MCLC: Consumers and Individuals announcement

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Michael B. Griffiths <mbgriffiths at gmail.com>
Subject: Consumers and Individuals announcement
***********************************************************

Press Release
Challenging Preconceived Ideas about China
“Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing Out, Fitting In”
By Michael B. Griffiths, Director of Ethnography, Ogilvy & Mather Greater
China, was published today by Routledge Press.
 

This book invites its readers to reflect on Chinese reality in new ways
and challenges many a preconceived ideas about China. “Consumers and
Individuals in China: Standing out, Fitting in” confronts the still
widespread notion that Chinese people are not “real” individuals by
showing how Chinese people go about their daily lives, how they interact
socially, make moral judgments, aspire to status and recognition, and
consume.

“Dr. Griffiths has given us a rare insight into the daily lives of
hundreds of millions of people who live in rapidly developing, but by
Chinese standards, still small cities. The skylines of Beijing and
Shanghai are now familiar to Western eyes, but it is in hundreds of cities
far from our gaze that the China of the 21st century is really being
made,” said Toby Lincoln, Lecturer in Modern Chinese Urban History,
University of Leicester, United Kingdom. “The decisions that these people
make about the lives they want to live will ultimately affect us all.”

Based on data gathered over a period of six years from a lower-tier city,
Anshan, in China’s northeast the book aims to show how Chinese people give
shape to contemporary Chinese society.

To this end, Griffiths tells how Chinese individuals take up cultural
norms pertaining to authenticity, knowledge, civility, sociability,
morality and self-cultivation, and make these norms their own. At the same
time, the author also portrays how the ways Chinese individuals do this
are themselves shaped by society.

Informants for the book’s analysis included consumerist youths,
enterprising farmers, retired Party cadres, and dissident intellectuals,
the rural migrant staff of an inner-city restaurant, the urban families
dependent on a machine-repair workshop, and a range of white-collar
professionals from both the public and private sectors.

“Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing out, Fitting in” appeals to
sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars, China Studies
generalists, and professionals working at the intersection of culture and
business in China. Marketers and communications professionals looking to
harness Chinese peoples’ motivations can glean insight from the way the
book draws out how these are differentiated. The vivid descriptions of
living in China and doing field research also mean that travelers will
find the book stimulating and useful.
 

“Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing out, Fitting in” is
available at bookstores worldwide, including in Shanghai and Beijing, as
well as online book sellers.
 

 
About the Book
“Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing out, Fitting in”
Published by Routledge Press
Publication date: 12 December 2012
Available online at
http://www.amazon.com/Consumers-Individuals-China-Standing-Fitting/dp/04155
35727
 

Shanghai Bookstores

Shanghai Foreign Language Bookstore
No. 390 Fuzhou Road, Shanghai
+86 (21) 6322 3200
 

Shanghai Hong Kong Joint Bookstore
No. 624, Huaihai Road, Shanghai
+86 (21) 5306 4393
 

Beijing Bookstores
China International Book Trading Corporation Bookstore
1st Floor, The International Books Culture Mansion, No. 91, North Road,
West 3rd Ring, Haidian District, Beijing
+86 (10) 6843 3157
 

Wangfujing Foreign Language Bookstore
No. 235 Wangfujing Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing
+86 (10) 6512 6903