Liz Moor

Branding consultants as cultural intermediaries

Advertising agencies are frequently the focus of sociological studies investigating the ways in which commodities are imbued with meanings, and the impacts of these efforts on consumer activity. However, advertising agencies face increasing competition from other symbolic intermediaries, of which branding consultancies are some of the most successful. This paper explores the nature and significance of branding by focusing upon three key themes: first, its history and relationship to the design industry; secondly, its everyday practice and efforts to translate brand values into material, as well as visual, form; and thirdly, the forms of knowledge drawn upon in its decision-making processes, and their relationship to its broader power and influence. These themes are addressed through a combination of historical analysis and empirical material drawn from interviews with branding professionals, and are framed with reference to the literature on cultural intermediaries

Sport and Commodification A Reflection on Key Concepts

Studies of the impact of structural changes in sports organizations on the nature of fan cultures have been an important part of the sociology of sport in recent years, and such studies have come to rely on the concepts of class, commodification, and consumption. This paper suggests that although such concepts are indeed important, their contentiousness and complexity are not always acknowledged, and that the concepts may therefore acquire an overgeneralized and taken-for-granted set of meanings. The paper uses examples from studies of football fan cultures in Britain to highlight some of the potential problems with this, before going on to outline some additional and alternative approaches to these terms, and to make suggestions as to how these might be incorporated into future research.

MAKING AND MEASURING VALUE: Comparison, singularity and agency in brand valuation practice

This paper explores the use of three different forms of valuation and measurement by or on behalf of brands and branded organizations: financial brand valuation; brand equity measurement; and internal social or environmental evaluations. These systems, it is argued, are sites at which possible relationships between economic and other values are explored, and at which understandings of what is valuable emerge in tandem with the means for acknowledging and measuring it. By tracing the contexts and workings of these systems the paper shows how they allow aspects of the social world, including relationships and affects, to be partially absorbed into the brand as values. We argue that in an environment in which ‘value’ is imagined to be diffuse but omnipresent, the proliferation of valuation systems evidences both a requirement for new forms of measurement (capable of capturing multiple forms of value) and a search for novel ways of linking measurement and valuation. The paper concludes with an exploration of how these new ways of linking measurement and valuation may allow economic agency to be recognized and distributed.

Fourth worlds and neo-Fordism: American Apparel and the cultural economy of consumer anxiety

This article examines the strategies of the ‘sweatshop-free’ clothing company American Apparel in the context of ongoing debates over the cultural turn and cultural economy. American Apparels key selling point is that it does not outsource: it manufactures in Los Angeles, California, pays ‘good’ wages and provides health care, yet the workers are not unionized and the migrant labour it depends upon is often temporary. These same employees are used in promotional material to create its brand identity of an irreverent, hip and quasi-sexualized ‘community’ of consumers and workers. A design- and brand-led company that nonetheless does not see itself as a brand in any conventional sense, and markets itself as ‘transparent’, the companys ethos turns on consumer anxiety towards the socio-economic injustices of post-Fordism. Indeed, it marks a partial return to Fordist modes of production by aiming to manufacture everything under one roof, whilst deploying modes of informality (and technology) stereotypically associated with the post-Fordist creative industries. This paper considers the complex dynamics of American Apparels emergence in a reflexive marketplace (in relation to what Callon has termed an ‘economy of qualities’) and discusses its problematic negotiations with ‘fourth worlds’, or the zones of exclusion Castells terms ‘the black holes of informational capitalism’.

Beyond cultural intermediaries? A socio-technical perspective on the market for social interventions

Marketing has long been considered part of cultural intermediary activity, but still sits a little oddly alongside the ‘cultural’ TV producers and ‘quality’ journalists and critics originally used to typify the category. This article argues that such a tension is productive, and uses an underexplored aspect of marketing – social marketing – to pursue some more conceptual questions about the nature and usefulness of the term ‘cultural intermediaries’. It employs a framework loosely derived from actor-network theory to describe the emergence of social marketing in Britain, paying particular attention to the efforts to construct a market for such services, the need to consider material and non-human forms of agency in cultural intermediary activity, and the value of understanding cultural intermediary work in terms of ‘culturalisation’ – that is, as a process by which some areas of life are designated as belonging to the problem of culture, and others not.

The materiality of method : the case of the Mass Observation Archive

The Mass Observation Archive presents numerous methodological issues for social researchers. The data are idiosyncratic, difficult to analyze, and the sample design is nonsystematic. Such issues seriously challenge conventional social research protocols. This article highlights a further characteristic of the archive: its unwieldy materiality. Focusing on the sensory experiences of the archive and its particular type of data, the article shows how the experience of getting ‘dirty with data’ plays a real and dynamic part of conducting Mass Observation research. Building on these observations, and drawing on two recent projects that have used the Archive, we reflect on the extent to which these issues are genuinely methodologically problematic, and how far the materiality of method and the sensuousness of data play a part in other research sites and methodological approaches too. In doing so, we emphasize the physical and logistical practicalities involved in engaging with all kinds of data, and highlight the opportunities as well as the constraints that these pose. We draw attention to the sensuous ‘cues’ and ‘hints’ offered by the Archives materiality, and explore different ways of responding to these and their likely implications for the type and status of outputs produced. Finally, we consider the implications of our discussion for possible future attempts to digitize the contents of the Archive.

Price and the person : markets, discrimination and personhood

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.

Money: communicative functions of payment and price

ABSTRACT Money is rich in semiotic potential and its capacity to express social identity and collectivity is well established. This essay explores a range of communicative functions of money, focusing in particular on the ways in which payments and prices may serve as cultural signals. It asks how the communicative significance of money might change as a result of the introduction of new types of currency, payment systems and pricing techniques, and suggests that such developments are likely to involve revisiting two key tensions: between state or corporate power on the one hand, and individual autonomy and privacy on the other; and between money’s power to generate collectivity and its power to divide and exclude.

Money Talk at the Mass Observation Archive

This chapter discusses people’s accounts of money in their childhood, using responses to the Mass Observation Archive’s 1982 Autumn Directive. This material provides valuable insights for understanding how people talk about money. In particular, the data indicate that in describing early experiences with money, respondents typically emphasise its entanglement in intra-familial relationships, and, often, try to provide explanations or justifications for their experience, despite not having being asked to do so. However, the data also show that research into talk about money can easily fall into the trap of repeating conventional or normative assumptions and may fail to capture the richness and complexity of people’s economic experience. The chapter concludes with some suggestions about how to develop these insights in future research.

On brutal culture

If it is true that culture has succumbed to the ‘derivative logic’ of contemporary economies of circulation, deprived of essential attributes and working to scramble and undermine the very premise of culture as essence, the word nevertheless continues to be used to explain things that are politically difficult, intractable, and yes, undeniably brutal.