Educate or serve: the paradox of “professional service” and the image of the west in legitimacy battles of post-socialist advertising

This article investigates a puzzle in the rapidly evolving profession of advertising in post-socialist Hungary: young professionals who came of age during the shift to market-driven practices want to produce advertising that is uncompromised by clients and consumers, and to educate others about western modernity. It is their older colleagues—trained during customer-hostile socialism—who emphasize that good professionals serve their clients’ needs. These unexpected generational positions show that 1) professions are more than groups expanding their jurisdiction. They are fields structured by two conflicting demands: autonomy of expertise and dependence on clients. We can explain the puzzle by noting that actors are positioning themselves on one or the other side based on their trajectory or movement in the field relative to other actors. Old and new groups vie for power in the transforming post-socialist professional field, responding to each other’s claims and vulnerabilities, exploiting the professional field’s contradictory demands on its actors. 2) The struggle is not between those who are oriented to the west and those that are not. Rather, the west is both the means and the stake of the struggle over historical continuity and professional power. Imposing a definition of the west is almost the same as imposing a definition of the profession on the field. In this historical case, “field” appears less as a stable structure based on actors’ equipment with capital, than as dynamic relations moved forward by contestation of the field’s relevant capital

Consumer Culture and Its Futures: Dreams and Consequences

Extensive lead chapter (25,000 words) in edited collection by Evgenia Krasteva-Blagoeva on consumer culture. This chapter addresses a range of questions about the dreams and consequences of consumption. The roots of consumer culture can be traced back to long-standing dreams of abundance and unrestricted consumption. With consumer culture now the dominant force central to the maintenance of the contemporary neoliberal global economy, the chapter asks the question how far are these dreams still viable? Today’s cultural heroes prominent in the media are still the rich, superrich, and celebrities, who enjoy excessive luxury lifestyles. Yet what are the consequences of 200 years of increasing consumption? Some would argue that the ecological consequences of a consumer society are evident in climate change and impending planetary disaster through the accumulation of excessive waste and unknown risks. If the unintended consequences now threaten planetary existence, what is the potential for thinking beyond consumer culture? Does consumer culture merely provide an extension of work, with increasing surveillance through digital devices effectively locking people into more compulsive patterns of behaviour with the loss of genuine free time and sociability? Can consumer culture still deliver the good life and happiness? The chapter explores alternative ways of being together that could reverse the excessive individualism, egoism of consumer cultures