Essay Sample on Technology, Consumerism, and Work

Work can be defined as the execution of tasks involving physical and medical effort expenditure. The main objective of work is to increase goods and services production catering to human needs. A job or an occupation, on the other hand, refers to the activities carried out for an exchange of an earning in the form of a wage and salary. Every culture upholds culture as a primary economic or economic system. The building structure for any form of culture is defined by an institution providing the distribution and production of goods or services. The various institutions offering economic backgrounds may have varying cultures, especially in the case of traditional setup and a modern world. The paper focuses on giving a reflection on sociology aspects such as work, consumerism, and technology.

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Traditional culture on food production and gathering involves work carried out by the population majority. Some of the traditional societies have defined a set of work, including prominent activities such as shipbuilding, stonemasonry, and carpentry. In a modernized society, due to the impact of industrialization, individuals have diverse working areas. Learning about economic, industrial, and working institutions forms a significant part in sociology since it encompasses the major societal characteristics hence influencing society in general. Work tends to be highly coupled with social inequalities, social processes, and also social structures—classical Sociological theorists from the first sociology of work form. Modern work forms the central part of the sociology field. There is a clear transition between the earlier work incidences, especially during the industrial revolution, and the modern work, which has led to deskilling and alienation of individual capabilities. On the other hand, the community has achieved stability through certain factors such as traditions, customs, and norms as industry and work changed during the transitional period.

Consumerism in Sociology

Consumerism is a type of belief that the level of personal wellbeing and happiness relies on the extent of personal consumption, especially while buying material goods. I the book, Zygmunt and Tim drive the idea about the wellbeing of an individual to depend on their standard of living above the specified threshold exclusively. They describe the center of happiness to be both consumption and material possessions. From the book, the idea of a consumerist society is evident all over, and it is portrayed as a society where all time, energy, among other resources, can be viewed as “consuming.’ The general; view of life in a consumerist society is brought out vividly. It is argued that consumption is good, and it only gets better with increased consumption.

Consumerism biasness can be described in terms of profit-maximization strategies. They argue that consumerism is generated by a fundamental process that revolves around the competition of profit maximization in a capitalist economy. They also draw several virtues of capitalism, such as competition that occurs among firms in a capitalist economy. In their book, they describe how competition leads to pressures on firms while innovating. Zygmunt and Tim describe productivity in a way that is common in our daily lives; it is the sum of inputs needed to be used to come up with a particular output. Zygmunt and Tim describe that the consumption biasness present in the capitalist economies to be evident in times of economic crisis. They describe how economic downtown is handled by governments by encouraging citizens to consume more, reducing interest rates to enable more borrowing, reducing taxes, among other ways. In their book, Zygmunt and Tim record the economic crisis of 2008, and it causes as it was made by economists. They also record that the economic crisis was resolved by people spending more and saving less.

Sociology and Technology

Technology entails extensive use of material objects, processes, and techniques to connect people, provide services, and produce goods. Sociologists, on the other hand, involve studying how the various units defined interact and how they are impacted by various technology forms present. The key research areas include the use of technologies in achieving a specific organizational goal and how technology as a tool is used by different use cases to relate with an organization or one another. Technology has various effects on social relationships, social organizations, and culture in general. Technology is used by individuals or modified by organizations to serve their role. Issues such as social-cognitive divide factors involve specific technological and scientific knowledge playing a considerable role in a vast number of people failing to achieve critical opportunities hence running dramatic conditions on their own life.

Senior citizens are not the only citizens to start using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). They show that this creates the chance for them to be expelled from the competent information society. Also, they argue that ICT is dynamic and keeps creating new opportunities for the old to raise their quality of life. In their book, Zygmunt and Tim look at a Danish program which was financed by the Danish Research Agency to determine the possibilities of ICT improving the lives of older people. They say that the idea is diverse and that it needs to be examined. They reckon that the Danish program is diverse, and among its six experiments, some deal with eCommerce, democracy, and others deal with the flexibility of work among retired people. Through this, the experiments present the perfect chance for the application of ICT and senior citizens.