The personal is professional: Personal trainers as a case study of cultural intermediaries.

The article examines the discursive construction of personal training as a case study of the characteristics of cultural intermediary work. Based on an analysis of US personal training occupational texts from 1990 to 2000, the article employs a cultural economy perspective (du Gay and Pryke, 2002) to examine the importance of normative codes of professionalism, the investment of personal resources and aesthetic labour, and the tension between cultural and economic categories in representations of the work. Personal training is a particularly revealing case because of its explicit tensions between cultural factors (e.g. a professional, service-oriented ethic) and economic parameters (e.g. the entrepreneurial aspects of selling services). In response, trainers are encouraged to adopt a vocational attitude, suggesting how cultural intermediary work more generally invokes particular dispositions, which are the outcomes of negotiating between economy and culture, and the personal and the professional, in specific occupational contexts

The Mall in Motion: A Narrative Stroll Through the Obstacle Course

How does one begin to write about motion, a process, in itself, that is always passing by, slipping away while attempts to capture it are made in words, on a map, or in notes (musical or otherwise)? Spaces of transition, such as hotel lobbies, bus depots, and highways, are difficult to capture, and often impossible to understand without their crucial element of movement. Shopping malls are such a space, and involve multiple levels of movement. As a private space designed to facilitate commercial exchange, there is the necessary fiscal movement of commodities. This in turn requires a second level of motion: the circulation of consumers. The shopping mall cannot be described solely on the basis of its floor plan, location or size; it can only be encountered *in motion*, as a matrix of time and space through which passes a multitude of trajectories. Without the movement of people, the mall itself is dead, not just in the financial sense, but in the spatial sense as well: the mall is incomplete without the crowd. Mirrors reproduce only commodities, floors reflect only muzac, and escalators transport only their own steps. The dependence of the mall on its kinetic component establishes the constitutive role of the crowd. The crowd in the mall is not an undifferentiated mass, regardless of how subtly the mall attempts to script its space and enforce the imperative to purchase. The "crowd" is a heterogeneous, moving collection of agents with different motivations, and disparate agendas. As such, the constitutive nature of the crowd preserves the potential for social use of a private space which is dedicated to the circulation of commodities and is understood only in motion

Aesthetics as market devices: Taste as a logic of and for practice in the natural wine market

Existing research suggests multi-directional relationships between the construction of cultural fields and everyday aesthetic practices and preferences. Looking beyond the well-­documented link between consumers’ tastes and their patterns of consumption, we can see that tastes serve as operational logics of production and not only of consumption. Gatekeeping cultural intermediaries draw on their own sense of taste to filter what makes it to the publishing, fashion and television markets (Entwistle 2006; Childress 2012; Kuipers 2012); television circulates new repertoires of good taste to China’s emerging middle class (Xu 2007); ‘cool hunters’ scope out taste-­leading marginal consumers for a glimpse of future fads (Gladwell 1997); consumers’ creativity feeds into product development co-­creation schemes (Zwick et al 2008). The aesthetic norms and material content of cultural fields are co-­created by cultural producers (whose aesthetics are occupational tools and outcomes) and intended audiences (whose aesthetics are to be mined and/or Mobilized). [Opening paragraph

Body lessons: Fitness publishing and the cultural production of the fitness consumer.

Since the 1970s, fitness has developed as a cultural field — a network of producers, consumers, products and practices that focuses on the exercising body. This article considers the textual aspect of the US fitness field, drawing from a content analysis of several US exercise manuals from the late 1970s to late 1990s. The content of exercise manuals sheds light on the broader tastes and attitudes of fitness consumers, who are chiefly middle and new middle class men and women. In particular, the article addresses three recurrent themes or ‘lessons’ regarding the fitness consumer and his or her attitude towards the body: as an object of consumption, as a source of calculable rewards and as a motivational problem

Authenticity is the new luxury?: Market myths and the reproduction of consumer culture

