Benjamin J. Hartmann

Peeking behind the mask of the prosumer Theorizing the organization of consumptive and productive practice moments

This article aims to contribute to long-standing debates on a dialectical relation between consumption and production. Whilst previous literature suggests an intermingling of consumption with production within economic spheres, individuals, firm–consumer interactions and consumer cultural processes, the discussion remains relatively stagnant when it comes to theorizing how the relationship between consumption and production is organized. In this article, I use a practice–theoretical perspective to reorient the discussion of the interplay between consumption and production to the level of practice performances. Complementing previous work on consumption as a moment in practice, this article theorizes consumption and production as alternate moments within practices of everyday living and unfolds how the relation between consumptive and productive moments is inscribed in a specific teleoaffective structure named facilitation. This advances an alternative view on craftsmanship, craft consumption and prosumption. Empirical material collected through interviews, observations, diaries and netnography within guitar playing and gardening systematically illustrates the theoretical proposals.

Media Brand Cultures: Researching and Theorizing How Consumers Engage in the Social Construction of Media Brands

In this chapter we acknowledge the branding process as an interplay between brand owners, consumers, popular culture, and other stakeholders. This interdependence between management practices and the external environment is becoming increasingly evident, not the least in the field of media. In a world of social and participatory media, consumers are given more and more opportunities to interact with, and through, their favorite brands. On the one hand these interactions may be signs of deep and sincere appreciation, while at the same time making brands more and more difficult to control or direct from a managerial point of view. This has led brand managers and researchers to identify a need for new insights into the cultures of brands. The research on consumer culture that has evolved over the past decades has the power to provide guidance. This chapter offers an introduction to researching and theorizing how consumers engage in the social construction of media brands and points out a handful of promising research areas.

Authenticating by re-enchantment: The discursive making of craft production

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of the way brand authentication operates through discursive enchantment as a series of ongoing negotiations among different market actors. We suggest that one specific type of enchantment, the concept of craft production, has been given too sparse attention in conceptualisations of authenticity. Through a qualitative multi-method inquiry based into the guitar subculture and a brand genealogy of the pseudo-Swedish guitar brand Hagstrom, we show how the rationalising trajectories of modernity can not only have disenchanting effects, but can also be dis-authenticating. We illustrate how various marketplace participants collectively engage in brand re-enchantment processes that provide the springboard for re-authenticating rationalised production through five enchanting craft discourses: vocation, dedication, tradition, mystification, and association.

Business Perspectives on Work in News Organizations

Abstract This article provides an overview of literature relating to work and work organization and relates the approaches, concepts, and theories to contemporary changes in news organizations. The authors thus provide a fundamental basis for analyzing, exploring, and understanding the effects and implications of the changes on individuals,workgroups, and news organizations as a whole.

The electric guitar – marketplace icon

The electric guitar is an ubiquitous part of contemporary consumer culture. In this Marketplace Icons contribution, we illuminate the iconicity of the electric guitar and what lies behind its thick layers of distorted riffs, mad soloing escapades and eccentric onstage performances, specifically within the rock genre. The genesis of electric guitar playing involves a series of technological alterations of the guitar that freed it from a mere background instrument allowing for new musical roles. It quickly became apparent that all the technical solutions designed to get rid of what was defined as unwanted noise could be turned “against” the clean tone and instead be used to create a unique sound. The control of these noise elements, such as feedback and distortion, became a core element of mastering the modern electric guitar. Rather than just being a marketplace icon, we argue that the electric guitar is fetishized because both its audio quality – the loudness and the potential roughness of the sound – and its visual looks and onstage performances symbolizes youthful rebellion, the essence of rock and roll.

Emotion and practice: Mothering, cooking, and teleoaffective episodes

While emotions are a central facet of consumer culture, relatively little is known about how they are tied to the embodied and tacit aspects of everyday living. This article explores how practices organize emotions and vice versa. Pairing Schatzki’s teleoaffective structure with emotions understood as intensities that are deeply inscribed in the structural blueprints of practices, we propose that the organization of emotions and practices is recursive and based on three teleoaffective episodes: anticipating, actualizing, and assessing. To illustrate this, we present an analysis of empirical material from an ethnographic study on mothering. The practice–emotion link we unfold contributes to understanding the operation of emotions in consumer culture by specifying how practices and emotions are co-constitutive. This offers novel insights into the embodied and routinized nature of emotions, illuminates the connection between practices and individuals, and highlights the role of emotions in practice change.

Inventing a past: Corporate heritage as dialectical relationships of past and present

In this commentary, we focus on invented corporate heritage, where organizations present falsified accounts of a corporate past. The extant corporate heritage literature has highlighted how the time frames of the past, present, and future (omni temporality) are merged in those organizations where there is trait constancy. Focusing on invented corporate heritage, we argue that this represents an extreme case of these dialectics, where present and future precede “the past,” or more appropriately “invented past.” Although lacking in authenticity, an invented corporate heritage may still be attractive to consumers since it can construct an aura of authenticity by delivering an enchanting experience to consumers, irrespective of its substantive genuineness. However, such inventions carry considerable risk since they represent a fabrication of the past.

Academic liner notes: a re-inquiry of Chris Hackley’s (2012) CCT Blues

ABSTRACT While in certain sub-areas of marketing and consumer research, alternative modes of investigation and representation have been mushrooming for a while - i.e. publications of poetry, poetry sessions at conferences, videography, and fiction - we suggest music and complementary academic liner notes as another form of alternative investigation and expression. This paper offers accompanying notes to our original contribution in musical format as an alternative mode of representation and critical dramatization in marketing and consumer research. The song is called CCT Blues and is perfomed by Postmödern talking sans frontiers avéc fromage [the song can be found on Applemusic, iTunes, and Spotify searching for CCT Blues and the artist name.] These liner notes guide the academic listener through our reflexive critical dramatization of the current intellectual condition of the CCT research area in form of a cover song of Chris Hackley’s CCT Blues [2012a. CCT Blues Electric Version.wmv, June 2. Accessed November 25, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1pgyaiw610]. Consequently, this paper offers a backstage pass into the world of producing and packaging our critique in audio format.