Proposing Fashion: The Discourse of Glossy Magazines

This essay discusses the production and discourse of fashion magazines, or glossies, which are an integral part of the ‘fashion system’. As intermediaries between producers and consuming public, the glossies’ main purpose is to propose: to make proposals about what in particular makes the latest clothes ‘fashion’; about what the latest trends are likely to be; about the importance of the names behind them; about reasons why fashion should be important in readers’ lives; and about where the clothes themselves may be purchased. Such proposals legitimize fashion and the fashion world in cultural — and commercial — terms.The glossies make meaningful connections between things that seem to be essentially independent; they give them social lives by creating an imaginary world about them; and they provide historical and aesthetic order in a world whose products, by their very seasonality and potentially chaotic quantity, are likely to go unnoticed. Fashion magazines represent the fashions shown in the catwalk collections. In so doing, they create ‘a discourse of fashion’ whose key evaluative terms are used by different people across time and space to mark out and contest semantic territory in which local cultural preferences engage with globalizing norms of fashion taste

Trade fairs, markets and fields: framing imagined as real communities

"This article describes how trade fairs act as a framing mechanism that enables participants to come together for the exchange of goods and services and to perceive themselves as acting in a social field. This way, trade fairs make markets possible. Based an ongoing participant observation at book fairs in Frankfurt, Tokyo and London, the paper discusses central features of fairs in the light of theoretical categories like networks, institutions and cognitions that are commonly employed in economic sociology. In this context, it highlights that participants negotiate the technical/material, social, situational, content/appreciative, and the use value of goods, values which are then equated with a commodity exchange value in the form of price. Trade fairs frame order, but they are also events where the respective field might be re-configurated. The contingency of personal interaction, the lightness of 'talk' and the carnival-like setting of fairs make them a site where disorder might be created that in turn can lead to change of field and market." (author's abstract

Creative Engagements and Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to the Study of Business

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Magical Capitalism

This essay looks at ways in which various branches of capitalist enterprise and their supporting mechanisms are often not as rational as they make themselves out to be, but operate instead according to magical premises. Magical thinking, as a mode of thought, creates or invokes extraordinary connections between things, people, organizations, and beliefs in order to understand, explain, influence, and occasionally predict, events. Magical practices involve magicians, magical rites, and magical representations ― almost invariably working together to perform the overcoming of uncertainty. And uncertainty, in the sense of unpredictability, is what underpins government, business, and the economy. The essay makes use of seven scenarios ― ranging from Davos and Brexit to GPS and Japanese manga ― to illustrate how politicians, media, education, and various forms of cultural production make use of language, technologies, and images to perform magic in contemporary societies