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1.
ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss how changes in the economic infrastructure of mass consumption have changed the values and attitudes of consumer culture. By focusing on an online community of Israeli sex consumers and applying the theoretical framework of the prosumer economy, this article suggests its innovative potential for understanding the intersections of cyberspace, capitalism, and sex work consumption. Using the context of the dynamic cultural terrain of prosumerism, the article examines how commercial way of thinking is encouraged, understood, and adopted by sex consumers in the practice of purchasing sexual encounters and sharing them online. The main argument is that the online community of sex consumers has become a collaborative project in which consumers simultaneously produce and consume – that is, they become ‘prosumers’ and thus occupy positions of power within the capitalist market-place. They, therefore, not only responding to market rules but also producing them. I claim that the change in the nature of the community has impacted both the nature of online writing and the way clients perceive sex workers.  相似文献   

2.
ABSTRACT

Drawing on Mallard’s contribution [2007. Performance testing: dissection of a consumerist experiment. The sociological review, 55 (2), 152–172] on the work undertaken by consumerist journals to evaluate products independently from the mediation of market players, our goal is to characterize the new digital form of the consumerist mediator by using a specific case: Yuka, a mobile application (app) enabling consumers to obtain alternative health labeling on foodstuffs. Relying on interviews, observations of the app and analysis of underlying product databases and reports on food labeling issues, we examine the new forms of consumer-to-market interactions brought about by the app, the conceptions of health inscribed in its product qualification algorithm and the operation of the database on which it is based. Our position is threefold: firstly, we argue that the relationship between the consumer and the market established by Yuka is less distant than the one established by traditional consumerist mediators. Secondly, in the case of Yuka, we argue that the market relationship is based on a compromise between scientific logic, technological uncertainty and consumer concerns. Thirdly, we claim that this case demonstrates new ways for consumerist prescribers to politically intervene on markets, but that the potential of the intervention is tied to new issues related to the openness of product data.  相似文献   

3.
ABSTRACT

Previous studies have overlooked how intermediaries and their digital cultural capital enhance the relationship between brand values and consumer identities; their specific uses of digital technologies; and how those uses are displayed in activities where intermediaries create consumer experiences. This paper thus explores the role that cultural intermediaries (music bloggers and an advertising agency) and their digital cultural capital play in making and communicating a branded music event. Briefly, intermediaries used a set of digital technologies (social media, guest lists, blogs, and websites) to create and orchestrate an authentic and exclusive experience between brands and consumers. We draw on empirical material from interviews and ethnographic work conducted in Santiago, Chile. Our study identifies digital technologies used by cultural intermediaries in communicating branded music events, including as: promotional tools; advertising campaign efficacy evaluation mechanisms; and relational objects that connect advertising agencies, music bloggers, brands, and consumers. By exploring the tensions and conflicts that arise among bloggers and advertising executives, we shed light on the uses and exchanges of digital cultural capital for commercial purposes, resulting from the connections between intermediaries that come from different fields of cultural production.  相似文献   

4.
We reconsider Rosen’s economics of superstars model establishing, in the case of single-type consumers, a constant price-to-quality ratio. Rosen also conjectured that, in the case of multiple-type consumers, the normal course of consumer behavior forces the price-to-quality relationship to be convex and prevents it from being concave. We show that this conjecture is false and explain why there is no a priori reason to rule out concavity in the price-to-quality relationship. In this model, the market matches consumers to artists on the basis of quality: consumers of each type select only one level of quality, supplied by artists endowed with a specific level of talent. The concavity or convexity of the price-to-quality relationship is non-trivially related to the way both populations are matched. Consumers with poor knowledge have greater fixed costs above and beyond the price they have to pay on the market. They are therefore less reluctant when prices rise sharply and they specialize in levels of quality that entail a high marginal appreciation of quality: this can mean either a high or a low level of quality, depending on price curvature. With convexity, as Rosen pointed out, they turn toward superstars. Symmetrically, convexity encourages connoisseurs to turn toward low quality. But concavity too is fully possible: consumer–artist matching, for the same reasons, simply has the reverse effect. Connoisseurs go for great talents, whose price of quality flattens out. The global shape of the price-to-quality relationship (concave or convex) is determined by market clearing conditions and, more crucially, by the distribution of agents on both sides.  相似文献   

