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1.
Branding is an economic and cultural process. Branding endows goods and services with value which corporations protect as their intellectual property, enabling brands to support share prices and be traded as assets in takeovers and mergers, at the same time as they serve to differentiate products competitively in the marketplace. Yet this ‘brand value’ depends on cultural perceptions of the meaning and worth of a brand. More than the unique image or positioning of a brand being maintained relative to others of its kind, such perceptions may involve the expressive and emotional attachment of consumers, and this may be very widely shared. This paper argues that, with certain brands, such shared attachment can occur on a national basis, so that they become symbols of national belonging. Whereas consumers attribute a putative foreign national origin to some global brands – for example, Harley-Davidson is unequivocally ‘American’ – they relate to other brands as expressive of their own national origin. This identification often persists even when national brands are taken over by global corporations, since the brand's association with the nation is a major dimension of its value, or the ‘brand equity’ which the new global owner has paid for, and intends to capitalise upon. The paper examines instances in which this has happened in Australia, such as the traditional brand Vegemite, long ago acquired by Kraft, and also cases where the Australian associations of a brand have been exploited in establishing its global identity, notably Foster's Lager.  相似文献   

2.
This article develops the argument that a ‘knowledge economy,’ despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of ‘knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products’). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.  相似文献   

3.
ABSTRACT

In the contemporary organization of the economy, creativity and branding constitute two distinctive imperatives which generally point in different directions: the former towards newness and change, the latter towards continuity and recognisability. Numerous agents in corporate organizations thus face a conundrum of creativity versus branding, which is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the fashion business. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a fashion company, I argue that these seemingly incompatible imperatives are inextricably entangled, as their paradoxical relation is solved, even dissolved, in a dynamic interplay between ‘a totemic logic’ and ‘an animist practice’. Thus, a dynamics of totemism and animism unites creativity and branding in the continual pursuit of uniqueness. While totemic and animist modalities are most commonly associated with non-western ontologies and perceived as mutually exclusive, I contend that they are also at work in contemporary commercial processes and that they are enmeshed in, and propelled by, each other. This suggests that these modalities operate together particularly when the making of distinctive identities is critical – as in economic competition today.  相似文献   

4.
ABSTRACT

This article develops the notion of the intimacy of surveillance, a characteristic of contemporary corporate marketing and dataveillance fueled by the accumulation of consumers’ economically valuable digital traces. By focusing on emotional reactions to targeted advertisements, we demonstrate how consumers want contradictory things: they oppose intrusive and creepy advertising based on tracking their activities, yet expect more relevant real-time analysis and probabilistic predictions anticipating their needs, desires, and plans. The tension between the two opposing aspects of corporate surveillance is crucial in terms of the intimacy of surveillance: it explains how corporate surveillance that is felt as disturbing can co-exist with pleasurable moments of being ‘seen’ by the market. The study suggests that the current situation where social media users are trying to comprehend, typically alone with their devices, what is going on in terms of continuously changing algorithmic systems, is undermining public culture. This calls for collective responses to the shared pleasures and pains while living alongside algorithms. The everyday distress and paranoia to which users of social media are exposed is an indicator of failed social arrangements in need of urgent repair.  相似文献   

5.
ABSTRACT

From frequent television advertisements to posters in jet bridges all over the globe, the public is continuously subjected to messages affirming the inception of a flat, borderless world. While these discourses suggest globalization is bringing humanity together into a globally connected, cosmopolitan world order, such corporate advertisements also seek to convey the desirability and inevitability of a borderless economy in which they may roam unfettered. To illustrate how these ideas are communicated, I investigate three emblematic cases: Emirates Airlines, HSBC, and Itaú. By interrogating their public discourses, this article elucidates how powerful actors seek to construct global (or regional–global) imaginaries for consumers by deploying esthetically pleasing (and, at times, seemingly ‘subversive’) advertisements. Their ultimate effect is to demonstrate the would-be futility of attempts to regulate the spread of global capitalism or their own profit-seeking behavior. Through showing how pop-culture artifacts attempt to ‘sell’ teleological global capitalism to audiences, this article contributes to the burgeoning literature on the cultural political economy of globalization. To conclude, I briefly explore how this analysis relates to important political debates concerning agency in globalization, the feasibility of state regulation of global capitalism, and the construction of alternative global imaginaries/orders.  相似文献   

