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1.
ABSTRACT

Since the global financial crisis of 2008 the issue of corporate tax avoidance has gained considerable political salience and public attention. This article explores the frameworks of meaning available for citizen-consumers to evaluate and form views on corporate tax behaviour. Building on research on the spatiality of taxation, I argue that brands and their spatial associations afford significant resources for making sense of the taxpaying responsibilities of multinational enterprises. Through the identification and analysis of three different forms of geographical entanglement – national origination, imbrication in the public domain, and territorialization of economic activity – I draw out the responsibilities that are inferred by these spatial associations. I propose that brands’ geographical entanglements tend to support a particular ‘logic of onshoring’, or common sense explanation concerning where corporations ought to pay tax, and I discuss the implications that the dominance of this logic may hold for the global politics of taxation. In drawing attention to the relationship between geographies of brands and geographies of taxation, the article furthers critical understanding of the role of space and place in everyday taxation imaginaries, and proposes an agenda for future research.  相似文献   

2.
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   

3.
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   

4.
Cinema marks a profound shift in the relation between image and text – indeed it is the watershed of the subjugation of language by image. Cinema as an innovative shift in both industrial capitalism and cultural practice marks, therefore, the restructuring of language function in accord with the changing protocols of techno-capitalism. The ‘talking cure’, otherwise known as psychoanalysis, is itself a symptom of cinema. As a precursor for TV and computing and Internet, cinema transacts value transfer across the image utilising a production process that can be grasped as founded under the rubric of what I call ‘the attention theory of value’. The deterritorialised factory that is the contemporary image, is an essential component of globalisation, neo-imperialism, and militarisation, organising, as it were, the consent (ignorance of) and indeed desire for these latter processes. Thus ‘cinema’, as a paradigm for image-mediated social production, implies a cultural turn for political economics. It also implies that it is the interstitial, informal activities that transpire across the entire surface of the socius as well as in the vicissitudes of the psyche and experience that are the new (untheorised) production sites for global capital – and therefore among the significant sites for the waging of the next revolution.  相似文献   

5.
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.  相似文献   

6.
This article develops the argument that a ‘knowledge economy,’ despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of ‘knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products’). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.  相似文献   

7.
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.  相似文献   

8.
ABSTRACT

Previous studies have overlooked how intermediaries and their digital cultural capital enhance the relationship between brand values and consumer identities; their specific uses of digital technologies; and how those uses are displayed in activities where intermediaries create consumer experiences. This paper thus explores the role that cultural intermediaries (music bloggers and an advertising agency) and their digital cultural capital play in making and communicating a branded music event. Briefly, intermediaries used a set of digital technologies (social media, guest lists, blogs, and websites) to create and orchestrate an authentic and exclusive experience between brands and consumers. We draw on empirical material from interviews and ethnographic work conducted in Santiago, Chile. Our study identifies digital technologies used by cultural intermediaries in communicating branded music events, including as: promotional tools; advertising campaign efficacy evaluation mechanisms; and relational objects that connect advertising agencies, music bloggers, brands, and consumers. By exploring the tensions and conflicts that arise among bloggers and advertising executives, we shed light on the uses and exchanges of digital cultural capital for commercial purposes, resulting from the connections between intermediaries that come from different fields of cultural production.  相似文献   

9.
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.  相似文献   

10.
ABSTRACT

From frequent television advertisements to posters in jet bridges all over the globe, the public is continuously subjected to messages affirming the inception of a flat, borderless world. While these discourses suggest globalization is bringing humanity together into a globally connected, cosmopolitan world order, such corporate advertisements also seek to convey the desirability and inevitability of a borderless economy in which they may roam unfettered. To illustrate how these ideas are communicated, I investigate three emblematic cases: Emirates Airlines, HSBC, and Itaú. By interrogating their public discourses, this article elucidates how powerful actors seek to construct global (or regional–global) imaginaries for consumers by deploying esthetically pleasing (and, at times, seemingly ‘subversive’) advertisements. Their ultimate effect is to demonstrate the would-be futility of attempts to regulate the spread of global capitalism or their own profit-seeking behavior. Through showing how pop-culture artifacts attempt to ‘sell’ teleological global capitalism to audiences, this article contributes to the burgeoning literature on the cultural political economy of globalization. To conclude, I briefly explore how this analysis relates to important political debates concerning agency in globalization, the feasibility of state regulation of global capitalism, and the construction of alternative global imaginaries/orders.  相似文献   

