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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
What has come to be called "consumer power" has been a subject of discussion for some time now. "The consumer is king," some profess, because it is consumers who decide on the prices of things, including books. In fact the book industry is currently going through a new policy of "fewer books at lower prices." Against mixing "the popular with the intellectually adventurous," this policy focuses on best-sellers.
Paul Valley's "Notebook" in The Independent claims that it is a result of the fallacy that consumers want lower prices rather than wider choice. "If this is irritating in a wine shop," he says, "in a book store it is actively debilitating." The controversy has arisen over the firing of a director of a bookstore chain, who followed the old maxim of offering wider choice. Book shops used to offer "a densely packed cornucopia with the biggest hardback fiction section, the best selection of contemporary American novels and the largest programme of events by visiting writers." This turned the bookstores into post-graduate literary centres.
Such activities will be replaced by "tables stacked with face-up copies of cheap books at cut off prices. The argument has raised the issue of what consumers are. It is not enough to "define ourselves merely as consumers," writes Amitai Etzioni, a professor at Georgetown University who has worked as adviser to President Clinton. He is the author of The Third Way to a Good Society. This Third Way has created quite a furor in Britain, America and beyond. According to Etzioni, though, it is a mistake to waste too much time on definitions.
Etzioni believes that, apart from the state and the market, a society needs a third pillar if it is to be a decent place to live. In addition to being consumers and citizens "we are bonded to other people by ties of affection and shared values as members of various kinds of community" -- and not just geographically but also through notions like the artistic.
As a society, he maintains, "we need to strengthen these communities because they are the places that nurture values, like trust, integrity, service, altruism, mutuality and the other values which underpin a shared moral culture."
Paul comments on this by saying that it is not shared values that create a community but shared experiences. It is an external threat, more than anything else, that gives rise to this. He gives as an example a recent plan to pull down three Victorian houses and build a block of 40 flats in their place. This led to objections on the part of the local residents. They were outraged, in part because one of the buildings was a nursing home in which "the old folk learned that they would have to find somewhere else to live by reading the sign on a lamppost."
A public meeting was called by a man who lived opposite the three houses. He booked a room for twenty but 150 people turned up to complain that the flats would be a strident and discordant feature of a leafy suburb. Furthermore, the new blocks of flats would endanger the traffic, and would bring extra noise and pollution.
The writer comes out of this with an important conclusion, that moral dialogue is one of the essential characteristics of a community. Already a dialogue has begun between the residents and one of the owners of the houses. The owner says that she wants to sell at a high price to be allowed to retire in Spain and the residents reply that they want to be able to retire here without the area being despoiled.
Thus a feeling of community has been created in the face of the outside threat. This, says Etzioni, is more important than being just consumers.