6.
THE PROPER COPY     
Efforts to make (and keep) knowledge public have provided a powerful counter-model to the recent expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights in such arenas as information technology, digital media, biological research, and pharmaceutical access. While sympathetic to the impulse to counteract the new ‘enclosures’ with knowledge made public, this essay critically interrogates some of the constitutive limits – in fact, the constitutive outsides – to these counter formulations. Paying particular attention to how public domain initiatives, like their strict intellectual property counterparts, also police the line between the proper and the improper copy, I argue that mechanisms for keeping knowledge public do not just circle the wagons against the predations of the Monsantos and Microsofts of the world. In their rhetorical and normative commitments to the proper copy, they also risk reproducing some of the same constrictions and exclusions that we tend to associate with (privatized) acts of enclosure itself. I explore this argument first in reference to creative commons and copyright, which can reproduce a strong ideological commitment to improvement – ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ – against the mere copy. What is the cost, I ask, of making the idea of improvement the price of admission not just to intellectual property claims, but to participation in newly ‘democratic’ public and common spaces of knowledge production? Second, I look to global pharmaceutical politics – specifically, regulatory efforts to improve access to cheaper copied and generic drugs in Argentina – to raise questions about the public domain's normative place in the continued expansion and harmonization of intellectual property regimes in the so-called global South. Together, these discussions suggest how the public domain and the commons, like their IP counterparts, can rhetorically and normatively expand and be secured against the improper copy.  相似文献   

7.
ABSTRACT

This essay reads the Latina/o/x migrant vernacular discourses that emerge out of pro-migrant activism. Anzaldúa’s notion of mestizaje – a logic of border consciousness – is put into conversation with Deleuze’s notion of nomad thought – a logic of movement – to inform a rhetorical strategy for reading the vernacular archive of social movement discourse. The “No Papers, No Fear” is one such social movement that demonstrate the logic of mestizaje/nomadism in their communication strategies. This study illuminates three tensions that define the ways Latina/o/x migrants in the US navigate the spaces of citizenship: tensions between movement/stasis, migrant identity/national identity, and fear/safety.  相似文献   

8.
ABSTRACT

This paper examines a situation in which finance is perceived as imperialist – as immanent to, and serving the interests of, a single ‘culture’ in the colloquial sense. The analysis centres on the long-forgotten 1969 bombing of the trading floor of la Bourse de Montréal (the Montréal Stock Exchange), a moment in an intense phase of the Québécois movement for independence from Canada. Because of the way in which the bombers framed the attack, and its political-economic and discursive contexts, the bombing presents an opportunity to think about key features of the relation between finance and cultural domination or imperialism. These features relate to finance’s specific articulation to the future, uncertainty, and, in the words of the séparatistes of the time, cultural ‘destiny’. The paper has three parts. The first describes the bombing of la Bourse and the public, media, and state responses, linking it to Québécois cultural-political geographies at several scales. Part two places the bombing in the longer-run cultural-politicization of finance in the francophone independence movement, to outline a specifically Québecois critique of finance capital. The third part considers finance’s perceived and real connection to, and thus capacity to shape or constrain, the cultural-political construction of collective possibility.  相似文献   

9.
This paper presents a mixed methods analysis of corporate governance and develops an argument that governance is impossibilist because it inflates expectations and sets fundamentally unattainable objectives. Disappointment with corporate governance is justified because proceduralisation plus new mechanisms (such as the insistence on more independent non-executive directors) have little ascertainable positive effect on shareholder value and firm performance. More fundamentally, governance misrecognises the mechanisms around value creation in giant public companies because it is shareholders more so than managers who create value in a stock market that operates as a kind of Ponzi scheme. A brief conclusion notes that impossibilism is associated with a massive increase in the circulation of ‘sincere lies’ which insidiously discredit the public company as an institution.  相似文献   

