Japanese Consumer Behaviour: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers (Consumasian) [Paperback]

John L. McCreery (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0824823168 | ISBN-13: 978-0824823160 | Publication Date: March 2000

What role does consumption play in Japanese lives that are more than study, work, and shopping? How have those lives changed since World War II as Japan has wrestled with the meaning of white-collar careers, increasing independence for women, changing family values, a shrinking birth rate, and an aging population? Japan's first think tank devoted to the study of consumer behavior was created to answer these questions. In this book, an anthropologist reads its research, exploring Japan through the eyes of Japanese researchers and discovering patterns of change that are both uniquely Japanese and shared by consumers in other advanced industrial nations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book succeeds as ethnohistory, popular culture, and management treatise." -- John Sherry, Kellogg School of Management

From the Inside Flap

"This book succeeds as ethnohistory, popular culture,and management treatise. It plays to the most compelling of postmodern social scientific concerns as well: reflexivity and polyvocality. The content, organisation and style are all engaging. Local nuance is supremely well captured, and interpreted effectively in the author's 'wrap-around' treatment." --John Sherry, Kellogg School of Management

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press (March 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0824823168
• ISBN-13: 978-0824823160
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,349,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Worthwhile Book, May 29, 2000

By 

vance bradley geiger (orlando, florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Japanese Consumer Behaviour: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers (Consumasian) (Paperback)

Japanese Consumer Behavior is a challenging book. There are multiple frames of reference: an analytical outsider, analyzing insiders analyzing their own culture, and changing trends within that culture. And that is just the approach. Then there is the data, relatively rapid changes across generations within a culture in response to major post-World War II, economic, gender-role, urbanizing, and, well, other real big changes. In essence there is a real fine grained analysis coupled with an analysis of the larger trends. And then there is the weird sense of dislocation, of finding "sneaker middles" in Japan bearing an almost but not quite resemblence to "yuppies" and trying to put a finger on what that "almost" but "not quite" is. The traditional anthropological road map one acquires does not apply very well to this book, hence it is an active reader book. If anyone is interested in what anthropology is going to be like in the future this is a good place to start.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Japanese consumers explained, June 8, 2000

By 

F. Uleman (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Japanese Consumer Behaviour: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers (Consumasian) (Paperback)

The expertise gained from years of experience in Japanese advertising is supplemented with interviews and translations from Hakuhodo's think-tank newsletter on consumer mindsets. Highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Consuming Japan, September 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Japanese Consumer Behaviour: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers (Consumasian) (Paperback)

McCreery is an anthropologist who has spent years working in the Japanese advertising industry -- not working in the sense of anthropological field work, but actually earning a living in the Japanese advertising industry. His book draws both on his insights into the industry and its products from this perspective, and his anthropological training. It is a data-rich book that ingeneously makes use of advertising or marketing research to create portraits of what advertisers think about different generations or sub-sets of Japanese consumers. It is a fascinating mosaic of materials and in many ways an experimental ethnography. Highly recommended.