Assembling Consumption

Researching actors, networks and markets

Robin Canniford, Domen Bajde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138820944
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317589624
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Assembling Consumption marks a definitive step in the institutionalisation of qualitative business research. By gathering leading scholars and educators who study markets, marketing and consumption through the lenses of philosophy, sociology and anthropology, this book clarifies and applies the investigative tools offered by assemblage theory, actor-network theory and non-representational theory.

Clear theoretical explanation and methodological innovation, alongside empirical applications of these emerging frameworks will offer readers new and refreshing perspectives on consumer culture and market societies. This is an essential reading for both seasoned scholars and advanced students of markets, economies and social forms of consumption.

1

ASSEMBLING CONSUMPTION

Robin Canniford and Domen Bajde

Consumer-cultural research has never been a more exciting and relevant area of study. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, the practices, materials and discourses of markets and consumption are proliferating in manners that blur conceptual boundaries commonly established between consumers and technology, objects and subjects; production and consumption, nature and culture, local and global. What specific aspects of consumption engender these fuzzy boundaries and how can we map markets as they extend over ever-new territories? To answer these questions, this book unites some leading authors who are tracing markets and consumer cultures through the lenses provided by the concept of assemblage.

During the past three decades assemblage has influenced thinking in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. Moving beyond the preoccupation with meaning associated with linguistic and interpretive turns, and problems of rigidity versus change associated with post-structuralism,¹ assemblage offers a range of tools for thinking about the social world as messy and ongoing interrelations between diverse kinds of things at various scales of life. So extensive is the concept’s impact that it would be impossible to describe the range of applications and innovations generated so far. As such, this introduction will provide an overview of some features that unite theoretical perspectives associated with the work of, amongst others, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Manuel DeLanda, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and Donna Haraway.

The perspectives these authors establish are diverse. Yet what unites ideas of assemblages, actor-networks and figurations are conceptions of the world as constituted from more or less temporary amalgamations of heterogeneous material and semiotic elements, amongst which capacities and actions emerge not as properties of individual elements, but through the relationships established between them. In what follows, we will unpack this definition, explain the new pathways that assemblage opens, and illustrate what the concept can change in terms of how we understand markets, consumption and consumers.

In so doing, we also introduce our co-authors’ explorations of consumption assemblages; the overlapping entanglements of heterogeneous components from which consumer cultures and markets are both localised and extended. These explorations are intended to renew and refresh theories of markets and consumption in a world where conventional scales, sites, expressions and borders are open to new paths of transformation. Indeed, our contributing authors wreak some havoc on established ways of thinking about key topics in consumer-culture theory. These include consumers, markets, value, families, the self, home, nature, leadership, as well as the management of bodies, space and taste. Without exception, these concepts and contexts are shown to be more fragile and nested in a broader array of interdependent features than is often acknowledged.

Throughout this introduction, we point to the contributions of our colleagues in an account that we hope is accessible for readers who are new to this area. It is with these readers in mind that we now turn to explain the emerging world of assemblage research under headings that connect different material-semiotic theories, whilst simultaneously highlighting their potential impact in marketing and consumer research.

Heterogeneity: relations in process

Perhaps the easiest entry into the world of assemblages is through the principle of heterogeneity. Assemblage and actor-network theories are first and foremost commitments to investigating and presenting the world as constituted from diverse kinds and scales of things. Consumption assemblages can encompass entanglements between things and concepts as diverse as TV celebrities, urban myths, spiny lobsters, procurements and gifts, legal statutes, organic potatoes, mega-cities and coaxial cables. A key benefit of assemblage theorising is the provision of tools and vocabularies that recognise and account for how such different kinds of phenomena relate. In so doing, these theories allow us to build descriptions in which material (tangible things) and semiotic (expressions of various kinds) elements become interconnected and shape each other; in which long-lasting phenomena such as credit networks connect with shorter-lived occurrences such as stock-market bubbles; and in which divisions between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces, or micro and macro levels of analysis are not taken for granted.²

In extending the purview of research to how multiple kinds of things connect and shape each other, material-semiotic theorists proceed according to a second principle, namely a focus on relations. Assemblage is a relational concept in that none of the components that make up assemblages are seen to exhibit fully predetermined or strictly fixed forms outside of contexts in which they become associated with other components. This applies to both people and things in dictating that nothing ‘rules itself’ since it only exists in so far as it is made of parts and in a system of objects’ (Pierides and Woodman 2012, 671). Put simply, nothing in our lists above – celebrities, network cables, stories, cities – have strictly singular uses, essential meanings, fixed borders or unchanging logics. Instead, the various elements that constitute assemblages gain their qualities and capacities through more or less stable connections with fellow elements.

A third principle stems from this relational quality of assemblages, namely process. This is the idea that relations between constituent elements are always uncertain, open to change and never final. To be sure, some objects, spaces and organisations appear constant and self-evident. Nonetheless, these apparent continuities require ‘work’ to constitute them as ‘well-formed assemblages’ (Latour 2005, 8). Early studies in actor-network theory in particular illustrated how the emergence of a stable assemblage requires ‘translations’.³ This is to say that things do not simply relate together automatically. Rather, step-by-step developments are required to assemble relationships and equivalences between previously unrelated elements in manners that lead to what we might think of later as a market, a technology or an innovation (Callon 1986; Latour 1988).

