Deborah Leslie

Spatializing commodity chains

There has been a growing interest in connecting production and consumption through the study of commodity chains. We identify three distinct approaches to the chain and review debates concerning the merits of a ‘vertical’ rather than a ‘horizontal’ approach. Drawing upon the example of the home furnishings commodity chain, the article highlights the importance of including horizontal factors such as gender and place alongside vertical chains. We consider geographical contingencies which underpin commodity chain dynamics, the role of space in mediating relationships across the chain and the spatialities of different products.

Geographies of Displacement in the Creative City: The Case of Liberty Village, Toronto

Creative industries are increasingly associated with employment, tourism and the attraction and retention of talent in economic development discourse. However, there is a need to foreground the interests involved in promoting the creative city and the political implications of such policies. This paper analyses new industry formation in Liberty Village—a cultural industry precinct in inner-city Toronto, Canada. The focus is on the place-making strategies at work in constructing Liberty Village. In particular, the paper explores a series of displacements associated with creative districts, focusing on three scales in particular—the level of the city, the neighbourhood and the precinct itself. An examination of these displacements foregrounds the contested nature of the creative city script.

Global Scan: The Globalization of Advertising Agencies, Concepts, and Campaigns

AbstractThis paper explores the role of the advertising industry in mediating geographic aspects of economic and cultural change. A transnationalization of advertising agencies through both foreign direct investment and acquisition has concentrated control and extended the spatial reach of a few large American, Japanese, and British advertising agencies and holding companies in the 1980s and 1990s. In the case of U.S. agencies, internal reorganization signals a greater geographic concentration of advertising services in New York City and cutbacks at regional offices. I argue that “global agencies” have realigned their internal operations to facilitate a global advertising approach and have promoted images of “globalism” congruent with their transnational expansion. Agencies have accelerated the push toward standardized campaigns, global research studies, global media buying, and international accounts. In this way, agencies mediate the globalization of both clients and consumptive markets.

Gender, Retail Employment and the Clothing Commodity Chain

This article analyzes the conditions of employment in fashion retailing, arguing that fashion retailing constitutes a distinct sector of retailing. The fashion commodity chain is characterized by a unique spatiality and temporality and as a result, female retail workers share much in common with women situated at production, advertising and consumption sites in the chain. Given that many of the issues women confront at different sites are similar, the sector is amenable to organizing across the chain.

Governing the Design Economy in MontrÉal, Canada

Cultural industries have assumed an increased importance to urban economic development. However, little attention has been paid to accommodating the complex set of activities—both cultural and economic—implicated in cultural production. A recognition of this complexity, however, has significant implications for policy. This paper considers the design sector in Montréal, a sector which has attained international visibility in recent years. We analyze the role played by four public and nonprofit institutions in regulating this sector and illuminate their mechanisms for reconciling commercial and aesthetic imperatives. An examination of such initiatives lends insight into the opportunities and the challenges within policy circles for accommodating a conceptualization of cultural industries that recognizes their irreducibly hybrid nature.

Identity, consumption and the home

Despite a rich literature on the power dynamics of households within domestic space, the specificities of home consumption have been undertheorized within broader accounts of consumption and identity. Consumption frequently is conceptualized as a individualistic process, undertaken by a single self-reflexive actor. Focusing upon the purchasing, acquisition and display of furniture and other domestic goods, this article reflects upon the role of home consumption in identity construction within both individual households as well as different household groups. We argue that home consumption at times may be equally important to both individual and multiple households—despite conventional associations between homemaking and the nuclear family. Notions of the self may be dissipated in collective provisioning by households consisting of couples, although fractures and conflict also may undermine general agreements about shared space. Both the making of the landscape inside the home and the narration of this making are ongoing projects undertaken within and through the diverse webs of relationship among individuals within a household.

Gender, Modern Design, and Home Consumption

Beset by a range of internal inconsistencies and contradictions, modernism never has been able to expunge completely that which has been constructed as its ‘Other’. Often coded as feminine, notions of ornamentation, decoration, craft, and ephemerality have long been defined in opposition to the modernist project. In this paper we chart a return to the aesthetics of modernism in the retailing, marketing, and consumption of household furniture during the 1990s as a means of extending existing assessments of modernist discourses. Given past associations between modernism and masculinity, we critically evaluate contemporary shifts in home consumption in the context of the gendering of the modern.

Flexibly Specialized Agencies? Reflexivity, Identity, and the Advertising Industry

In this paper I examine the process of restructuring in advertising, an image-oriented industry, in the context of debates over flexible specialization and reflexive modernization. There have been far-reaching changes in the US advertising industry in the 1980s and 1990s, including the recent expansion of small, flexible, and more creatively based agencies or ‘boutiques’. The growth of creative agencies reveals a desire on the part of advertisers to reroute rising consumer skepticism of advertising by producing more reflexive, innovative work and signals a heightened apparatus of control. The case of advertising raises questions about the limits to reflexive consumer subjectivities.

Femininity, Post-Fordism, and the ‘New Traditionalism’

In this paper I explore the links between identity and space, and in particular the relationship between female identity, consumption, and the space of the home. I argue for the centrality of images to the construction of femininity. Through a case study of contemporary representations of the family and traditionalism in advertising, I illustrate how advertisers exploit tensions in femininity, and in turn mediate and negotiate these tensions. Alongside the economic and cultural shifts associated with post-Fordism, a reorganization of gender relations is taking place. A ‘new traditionalism’ in advertising, as one of a number of significant female consumer identities, is an attempt to redefine womens roles in line with a nostalgic discourse of familialism and a return to the private sphere of the home. Space and place are central to the definition of the ‘new traditionalist’ woman.

Creativity and Place in the Evolution of a Cultural Industry the Case of Cirque du Soleil

The Cirque du Soleil, based in Montreal, is known internationally for its innovative form of circus production. Although a transnational company recruiting talent from around the world, it is argued that the Cirque’s ability to innovate is underpinned by its historical and geographical situatedness in Montreal. Drawing on evolutionary economics, the paper examines the place-specific and path-dependent trajectory which has informed the emergence of the Cirque, focusing on how a series of latent synergies—including a vibrant tradition of street performance in Quebec, the lack of established circus conventions, and the strength of related cultural sectors in Montreal—gave rise to the Cirque. In addition, the paper explores the purposive role of the state in actualising some of these latent synergies.