Culture and Commerce

The cost aspects of supplying cultural goods and services have raised many basic questions concerning the economic activity of cultural institutions. There is more or less a consensus that the same criteria that apply to the cost aspects of any business also apply to cultural institutions. The nature of the products supplied and the stress on revenues earned are different. A key question to be asked by each society is how to balance the product mix offered by its cultural institutions taking into consideration both the societal valuation of the public goods provided and the earning potential of the institution. This essay examines some of the questions that occur at this intersection of culture and commerce.     

Creativity versus branding: totemism,animism and the pursuit of uniqueness in fashion

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary organization of the economy, creativity and branding constitute two distinctive imperatives which generally point in different directions: the former towards newness and change, the latter towards continuity and recognisability. Numerous agents in corporate organizations thus face a conundrum of creativity versus branding, which is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the fashion business. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a fashion company, I argue that these seemingly incompatible imperatives are inextricably entangled, as their paradoxical relation is solved, even dissolved, in a dynamic interplay between ‘a totemic logic’ and ‘an animist practice’. Thus, a dynamics of totemism and animism unites creativity and branding in the continual pursuit of uniqueness. While totemic and animist modalities are most commonly associated with non-western ontologies and perceived as mutually exclusive, I contend that they are also at work in contemporary commercial processes and that they are enmeshed in, and propelled by, each other. This suggests that these modalities operate together particularly when the making of distinctive identities is critical – as in economic competition today.     

The Competition between High Culture and Popular Culture as Seen in the New York Times

The Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section of the New York Times for selected years is examined to gauge competition between “high” culture and “popular” culture. From 1962 through 1988 high culture consistently outranked popular culture in percentage of articles, but after 1988 popular culture gained steadily, and by 1993 accounted for 49 percent of articles as compared with only 39 percent for high culture. Most of the gain was accounted for by coverage of motion pictures. For two out of four sub-categories a significant correlation was found between editorial content and advertising, so that one cannot reject the hypothesis that advertising affects editorial coverage. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The prosumer economy and the sex industry: the creation of an online community of sex prosumers

ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss how changes in the economic infrastructure of mass consumption have changed the values and attitudes of consumer culture. By focusing on an online community of Israeli sex consumers and applying the theoretical framework of the prosumer economy, this article suggests its innovative potential for understanding the intersections of cyberspace, capitalism, and sex work consumption. Using the context of the dynamic cultural terrain of prosumerism, the article examines how commercial way of thinking is encouraged, understood, and adopted by sex consumers in the practice of purchasing sexual encounters and sharing them online. The main argument is that the online community of sex consumers has become a collaborative project in which consumers simultaneously produce and consume – that is, they become ‘prosumers’ and thus occupy positions of power within the capitalist market-place. They, therefore, not only responding to market rules but also producing them. I claim that the change in the nature of the community has impacted both the nature of online writing and the way clients perceive sex workers.     

Currency and the Collective Representations of Authority,Nationality, and Value

Mainstream economics has consistently ignored the iconography of currency, describing money ‘just’ as a commodity. The paper is going to investigate the economic and political significance of the representations of authority and nationality in currency describing how these representation support its acceptability. The aim of the analysis is double: to decipher the visual identity of currency and its contribution to the acceptance of money in day-to-day transactions, as well as to discuss the operational principles of the monetary system as they are uncovered in the iconography of money. By answering these questions, the paper is going to trace the theoretical presuppositions and the cultural stereotypes that inform the representation of economic value and national identity as they are articulated in banknotes and coins with a specific emphasis on the European Monetary Union and the recent financial crisis that is still affecting its periphery.     

特色小镇在民族深度贫困地区的扶贫探索--以广西都安瑶族文化长寿养生特色小镇规划为例

中国进入脱贫攻坚的决胜期,肩负着2020年必须实现全面脱贫的历史使命,民族地区一直是脱贫攻坚的主战场,是打赢脱贫攻坚战的重点。广西河池市都安县是国家级深度贫困县,以都安瑶族文化长寿养生特色小镇建设为契机,探索在扶贫大背景下特色小镇在其中起到的意义和作用。提出了"民族文化+"的扶贫新模式,从民族品牌建设为引领,从"民族文化+旅游""民族文化+产业""民族文化+人才""民族文化+创业""民族文化+就业"5个方面为抓手,紧抓特色小镇发展优势,提出针对性的扶贫路径和扶贫模式,助推都安县扶贫攻坚战,也为全国其他民族地区的扶贫提供了一种新的思路。     

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.     

