首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
相似文献
 共查询到20条相似文献，搜索用时 33 毫秒
1.
In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is shaped by various market devices whose strategic negotiation informs – and is informed by – the moral economy articulated on web forums where models gather to discuss their work experiences and market strategies. We first introduce Chaturbate and the ways in which it organizes market competition, surveying the environment models have to negotiate. We then zoom in on two controversial strategies for beating the competition, each of which upset the moral economy of Chaturbate’s model community. Subsequently, we turn to what models term ‘the hustle,’ which encompasses a number of competitive strategies and criteria judged to be fair and thus legitimate. The final part of our analysis considers the limitations of the hustle, as well as the meritocratic and entrepreneurial discourse that surround it, in light of what we identify as Chaturbate’s ‘manufactured uncertainty.’  相似文献   

2.
ABSTRACT

The emergence of close-knit global–local links in many agro-food production systems has necessitated rigorous coordination between the key stakeholders to ensure that quality and safety standards are met. To analyze this new supply chain configuration, agro-food studies inspired by convention theory have drawn significant attention to the plurality of quality conventions. In the literature specifically focusing on the inter-relationships between multiple quality conventions, the ways of interpreting a specific value orientation are perceived to have important implications. This view may lead to a questioning of how the configuration of multiple quality conventions can be stabilized if conflicting justification principles are not easily reconciled. The argument is further connected with an examination of situated plurality in a particular context, focusing on how the boundary among multiple quality conventions is stabilized on the ground. In this paper, through a case analysis of coffee quality management in Timor-Leste, I attempt to demonstrate that commoditization is to be reformulated as the process in which the qualification of objects and regularization of action are constituted through the differentiation of consumable quality as generality from heterogeneous cultural elements as particularity.  相似文献   

3.
With what mechanisms and cultural resources do market actors pursue change? Based on an analysis of business-to-business advertisements in two US food industry trade publications, we show the generative influence of social movements on perceived market opportunities. Building on recent scholarship on market-making, we find that market actors articulate and reshape critiques of their own industry by making claims about what consumers ostensibly want and about how their products can satisfy those desires. We find that business-to-business food ingredient advertisements selectively articulate precepts of the emergent ‘good food’ movement by urging manufacturers to develop healthy, natural, and ‘clean’ foods. While ‘good food’ advocates typically portray processed and packaged food as inherently unhealthy, suppliers and trade associations' advertisements transform this critique by claiming that products will be more marketable to consumers if they are made with ingredients designed to provide specific health benefits and to comply with federally mandated product labeling regulations. As such, we find that these business-to-business advertisements mediate between imagined demands and pragmatic constraints while serving as a conduit for the influence of social movements on industry practices and products.  相似文献   

4.
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.  相似文献   

5.
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.  相似文献   

6.
This paper draws upon the history of the funeral market over two centuries to examine three major devices which have played a central role in the funeral economy, both in terms of defining the nature of the ‘goods’ and their attendant value but also in regulating the relations between the Pompes Funèbres and the other institutional actors involved. It highlights the ways in which these devices provide a ‘politics of value’ performing the articulation between the formatting of economic value and the pursuit of political concerns. First, observing the constitutional phase of the private industry, it examines the ‘system of the classes’ as a central device of managing dissonance between conflicting interests. Then, a historical jump leads us to half way through the twentieth century to the market infrastructure formed by the management of ‘care for the deceased’. As a third point, the exponential development of death insurance in recent years appears as an expression of rationalization of funeral arrangement. The analysis of the market devices will highlight an essential property, that is, the incorporation of a ‘calculation formula’ which set up both the profit sharing and the handling of moral and political issues.  相似文献   

7.
The paper is concerned with the issue of whether international copyright legislation is effective in curbing audio software counterfeiting. The paper finds that copyright conventions have not been effective in reducing audio counterfeiting to comparatively low levels. This result holds even when allowances are made for the duration of copyright convention membership and the specificity of the articles of the convention. Economic development is found to be the main determinant of low counterfeit levels. This would tend to support anecdotal evidence which indicates that economic development is a necessary condition for the active recognition of audio property rights by the general public, judiciary and police. It is also consistent with a view that pirate audio software, being an inferior good, has a more buoyant market in less developed economies. From a policy perspective the research would seem to suggest that the extensive efforts and copious attention to detail by legal experts has made little impact on counterfeit activity and is secondary in importance to the socio-economic environment in which these laws are being applied.  相似文献   

8.
ABSTRACT

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.  相似文献   

9.
Abstract

The objective of this article is to critique the current literature on Jews and Jewishness in North American television. It is our contention that this work is problematic in a number of ways. First, it insists on a strict binary between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ television images, and ‘bad’ and ‘good’ audience responses to these images. Second, it assumes that a unified, ‘acceptable’ Jewish identity pre‐exists the production of these images, and that this identity merely needs to be incorporated into the television landscape to make its images ‘better’. Third, it assumes a direct and unproblematic relationship between what the viewers see on television and how they understand the world. In the second half of this essay we introduce scholarship in other areas of television and media studies, as well as in the emerging field of Jewish cultural studies, to point to the need to theorise a much more complex relationship between identity and spectatorship than is realised in much of the current literature on Jewishness and television. We argue that our relationship, as viewers, to television is inherently complex, contradictory, ambivalent, and shifting, and thus cannot be pinned down by rigid and hierarchical binary structures. Further, we argue that Jewishness cannot be reified as a single, visible, knowable identity, and that the ambivalent pleasures of viewers viewing Jewishness on television, including our own, must be accounted for rather than dismissed.  相似文献   

