Justifying inherited wealth: Between ‘the bank of mum and dad’ and the meritocratic ideal

How do people reconcile belief in meritocracy with the receipt of unearned economic gifts? Drawing on interviews with first time homeowners who had bought property with familial gifts or inheritances, we find that many downplay the intergenerational privilege associated with gifting by reporting extended family histories of working-class struggle, upward social mobility and meritocratic striving. Interviewees also draw boundaries between their own wealth and the less legitimate wealth of others, or dispute the significance of gifting compared to other inequalities. We further argue that gifting is a site where two competing logics, the ‘domestic’ and family-orientated and the ‘civic’ and meritocratic, collide. While these competing principles appear to be in conflict, we detail how many labour discursively to bring them into alignment. Here interviewees deploy a humble ‘intergenerational self’ to recast familial gifts as evidence of multigenerational meritocratic success. Yet, while some successfully reconcile these conflicting ‘orders of worth’, for others the tension remains unresolved

Who, or what, is insurtech personalizing?: persons, prices and the historical classifications of risk

This paper examines the promises and pitfalls associated with Insurtech – the anticipated innovations in the insurance industry associated with social media marketing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and more – and focuses in particular on the new methods of pricing and premium setting that are claimed to follow from the availability of self-tracking technologies and new volumes of customer data. Using the examples of telematics data in car insurance, efforts by health insurers to incentivize health behaviours (for example through the use of fitness trackers), and insurance companies’ own marketing materials, we assess the current state of play in the field of ‘personalized’ insurance pricing, pointing to obstacles as well as opportunities associated with its development. We then set these contemporary developments against a longer history of insurance pricing, understood as a history of arranging and classifying objects and persons for the purposes of calculating risk. We show that in its longer history, insurance reflected but also contributed to uncertainties about the distinction between persons and property. Drawing these two strands together, we conclude by assessing the implications of insurtech for future understandings of personhood. While there is scope for new categories of personhood to emerge, we show that there are also important continuities between past and present in terms of the challenge of bringing persons, parts of persons, material objects and pecuniary interests into successful alignment

Brands, Property and Politics

Brands and branding are one of the newer ways in which bridges are built between the worlds of production and consumption, and through which participation in a market society is encouraged and sustained. They are also, as the above example suggests, becoming part of a wider vocabulary, a way of describing a range of concerns about celebrity, reputation, memorability and value. Academic work on the subject is still in its infancy, but sociologists tend to see branding in terms of the new centrality of intellectual property rights to the production and the circulation of goods, while legal scholars have noted that the laws of trademark are becoming increasingly geared towards protecting the rights of producers at the expense of consumers.2 It is, however, in the area of popular and business literature that statements about branding have been most bold. The business sections of bookshops abound with texts describing ways of building and re-building brands, proposing ‘brand communities’ as new forms of social cohesion, and even providing advice on how to turn oneself into a brand. From a very different perspective, popular political texts such as Naomi Klein’s No Logo see branding as a distinctive contemporary version of the fetishism of commodities, concealing not just relations of production per se, but more specifically the striking disparities in wealth and privilege, and new forms of exploitation, produced by a global division of labour

The Making of Place: Consumers and Place-affiliated Brands

Despite overstated claims of their 'global' homogeneity, ubiquity and contribution to 'flattening' spatial differences, the geographies of brands and branding actually do matter. This vibrant collection provides a comprehensive reference point for the emergent area of brand and branding geographies in a multi-disciplinary and international context. The eminent contributors, leaders in their respective fields, present critical reflections and synthesis of a range of conceptual and theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, incorporating market research, oral history, discourse and visual analyses. They reflect upon the politics and limits of brand and branding geographies and map out future research directions. The book will prove a fascinating and illuminating read for academics, researchers, students, practitioners and policy-makers focusing on the spatial dimensions of brands and branding

The Rise of Brands

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

Designing the state

Design and other creative industries not only shape our lives in numerous ways, providing 'cultural' goods such as films, music and magazines, but also shape the look and feel of everyday objects and spaces. The creative industries are also important economically; governments and businesses now make considerable efforts to manage creativity for a range of political and economic ends. Does the management of design conflict with traditional ideas of creative freedom and autonomy? How do government policies and business priorities influence the day-to-day practices of designers? And how far have the processes and purpose of creative work been changed by its new centrality to business and government? Bringing together case studies and material from a range of industries and contexts, as well as a series of interviews with practitioners, Design and Creativity provides a cutting-edge account of key trends in the creative industries at the start of the twenty-first century

Global Brands

There are, as any marketing person will tell you, very few truly ‘global’ brands, in the sense of brands that are known and sold in every country in the world. There are, however, many brands that are international, and still more that are trying to become so, often by employing agencies and techniques that are themselves international in scope. Such efforts have long exercised academics in media and cultural studies, although their concerns have often been split between, on the one hand, the cultural effects of such efforts and, on the other, the political and economic consequences of what have so far been predominantly Western attempts to turn the rest of the world into a market for its products. Three new books explore the ways in which branding – as a means of imbuing goods with symbolic or aesthetic content, and then using the laws of intellectual property to control their circulation – brings these issues together, and is linked in turn to broader shifts in the structure and regulation of international trade and the continued prioritization of marketing concerns within business. In doing this, each raises important questions about what happens to ‘culture’ when it is imagined as a series of distinctive properties whose circulation can be controlled, and seen as central to both the continued dominance of established economic players and the emergence of new ones

Branded Spaces: the scope of 'new marketing'

This article comprises a series of critical reflections on some current directions in marketing, with reference to empirical material from a case study of the promotion of a series of live music events. In particular, it highlights a key theme in contemporary marketing: the attempt to approach consumers in an expanded range of everyday spaces. This, in turn, is related to a heightened emphasis on branding, which derives from a complex of factors including a perceived fragmentation and diversification of media audiences and new ideas about the best ways of structuring and stabilizing markets. Within this scenario, the case study is presented as an example of ‘experiential marketing’: one of a range of possible strategic choices in the attempt to insinuate marketing practices more deeply into the lives of consumers. In addition, the case study shows how these spatial practices may be connected to electronic marketing technologies, such as databases, consumer websites and‘viral marketing’ campaigns, in an attempt to extend the scope of emotional or affective bonds forged between consumers and brands. The article concludes by arguing that whilst such strategies may not always succeed in their stated aims, their emergence should nonetheless be taken seriously as an important development in the mediation of production and consumption

Branding

The Cultural Intermediaries Reader offers the first, comprehensive introduction to this exciting field of research, providing the conceptual and practical tools needed to analyse these market actors. The book: •Surveys the theoretical terrain through accessible, in-depth primers to key approaches (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Callon and the new economic sociology). •Equips readers with a practical guide to methodology that highlights the central features and challenges of conducting cultural intermediary research. •Challenges stereotypes and narrow views of cultural work through a diverse range of case studies, including creative directors of advertising and branding campaigns, music critics, lifestyle chefs, assistants in book shops and fashion outlets, personal trainers, bartenders and more. •Brings the field to life through a wealth of ethnographic data from research in the US, UK and around the world, in original chapters written by some of the leading scholars in the field. •Invites readers to engage with proposed new directions for research, and comparative analyses of cultural intermediaries’ historical development, material practices, and cultural and economic impacts. The book will be an essential point of reference for scholars and students in sociology, critical management, cultural studies, and media studies with an interest in cultural economy, creative labour, and the past, present and future intersections between production and consumption