University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Psychology

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 10, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Thesis advisor: Dr. Amanda Hinnant. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 216-221). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborgs universitet, 2003. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1981.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Art. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Urban Studies / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Drawing on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory, this thesis examines the representation of commodity culture in a selected body of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction. In so doing, it explains how the commodity, as capitalism's representational agent, created and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth century, and how that culture, still with us today, has persisted and evolved over the course of the twentieth century. It follows the commodity and the cultural forms it generates through their historical development. And it considers how fiction, from realism through modernism and into postmodernism, accommodates and responds both to the commodity's increasingly loud cultural presence and to its colonization of the social imagination and its desires. The study begins by examining responses to the rise of commodity culture in Victorian social novels before moving on to explore how key issues raised in nineteenth century writing resurface and are reshaped in first early modernist and then postmodernist fiction. The chapters focus, in turn, on Gaskell and the casualties of industrialism, carnivals of consumption in Thackeray, Trollope's 'material girl,' decay in Conrad, and shopping with DeLillo. Together, they argue that the task of assessing commodity culture's impact on identity and agency represents a dominant concern in literary production from the mid-nineteenth century onwards; and that both the commodity and the consumer world through which it circulates find ambivalent expression in the narratives that represent them. Finally, and as its title suggests, the thesis finds that the commodity figures throughout the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a living object of consumer fetish that excites desire yet strangely denies satisfaction.

This thesis develops a relational conception of consumption, exchange and contract, and applies it to understand the history and conceptual development of contract and sale of goods law and their impacts on problems of consumption and sustainability. Drawing on actor-network theory and geographies of consumption, consumer goods are understood as part of `"networks" and contract and sale of goods as particular stages within the wider processes of commodity networks. This provides the basis for a legal theory of the social and ecological role of the law of contracts, sale of goods (and other areas of law) in terms of the maintenance, enablement and regulation of commodity networks. This theory is applied to a genealogy of the concepts of consumer goods and of the consumer as embedded in nineteenth century English contract and sale of goods law, and of concepts of sustainable consumption found in contemporary debates and practices.

The objective of the research was to demonstrate the need, feasibility and relevance of disaggregating by income group the endogenized household sector in the Canadian Input-Output (I-O) model. Personal expenditures and revenue sources were endogenized into Agriculture Canada's I-O open model. Two models were developed, Model 1 and Model 2. Model 1 was a closed model that assumed homogeneity among households. Model 2 relaxed the homogeneity assumption. / The superiority of Model 2 was empirically demonstrated by comparing the economic indicators generated by the models. The indicators of interest were industrial output, GDP at factor cost and the number of paid jobs. A sensitivity analysis investigated the impact of changes in wages and salaries and final demand on the models. Larger differences were found between the models when wages and salaries were stimulated. As hypothesized, Model 1 underestimated the contribution of the lowest wages and salaries group by 19.9 percent and overestimated the impact of the higher wages and salaries group by 19 percent. A $1 million increase in the final demand for agricultural, agri-food and petrochemical products was also simulated. The largest impacts on industrial output occurred when agricultural production was shocked ( $3.8 million). This was followed by agri-food products ($3.2 million) and petrochemical products ( $2.7 million). While differences in the models' estimates were minimal when changes in final demand were simulated, Model 2 generated additional information on the distribution of income. / In conclusion, the results generated by the I-O model with the disaggregated household sector, Model 2, were consistent with budget data and economic theory.