What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation

Theorists of discourse have long recognised the complexities of attributing reported speech in textual circulation. Yet rarely does one follow words from an original speech event through their many re-entextualisations, and it has proved particularly difficult to capture such circulations between oral events, print, and online media. This article captures such movements by following the mediatised – and politicised – afterlife of a speech event that would normally be classified, in academia, as ‘a talk’. It begins with a talk on Russia, given by the author-anthropologist of this paper, that was (mis)reported in Russian by a Voice of America (VOA) journalist, then traces the resulting text's subsequent movement from the VOA website into the Russian fieldsite that the oral talk described. It explores how the tone and substance of debates over politics and representation were enabled, constrained, and otherwise shaped by the particular textual circulations made possible in digital media. As the text traversed online newspapers, comments forums, blogs, social media networks, and private-turned-public personal emails, it produced a body of commentary that was both directly and indirectly a struggle over representation. While substantive debates unfolded over ethnic and national politics, much of the online commentary concerned the expertise of the commenters weighing in and the expertise and identity of the anthropologist who had been cited. This essay argues that Russian commenters and posters were productively using the intertextual gaps offered by digital circulation, while minimising those gaps' increasing breadth and depth by attributing ‘original’ authorship to a discrete, stable person.     

Reputational capital in ‘the PR University’: public relations and market rationalities

Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education.     

On the Symbolic Production of Digital Markets for Cultural Goods

This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.     

THE PROPER COPY

Efforts to make (and keep) knowledge public have provided a powerful counter-model to the recent expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights in such arenas as information technology, digital media, biological research, and pharmaceutical access. While sympathetic to the impulse to counteract the new ‘enclosures’ with knowledge made public, this essay critically interrogates some of the constitutive limits – in fact, the constitutive outsides – to these counter formulations. Paying particular attention to how public domain initiatives, like their strict intellectual property counterparts, also police the line between the proper and the improper copy, I argue that mechanisms for keeping knowledge public do not just circle the wagons against the predations of the Monsantos and Microsofts of the world. In their rhetorical and normative commitments to the proper copy, they also risk reproducing some of the same constrictions and exclusions that we tend to associate with (privatized) acts of enclosure itself. I explore this argument first in reference to creative commons and copyright, which can reproduce a strong ideological commitment to improvement – ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ – against the mere copy. What is the cost, I ask, of making the idea of improvement the price of admission not just to intellectual property claims, but to participation in newly ‘democratic’ public and common spaces of knowledge production? Second, I look to global pharmaceutical politics – specifically, regulatory efforts to improve access to cheaper copied and generic drugs in Argentina – to raise questions about the public domain's normative place in the continued expansion and harmonization of intellectual property regimes in the so-called global South. Together, these discussions suggest how the public domain and the commons, like their IP counterparts, can rhetorically and normatively expand and be secured against the improper copy.     

Human and non-human intermediation in rural agricultural markets

ABSTRACT

A central trope of the information society is that of ‘information flows.’ The implicit assumption underlying such a vision involves the removal of gatekeepers and intermediaries who are perceived to impede such flows. Drawing from field research on information circulation, trade, and money in rural markets in Myanmar and India, we show why intermediaries persist alongside information and communication technologies (ICTs) in trade and financial transactions in the ‘Information Age.’ We examine the range of roles, (human and non-human) actors, and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions, and we show the importance of historical legacies and politics in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age. Focusing on the different value that human and non-human intermediaries bring to financial encounters helps explain what characteristics make each resilient or replaceable in a time of change. By situating intermediaries and mediations in the social relations within which they operate, we bring back the role of power and politics – an element that is often missing in accounts focused on the unmediated and ‘free’ circulation of information using ICTs – in explaining processes of mediation and circulation.     