10.
ABSTRACT

Via a discussion of public debates surrounding the potential minting of a trillion dollar platinum coin in the context of the American debt ceiling crises of 2011 and 2013, this essay seeks to make sense of the popular persistence of ‘commodity’ or ‘metallist’ understandings of money's value in the face of a scholarly consensus that all currency is ‘token’ or ‘fiat’ in nature. Scholars from Knapp to Desan have elaborated token theories of commodity money, wherein both precious and non-precious currencies are treated as the products of social construction. By contrast, I suggest the need to supplement such approaches with what I term a commodity theory of token money, wherein money objects made from both precious and non-precious materials are treated as inherently valuable. Exploring the semiotic convergence between gold, Bitcoin and modern paper money, I suggest that the broadly Peircean notion of rhematization in which symbol and indexical signs are (mis)taken for iconic ones is particularly suited to unpack the continuing social salience of commodity theories of money across the gold/paper divide. Moreover attention must be paid to how we define the icon itself.  相似文献   

11.
Abstract

Using sources from popular media, and ethnographic data collected from a university‐based urban design studio, I challenge Paul Virilio’s assertion that the modern human condition is dominated by a process of emotional synchronisation based on fear (the result, according to Virilio, of a collusion of technology and speed), and offer the analogous idea that contemporary consumer capitalism works toward a synchronisation of desire, operating, at least in part, through the ideologies and machinations of the idea of design. To do this, I analyse designerly approaches to problem‐solving as potential disciplining forces, or technologies of governmentality, which help to create order by manufacturing certain subjectivities like consumer, community member, or sense‐of‐place – subjectivities that are amenable to neo‐liberal notions of civil society in consumer‐capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that Virilio’s ‘art criticism of technology’, but also common critiques thereof, both depoliticise aesthetic judgement and work together toward the obfuscation of power within the symbolic economy of neo‐liberal consumer capitalism.  相似文献   

12.
Abstract

This essay revisits the question of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm in light of the now-urgent question of transmission – the shift in mourning and memory between first-generation survivors and later generations. Offering a different but complementary analysis to those in trauma or memory studies, I argue that post-Shoah witness and testimony are acts of ‘irreconcilable mourning’. This sense of mourning departs from post-Freudian approaches that focus on closure. Instead, irreconcilable mourning is a non-totalising approach to loss that resists ‘redemption’ and instead necessitates an ongoing, creative, and critical response to loss. In the course of this argument, I examine first-generation accounts such as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's to highlight the necessity and contingency of transmission by interrogating concepts such as the ‘unsayable’ and the remnant. I then focus on Art Spiegelman's second-generation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, bringing cross-generational questions of witness and testimony as acts of irreconcilable mourning into the fold of Marianne Hirsch's ‘postmemory’ and Edith Wyschogrod's heterological history-telling.  相似文献   

13.
ABSTRACT

Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.  相似文献   

14.
ABSTRACT

Economic anthropology has long advocated a broader vision of savings than that proposed by economists. This article extends this redefinitional effort by examining ceremonial gifts in India and arguing that they are a specific form of savings. Rural households, including those at the bottom of the pyramid, do save, in the sense of storing, accumulating and circulating value. But this takes place via particular forms of mediation that allow savers to forge or maintain social and emotional relations, to keep control over value – what matters in people’s lives – and over spaces and their own future. We propose terming these practices relational and reproductive saving, insofar as their main objective is to sustain life across generations. By contrast, trying to encourage saving via bank mediation may dispossess populations of control over their wealth, their socialisation, their territories and their time. In an increasingly financialised world of evermore aggressive policies to push people into financial inclusion, the social, symbolic, cultural and political aspects of diverse forms of financial mediation deserve our full attention.  相似文献   

15.
ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine Catherine Malabou’s concept of trauma, and argue that her replacement of the Freudian unconscious with the cerebral unconscious might fit adequately into a different framework from the one she proposes. Comparing her view of pathology to that of Georges Canguilhem, I propose a dimensional reading of pathology. Building on this – and by reference to metaplasticity – I ask whether one can explain the mechanisation characteristic of the new wounded mechanistically. I then look at her exchange with Slavoj ?i?ek to get at Malabou’s understanding of psychoanalysis. She seeks to realign Freud and neuroscience to resolve issues with both. As part of this shift, she introduces the term ‘the Material’ – linked to the cerebral unconscious – as an alternative to the Lacanian triad of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. She does, however, leave it underdeveloped, and I argue that this points to tensions in her theory. While her concept of plasticity runs against ideas of an isolated transcendental subject exempt from the outside, Malabou seems to literalise (or ‘corporealise’) trauma. If this is correct, then how radical is her concept of trauma, and are there ways of describing trauma that are equally compatible with her concept of plasticity?  相似文献   

