SOCIOL 173 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Ikea, Economic Integration, Social Cost
Document Summary
Assumption: goods &services are increasingly produced for exchange on the market for profit. Empirical question evidence: commodities and market exchange. Commodities = use value, exchanged in a transaction for equivalent money value. Non-commodities = priceless, either uniquely valuable or uniquely worthless. Commodification = process of social transformation, involving cultural meanings; value and value equivalence money allows more commodification. Commodification = not uniform process, not uniform results: biographies of things (igor kopytoff"s work); kopytoff argues that things can move into and out of commodity status. The only time when the commodity status of a thing is beyond question is the moment of actual exchange. Commodification homogenizes value; value is expressed in quantitative ($) terms. Extensive commodification = troubling in modern societies (culturally we distinguish values in qualitative terms) response: setting apart portions of the environment as sacred (artic wild life, everglades, spotted owl, ); responses are shaped by cultural and political factors.
