Promotional Cultures (Davis, Aeron 2010)

Aeron Davis' book Promotional Cultures (2010) is one of the books for my last exam in just less than a week. It's an easy read without long sentence structures so familiar to most academic books and at first, it seems to be stating the obvious that we us consumers already know.

Davis explains the history of the rise of promotional activities to coincide with the industrialization of societies and draws on familiar examples from the fashion and film industries to demonstrate how it has become vital to its functioning. This includes top fashion designers designing affordable lines to global chains like H&M or the selling of McDonald's fast food with plastic toy characters from films aimed at children. In many cases, the side products are taking in much more revenue than the cultural text itself.

...but this we already know fully well, so what's new? Davis also covers the use of promotional activities in politics and in civil society, and considering that we've just gone through the parliament elections here in Finland, that makes it the more interesting part of the book.

Some say that promotional activities have increased communication between citizenry and politics (e.g thanks to internet, much more government data is easily available to people), whilst others argue that it has been used to divert the public's attention and to manage public opinion (e.g the infamous weapons of mass destruction and the Bush Administration in the US/New Labour in the UK). Both true to a large extent, I'm sure.

An interesting question relating to the mediatization of societies in general is how it impacts politics. Effectively, since much of what is going is now mediated to us via social media or the more traditional channels, how does it impact political content and communications? Not in a good way, if one talks about simplifying complex issues or the forever diminishing attention span of the typical media consumer, but hey, if more people are aware of the political issues brought to the attention of media than ever before, is it such a bad thing after all? One can only wonder.

In the chapter concerning the recipients of the promotional activity (audiences) Davis' book draws on familiar fellows: Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding, Barthes' mythic signs, Hebdige's bricolage and Bordieu's habitus to name a few. If one is already familiar with these concepts, the book makes an easy-going read with the pages just swooshing by. In addition, Davis backs his stuff up with loads of statistics on just about anything, which is great for the argument but a bit hard to take in, when it's written down (and not put in a table, for example).

Organization Theory (Hatch, Mary 2006)

Enough of the cat videos and here I go again with theory! In preparation to my next exam in May, I'm getting familiar with ways to approach researching an organization from mainly three theoretical frame works: modern, symbolic and post-modern.

There's no doubt in my mind that all these approaches are at work at any given organization. Whilst the modern way of measuring an organization through facts provides concrete knowledge about an organization, every organization at least tries to stand for something in a way of symbolizing the values it has chosen to represent. Take Fazer as an example for an organization, which would have to be tightly measured due to producing foodstuffs in a manufacturing environment while, at the same time, being an organization which is perceived to be classy and refined. One point to note here, though, is to separate the marketing of the products from the company specific organizational culture, which is, of course, hard to assess from the outside and that is where research comes into the picture.

Postmodern paradigm looks at things like power and control critically via methods of deconstruction and precisely because of that, it is difficult to see how it would prove to be useful to the organizations themselves. I mean it's all very well pointing out the inequality within an organization, but who can and truly wants to do something about it? There are, however, some tones of postmodernity which have found their way into the public discourse. Take the discussion over gender quotas in listed companies for an example. Or looking at things from an different angle, Google, which has become one of the global conglomerates in commodifying information.

I believe that to be successful, an organization has to work on several levels, not just one. The production and the processes have to be optimized, the organization has to speak to people, both employees and customers, in symbolic values (trustworthy, forward-thinking and so on), but every organization can also be critically evaluated using the concepts of gender, power and such.

With this in mind, I will continue reading for my final test of the spring...