\u27Twas the Night Before Black Friday: A Rhetorical Analysis of Hegemonic Consumerism in Mediated, Consumptive, and Resistance Spaces

This thesis analyzes Black Friday media, consumption, and resistance spaces to interrogate the construction of and opposition to the hegemonic consumer. In order to investigate hegemonic consumerism, my work is divided into three chapters in which I perform a rhetorical critique of Black Friday spaces: mediated space, consumptive space, and resistance space. In the first chapter, I analyze mediated space, offering a close analysis of 10 Black Friday commercials to identify mediated constructions of the hegemonic consumer. In the second chapter, I employ ethnographic research to assess consumptive space, specifically the retail space of Target on Black Friday to engage an analysis of the rhetoric of consumption and enactment of the hegemonic consumer. The third chapter offers a rhetorical critique of What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary featuring anti-consumption activists Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, to examine resistance space that thwarts the mediated and consumptive hegemonic consumer. The mediated and consumptive spaces simultaneously contribute to the contemporary construct of the hegemonic consumer. In both spaces, the hegemonic consumer demonstrates their cultural values through their consumptive behavior. The resistance space problematizes both the construct and the enactment of the hegemonic consumer. Through the trajectory of three Black Friday textual artifacts, my goal is to identify how the hegemonic consumer occupies mediated, consumptive, and resistance spaces. The mediated hegemonic consumer does more than maintain normative public values; the hegemonic consumer also calls upon subjects to fulfill the role through consumptive enactment. When the hegemonic consumer is resisted and problematized, consumptive acts continue to persist as components to the proposed alternative - Reverend Billy\u27s ideal consumer still consumes, but does so to aid others and uphold the nostalgic Christmas. Through media, cultural rituals, and even resistance efforts, consumption is illuminated as an integral public value

Security Breach at Target

This case study follows the security breach that affected Target at the end of 2013 and resulted in the loss of financial data for over 70 million customers. The case provides an overview of the company and describes the reasons that led to one of the biggest security breaches in history. It offers a discussion on Target’s vendor management processes and the vulnerability at Fazio Mechanical Services that was among the main causes of the breach. Further, the case introduces the incident response plan implemented by Target and discusses the aftermath of the attack. The lessons learned describe some of the steps the company took to mitigate risks in the future and to strengthen its security posture. While the breach had a significant impact on Target, the organization was able to fully recover from it and develop best practices that are now widely implemented by other retailers. The case is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in information security or information systems courses that discuss vendor management, security incident response, or general security program administration topics

Tinkered care: Assembling Medicine Consumption in Grey Zones

The aim of this dissertation is to advance knowledge about care as situated practices within and beyond medical institutional settings. It addresses the phenomenon of substandard and falsified medical products, an issue that concerns state governments globally and organisations including the World Health Organization. While legal sanctions and technological innovation are strongly advocated to protect legal pharmaceutical markets, this study looks at ambivalences and ambiguities in the provision and experiences of health services. By drawing on the concepts of assembling and tinkering, and using empirical data collected from care seekers, physicians and pharmacy staff, the analysis suggests that the individual agency of care seekers is enacted and enabled in a context where an ability to adapt to a changing environment increasingly becomes a social norm. Medical professionals are well aware of people’s evolving medicine consumption, but find it challenging to respond to these changes. Furthermore, observations conducted at pharmacies suggest that, in this semi-institutional and semi-retail setting, medical authority is carefully managed through embodied and routinised engagement with store environments and by attuning to customers’ emotions. All these findings lead to a conceptualisation of care as a tinkered practice, with attentiveness and flexibility being two essential characteristics. However, tinkered care involves risks, especially in relation to medicine access and use.Tinkered care: Assembling medicine consumption in grey zones provides an empirical account of health services as a multi-actor network. It adds knowledge to the spatial-temporal dimension of care practices and offers a conceptualisation of care as tinkered practices. It argues for a need for alternative understandings of care and health services other than institutionally scripted ones