5.
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   

6.
ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy focuses on the digitalization of consumption and its social, cultural, ethical, political, and gendered implications. It thus answers the call for more research on how digital devices spread from the purely personal domain to multiple sociocultural domains. Through their use, new cultural practices have emerged between consumers and these devices, and devices and markets, that lead to change, in terms of consumer demand, consumption norms, and issues of ethics, culture, and power. Closely examining the role that devices play in consumption behavior enables us to address the supposed manipulative power of hi-tech companies, infrastructures, and systems at the global level, and the view ordinary market actors hold of digital appliances as empowering tools at the local level. The papers in this volume bridge ‘actor network theory' and ‘consumer culture theory' from the perspective of market ‘agencements.’ Ruckenstein-Granroth and Beauvisage-Mellet, and Arriagada-Concha focus on the device-mediated relationship between large digital market infrastructures and consumer behavior; Petersson McIntyre and Licoppe unveil the societal and cultural underpinnings of digitalized markets. Last but not least, Sörum and Soujtis address the political dimensions and implications of our new digital consumer equipment and society.  相似文献   

7.
ABSTRACT

This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to ‘personalize’ price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others are novel and likely to be contested. We argue that many newer pricing techniques make it harder for consumers to identify themselves as part of a recognized group. We conclude that contemporary price personalization should be understood in terms of the intensification of individualization in combination with dividualization, and as such, contributes to novel and consequential forms of classification.  相似文献   

8.
In recent years, web sites where individual consumers can rate and review goods and services have mushroomed all over the Internet. Restaurants are particularly affected by online reviewing. If the impact of online consumer reviews (OCRs) on the demand side of markets is now well understood and measured, few studies examine the reception of this new evaluation method by those who are assessed. Based on interviews with French restaurant managers, our research shows that OCRs systems reconfigure relations of accountability in the restaurant industry. We use the notion of reactivity to describe the mechanisms through which the new evaluation system transforms the activity of restaurants. We also examine the affects surrounding the reception of ratings and reviews by restaurant managers and the moral criteria that accompany their discourses on online reviews. Many restaurants consider online reviews as a brutal and hypocritical mode of judgment. The judgment produced by online ratings and reviews is not easily borne by restaurant managers, because it challenges the conventions of quality they had previously internalized as legitimate, that is, those produced by professional experts. We interpret this ambivalent reception as the unfinished movement of transforming a performative reputation device into a legitimate evaluation institution.  相似文献   

9.
Abstract

The Product (RED) campaign raises money to fight AIDS in Africa by helping to sell brand-name merchandise to affluent consumers. This paper examines the racialized representations of the (RED) website and the campaign's use of a consumer–celebrity fund-raising model. Through the analytical lens of critical cultural studies, I argue that (RED) commodifies Africans and “African-ness” under a celebratory guise, and reinscribes a narrative of Africa as a “problem child.” The campaign paradoxically trades on the very disparities of global capitalism that propel the AIDS crisis. It is central in (re)producing the human consequences of globalization, shoring up a symbolic and material marketplace marked by extreme poverty and extreme consumption.  相似文献   

10.
Major Hollywood studios typically release new movies in North America in one of the two ways, wide release or platform release. In this paper, we investigate how release form affects the demand of a new movie after it is nationally released. In particular, we focus on movies for which the platform release is pre-planned to make the problem tractable. We estimate our model using a sample of Hollywood movies that eventually received nationwide release from 1999 to 2003. Our results show that platform release shifts consumers’ perception of unobservable movie appeal through its first stage performance, which turns out to be a stronger effect than that of advertising. Meanwhile, we find that the demand for platform movies decays faster than for wide release ones after their national release. Using counterfactual analysis, we find that more than half of the platform movies which later went to national release would have earned higher profits if they had been given a wide release.  相似文献   

11.
ABSTRACT

We develop the concept of methods as ‘forces of subjectivation’ in relation to experiments we have encountered in a study of government methods for generating official population statistics. These experiments problematise the subjects of traditional methods based on paper questionnaires and offer new digital technologies and data sources as possible solutions. We reflect on these experiments in relation to recent work on sociological and digital research methods as inventive and live. What this work identifies in relation to questions of research methods we take up to think about government methods in two ways. One concerns how government method experiments offered as solutions to problematic subjects, once put into action, change initial problem formulations and are inventive of new ones. Secondly, they are also inventive of their subjects who do not pre-exist but come into being through the agential capacities that methods configure. Both aspects of methods, we argue, are the result of the interactions and dynamics between human and technological actors, the outcomes of which cannot be settled in advance.  相似文献   

12.
The cinema exhibition sector in Spain, as well as in the rest of Europe, is a dynamic sector characterised by the present growth of multiplexes and consumer demand after a long period of decline. These changes make it relevant to analyse the cinema attendees' profile from a marketing perspective. To this end, we have developed an exploratory study on segmentation applied to the young cinema attendees. Doing so, we have found three different groups according to benefits sought in their going to the cinema and other demographic and behavioural variables. On the basis of information as such, specific marketing objectives could be set and more efficient strategies designed and implemented.  相似文献   