This double emphasis on assemblages as both situated collections of things, but also as processes of those things coming together or falling apart (Phillips 2006), has become important for studies of markets, innovations, brands and consumption, because it highlights the fragility, contingency and progressive work required to generate these phenomena. Indeed, marketing and consumer researchers have recently applied ideas of translations to understand the processes through which consumer experiences, markets, communities and brands gel or dissipate (Canniford and Shankar 2013; Thomas et al. 2013; Giesler 2012; Martin and Schouten 2014; Parmentier and Fischer 2015).

What does this viewpoint offer us? Principally, by keeping an eye on instability and the necessity for multiple things to gel together, assemblage research can illuminate previously overlooked aspects of markets and consumption. If the processes of brand management, consumer experiences or market creation require multiple things to come together, then we must discover what these things are, and search out the catalysts, enablers or inhibitors of processes that interest us, many of which have yet to be described.

In Chapter 2, John Schouten, Diane Martin, Hedon Blakaj and Andrei Botez examine one such process: the growth of the organic food market/culture in California from the early twentieth century to the present day. Counter to ideas that useful innovations will inevitably diffuse through markets, cared for by either an invisible hand, by ‘early adopters’, or by clever marketers, this chapter explains a market as emerging from ideological desires of embedded entrepreneurs who innovate within dynamic material-semiotic systems. From their historical account, it transpires that these systems consist of multiple actors and catalysts. Supply chains, legal work, restauranteurs, certification schemes and brands all play active roles in forging the local translations that gradually mobilised what are now massive marketplaces for organic foods.

Is this just a new way to describe what interpretive consumer research has already told us about how products, services, advertisements and brands are made meaningful and valuable? Postmodern marketing perspectives (Brown 1993; Firat and Venkatesh 1995; O’Donohoe 1994), the linguistic turn (Denzin 2001) and historical approaches (Karababa and Ger 2011) all emphasise that ideas, markets and meanings are fluid and negotiated. Assemblage and actor-network theories continue to stress this fragile quality of worlds that are always open to change. What is added by a concern with heterogeneity is a broadened research gaze. In addition to linguistic, narrative and institutional conditions of possibility and change, assemblage approaches demand that we consider also how material things play active roles in (re)shaping worlds (DeLanda 2006; Latour 2005).

Put differently, objects and technologies are not passive vessels to which humans can simply delegate tasks or attach meaning. Rather, objects can act to stabilise and order society through their obduracy (Latour 1999), or they can transform assemblages in surprising ways (Bettany 2007); think of how power lines stabilise everyday consumption events, yet how a single falling tree can transform expectations so radically. This potential for both people and ‘objects’ to transform assemblages, or to remain somewhat passive in relation to other elements, emerges within relational, heterogeneous systems.

It follows that in assemblage and actor-network theories, the capacity to act is always made possible by and negotiated amongst multiple human and non-human counterparts (Borgerson 2013). The experience of riding a motorcycle for instance emerges from an assemblage of a motorbike – itself a local assemblage of parts; a road – a wider-reaching assemblage of asphalt, rules and other road users; and of course the rider – whose skills can be traced to an assemblage that might include motorcycling schools, embodied knowledge and even YouTube videos (Murphy and Patterson 2011).

Acknowledging the necessity of assembled objects for agency to occur encourages researchers to go beyond a purely linguistic focus. The benefit of this is that in concentrating on how both physical stuff and expressive acts – such as narratives – combine we find new pathways to theorise how use, value, meaning and action emerge in particular contexts. In Chapter 3, Zeynep Arsel illustrates this potential by tracing the movements of makeup products across global market assemblages. In so doing, she advocates a new relational ontology of value, and advances a theory of object positions that accounts for value as process in commodity exchange systems which comprise many material and semiotic elements.

In so doing, Arsel explains that the value of an object is established in extended, idiosyncratic settings, amongst actors with divergent interests and agencies. Rather than trying to speak of a singularised principle of value at one moment in time or located in a particular product, she sees value as distributed across extended and protean ‘value chains’. When one considers the work necessary to create the value of diamonds, for instance, Arsel’s principle makes good sense. From the forging of popular cultural principles – diamonds are forever, or a girl’s best friend, to the limited supplies carefully maintained by producers, or the masking of questionable production and distribution activities, the value of the glittery rock on your finger depends, as Arsel suggests, on complex networks through which diverse elements (e.g., objects, discourses, competences, infrastructures) move.

Movement and change are recurring themes throughout this book. The collections of material and expressive things that form assemblages never remain still, and as new things come into play, assemblages alter. In Chapter 4, Jon Roffe begins by recounting key features of the many kinds of assemblage described in this volume. In so doing, his chapter explains clearly the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of the assemblage as ‘tetravalent’. This is to say that all assemblages are characterised by four conditions. We have alread...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Assembling consumption
• PART I Heterogeneity Relations in process
• PART II A world of hybrids
• PART III Consumers within networks
• Part IV Intervening in assemblages
• Index