(Re)ordering and (dis)ordering of street trade:the case of Recife, Brazil

Informal urban street trade is a prevalent feature across the Global South where much of the production and/or buying and selling of goods and services is unregulated. For this reason, local authorities have historically seen it as backward, inefficient and detrimental to the development of urban areas and have thus developed formalisation programmes aimed to control and ultimately make it disappear. Critics argue that the design and implementation of these programmes can marginalise and disempower informal traders as it acts against the traders’ livelihoods and long-established practices they have developed for decades. This research speaks to these concerns and aims to investigate how informal urban street trade manages to continuously reproduce itself despite formalising efforts to make it vanish. The study follows a post-structuralist approach informed by post-development sensibilities (Escobar, 2011). The purpose is two-fold. First, to critically investigate the implications of imposed power-knowledge essentialism inherent to formalisation processes (Foucault, 1980). Second, to analyse the ways in which cultural and socioeconomic development is enacted through the daily assembling of informal urban street trade (Farías and Bender, 2012; McFarlane, 2011). The research offers a thick ethnographic inquiry, conducted over a one year-long period (2014-2015) in the urban centre of Recife, Northeast capital of Pernambuco state, Brazil. Recife is a particularly rich site to investigate these issues as informal urban street trade has historically been pervasive of its squares and streets and the municipally has in place a formalisation programme aimed to gather information about traders, license them and relocate them into purposefully-built facilities. The ethnographic inquiry focused on the practices, knowledges, materials and technologies associated with the daily work of both informal traders, selling on the streets, and governing officials implementing the formalisation programme, both on the streets and on the City Council office. Primary data collection was gathered through ethnographic observations and fieldnote diaries enriched with pictures and audio recordings of the day-to-day sensorial experience of informal urban street trade. This was enhanced with informal conversations as well as semi-structured and unstructured interviews with governing bodies’ officials, licenced and unlicensed street traders, formal shop owners, and a diversified set of urban citizens. The thesis highlights that formalisation, through the introduction of regulations, classification schemes and practices of classifying traders through an information system, seeks to establish and expand an individualistic developmentality among all actors. Through this, formalisation aims to shape and normalise their everyday practices to focus on the City Council’s agenda of rendering informal street trade as problematic and turning the solution of formalised trade not only unquestionable, but desirable by all. More problematically, the formalisation programme’s overdetermination of what a socioeconomic order is to be and its imposition of individualising subjectivities to assist in its implementation acts against the traders’ collective and community-based understanding of work and livelihoods which, contrary to the formalisation discourse, greatly benefit the cultural and socioeconomic development of these communities. This is achieved through the traders’ daily assembling of work, value and supply on the streets. The findings reveal that the collective organisation of traders’ work is strongly based on a ‘cooperative ethos’ that is not only efficient in taking advantage of and adapting to the challenging conditions of street markets, but also is key on the ongoing fostering and strengthening of the local community identity. The findings also show that traders, through their tacit knowledge of the best fits between products, services and sites, are key in shaping the valuation of both formal and informal enterprises as well as urban sites thus bolstering the local economy. Lastly, the findings also reveal that, through their interactions with formal and informal supply circuits, street traders are fundamental for the distribution and promotion of local artists and producers thus helping on the support and fostering of local culture. The main contribution of this research is it offers novel empirical and theoretical insights on the ways in which formalisation and informality are performed. It richly reveals the contested nature of development that is negotiated daily between the individualist developmentality imposed by formalisation and the communitarian- based development possibilities which are enacted through informal trading practices. These developmental possibilities are turned invisible by formalisation as classification enforces a strong reading of street trade which is ontologically distant and even contrary to the community-based values which make street trade not only resilient to formalising efforts but also adaptive to the challenging conditions and, more importantly, central to the cultural and socioeconomic development of these communities

Praxitopia : How shopping makes a street vibrant

During recent decades, shopping’s geographical manifestations have altered radically and the presumed ‘death’ of town centre retailing has become a public concern. The social, cultural, and economic backgrounds of this decentralisation of retail and its effects on city life have been studied comprehensively. However, to date, few studies have examined the changing dynamics of non-mainstream shopping geographies, particularly local shopping streets. How shopping is enacted in such places, and shopping’s part in shaping them, has been largely overlooked. Aspiring to fulfil this knowledge gap, this dissertation examines shopping activities on Södergatan, a local shopping street in a stigmatized ‘super-diverse’ district of Helsingborg, Sweden known as Söder, and contributes to the literature on shopping geographies by drawing on a sociocultural perspective.The study draws on practice theory and focuses on shopping as the main unit. The analysis is built on a sensitivity to the interrelationships existing between social practices and place, emerging from the epistemic positioning resulting from the identification of 'modes of practices'. In order to grasp the enmeshed character of shopping, which is complicated by cultural, spatial, temporal, material, and sensorial layers, video ethnography was employed as the primary research collection method, in combination with go-along interviews, observation and mental-mapping.The research reveals five major modes of shopping practice which jointly represent a typology for understanding shopping in terms of being enacted in the street; i.e. convenience shopping, social shopping, on-the-side shopping, alternative shopping, and budget shopping. This thesis also shows that the bundling of these modes of shopping shapes the street into a vibrant part of the city by interrelating with the shopping street’s sensomaterial and spatiotemporal dimensions in complex and multifaceted directions. Consequently, the local shopping street is conceptualized as a praxitopia, a place co-constituted through social practices

Understanding Social Media Shopping : Instagram and the reconfiguration of the practice of shopping