13.
The paper reflects on the ways market research in Britain helped produce understandings of and information about the ‘mass housewife’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper does this through a case study of the market research used and generated by the London subsidiary office of J. Walter Thompson advertising. The paper focuses on key client accounts, as well as the agency's non-product specific research, as a way of exploring how it sought to understand the ordinary housewife and her consumption habits. In exploring JWT London's approach to the ‘mass market’ housewife, the paper draws on recent sociological arguments about advertising and market research that have conceptualized these commercial practices as technologies or socio-technical devices for ‘making-up’ the consumer. However, the paper also seeks to revise certain aspects of this sociological approach. It does this by proposing a more differentiated sense of the various marketing and market research paradigms that were used by advertising agencies in order to contest the claim that post-war market research was subject to growing sophistication under the influence of the psychological sciences. Secondly, the paper seeks to bring a more international and specifically trans-Atlantic dimension to the understanding of post-war market research. US-derived techniques formed a visible presence within post-war British market research and constituted a key point of reference for British-based practitioners. This influence was neither totalizing nor did it go unchallenged, but even as they rejected elements of ‘American’ approaches to the consumer, British practitioners still had to reckon with their intellectual authority and commercial force in this period.  相似文献   

14.
ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.  相似文献   

15.
While there is a fair amount of work on determinants of demand for the live performing arts, results have often been contradictory with little explanatory power. This may be because of the difficulty in describing the attributes of a performance, particularly in terms of its quality, and the heterogeneity of consumer preferences. This article uses conjoint analysis, also called choice experiments, to investigate the impact of the attributes of live theatre performances on demand, using data collected from 483 randomly chosen attenders at live theatre performances at the 2008 South African National Arts Festival. Attributes include the type of cast (professional, semi-professional or amateur), reputation of the producer/director, the context or setting, production type and ticket price of the show. Results largely support the a priori expectations based on the results of other demand studies. For example, it is found that the age of consumers affects the type of show chosen, that utility and willingness to pay increase for shows with professional and semi-professional casts and that 93% of the potential audience prefer shows with a South African context. It is concluded that the method could prove useful to both event organisers and policy makers, especially where the goal is to broaden access to the arts.
J. D. SnowballEmail:
  相似文献   

16.
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   

17.
The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’. The varied, messy and sometimes contradictory understandings of value, values, worth and goodness that are present in the calculative device of Punternet reveal the complex ways in which market actions are made moral by consumers. ‘Value’ in the market for sex is a moral judgement made by male authors whose understandings of themselves as deserving customers derives from the stories they tell of good and bad service providers. Although the moral status of prostitution is contested by many, Punternet reports lay claim to it being a legitimate consumer activity, with customers themselves vulnerable to being denied ‘value for money’. The good worker is seen as providing value for money by being professional, committed to pleasing the customer and appearing to enjoy her job.  相似文献   

18.
In this paper, we adopt the framework of analysis of the economy of qualities [Callon, M., Méadel, C. & Rabeharisoa, V. (2002) ‘The economy of qualities’, Economy and Society, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 194–217] to describe the sales and marketing practices of a French farm supply company whose products have uncertain characteristics and disputed effects. We show that this uncertainty leads sales staff of the company to develop an argument designed to generate attachments but also, and even more importantly, detachments. We also show that these detachments and attachments do not just concern the farmer, the company and its products. To understand the competitive dynamics involved here, it is also necessary to focus on the associations that are broken and established with natural entities, actors in the supply chain, institutions of agricultural science and conceptions of the farming profession.  相似文献   

19.
From a representative survey of 2,000 individuals, we study whether consumption of music through streaming services, like Spotify or YouTube, is a substitute or a complement to physical music consumption modes, such as CDs and live music. Controlling for the taste for music, various socio-demographic characteristics and the usual determinants of music consumption either offline (radio, TV, friends/relatives) or online (online recommendations, social networks), our results show that free music streaming (where the consumer does not possess the music but only has access to it) has no significant effect on CD sales and affects positively live music attendance, but only for national or international artists who are more likely to be available on streaming services.  相似文献   

20.
Abstract

News translation, which takes many forms, encounters two types of cultural resistance that hinder intercultural understanding. The first is apparent in the need to transform a text in order to make it meaningful in a new context, while the second results from the irreducibility of culture as a way of life to the form of a text. This article illustrates both forms of resistance by analyzing a story originally broadcast on The National in Canada in 1992, and it concludes by considering the implications of the power relations between journalists and the people they describe in acts of news translation.  相似文献   

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