16.
ABSTRACT

The relationship between masculinity, neoliberalism, and capitalist economy is difficult to analyse. This is apparent when we consider recent studies of neoliberal capitalism, which are almost entirely books about men, and yet this feature consistently escapes critical attention. In contrast, this article brings this relation into focus, and suggests that the critique of hegemonic masculinities is an important feature of the critique of neoliberalism. The article first reviews existing literature on the intersection of masculinity and capitalism, which is increasingly being drawn towards the analysis of neoliberalism. It then briefly takes up Michel Foucault’s study of neoliberalism, especially his contention that classical liberalism’s concern with the nature of markets maintains an ambiguous persistence within the neoliberal project, in order to consider what it may have to offer to an analysis of masculinity and neoliberalism. Finally, I turn to one of the key thinkers in the intellectual development of neoliberalism – Ludwig von Mises – and provide a critical rereading of his 1944 book Bureaucracy. I argue that, beneath its veneer of economic rationality, the text mobilizes masculinity as a technology that is crucial to managing both the affective and economic insecurities generated by neoliberal conceptions of freedom in market-based societies.  相似文献   

17.
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18.
Following recent works that have underlined the increasing search for liquidity in economic exchange, this article studies how illiquid forms of money are converted into liquid forms by corporate finance actors. In the name of ‘shareholder value’, the various forms of value generated by companies (such as ‘trade credit’) tend to be increasingly transformed into liquid forms of money that are easily distributable to shareholders (‘cash flows’). Describing this phenomenon as an example of what anthropologists of money call ‘conversion’, this paper highlights how such a conversion process was necessary for the historical development of ‘shareholder value’ policies in corporate finance. Considering documentary sources and interviews with consultants, auditors, and private equity fund managers involved in ‘cash flow’ optimisation practices, this paper details this conversion phenomenon and shows how it has relied on the historical elaboration of specific metrological, technical, legal, and moral norms.  相似文献   

19.
In 1999, Carruthers and Stinchcombe provided the classic discussion of ‘the social structure of liquidity’: the institutional arrangements that support markets in which ‘exchange occurs easily and frequently’. Our argument in this paper is that the material aspects of these arrangements – and particularly the materiality of prices – need far closer attention than they normally receive. We develop this argument by highlighting two features of new assemblages that have been created in financial markets since 1999. First, these assemblages give sharp economic significance to spatial location and to physical phenomena such as the speed of light (the physics of these assemblages is Einsteinian, not Newtonian, so to speak). Second, they have provoked fierce controversy focusing on ultra-fast ‘high-frequency trading’, controversy in which issues of materiality are interwoven intimately with questions of legitimacy, particularly of fairness.  相似文献   

20.
Management devices from industrial sectors are proliferating in the public sector, a trend now being accused of undermining the proper values of public organizations. A prominent example of such a management device is lean management, which is a set of principles and tools employed by contemporary management consultants to eliminate waste and promote value – often for the sake of efficiency. While lean management has been particularly welcomed in the healthcare sector, healthcare professionals are increasingly resisting attempts at leaning their work processes. Applying the notion of trials of valuation, this study empirically unfolds the conflicts arising when lean management is used to reorganize the task of distributing patients to beds in a children’s hospital. Following the turn to value and the pragmatic tenet of studying values as the outcome of work, this paper suggests that the effects of a management device on the values of an organization can fruitfully be investigated for its ability to organize. Further, the paper contributes to the field of valuation studies with a heuristic to undertake such an investigation, directing attention towards the object of valuation, the temporal and spatial dimensions of the valuation situation, and the knowledge used to inform that valuation.  相似文献   

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