The paper examines the construction of the myth of luxury in the specific case of champagne. Champagne has a global and long standing reputation as a luxury product; yet changes in recent decades have challenged both its status as a prestige product, and established notions of what constitutes an elite champagne. Drawing from interviews with champagne producers and an analysis of media representations of champagne, the paper examines how—and to what effect—the myth of luxury is constructed. Combining a semiotic approach to myth with a cultural field approach to the study of consmer culture, the paper provides an overview of the champagne field and its contextualizng factors: structural properties and changes in the market; a new nexus of producers, consumer tastes and sites for the public affirmation of champagne’s status; and media texts that circulate a field-¬‐specific discourse linking champagne to good taste. The analysis identifies, first, how champagne’s product myth of luxury is anchored in particular material and symbolic properties. Second, the analysis disentangles two different articulations of the meta myth of luxury: that of exclusivity and authenticity. These two articulations are typically conflated with particular organizational modes of production, creating an either/or flexibility to the meta myth of luxury, and raising both radical and conservative implications of the possibility that authenticity is the new luxury

The Taste for the Particular: A Logic of Discernment in an Age of Omnivorousness

This article provides an analysis of two leading specialist wine magazines, Decanter and Wine Spectator, and the codification and legitimation of a ‘taste for the particular.’ Such media of connoisseurship are key institutions of evaluation and legitimation in an age of omnivorousness, but are often overlooked in research that foregrounds the agency of tasters and neglects the conventionalization of tasting norms and devices. The wine field has undergone a process of democratization typical of omnivorousness more broadly: former elite/low boundaries (operationalized in the paper through the Old/New World dichotomy) are ignored, and a discerning attitude is encouraged for wines from a diversity of regions. Drawing on the magazines’ audience profile and market position data, and a content analysis of advertising and editorial content from 2008 and 2010, I examine the differences in the use of four legitimation frames (transparency, heritage, genuineness and external validation) for the provenance elements of Old and New World wines. The analysis suggests that the Old World—typically French—notion of terroir, on which the traditional Old/New World boundary rested, has been democratized through the particularities of provenance. Yet, the analysis also reveals continuing differences between the two categories (including greater emphasis on the heritage and external validation of Old World context of production, and on the transparency and genuineness of New World producers), and the preservation of established hierarchies of taste through the application of terroir to New World wines, which retain the Old World and France as their master referent

Fit and flexible: The fitness industry, personal trainers and emotional service labor.

The contemporary United States fitness industry, in conjunction with the medical endorsement of exercise and the marketing of lifestyle consumption, has made possible the emergence and rapid growth of health and fitness services. This paper brings together the sociological fields of work, consumption, and physical culture, suggesting how the structure and organization of personal training impacts upon how fitness is sold. Drawing from interviews with personal trainers, the occupation is discussed as a combination of frontline service work, emotional labor, and flexible work strategies, resulting in a variety of job roles: the representation of the fitness club, the brokering of clients’ consumer relationships with the fitness industry, the motivation of clients through service relationships, and the entrepreneurial cultivation of a client base and semi-professional authority

Commercial Fitness and Challenges for Health.

The article explores the ambivalent relationship between the commercial fitness industry and question of health. While commercial fitness has drawn support and legitimacy from the health field, it is poorly equipped to address population health issues. The article draws from research on the US, where the commercialization and individualization of physical culture and leisure are most marked; however, these are global issues, just as obesity and inactivity are global problems. Using the example of commercial exercise manuals, the article outlines the problematic construction of fitness as an individualized consumer leisure activity, which obscures the social roots of health problems and further entrenches class-based stratification of health and health risks

