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.     

A care-infused market tale: on (not) maintaining relationships of trust in energy retrofit products

ABSTRACT

Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.     

Market innovation as framing,productive friction and bricolage: an exploration of the personal data market

This paper explores the possibilities offered by recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) research on markets for engaging with market innovation. Although there exist few reflections on how innovation happens in markets, market innovation has not been singularly theorized in STS-inspired market studies. In this paper, we explore the potential analytic utility of different sets of ideas in the field of market studies, such as ‘framing’ [Callon, M. (1998) ‘Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics’, in The Laws of Markets, ed. M. Callon, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–57; Callon, M. (2007) ‘An essay on the growing contribution of economic markets to the proliferation of the social’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 7–8, pp. 136–163], ‘productive friction’ [Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] and ‘bricolage’ [MacKenzie, D. & Pardo-Guerra, J. P. (2014) ‘Insurgent capitalism: Island, bricolage and the re-making of finance’, Economy and Society, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 153–182]. Drawing on our research into the online personal data industry and start-ups developing personal data control products, we put together five sensibilities that we think are of use for broader considerations of market innovation.     

Agencing femininity: digital Mrs. Consumer in intra-action

ABSTRACT

Social media is abound with women writing about consumption goods and practices associated with femininity and heterosexual nuclear family life, such as being married, dressing, cooking and home decoration. This article examines how the housewife ideal can be an attractive identity in the 2010s and, drawing on the post-humanist performativity by Karen Barad (2007), it maps the material-discursive agencies that enable the re-emergence of this figure. Building on in-depth interviews with women who refer to themselves as influencers and bloggers, and visual and textual analyses of their Instagram-accounts, including links to sponsors and comments from followers, the article analyzes how the tensions between these women's real lives and their cyber lives, become meaningful in this technological culture. The breaking of boundaries between human and non-human resulting from digital technology has re-configured the housewife role by transforming boundaries between intimate and commercial practices. By focusing on the three areas: Transforming the feminine body, Transforming Intimacy, and Entrepreneurial femininity the article shows how agency emerges from within transforming practices of body, intimacy and entrepreneurship, intra-acting within this new housewife phenomenon. In doing so it discusses the negotiations and space for agency these women thought that digital technologies provided for them.     

Trust,reputation and ambiguous freedoms: financial institutions and subversive libertarians navigating blockchain,markets, and regulation

This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.     

Ethical consumption applications as failed market innovations: exploring consumer (non) acceptance of ‘quasi’ market devices

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I conceptualise ethical consumption applications (ECAs) as market innovations inflected in processes of configuring market actors and market (re)framings. The introduction of ECAs through the work of civil society is not only about changing frames of market exchange, but also work in the register of making ‘good consumers’ and consumers as ‘agents of change’ and moralising markets. Thus, a more accurate concept for these devices is suggested: ‘quasi’ market devices. The main aim of this paper is to analyse how consumers attached to and resisted use of ECAs designed to assist in product choices and shape responsible everyday practices. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sweden, the article applies a methodology grounded in Science and Technology-inspired market studies in combination with Consumer Culture Theory’s (CCT) interest in identity work and sense-making associated with technology consumption. Although available at the time of the empirical data collection period of the study, all three apps were off the market during the analytic work of this paper; a major argument for focusing on barriers to acceptance of the apps and trying to conceptualise how such non-acceptance can be understood.     

UNDERSTANDING ORDINARY WOMEN

The paper reflects on the ways market research in Britain helped produce understandings of and information about the ‘mass housewife’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper does this through a case study of the market research used and generated by the London subsidiary office of J. Walter Thompson advertising. The paper focuses on key client accounts, as well as the agency's non-product specific research, as a way of exploring how it sought to understand the ordinary housewife and her consumption habits. In exploring JWT London's approach to the ‘mass market’ housewife, the paper draws on recent sociological arguments about advertising and market research that have conceptualized these commercial practices as technologies or socio-technical devices for ‘making-up’ the consumer. However, the paper also seeks to revise certain aspects of this sociological approach. It does this by proposing a more differentiated sense of the various marketing and market research paradigms that were used by advertising agencies in order to contest the claim that post-war market research was subject to growing sophistication under the influence of the psychological sciences. Secondly, the paper seeks to bring a more international and specifically trans-Atlantic dimension to the understanding of post-war market research. US-derived techniques formed a visible presence within post-war British market research and constituted a key point of reference for British-based practitioners. This influence was neither totalizing nor did it go unchallenged, but even as they rejected elements of ‘American’ approaches to the consumer, British practitioners still had to reckon with their intellectual authority and commercial force in this period.     