10.
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.  相似文献   

11.
This paper investigates the underlying principle of ‘economy’ in the Greek Orthodox monastery of Vatopaidi, Mount Athos, in complementary relation to the monastic ideal of ‘virginity’ as the means of separating monastic from secular life. In this context, ‘economy’ represents an internal and external dichotomy: an economy within the spiritual self (‘economy of passions’) and the monastery (‘law of the house’), expressed in traditional practices, such as prayer, confession, psalmody, and painting; and an economy of relations between the monastery and the materialist ‘cosmopolitan’ world outside Athos, which is manifested by Vatopaidi's strong financial and political status in the Orthodox world. The material reveals the overlapping connection between the notions of the ‘self’, the ‘monastery’, and the ‘world’, in order to critically evaluate the cultural economy of Vatopaidi in relation to its historical past, and in connection to its present political and economic status within and against the Greek state.  相似文献   

12.
ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which middle class Muslims in Turkey talk about Islamic ‘community’ and analyses these discourses in relation to the phenomenon of market Islam. The evidence is drawn from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with donors, managers, and volunteers of a government friendly Islamic NGO, the Light House (Deniz Feneri Sosyal Yard?mla?ma ve Dayan??ma Derne?i) in 2009–2010, followed by subsequent trips in 2013 and 2015. I argue that Islamic charity is not merely a calculative economic behaviour or a reflection of deep-seated religious values, but rather a performative site of market Islam. In seeking to reconcile a faith-based understanding of charity with diverse interpretations of the neoliberal economy, I show that middle-class Muslims adhered to two discourses of ‘community’: whereas donors saw charitable giving as a market-enhancing mechanism, NGO managers defined their charitable work as part of an Islamic project focused on economic redistribution. Although they conceptualized the relationship between faith and markets in divergent ways, both discourses of market Islam posit ‘community’ as an intrinsic component of governing the poor in Turkey.  相似文献   

13.
This paper offers a cultural approach to technology as an alternative to what we see as a prevailing treatment of technology in social studies of finance. This latter treatment, which we refer to as the ‘tools of coordination’ approach, sees technologies as mediators of market behavior that promote standardization and coordination. While this may be one important function of some technologies, taking a cultural approach to studying financial technologies highlights other important aspects of financial activity – in particular profit making. Instead of focusing primarily on how technologies coordinate market behavior, we focus on how technologies enable profit-making practices, in particular arbitrage. In two different case studies, one examining arbitrage between stock exchanges during the late nineteenth century and the other focusing on contemporary high-frequency trading, we employ the cultural approach to technology. We find that while new technologies do eventually promote greater coordination in financial markets, they are initially deployed for the opposite purpose, to produce what we call network differentials that allow some to profit at the expense of others.  相似文献   

14.
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.  相似文献   

15.
Abstract

This article rethinks the notion of articulation as formulated in the ‘studies‐discourse’: cultural studies, gender studies, science studies. I analyse the inner workings of the concept of articulation against the background of Luis Buñuel’s film Tristana. Using the language of Spanish cultural practices, Buñuel offers the negative story of an oppressive society. The film foregrounds the role of a primordial asymmetry between the sexes in obliging articulation. This is suggestive of how articulation is interwoven with, and undone by, a radical refusal which unveils the ongoing incommensurability and inevitable disparity between the world in which we dwell and a world which remains unvoiced in the ‘studies‐discourse’: World 2, an imperceptible world which questions the fantasy of an overall and limitless emancipation inherent in the mythology of liberalism.  相似文献   

16.
Sociologists over the last two decades have taken inspiration from actor-network theory to suggest that competition, like ‘the market’, takes place through a dynamic of detaching objects from one set of relations and reattaching them within another: objectification and singularisation. Yet there has been little theorisation of how competition differs between situations. To approach this question, we can ask how competition, as a process of objectification and singularisation, interacts with other patterns of movement. Ethnographers have described one such pattern in the everyday work of architects. Here a building emerges from an ever-increasing number of ‘versions’, images and models, in an open-ended accumulation. This study considers the interaction between, first, the objectification and singularisation of competition and, second, the open-ended accumulation of architectural work. To do so, I examine architectural competitions in the UK. I draw from document analysis of one competition for a school in northern England, as well as interviews with architects about their work on competitions. This study concludes that architectural competitions repeat the multiplicity of architectural work but in a more delimited form. Multiplicity is not ‘cut-off’ so much as winnowed down through an explicit process of selecting images and blocks of text.  相似文献   

17.
ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.  相似文献   

18.
The website ‘Punternet’ contains customer service reviews (‘field reports’) of commercial sex encounters in the UK's indoor sex market. Treating Punternet as a calculative device shows how ordinary understandings of morality underpin consumer markets, as field reports qualify commercial sex to produce understandings of ‘good value’. The varied, messy and sometimes contradictory understandings of value, values, worth and goodness that are present in the calculative device of Punternet reveal the complex ways in which market actions are made moral by consumers. ‘Value’ in the market for sex is a moral judgement made by male authors whose understandings of themselves as deserving customers derives from the stories they tell of good and bad service providers. Although the moral status of prostitution is contested by many, Punternet reports lay claim to it being a legitimate consumer activity, with customers themselves vulnerable to being denied ‘value for money’. The good worker is seen as providing value for money by being professional, committed to pleasing the customer and appearing to enjoy her job.  相似文献   

19.
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.  相似文献   

20.
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.  相似文献   

设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号