11.
This article explores the cultural framings that all too frequently pass un-noticed in standard cost-benefit accounts of development economics. Our purpose is not simply to add our voice to those who argue for the importance of ‘bringing culture back in’, for we assume that in contexts of modern development economics ‘the cultural’ cannot simply be added to the technical or the economic, as these perspectives are explicitly elaborated as an abstraction from the cultural. Rather, we are interested in how an exploration of the cultural dynamics of technical process leads us to a disjunctive (rather than an additive) mode of ‘inclusion’. Building on approaches from science studies and social anthropology, we draw on our ethnographic and historical investigations of road-building in Peru to explore divergent modes of connectivity through which a politics of cultural engagement is played out. Taking the example of a highway under construction in a frontier zone not generally considered of economic importance to the wider national economy, we discuss the historical desire for ‘connectivity’, highlighting the instability of the physical and social environments on the margins of a marginal state. In this context we find that the vital energies of the frontier – entrepreneurial, innovative, experimental and unruly – consistently disrupt the vision of smooth, orderly, technical integration. We argue that this tension between the cultural and the technical, so clearly manifest at the frontiers of capitalist expansion (but characteristic of technological expansion more generally) is a driver rather than an obstacle in the development process. Attempts to produce a political resolution to a perceived lack of integration on the margins of society too often proceed through further attempts at securing smooth continuity (via further technical modes of intervention) rather than building on the diverse (disjunctive) modes of engagement that already exist.  相似文献   

12.
Focusing on the ‘talent pathways’ outlined in the 2008 Department of Culture, Media and Sport Creative Britain report, this article explores how different forms of creative agency are positioned to make a ‘contribution’ to the creative economy. Drawing on Paul du Gay's concept of personhood, case studies on digital gaming explore the formation of two forms of personhood – creative consumers and creative workers. Specifically, these forms of creative agency are analysed in terms of their connections on the ‘talent pathway’, and the transitions that see creativity and talent as inherent in all individuals and in need of channelling and directing. The creative-consumer case study unpacks the digital games industry strategy of enrolling fan-creators within their commercial operations. This case study reveals the increasing importance of co-production for the creative economy, and the extent to which diverse cultural practices are facilitated and positioned. Higher education Games Design courses will then provide the case study for examining how the creative-consumer can be positioned to make a productive contribution to the creative economy as a worker. Within this context, the formation of fans/students into a creative worker or industry-ready worker is evident. Through tracing different forms of creative agency and how they are connected to make a contribution to the creative economy, this article explores the governance of creative agency and economic subjects.  相似文献   

13.
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   

14.
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   

15.
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.  相似文献   

16.
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   

17.
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.  相似文献   

18.
Iconographic avatars in web-based graphical chat environments work to create a ‘shattered’ sense of self through the use of emblematics (the bringing together of text and image) coupled with a reformulated use of free indirect discourse, a style of indirect address found in the modern bourgeois novel. Free indirect discourse, or ‘middle voice’, is crafted by the novelist but takes on the characteristics of the person described, even as the difference between novelist and character creates an ironic distance directed at both the character and the reader who may be encouraged by the style to identify with the character. Avatar-driven graphical chat suggests a synthesis of the value of an avatar external to oneself and that of the ironic distance provided by free indirect discourse. The ‘middle ground’ of iconographic graphical chat environments exemplifies how images reformulate and seemingly mitigate the tensions inherent in text-based free indirect discourse – with its suggestion of ‘experience without a subject’ – to create greater ambiguity, irony and abstraction of the self and others. This mirrors how various forces of global capital work to reformulate the subject.  相似文献   

19.
This paper examines the tension between the materiality of information and communications technologies and the hyperreality which they are thought to produce. The setting for our analysis is Indonesia, where the most recent innovations in communications technologies co-exist alongside ancient – but still functional – ‘predecessor’ devices. Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerji's work on seventeenth-century French formal gardens, we examine how the national imaginaries specific to Suharto's New Order state are embedded in the materiality of the present.  相似文献   

20.
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