Perverse Tactics: ‘Terrorism’ and National Identity in France

This essay focuses on the French legal concept of denaturalisation (déchéance de la nationalité), paying particular attention to the link between denaturalisation and the notion of ‘terrorism’ in French law. Critically reviewing and assessing relevant parliamentary debates and reports from the 1980s and 1990s, the essay discusses the extent to which the legal definition of terrorism is caught in and fuels an affective economy at the basis of denaturalisation practices. Accordingly, the essay argues that while ‘terrorism’ operates as the unknown and unknowable threat, the term follows a narrative of uncertainty and crisis that goes in two directions. On the one hand, it shapes a surface of power by aligning those being labelled as terrorists against the community. On the other, the ambiguous semantic content of the term allows those in power to constantly review the boundaries of their own categories.     

‘This could be our reality in the next five to ten years’: a blogpost platform as an expectation generation device on the future of insurance markets

William James (1919) characterises hypotheses as either live or dead. A hypothesis is live when it is taken into account as a ‘real possibility’. We follow James’ suggestion to not attribute intrinsic properties to hypotheses, but rather investigate how they came into being and look at the effects they generate. Expectations of digital technologies are a topic of vivid debate in the insurance industry. Before these expectations can become ‘live’, they have, in the first place, to be generated by market devices. We investigate how the reinsurance blogpost platform Open Minds functions as an ‘expectation generation device’ on the future of insurance markets. Combining Beckert’s work on the role of fictional expectations with the pragmatist turn in sociology of markets, we propose to study ‘expectation generation devices’, provoking expectations on economic markets. In our empirical analysis, we demonstrate the explicit fictional character of the Open Minds contributions, and analyse how a contained space of openness is generated to provoke expectations. We demonstrate how Open Minds can become live through circulation to other expectation generation sites in the insurance industry and beyond. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of expectation generation devices as a particular type of market devices.     

The paradoxes of creativity in Guangzhou,China’s wholesale market for fast fashion

ABSTRACT

In Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector, creativity operates as practices in boundary-making, which emerge in spaces within the blurred boundaries that delineate original and copy production. Using the Xi Fang Hang market as a case study, I demonstrate how the quick turnover of fast fashion commodities compels different groups of market participants to claim contesting definitions and practices of creativity. While building managers and wealthy entrepreneurs mobilise techniques of rent extraction and claim originality as rightful sources of creativity, less established migrant entrepreneurs use design copying as a tool for market survival. With limited resources and formal education in fashion and merchandising, migrants claim success in delivering the right styles and trends at the right time and in keeping their businesses afloat. Together, these competing practices constitute what I call ‘paradoxes of creativity’, dynamics that highlight creativity as a fluid cultural category that is always subject to tensions and contestations.     

Swings and roundabouts: Swedish music copyrights 1980–2009

For this study, data from the annual reports of the STIM (the Swedish Performing Right Society) (By Swedes it is read as a word: ‘stim’ and not as four separate initials S.T.I.M.) were collected and analysed. If the general hypothesis that a digital technology shift has resulted in illegal downloading holds true, there should be a decrease in total revenues for composers from record sales. This is what the STIM data show. There has, however, been a simultaneous growth in income from other sources, which compensates for the loss from record royalties. This study also includes a unique data set from the STIM showing revenues for individual music IPR owners. The general finding is that a very small group of composers receives a very large share of the copyright revenues. Music as a ‘winner-takes-all’ arena is apparent.     

Intimacy and Self-Abstraction: Radio as New Media in Aboriginal Australia

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a number of Indigenous radio stations around Australia began to use digital programming and digital music libraries, at times pre-programming their broadcast signal days in advance through various forms of digital audio workstation (DAW). This shift initially caused both celebration and concern, and occasioned reflection by many producers on how radio ought to work and sound. For some producers the shift to digital pre-programming seemed a threat to the intimate address that Aboriginal radio entailed. On the other hand, some of these same producers began to re-imagine the audience to which such indigenous media might now aspire and to celebrate the sheer quantity of Aboriginal programming that a smaller number of producers could now produce. In challenging radio's naturalised ‘liveness’ for Aboriginal radio producers this oscillation suggests a distinct media ideology (Gershon 2010a), a sense of what radio media ought to accomplish, that draws together forms of intimate address and public abstraction. In my analysis I re-imagine John Durham Peters' heuristic dichotomy of dialogue and dissemination as a tension between intimacy and self-abstraction in order to suggest how radio as ‘new media’ continues to animate some longstanding dynamics of Aboriginal cultural production.     

