By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. 2005. A Social History of the Media from Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2006. \"Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-11. Deibert, Ronald. 1997. Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2006. \"Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Kennan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 13-26. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Luhman, Niklas. 2000. The Reality of the Mass Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2006. \"Network Subjects or, The Ghost is the Message.\" In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan eds., New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 335-345. Saenger, Paul. 1997. \"Introduction\" to Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-17. Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins eds. 2003. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Boston: MIT Press.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (review)

It’s been a long time since academic discussions about research and teaching were part of the board meetings of the department of Anthropology and Sociology of the University of Amsterdam. Most of our meetings today deal with administrative problems [...]

Seeing like a State.

The term design thinking has gained attention over the past decade in a wide range of contexts beyond the traditional preoccupations of designers. The main idea is that the ways professional design...

Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I

The paper examines Facebook’s ambition to extend into the entire web by focusing on social buttons and developing a medium-specific platform critique. It contextualises the rise of buttons and counters as metrics for user engagement and links them to different web economies. Facebook’s Like buttons enable multiple data flows between various actors, contributing to a simultaneous de- and re-centralisation of the web. They allow the instant transformation of user engagement into numbers on button counters, which can be traded and multiplied but also function as tracking devices. The increasing presence of buttons and associated social plugins on the web creates new forms of connectivity between websites, introducing an alternative fabric of the web. Contrary to Facebook’s claim to promote a more social experience of the web, this paper explores the implementation and technical infrastructure of such buttons to conceptualise them as part of a so-called ‘Like economy’.

The like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web:

Brands and logos are all around us - from the clothes we wear and the objects we buy, to the advertisements which cover our cities and the celebrities created by the media. We regard the brand as a new phenomenon, something born with the consumer society, but branding was born with civilization, its earliest examples dating to the Roman Empire.

Branding is now a growing industry, applied not only to commodities but to charities, cities, the worlds of sport and entertainment, even government initiatives. Such is the ubiquity and power of branding that it is increasingly taken as a sign of the commodification of everyday life and the rapacity of corporate power.

Examining the brand in history, the growth of national and global brands, the changing approaches of the branding industry and the exploration of new spaces for advertising, The Rise of Brands analyses exactly how brands develop and operate in contemporary society.

The Rise of Brands

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

Branding consultants as cultural intermediaries

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.

Sport and Commodification: A Reflection on Key Concepts

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.

Making and Measuring Value: Comparison, singularity and agency in brand valuation practice

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 ...

Liz Moor

Papers

The Rise of Brands

Branding consultants as cultural intermediaries

Sport and Commodification: A Reflection on Key Concepts

Making and Measuring Value: Comparison, singularity and agency in brand valuation practice

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