Cultural goods creation, cultural capital formation, provision of cultural services and cultural atmosphere accumulation

The cultural atmosphere in a society is accumulated over time through the consumption of cultural services and is diminished through depreciation. Using cultural capital (e.g., cultural heritage, paintings, music scores), cultural services are provided by the cultural-services industry (e.g., museums, opera houses); cultural capital is enlarged by new cultural goods created by individuals. Individuals’ utilities are positively affected by the cultural services they consume, by the cultural goods they create and by the cultural atmosphere and the cultural capital accumulated in society. In a laissez-faire economy, individuals tend to ignore the positive external effects of their cultural-services consumption and creation of cultural goods on other individuals via accumulating cultural atmosphere and cultural capital. Consequently, suboptimally little cultural atmosphere and cultural capital will be accumulated. The efficient intertemporal allocation can be restored by introducing an appropriate subsidy that not only stimulates consumers’ demand for cultural services and the creation of new cultural goods but also enhances the accumulation of cultural atmosphere and cultural capital.

江西丰城白马寨匾额语义与空间关联研究

中国古代的民居建筑往往会迎合主人的心理追求,凭借环境要素,构建建筑与文化的空间关联性,匾额便是这种人居意识的物化体现.江西丰城白马寨明清古建筑群现存大量匾额,具有丰富的文化内涵和鲜明的地域特色,是赣中地区民居建筑匾额文化的突出代表.以白马寨为例,从横向和纵向两个维度展开,横向维度进行文化释义和类型分析,纵向维度探究匾额...     

Intellectual property rights and U.S. information goods exports: the role of imitation threat

Trade in information goods is particularly sensitive to the strength of intellectual property rights (IPR) and encounters an apparently different pattern of imitation threat compared with manufacturing trade, but the information goods trade–IPR nexus is less systematically investigated. This article analyzes whether and how U.S. information goods exports are sensitive to national differences in IPR protection and the degree of threat-of-imitation from the dynamic perspective. Employing the technique of instrumental variables for a dynamic panel model to consider the hysteretic effect and controlling the endogeneity problem, the empirical results show that the strength of the importing country’s IPR protection overall exhibits a trade-enhancing effect, supporting the standpoint that stronger IPR protection will induce more trade. Moreover, we adopt the piracy rate as a proxy for threat-of-imitation to examine its role on the information goods trade–IPR nexus. Empirical findings validate the prevalence of the market expansion effect wherever the degree of imitation threat of importing countries is high or low, because the technology level and production cost of reproduction are very low. It implies that the existing theory on threat-of-imitation may not apply to the information goods trade.

水文化与大运河文化研究热点、路径与前沿的知识图谱分析

CiteSpace分析发现:水文化和大运河文化的研究热点分别为"大禹治水""李冰"和"大禹"与"大运河""京杭大运河""浙江"和"漕运"。前者的演化路径呈现为从"李冰""郭守敬"及"水利工程"向"大禹治水",再向"导淮""大禹""张謇"及"李仪祉",最后向"治水思想""都江堰"及"长江"转向的趋势。后者呈现为从早期关注隋炀帝开凿运河的原因探索、功过评价、个人轶事追溯向大运河漕运研究、大运河沿线城市研究以及大运河文化带建设研究转向的模式。在研究前沿方面,前者以"李冰"以及"李冰父子""李冰水利功绩"和"李冰修复都江堰"为重点,而后者以"大运河"以及"漕运"和"大运河沿线城市发展与繁荣"为重点。上述分析结果对中国水文化在世界范围走出去、走上去、走进去,并向不同文化背景的听众讲清、讲明、讲懂大运河文化故事能够发挥积极有效的作用。     

Learning-by-Consuming and the Dynamics of the Demand and Prices of Cultural Goods

The major distinctive feature of cultural goods is that consumers must learn how to consume them, implying that preferences should be modelled as intertemporally dependent. The canonical model in the literature uses a habit formation analogy. In this paper, we discuss in detail, though in the simplest setup, a consistent preference structure for that model. Then, we derive the implications for the dynamics of two aggregate equilibrium models, a fixed price model and a flexible price model. The learning-by-consuming behaviour is characterised by a preference structure displaying bounded adjacent complementarity in the demand for the cultural good. This implies that there will be short run complementarity between the stocks of culture and financial wealth and that the adjustment of the demand for cultural goods, or of their relative price, will have some inertia. In the exogenous price model, we find that increases in income will raise the long run demand for cultural goods while increases in the relative price will decrease it. In the endogenous price model, an increase in the supply of cultural goods will imply an initial undershooting of the price of cultural goods followed by an upward transition process. Our results seem to be consistent with the empirical results on the demand for cultural goods and seem to offer an explanation for the Baumol and Bowen paradox.JEL Classification: Z1, E21Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the 1st Conference of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Investigação em Economia (SPiE, 1997) and at the Xth Conference of the Association for Cultural Economics International, 1998, Barcelona.     

Regulating belonging: surveillance,inequality, and the cultural production of abjection

ABSTRACT

Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare systems, battered women’s shelters, and homelessness), criminalized poverty (police targeting of the poor and emerging ‘poverty capitalism’ arrangements), and the radically adrift (the identification, tracking, and containment of refugees). In each of these cases, surveillance is yoked to structural inequalities and systems of oppression, but it also possesses a cultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanized subjectivities upon the abject Other. Therefore, I argue that in order to critique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of contemporary surveillance, it is necessary to take seriously the mythologies that give meaning to surveillance practices and the subjectivities that are engendered by them.     