Algorithms,advertising and the intimacy of surveillance

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.     

Keeping things different: coexistence within European markets for cleantech and biofuels

Environmental policy increasingly resorts to market-based instruments in order to meet sustainability objectives. The ‘carbon market’ instituted by the European Emissions Trading directive from 2003 is a canonical example, which has been described, and critiqued, as a delegation of policy objectives to market exchanges. In this paper, we examine the complex ways in which the operationalization of policy objectives and the organization of markets are intertwined, focusing on two other examples of European environmental regulation. The first one is the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control directive from 1996, which defined the ‘best available techniques’ to curb emissions in air, water and soil. The second one is the Renewable Energy Directive from 2009, which introduced criteria for the definition of the sustainability of biofuels. Through the analysis of the design and implementation of these two directives, we identify a central concern for the coexistence of various objects, and various initiatives undertaken by European institutions, member states and private actors. We use the notion of coexistence to describe a European political and economic ordering that is inherently hybrid, and cannot be reduced to a mere delegation of policy objectives to the market, or a legal constraint imposed on all European actors. It grounds its political legitimacy and economic rationality on the distribution of roles and responsibilities across public and private actors, and on the ability to ‘keep things different’ according to local variabilities.     

The Making of a ‘Good Deal’

Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent exchanges in Swedish society, and there are many reasons for performing them. On the one hand, a good deal is part of everyday social life when people help each other. On the other hand, a good deal also reinforces views that economic rationalities are values that do not exclusively adhere to formal markets. This article focuses on the values that construct the ‘good deal’ when getting your car fixed informally. These overlapping and somewhat contradictory values in theory, but commonplace in practice, illustrate how notions of reciprocity and economic calculations interweave and are difficult to entangle one from the other. The ‘good deal’ thus concerns how illegal, yet licit purchases of services are made acceptable when posing them as cheap and simple transactions that simultaneously invoke a realm of closer relations.     

Silicon Valley,disruption, and the end of uncertainty

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘demonic’ or rather eschatological elements apparent in the promissory twin rhetoric of disruption and inevitability that a number of contemporary technology firms employ. The conjuring up of liberatory high-tech futures implicates a political-philosophical perspective of the end game. It utilizes at once the productive power of uncertainty to create visions of ‘absolute riches’ and societal gain but at the same time narrows these futures down to one inevitable alternative to the status quo. Through the examples of two Silicon Valley disruptor firms, I argue that these eschatological narratives need to be opened to social scientific critique in order to examine their potential societal consequences above and beyond the narrow geographic confines of ‘the Valley.’     

Digitalizing consumer society: equipment and devices of digital consumption

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.     

Reading against culture in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism

Edward Said is the literary critic most cited by American anthropologists, but there has been relatively little anthropological examination of his concept of culture. Apart from an isolated attempt by Lila Abu‐Lughod to ‘write against culture’, most anthropologists have ignored Said’s approach. In Culture and Imperialism, Said draws on Matthew Arnold’s ‘best of the best’ definition, while American anthropologists owe their holistic culture to fellow Victorian Edward Tylor. Claude Levi‐Strauss is praised by Said, but other major anthropological approaches to culture are ignored. Said assumes anthropology is on the wrong side of the colonial divide, although he holds out hope for those who are now reading the work of literary and cultural critics. In this essay I compare Said’s reading of anthropology, exemplified by Kipling’s Colonel Creighton, to the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas on ethnographic method.     

Children’s market researchers as moral brokers

Drawing on interviews with children’s market researchers, brand managers and other market actors in North America, the UK and Europe, this study analyzes and positions children’s market professionals as knowledge brokers and moral interlocutors who transact between and among clients, colleagues and, at times, parents. The transactions – as understood by practitioners – extend beyond simply seeking to elicit ‘preferences’ for this or that product or experience and suggesting ‘market solutions’ to the immediate business problem at hand. Rather, the cultural labor exerted here resembles a continual sorting process in pursuit of the distinction between the child as a dependent economic actor from the child as a moral being worthy of recognition and commercial deference. They thereby strive to enable the continuity – i.e. erase the boundary – between markets and culture by enacting sympathy, sentiment and even intimacy in the conceptualization and execution of research. Investigating how these market professionals understand, construct and act upon children as economic actors, while situated amidst public, moral discourses to the contrary, opens possibilities to examine how value arises in the cultural practice of making social persons and how social personhood in some ways modulates and informs market exigencies.     

