Saturday 30 November is ‘Buy Nothing Day’, an annual one-day event that invites us to step off the shopping treadmill and think critically about the place of consumption in our everyday lives. It’s a chance to question what we buy and what we (think we) need, and to think about consuming for the long-term rather than short-term; buying less (and perhaps better) rather than more; seeking out slow goods rather than fast. BND is also a great example of ‘critical management’ in action: an intervention into people’s relationships with the market, with the intention of organizing people’s behaviour and attitudes in new ways. With that in mind, Jennifer Smith Maguire has challenged her year 1 BA Management and Economics students to take part this Saturday, and to come up with their own ideas for other critical disruptions to the marketplace status quo. In this podcast, Jennifer gives a quick primer on BND’s goals and history.
Buy Nothing Day: Critical Management in Action
About Jennifer Smith Maguire
Jennifer is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Production and Consumption. Her research focuses on the intersection of processes of cultural production and consumption in the construction of markets, tastes and value. Major areas of interest include cultural intermediaries as taste makers and key market actors in the cultural economy of goods and the study of consumption as a cultural field; the production and consumption of provenance as a form of value in the cultural fields of super-premium wine, craft beer and local food; the construction of new regimes of good taste in contemporary urban China; the commercial fitness field, and the construction of the value of the fit body. Jennifer is the co-director of the Cultural Production and Consumption Research Group (http://www.le.ac.uk/cultural-production-and-consumption), and an elected council member of the American Sociology Association Consumer and Consumption Section.
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