Heidi Hirsto

Personal interviews in cultural consumer research – post‐structuralist challenges

This paper takes a post‐structuralist perspective on consumer research and discusses the role of personal interviews in cultural analysis. It problematizes the use of the phenomenological interview in cultural consumer research, arguing that the underlying research paradigm, existential‐phenomenology, is not necessarily adequate for cultural analysis because it focuses attention primarily on the individual and the first‐person experience. Such a paradigmatic perspective is problematic because it tends to sustain a view of human agency that is highly individualistic and thus fails to account for the cultural complexity of social action. Overall, the paper contributes to the further development of the post‐structuralist approaches to postmodern marketing thought. Post‐structuralist ideas and assumptions challenge the central principles of modern marketing and consumer research in many ways and it is the aim of the paper to contribute to a better understanding of the methodological implications that they entail.

Emotions in Institutional Work: A Discursive Perspective

This article focuses on the dynamics and interplay of meaning, emotions, and power in institutional work. Based on an empirical study, we explore and elaborate on the rhetorical strategies of emotion work that institutional actors employ to mobilize emotions for discursive institutional work. In an empirical context where a powerful institutional actor is tasked with creating support and acceptance for a new political and economic institution, we identify three rhetorical strategies of emotion work: eclipsing, diverting and evoking emotions. These strategies are employed to arouse, regulate, and organize emotions that underpin legitimacy judgments and drive resistance among field constituents. We find that actors exercise influence and engage in overt forms of emotion work by evoking shame and pride to sanction and reward particular expedient ways of thinking and feeling about the new institutional arrangements. More importantly, however, the study shows that they also engage in strategies of discursive institutional work that seek to exert power—force and influence—in more subtle ways by eclipsing and diverting the collective fears, anxieties, and moral indignation that drive resistance and breed negative legitimacy evaluations. Overall, the study suggests that emotions play an important role in institutional work associated with creating institutions, not only via “pathos appeals” but also as tools of discursive, cultural-cognitive meaning work and in the exercise of power in the field.

Everyday discourses of stock market investing: Searching for investor power and responsibility

The latest financial crisis has aroused public discussion about the moral aspects of financial speculation and the rights and responsibilities of different market actors, including private consumers of financial products. Shifting the focus away from the level of individual morals and choices, this paper sets out to trace the discursive “conditions of possibility” for reflective and responsible financial consumption. Through a critical discourse analysis of media and marketing texts, the paper identifies and examines four conventionalized discourses of stock market investing: market mechanics, market psychology, market participation, and market expertise. The paper shows how each of these widely normalized discourses articulates investing as an individual enterprise of wealth management, devoid of broader social or political relevance. It is argued that the prevalence of such representations is likely to discourage social awareness with regard to financial consumption and to impede the establishment of fair and sustainable market practices.

Economic Citizenship in Online Financial News: Affect and Argumentation in Eurocrisis News Coverage

This paper evaluates the practices of online news media in representing citizens in the midst of the Eurozone crisis from the perspective of civic participation. Our special focus is on the interplay of argumentation and affect as crucial sources of political action. The empirical analysis examines affective and argumentative framing in two multimodal story types, captioned photo galleries and video reviews, and evaluates their capacity facilitating or hindering political agency. Video reviews construct news narratives that incorporate both affective and argumentative elements. Photo galleries, by contrast, emphasize affect at the cost of argumentation and voice resulting in alienation and silencing. The analysis gives grounds to suggest that dramatized visual news narratives about the financial crisis echo discourses of war on terror and unspecific threat. Such discourses legitimize pre-emptive action (austerity measures, police force), which, in effect, participate in producing what it is supposed to fight (economic inequality, social unrest, violence).