1,721,039 research outputs found
“Names doing rounds”: On brands in the bazaar economy
Full text linkThis article draws on fieldwork form Delhi’s garment and electronics bazaars to articulate an alternative perspective on the role of brands in the global bazaar economy. Knockoffs and counterfeit brands have mostly been viewed as problematic manifestations of counterfeiting and piracy, or framed in terms of authenticity or marginal practices of imitation. In this article, we suggest that bazaar brands also function as central to a growing popular innovation system able to provide material goods as well as immaterial experiences to the world’s poorer consumers in ways that stay in close contacts with the mediated fluctuations of popular affects. Bazaar brands develop a unique relationship with consumers based on an ability to seize the moment rather than the creation of enduring loyalties. We suggest that bazaar brands can be understood as central to an emerging postcapitalist consumer economy that has been substantially empowered by the spread of digital technologies
Climate perplexity: Rural changemakers facing the anthropocene
No full textClimate change is perhaps the greatest challenges that human civilization now faces. To a large extent, attempts at mitigating or addressing climate change are performed by Changemaker ventures: small scale, entrepreneurial ventures that attempt to combine market orientation with social or ecological value-creation. The Changemaker phenomenon is particularly prevalent in the new food economy, where it is driving a fundamental restructuring of rural economies in Europe as well as in Asia and the Americas. But how do market oriented entrepreneurial ventures respond to climate change? Based on six years of interviews and participant observation with Italian rural Changemakers this article suggests that in the absence of collective organization, the Changemaker response to climate change is market by a paralysing perplexity, similar to that of resource-poorer peasants in the South. Without a strong forms of collective solidarity and deliberation the experience of climate change cannot be incorporated within a coherent view of the future. The results can be understood as a ‘weak signal’ that has implications for the study of peasant responses to climate change as well as for theoretical reflexions on the viability of changemaker-style social enterprises in promoting coherent strategies for survival in the Anthropocene
Value in the Information Economy and on the Internet
No full textWe engage with recent applications of the Marxist “labor theory of value” to online prosumer practices, and offer an alternative framework for theorizing value creation in such practices. We argue that the labor theory of value is difficult to apply to online prosumer practices for two reasons. One, value creation in such practices is poorly related to time. Two, the realization of the value accumulated by social media companies generally occurs in financial markets, rather than in direct commodity exchange. In an alternative framework, we offer an understanding of value creation as based primarily on the capacity to initiate and sustain webs of affective relations, and value realization as linked to a reputation based financial economy. We argue that this model describes the process of value creation and appropriation in the context of online prosumer platforms better than an approach based on the Marxist labor theory of value. We also suggest that our approach can cast new light on value creation within informational capitalism in genera
Value and virtue in the sharing economy
No full textCritical accounts suggest that the ‘sharing economy’ is mainly an ideological entity, bringing together a wide range of diverse empirical phenomena that have little in common, apart from their common adherence to an ideology of ‘sharing’. This article suggests that the sharing economy can be empirically understood as instances of peer production attempting to ‘come to market’ via the use of a common ‘sharing fiction’. Analysing the origins and present functions of this fiction, the author suggests that we can conceptualize differentials in economic power within the sharing economy in terms of the work that goes into the reproduction of this sharing fiction and the ability to capitalize on it in terms of price differential
The coming community. The politics of alternative food networks in Southern Italy
No full textSociologists and political scientists suggest that community is increasingly lacking in contemporary life. At the same time, consumer researchers have long suggested that brands and commodities can act as a source of community and ethics. In recent years a number of communitarian productive networks have emerged in sectors like food, software, fashion, design and social enterprise. Such communities of commons-based peer production have transformed the role of consumer communities by making communitarian relations count also in the material production of goods and services. In this paper we examine the ‘neorural’ communitarian networks located in Southern Italy. We suggest that the creation of community around high quality, ‘authentic’ agricultural produce serves a dual role. On the one hand such communities singularise agricultural products and enable them to acquire market value as goods. At the same time, communities provide space for a new politics of things oriented towards pragmatic social transformation and the creation of ontological security in a world understood to be highly contingent
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