Movie Stars and the Distribution of Financially Successful Films in the Motion Picture Industry

Audiences choose to see films using information from previous films. A stochastic consumer choice process based on this assumption generates a particular distribution of financially successful films among film types. Movie stars can be used to mark these successful film types. Thus, their star power originates not only from box-office appeal but also from marking power. Evidence of 960 top 20 films released in the United States and Canada between 1940–1955 and 1960–1995 is consistent with this model.     

原乡与身份认同:改革开放25年(1978-2002)电影中的乡村空间解读

改革开放25年(1978-2002)电影中的乡村一方面具有档案价值,另一方面是小中窥大、面对未来的观察窗口.立足于日常空间理论和电影空间3要素,对中国4部电影中的乡村空间进行了论述.指出原物重在"传和承",电影叙事中的组织制度变化、公共空间和节点转换,对建构新的身份认同颇为关键.     

Win, Place or Show: Gauging the Economic Success of the Renoir and Barnes Art Exhibits

Special art exhibits, sometimes known as``blockbusters', are often thought of as tourism andbusiness generators. This belief is fostered byeconomic impact studies that bravely estimate thetotal gross domestic product or total jobs ``created'by such exhibits. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of theexhibit promoters often leads them to the uncritical useof methodologies that exaggerate the size of theexhibit's contribution to the local economy. Fortunately, such methodologies are well understoodand corrective measures are available to make theestimates they produce more realistic and useful foradvocacy purposes. This paper presents a comparisonof two studies done in Canada to provide arts managerswith a gauge for realistically forecasting thepotential impact of planned ``blockbusters'.Several Canadian art galleries have recently hostedspecial art exhibits, notably the Renoir Portraits atthe National Gallery of Canada and the BarnesExhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. They havesurveyed the visitors to them using a correctivemethodology that enables researchers to determinewhich visitors came to the region only because of theexistence of the exhibit and which would have come tothe region and spent money whether the exhibit existedor not. These data enables researchers to estimatequite accurately the amount of visitor spending thatis actually due to the exhibit. This lower, but morecredible, estimate is very useful in helping promotersobtain exhibit sponsorship from local tourismbusinesses who have become skeptical of theexaggerated claims of economic impact estimates basedon standard survey approaches.     

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.     

Mobile consumers and the retail industry: the resistible advent of a new marketing scene

ABSTRACT

Over the last ten years, marketing professionals have invested in various devices aimed at digitalizing the point of sale. Mobile phones, and the connection they open between the digital and physical worlds, are likely to profoundly renew the way organizations build the representations of consumers upon which they operate. This article aims to describe the new, mobile-based market infrastructure that is currently being implemented; the figures of the consumer it builds on and renews for marketing purposes; and the opportunities it offers to create a new marketing scene. We address this question by focusing on the world of physical retail. We show that online commerce websites and http cookies have enabled a connection between three traditionally separate figures of the consumer and associated marketing scenes: the consumer as an audience, as a shopping cart, or as a (loyalty) card. The smartphone carries the promise of pursuing this movement into store aisles. We show, however, that the domestication of physical geography to cultivate mobile consumers is particularly difficult, and so far based on a series of disparate attempts and experiments.     

大运河历史文脉与国家形象文化基因研究

作为千年国脉的大运河是中国古代大一统中央集权国家的物质基础和精神纽带,与长城一样是中国国家形象的代表之一。通过分析大运河的作用,厘清大运河文化的概念,通过梳理大运河历史文脉,采用归纳分析、调查比较等方法,阐述大运河所代表的国家形象、大运河的千年底蕴、时代价值和当代形象,从而提炼出大运河国家形象的五大文化基因:国家集中治理的程序基因、区域经济联通的链条基因、天人合一的生态睿智基因、多元文化融合的空间基因、走向国际社会的开放基因,为利用大运河历史文脉,建构传播国家形象,增强文化自信,传承中华优秀文化奠定基础。     

人文城市的理论发生、现实建构与未来形态

人文城市是我国新型城镇化规划明确建设的新型城市类型之一,是中国特色社会主义城市发展道路的重要组成部分。中国人文城市在理论发生上,主要是以人文学科的理论与方法为基础,吸收了西方人本主义城市科学理论资源的结果。在世界城市化和中国快速城镇化的背景下,人文城市既深受全球城市发展主流和趋势的影响,也是适应我国城市发展规律与需要的新探索和新实践。人文城市以承载着城市的价值和意义为主要职能,在各种城市形态中与人的关系最为密切和直接,是评价和衡量城市文明水平和城市美好生活的核心尺度。非一般性的物质、制度问题,人的文化和精神问题正在成为新型城镇化建设的头等大事,也是中国城市必须选择人文城市的先进模式、中国新型城镇化必须走文化型城市化新路子的根本原因。