{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":225,"pdf_page":233,"physical_index":233,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"948e86a2103a0d9e15631f69ea1b3c8d8c8a033038248630d05e9c345172b61b"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"In the remainder of this chapter, I try to answer this question by analyzing talk about planned obsolescence in the middle part of the last century. My objective is to tease out the issues at stake in the discussion and its underlying assumptions. With this aim in mind, I chart the changing terms of the controversy around planned obsolescence, as it unfolded in the public sphere from the first appearance of the concept in the 1930s, through to its articulation to nascent concerns about the environment in the early 1970s. The focus of the chapter is on how the controversy illuminates normative notions about use and exchange in the context of the Fordist moral economy that emerged by the middle decades of the twentieth century.\n\n3. Tracking Moral Panics and Disturbances\n\nIt is perhaps a sociological truism that not every element of a culture that has normative force is spelled out explicitly as a norm. Even where norms are made somewhat explicit, for example in law, it is often the case that the account given of the norm is rather thin—the norm is articulated as a rule without elaboration of the underlying system of values within which the rule makes sense. Moreover, the relative importance of a norm, and its influence on behavior, cannot be inferred just from formal statements of the norm. Some rules can be broken with relative impunity. Others, when transgressed, induce extremely powerful reactions. For these reasons, in order to give a full account of a norm, it is often necessary to elicit a “thick” account of it, by way of various forms of ethnographic investigation. What can we do, however, when we are interested in the normative dimension of a past that is accessible only as refracted through the materials of archives—when, therefore, it is impossible to develop a deeper understanding of the norms underlying actions and reactions by questioning, or just directly observing, living subjects? To get a fuller picture of past norms we must go beyond just attending to formal statements about norms, such as those found in law, and develop more oblique interpretive approaches. One strategy is to analyze the shape and intensity of the response where norms are thought to have been transgressed. The historical analyst pays particular attention to the way in which things get talked out in expressions of outrage, then makes abductions about the moral background within which that talk makes sense.\n\nMoral Panic about Utility\n\n225","previous_page":224,"next_page":226}