In the recent past, social media has gradually evolved from a platfrom for communication and personal exchange to a space where contemporary consumer desires are awakened, directed, and also fulfilled. Instagram, in particular, is one of the social media platforms that has made specific design decisions to combine the social and entertaining aspects of the native, virtual social media experience with shopping and consumption. At the same time, Instagram and similar platforms have become an integral and meaningful part of many people’s daily routines.Based on these considerations, this dissertation examines the consequences of introducing social media to thepractice of shopping. Using a sociomaterial practice approach, it examines how social media – as a sociomaterial assemblage – reconfigures shopping. Drawing on a digital ethnography centering on Instagram as the research field for collecting empirical material, it conceptualizes and vividly illustrates how social media shopping is emerging as a new form of shopping, what defines, enables, and constrains it, and shows how social media ultimately shapes practical shopping enactments.Moreover, this work conceptualizes the social media shopper as a hybrid actor that is shaped and constituted by both virtual and analog, both human and non-human entities. It presents how this actor, referred to as the ”social media shopper”, is gradually taking shape in and through practice, while also pointing to the consequences that this form of shopping has for its practitioners’ everyday lives. It is shown that social media shopping can be both a leisure activity and a demanding profession – often resulting in practitioners having to meet different demands at the same time. For example, they often feel challenged as they must simultaneously cater to their audience and their personal relationships, or maintain individuality and authenticity while adhering to specific social media scripts.As such, this work expands our understanding of how humans and technologies interact and constitute eachother. This dissertation also allows us to more critically understand the role that technology plays in everyday life by illuminating both positive and negative implications. By showing how social media contributes to the blurring of previously established boundaries and roles – such as buyer/seller or digital/analog etc. – it demonstrates that social media is decisively contributing to shopping becoming an integral part of the mundane and ordinary life of a mostly young, very social media-savvy consumer group. This dissertation therefore offers new insights into the understanding of novel, technology-driven consumption habits, and sheds light on a special group of consumers who have firmly integrated social media into their everyday lives. In doing so, it contributes to the broader discussion on the transformation and digitalization of retail

Smartphone owners need security advice. How can we ensure they get it?

Computer users often behave insecurely, and do not take the precautions they ought to. One reads almost daily about people not protecting their devices, not making backups and falling for phishing messages. This impacts all of society since people increasingly carry a computer in their pockets: their smartphones. It could be that smartphone owners simply do not know enough about security threats or precautions. To address this, many official bodies publish advice online. For such a broadcast-type educational approach to work, two assumptions must be satisfied. The first is that people will deliberately seek out security-related information and the second is that they will consult official sources to satisfy their information needs. Assumptions such as these ought to be verified, especially with the numbers of cyber attacks on the rise. It was decided to explore the validity of these assumptions by surveying students at a South African university, including both Computer Science and Non-Computer Science students. The intention was to explore levels of awareness of Smartphone security practice, the sources of advice the students used, and the impact of a Computer Science education on awareness and information seeking behaviours. Awareness, it was found, was variable across the board but poorer amongst students without a formal computing education. Moreover, it became clear that students often found Facebook more helpful than public media, in terms of obtaining security advice

The Fripe as Urban Economy: Market- and Space-Making in Tunis

“Fripe” is the term used to refer to a heterogeneous array of imported second-hand donations and fast-fashion cast-offs in Tunisia that are part of the global second-hand trade. This thesis builds an account of the fripe as a singular urban economy in Tunis, the capital city. Firstly, it comprises a hitherto unwritten analysis of the fripe’s historical constitution as a contested urban economy; demonstrating its distinct political economy and constructing counter-histories of urban renewal that reveal the role of the fripe trade and its rural migrant constituencies in remaking post-independence Tunis. These histories expose the systems of differentiation that operate to exclude the fripe from formally delimited realms of ‘the national economy’ and ‘the planned urban order’, while also partially incorporating it into modes of government and city-making. Secondly, it investigates the entanglements of contemporary processes of market- and space-making that position the fripe economy as a central agent of urban change, as captured in the vernacular word creation “fripisation”. The ethnography of economic practices underpinning this investigation starts with the unstable commodity status of fripe imports, examining the situated processes of valuation that allow diverse garments and objects to enter renewed cycles of commodity circulation and exchange in Tunis. Centring on what is termed ‘valuation work’ by diverse market-makers in the fripe economy, emphasis lies on how the economy is enacted in urban space and becomes constitutive to socio-spatial relations. Three ‘collective enactments’ of fripe valuation demonstrate how the economy drives localised urban transformations; creates interdependencies and rhythms connecting disparate actors and sites; and allows the staging of temporary publicness. Overall, this thesis advances a perspective on the economy as operating through and as constitutive to urban space, positing the ‘urban economy’ as a tool to expand what can be brought to matter as economy in present-day cities

[Abstract] A re-examination of value co-creation in the age of interactive service robots: a service logic perspective

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