Marketing, the past and corporate heritage

Argues for a more expansive conceptualisation of the past’s relevance in, and for, marketing. Such a differentiated approach to the past is pregnant with possibilities in terms of advancing scholarship apropos temporal agency in marketing along with consumption practices. Symptomatic of this perspective is the increased mindfulness of the rich palate of past-related concepts. Significantly, the corporate heritage notion - because of its omni-temporal nature - represents a distinct and meaningful vector on the past by coalescing the past, present and future into a new type of temporality. As such, the authors reason this expansive conceptualisation of ‘the past-in-marketing’ is both timely and efficacious. Whilst sensitive of the importance of the historical method in marketing and the history of marketing scholarship and practice per se. This broader marketing approach to and of the past highlights the ideational and material manifestations of the past-in-the-present and an envisaged past-in-the future

Historical Criminology and the Explanatory Power of the Past

To what extent can the past ‘explain’ the present? This deceptively simple question lies at the heart of historical criminology (research which incorporates historical primary sources while addressing present-day debates and practices in the criminal justice field). This article seeks first to categorise the ways in which criminologists have used historical data thus far, arguing that it is most commonly deployed to ‘problematize’ the contemporary rather than to ‘explain’ it. The article then interrogates the reticence of criminologists to attribute explicative power in relation to the present to historical data. Finally, it proposes the adoption of long time-frame historical research methods, outlining three advantages which would accrue from this: the identification and analysis of historical continuities; a more nuanced, shared understanding of micro/macro change over time in relation to criminal justice; and a method for identifying and analysing instances of historical recurrence, particularly in perceptions and discourses around crime and justice

Social theory and the politics of big data and method

This article is an intervention in the debate on big data. It seeks to show, firstly, that behind the wager to make sociology more relevant to the digital there lies a coherent if essentially unstated vision and a whole stance which are more a symptom of the current world than a resolute endeavour to think that world through; hence the conclusion that the perspective prevailing in the debate lacks both the theoretical grip and the practical impulse to initiate a much needed renewal of social theory and sociology. Secondly, and more importantly, the article expounds an alternative view and shows by thus doing that other possibilities of engaging the digital can be pursued. The article is thus an invitation to widen the debate on big data and the digital and a call for a more combative social theory

Differentiation and displacement: Unpicking the relationship between accounts of illness and social structure

This article seeks to unpack the relationship between social structure and accounts of illness. Taking dentine hypersensitivity as an example, this article explores the perspective that accounts of illness are sense-making processes that draw on a readily available pool of meaning. This pool of meaning is composed of a series of distinctions that make available a range of different lines of communication and action about such conditions. Such lines of communication are condensed and preserved over time and are often formed around a concept and its counter concept. The study of such processes is referred to as semantic analysis and involves drawing on the tools and techniques of conceptual history. This article goes on to explore how the semantics of dentine hypersensitivity developed. It illustrates how processes of social differentiation led to the concept being separated from the more dominant concept of dentine sensitivity and how it was medicalised, scientised and economised. In short, this study seeks to present the story of how society has developed a specific language for communicating about sensitivity and hypersensitivity in teeth. In doing so, it proposes that accounts of dentine hypersensitivity draw on lines of communication that society has preserved over time

Prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent promise

'Prefigurative politics' has become a popular term for social movements' ethos of unity between means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles two components: an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives; and prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised re-surfacings in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck's 'process of reassurance' in a pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of means-ends unity in terms of Bloch's 'concrete utopia', and associating it with 'anxious' and 'catastrophic' forms of hope

Hamburg's Spaces of Danger: Race, Violence and Memory in a Contemporary Global City

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right-wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg’s urban boosterism relies on, while simultaneously obscuring, the same structures of racial violence that embolden reactionary movements. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Allan Pred, we present an archaeology of Hamburg’s landscape, uncovering some of its ‘spaces of danger’––sites layered with histories of violence, many of which lie buried and forgotten. We find that these spaces, when they become visible, threaten to undermine Hamburg’s cosmopolitan narrative. They must, as a result, be continually erased or downplayed in order to secure the city as an attractive site for capital investment. To illustrate this argument, we give three historical examples: Hamburg’s role in the Hanseatic League during the medieval and early modern period; the city under the Nazi regime; and the recent treatment of Black African refugees. The article’s main contribution is to better situate issues of historical landscape, collective memory and racialized violence within the political economy of today’s global city

Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors engage the future

Our paper deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of ten important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, and an assumption of confident access to the future. Managers envisage their organization?s future and make plans for organizational action in a space where ?business as usual? reigns, and there is little engagement with the future as fundamentally open; as a time-yet-to-come. In using a conceptual lens inspired by the work of Fredric Jameson, we first explore the details of this presentism and a particular colonization of the future, and then linger over small disruptions in the narratives of our interviewees which point to what escapes or jars their common sense frame, explore the implicit meanings they assign to their agency, and also find clues and traces of temporal actions and strategies in their narratives that point to a subtly different engagement with time

Beyond spheres of influence: the myth of the state and Russia’s seductive power in Kyrgyzstan

This article questions the analytical value of “spheres of influence” for understanding power and the state in the post-Soviet region and beyond, based on a critical deconstruction of the ontological and epistemological assumptions inherent in the concept. It proposes an alternative reading of power and the state, drawing on the concept of “seductive power” at a distance and Timothy Mitchell’s “state effect.” Rather than the concept of a sphere of influence, a highly politicized concept that conveys an ontology that flattens and divides space, essentializes the state, and relies on an intentionalist account of power, we need an analytical framework that can help us make sense of the multiple, varied spatialities and historical legacies that produce the state and power. I demonstrate this through an extended discussion of Russian power in Kyrgyzstan, a country often described as a Russian client state. Mobilizing recent re-conceptualizations of state and power in anthropology and political geography, I present an analysis of Russia’s seductive power in Kyrgyzstan and the way it contributes to producing Kyrgyz state-ness. I also show how Russia’s Great Power myth is itself evolving and conclude that the differentiated, relational production of space and power in either Kyrgyz or Russian myths of the state is not captured by a the concept of a return to spheres of influence

1989 as a mimetic revolution: Russia and the challenge of post-communism

Various terms have been used to describe the momentous events of 1989, including Jürgen Habermas’s ‘rectifying revolution,’ and my own notion of 1989 as a type of ‘anti-revolution’: repudiating not only what had come before, but also denying the political logic of communist power, as well as the emancipatory potential of revolutionary socialism in its entirety. In the event, while the negative agenda of 1989 has been fulfilled, it failed in the end to transcend the political logic of the systems that collapsed at that time. This paper explores the unfulfilled potential of 1989. Finally, 1989 became more of a counter- rather than an anti-revolution, replicating in an inverted form the practices of the mature state socialist regimes. The paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation arising from 1989 is striking. The dominant motif was ‘returnism,’ the attempt to join an established enterprise rather than transforming it. Thus, 1989 can be seen as mimetic revolution, in the sense that it emulated systems that were not organically developed in the societies in which they were implanted. For Eastern Europe ‘returning’ to Europe appeared natural, but for Russia the civilizational challenge of post-communism was of an entirely different order. There could be no return, and instead of a linear transition outlined by the classic transitological literature, Russia’s post-communism demonstrated that the history of others could not be mechanically transplanted from one society to another