founded upon possession of prestigious goods, access to personal services, lavish ceremonies or an entourage of dependants. What in one society is a source of symbolic superiority is, in another, a sign of vulgarity. Thus, for example, rich Norwegians conceal their wealth, ‘conspicuous modesty’ being a collective ethical imperative; Americans are much more likely to make material display of their personal opulence; while the ostentation of the ‘Big Men’ of Nigeria serves to express the collective standing of their clients. Daloz argued that the principal sociological theories – of Simmel, Elias, Veblen and Bourdieu – fail to appreciate the full range of possible strategies and tend to see the behaviour of elites through the lens of the national system with which they were most familiar. Theoretical progress, then, requires more observations across time and space. About Britain there is currently little information; to our knowledge, apart from some schematic descriptions of the lifestyle of the established upper class in the mid-20th century (eg Scott, 1982), the consumption patterns of the elite have not been subject to systematic social scientific analysis. This chapter takes one small step forward by looking in detail at changes in the consumption behaviour of members of the economic elite in Britain since 1961. Following the advice of Daloz, we seek to make new research bear cumulatively on older theoretical insights, thereby also to establish their limits. Over

Affluence and the Dynamics of Spending in Britain, 1961–2004

There is considerable debate among historians and sociologists over the periodisation of the social dynamics of mass consumption in the second half of the twentieth century. During the immediate period following post-war austerity, journalists and other commentators focused on greater affluence and the relative reduction in spending on ‘necessary’ items. Sociologists, however, often emphasised the continued role of class in shaping consumer preferences. In this paper, I use evidence from the Family Expenditure Survey,1 conducted by the UK government since the 1950s, to capture relative differences in the weekly spending patterns of all households. I compare expenditure data for the year 1961 for detailed categories of consumer goods and services, with respect to differences in income, class and age, and compare these data with the results for 1971, 1981 and 2004. Using a multi-dimensional approach more conventionally used in lifestyle research and brand marketing allows us to examine how consumption is structured by inequality, though in subtly changing ways.

The Challenge of Finance in South East Asia during the Second World War

This article analyses finance in South East Asia during the Second World War in terms of three challenges. Beginning in December 1941, Japan swiftly occupied South East Asia and immediately faced the challenge of how to finance occupation. Finance largely through printing money gave rise to a further challenge in the need to avoid hyperinflationary pressures. After the war the reoccupying powers faced their own, and a third, challenge of wartime finance in deciding how to deal with a large stock of money created during the conflict. Comparison with war finance elsewhere shows that the three challenges were met in sometimes unusual but rather effective ways.

Financing Japan’s World War II Occupation of Southeast Asia

This paper analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. In Malaya, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines, the issue of military scrip to pay for resources and occupying armies greatly increased money supply. Despite high inflation, hyperinflation hardly occurred because of a sustained transactions demand for money, because of Japans strong enforcement of monetary monopoly, and because of declining Japanese military capability to ship resources home. In Thailand and Indochina, occupation costs and bilateral clearing arrangements created near open-ended Japanese purchasing power and allowed the transfer to Japan of as much as a third of Indochinas annual GDP. Although the Thai and Indochinese governments financed Japanese demands mainly by printing large quantities of money, inflation rose only in line with monetary expansion due to moneys continued use as a store of value in rice-surplus areas.

The Japanese Occupation of South East Asia during the Second World War

This article reviews recent Japanese- and English-language publications to assess scholarly interchange between the two languages and the effects on South East Asia of Japans Second World War occupation. The economic and social impact on Borneo, Malaya and Singapore of the Japanese interregnum was devastating. In Burma and Indonesia, military training given by the Japanese fundamentally shaped the post-war order. The authors find surprisingly little cross-over between those writing in Japanese or in English and argue that greater academic exchange, possibly facilitated through translation, would enhance understanding of wartime South East Asia.