When socialists marketize: the case of China’s wind power market sector

This paper analyzes China’s attempt at maintaining and stabilizing the market framing of wind power development as ‘sustainable.’ Drawing on mixed data and new directions in the social studies of marketization, the analysis focuses on the Chinese government’s responses to the ‘quality crisis’ in the wind turbine industry. Employing five types of framing – goods, marketizing agencies, market encounters, price-setting, and market design and maintenance – the paper sheds light on flexible government interventions to steer the socio-technical assemblage around wind power towards a ‘turn to quality.’ In essence, this is a study of market construction in the context of Chinese wind power experiments. The paper contributes to new directions in market studies by (1) demonstrating the importance of attending to the contested algorithmic transformation of wind resources to wind power; (2) taking market studies to a transitional and developmental context, which renders marketization prone to constant overflowing; and (3) elucidating a particular Chinese model of experimental market construction ‘through embracing overflowing.’ The paper proposes new trajectories for future market studies with a focus on non-Western contexts, to reveal the wide variety of how marketization unfolds.     

‘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 logic of practice in the practice of logics: practicing journalism and its relationship with business in times of technological changes

This paper investigates the workings of institutional logics in practice, by focusing in particular on the interplay between material, practical and linguistic dimensions of practices. In other words, drawing on Bourdieu's sens pratique, the paper explores the logic of practice in the practice of logics through a six months full-time ethnographic study at Il Sole-24 Ore, the largest Italian financial newspaper, between 2007 and 2008. An original conceptual framework is developed to analyse how the logic of journalism is enacted vis-à-vis that of advertising in a setting in which an old technology for news production – print newspaper – coexists with a new one – website – and thus encounters between new and old technological possibilities make workings of institutional logics particularly visible. The findings point out different mechanisms of institutional work dealing with actions that, made possible by new technological possibilities, are potentially, but not necessarily classified as divergent from institutional logics.     

The institution of institutionalism: difference,universalism and the legacies of Institutional Critique

This text analyses the relationship between institutionalism, context and cultural criticism. Its main objective is to identify how universalism has permeated the different waves of Institutional Critique, conditioning the subversive potential conferred to creative practices and locating radical, alternative institutionalism within the narrow geo-cultural landscape of mainstream biennials. Taking as point of departure Cildo Meireles’s participatory public intervention in documenta 11, I consider how representational concerns are privileged vis-à-vis visual practices related to coloniality and difference. From that position, the article argues that only by challenging the assumed universality of the debates on cultural institutionalism will we be able to stress the relevance of critique in addressing cultural policies and non-representational practices. This implies confronting the troublesome relationship between Institutional Critique and modernity from a ‘geographically-informed’ position capable of recognising institutionalism as a heterogeneous body of practices that are being globally transformed.     

Making news of value: exploiting dissonances in economic journalism

This article explores the multiple modes of valuation that pervade newsmaking in economic journalism. It does so by exploring the different ways in which journalists at Valor Econômico, the leading economic newspaper in Brazil, compete and cooperate in the production of news. Valor is a paradigmatic case for discussing valuation practices in newsmaking since its institutional promise is to produce news of value. How, if at all, do Valor journalists embrace the promise of producing news that generates value? Elaborating on Stark’s (2009. The sense of dissonance. Accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton University Press) idea of dissonance, it is contended that different orders of worth collide and cooperate within Valor newsroom. Moreover, journalists engage in a variety of valuation practices through which these orders of worth are shaped, defined, and refined, reflecting different understandings of economy and society, and different conceptions of what journalism is good for. I argue that Valor’s direction intentionally fosters a plural space of value dissonance in order to improve the quality of news reporting. I emphasise, however, that these dissonances are only productive against a larger background of consonance about what actually there is to disagree about. The article is based on a seven-month ethnography of Valor’s newsroom in São Paulo between 2013 and 2015.     

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.     

The impact of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Droit de Suite</Emphasis> in the UK: an empirical analysis

The Droit de Suite, known in the UK as Artists’ Resale Rights, provides an artist with the inalienable right to receive a royalty based on the resale price of an original work of art. This paper provides an empirical analysis of actual changes in the UK auction market for art that is newly subject to the Droit de Suite (DDS) because of a change in law. All changes are measured relative to changes for art not subject to the DDS and relative to changes in the auction markets for art in countries where there has been no change in law. We do a difference-in-difference analysis, differencing price growth and sales growth across market segments and across countries over the period 1993–2007. Our results suggest that the introduction of the DDS has not had a consistent negative impact on the UK art auction market during the period of study.     