The Culture of Fitness: Opportunities and Challenges for Health

Over recent decades, many Western countries have experienced a strange paradox, with sport, exercise and leisure industries expanding alongside problems with inactivity and obesity. This paper examines the relationship between the commercial fitness industry and the question of health, focusing specifically on the case of the United States. The paper is organized around three key questions. The first concerns the notion of fitness: what is fitness? We are encouraged by the popular, medical and academic press and by governments to view fitness as both a measure of physical capacity and as an unquestioned good. However, if we look at the concept of fitness more closely, we can see that it is not so straightforward. Definitions of fitness change over time and relative to different political, economic and social conditions. For example, in the United States, fitness in the 19th century was linked to questions of national strength and moral character. Over the 20th century, this has gradually changed such that fitness is now primarily an aspect of individual improvement and capacity (Green 1986; Mrozek 1989). However, definitions of fitness remain contested, all the more so at times of military conflict or economic uncertainty, when anxieties about national and social fitness and preparedness are visited upon the individual in particular ways, as with the current ‘war’ on obesity in many Western countries. The second key question concerns the commercial fitness ‘boom’ that has occurred in the past three decades, and how we might understand it as a particular cultural field (Bourdieu 1993). While the paper and the larger research project from which it draws are focused on the US, where the pace and scope of the individualization and commercialization of fitness have been most dramatic, the commercial fitness field is a global phenomenon. Bearing in mind that the commercialization of fitness—and associated decline of physical education and public provision of recreation programmes and facilities—is mediated by local conditions, including sporting traditions, patterns of state provision of leisure services, socio-economic stratification, climate, and patterns of urbanization and commuting, it can be particularly illuminating to study the US as an extreme example of the commercialization, privatization and individualization of leisure (Rojek 1985, 1995) in consumer societies around the world. Finally, the paper poses the question: is fitness good for us? This is not a ‘yes or no’ question. Over the past three decades, medical research has continued to substantiate the role of exercise in decreasing the risks of various diseases and ailments, including arthritis pain, breast cancer, colon cancer, osteoporosis, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and 2 congestive heart failure (Krupa 2001). However, when we take for granted that fitness is ‘good’ we fail to question the vested interests and unintended consequences of the particular way in which fitness is constructed and sold to us. For this reason, let us pose the question in a polemical fashion, and attempt to understand how the commercial fitness field benefits from, but is poorly equipped to address, population-level health issues such as inactivity and obesity

The construction of an urban, middle-class Chinese consumer culture: The case of cultural intermediaries in the Shanghai wine market

China is a society in transition: while a middle-class market has increased dramatically in size in recent times, an associated middle-class culture of consumption has yet to be fully realized (Elfick, 2011). Although government-led reforms may have facilitated the redistribution of economic capital and created the potential for middle-class wine consumption, wine appreciation has yet to become established in the patterns of middle class taste and behaviour. As China’s production, importing and consumption of wine continue to expand significantly, wine has emerged as a significant site for the cultural construction of a Chinese middle-class culture. The Chinese wine market thus offers a critical case study of the dynamics and actors at work in the development of markets, tastes and middle-class identities. This paper offers a preliminary and partial account of findings from a larger research project that investigates how processes of market formation and taste formation are intertwined. This broad, theoretical focus is approached via the empirical question of how cultural intermediaries (such as wine writers, educators, distributors and sommeliers) frame domestic and imported wine, and wine consumption for the Chinese middle class. The research focuses specifically on Shanghai. Arguably the most important wine market in China, Shanghai is home to significant numbers of wine importers, retailers, wine bars, wine clubs and educational classes, world-renowned sommeliers, as well as international commercial wine exhibitions and events. In contemporary China, the significance of such cultural intermediaries as the vanguard of new class and taste practices is arguably magnified, because of the nascent state of the cultural field and its associated products, practices and forms of expertise. And yet, the roles of such market actors remain largely unexplored in the existing research on the development of Chinese consumer culture. There is now a timely opportunity for an investigation of the strategic and formative role of cultural intermediaries in the construction of Chinese middle-class tastes and markets. The paper proceeds with a brief overview of literature pertinent to conceptualizing the links between class, consumption and cultural intermediaries in the context of the field of wine in China. After a summary of the research design, the paper presents some of the initial findings from the preliminary analysis of the project data. [Taken from the Introduction