Against accumulation: lifestyle minimalism,de-growth and the present post-ecological condition

The post-2008 financial crisis era has seen an upsurge in popular cultural narratives that implicitly challenge principles of economic productivity, consumption and growth by lamenting a so-called ‘world of too much,’ advocating ethics of minimalism, and renouncing everyday busyness. Narratives range from lifestyle advice on simplicity and de-cluttering private homes, to quests for the reduction of individual labor, communication, social contacts and distraction. This article questions these narratives in terms of eco-politics. Using Kate Soper’s concept of ‘alternative hedonism,’ the article analyzes a selection of five self-help books and one blog that promote lifestyle minimalism in order to interrogate their potential in stimulating de-growth eco-politics through popular culture. Drawing on post-ecological theory, it argues that narratives of lifestyle minimalism are paradoxical in that they resist yet at the same time promote capitalist cultures of growth. To overcome this limitation, it is crucial to understand and transform the narrative premises of lifestyle minimalism in ways that contextualize problems of ‘excess,’ ‘clutter’ and ‘a world of too much’ as intrinsic to the current system of capital accumulation. The article concludes by reflecting on the potential of an eco-movement that joins the alternative culture of minimalist hedonism with the eco-political agenda of de-growth.     

Internet Software Piracy in China: A User Analysis of Resistance to Global Software Copyright Enforcement

Abstract

China's entry into the global networked society has raised considerable debate over what is derived from the development and expansion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the hotly debated issues is Internet copyright piracy, which is critical to the credibility and stability of China's membership to the global networked society. This paper examines Chinese users’ online discussion about Internet software piracy as local resistance to global copyright enforcement exercised through globalization processes. The study uses Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework of Polanyi's (1957) counter-hegemony and Gramsci's (1971) counter-movements as a heuristic device to conceptualize the resistance points to globalization located within the dominant discourse on intellectual property rights, specifically Internet software piracy, by Chinese Internet users. Gee's (2002) discourse analysis framework is applied to produce seven recurring themes within online postings: cost, convenience, software companies, foreign developed countries, China's development, Chinese culture, and moral dilemma. The analysis on these dominant themes illustrates the cultural models held by Chinese users towards the issues of Internet software piracy: Internet as a public domain, socialist market economy, patriotism, and Chinese culture. These cultural models represent different types of resistance in Mittelman and Chin's (2005) framework. Meanwhile, these resistance positions are integrated under the notion of Chinese nationalism to constitute a complete set of counter-discourses to global software copyright enforcement.     

What is the ‘Social’ in Climate Change Research? A Case Study on Scientific Representations from Chile

Over the last few decades climate change has been gaining importance in international scientific and political debates. However, the social sciences, especially in Latin America, have only lately become interested in the subject and their approach is still vague. Scientific understanding of global environmental change and the process of designing public policies to face them are characterized by their complexity as well as by epistemic and normative uncertainties. This makes it necessary to problematize the way in which research efforts understand ‘the social’ of climate change. How do ‘the climate’ and ‘the social’ interpenetrate as scientific objects? What does the resulting field look like? Is the combination capable of promoting reflexivity and collaboration on the issue, or does it merely become dispersed with diffuse boundaries? Our paper seeks to answer these and other related questions using Chile as a case study and examining peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic. By combining in-depth qualitative content analysis of each paper with a statistical meta-analysis, we were able to: characterize the key content and forms of such literature; identify divisions and patterns within it; and, discuss some factors and trends that may help explain these. We conclude that the literature displays two competing trends: while it is inclined to become fragmented beyond the scope of the ‘mitigation’ black box, it also tends to cluster along the lines of methodological distinctions traditionally contested within the social sciences. This, in turn, highlights the persistence of disciplinary divisions within an allegedly interdisciplinary field.