Uncertain hog futures: life,death, and arbitrage on the factory farm

ABSTRACT

Between 2013 and 2014, PED virus (PEDv) swept through American pig farms, killing millions of animals and causing a market panic that drove the prices of both physical pork and lean hog futures to all-time highs. However, a divergence between pricing in financial markets and on-farm realities allowed some producers to reap record profits via a unique form of biological arbitrage. This arbitrage was novel in that it allowed for an underlier (pigs) to be used to profit from fluctuations in the price of a derivative (lean hog futures). This article explores the case of PEDv to examine the entanglements and divergences between ‘real’ and ‘abstract’ values in financialized industries, paying particular attention to the schisms between the imaginaries and practices of actors in the financial and tangibly productive links of the agricultural value chain. To do so, it examines the historical co-constitution of American agriculture and the financial sector, and shows how in the contemporary moment these two ever-more-intertwined sectors are nonetheless marked by important differences. It argues that the nature of agricultural production can confound the expectations of finance, and highlights the fact that financialization entails contextually-specific practices that can lead to uneven and unexpected market outcomes.     

Back in the bazaar: taking Pierre Bourdieu to a trading room

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of aesthetic judgment, this text offers an inductive account of financial reasoning inside a trading room. Driven to maximise bank profits, trading room operators do not find ‘one best way’. Rather they choose among several possible winning strategies: mathematical arbitrage, economic analysis, chartist analysis. These strategies differ sharply from one another in their conception of the market, method, proximity to scholarly knowledge, and legitimacy. We show that the choice of one method depends on a system of tastes and distastes that are both historical – depending on individuals’ social and educational background – and relational – depending on the individual's relative position within the trading room viewed as a field.     

Cultural discourses of privacy: Interrogating globalized workplace relationships in Japan

Using Carbaugh’s (2005. Cultures in conversation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 2007. Cultural discourse analysis: Communication practices and intercultural encounters. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 167–182) cultural discourse analysis and Petronio’s (2002. Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory, this study highlights four cultural premises that garner intercultural privacy management between foreign English language teachers (ELTs) and Japanese coworkers (JCWs) in Japan. The analysis revealed that ELTs: (a) expected not to be a “free space” for privacy inquisition by JCWs, and (b) expected voluntary reciprocity in (egalitarian) workplace relationships. JCWs viewed: (a) privacy inquisitions as acts of kindness/caring and (b) soliciting help from a supervisor as providing opportunities for better care. This study calls for attention to intercultural privacy management and enhances CPM’s cultural criteria.     

Performing housing debt attachments: forming semi-financialised subjects

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the understanding of how first-time buyers and their parents form attachments to housing debt. Interviews, carried out in the Czech Republic, with 40 first-time homebuyers and 10 with their parents were used to identify multiple layers of debt performativity. These layers consist of statements expressing moral evaluations and emotions; calculative and cognitive devices; and references to practices. Two arguments are advanced through a framework of layered performativity. The first argument concerns the subjectivities of debtors. Debtors adopt investment concepts in their statements and use calculative devices. However, by relying on familial moral orders of security and familial financial transfers, these debtors must be regarded rather as semi-financialised subjects. The second argument relates to the re-configuration of social and economic relations in families. Debt attachment endorses the use of intergenerational financial transfers, which in turn may enforce continued intra-familial reciprocity, both in terms of the recipients’ obligation to the providers of a gift or loan as well as concerning an obligation to help their children attain homeownership in the future. Finally, intergenerational transfers also transform the character of the mortgage market and mortgage debt, making informal debts an important part of formal debt circuits.     

Directed Evolution: A Historical Exploration into an Evolutionary Experimental System of Nanobiotechnology, 1965–2006

This study explores the history of nanotechnology from the perspective of protein engineering, which differs from the history of nanotechnology that has arisen from mechanical and materials engineering; it also demonstrates points of convergence between the two. Focusing on directed evolution—an experimental system of molecular biomimetics that mimics nature as an inspiration for material design—this study follows the emergence of an evolutionary experimental system from the 1960s to the present, by detailing the material culture, practices, and techniques involved. Directed evolution, as an aspect of nanobiotechnology, is also distinct from the dominant biotechnologies of the 20th century. The experimental systems of directed evolution produce new ways of thinking about molecular diversity that could affect concepts concerning both biology and life.