Market Ideology Research Articles

From Marketing Ideology to Branding Ideology

This special issue of the Journal of Macromarketing is concerned with the globalization of marketing ideology. That topic raises the questions of what constitutes a marketing ideology and what might be its status on the global scene. The different approaches adopted in this special issue acknowledge the breadth of the topic and illuminate the intersection of marketing with the basic forces of cultures, politics, religion, conflicts, and a dismal financial debt crisis in the Western nations. To gain perspective, it seems relevant to observe the historical trajectory of marketing ideology and its likely continued path. To this end, we trace marketing ideology from a nineteenth-century premarketing ideology, to its initial focus on production/distribution technology, to its early twentieth-century focus on customer orientation and branding, to its current focus on network conversations and the significance of modern brand ubiquity. Using these insights, we then discuss three perspectives on future development and raise some potentially relevant questions.

Argentina: Back to Peronism

Argentina: Back to Peronism

Globalization and a Conservative Dilemma: Economic Openness and Retributive Policies

Globalization is associated with economic openness and, in this sense, is in line with conservative free market ideology that embraces less government intervention. Globalization is also associated with greater contact with dissimilar outgroups and potential threats from terrorists and seems to run against conservative attitudes toward outgroup threat and civil liberties. We report research employing two nationally representative samples of 1,000 adults (collected in 2006 and 2008) that explored conservative individuals’ attitudes as American views of terrorism evolved following 9/11. Despite diminishing estimates of the likelihood of terrorist attacks, conservatism remained strongly associated with support for seeking revenge for foreign terrorist attacks and for restricting the civil liberties of foreign visitors and noncitizens in order to prevent terrorism. These trends were not accounted for by differences in levels of perceived threat or by demographic characteristics distinguishing conservatives from others. Results are discussed in the context of globalization and the role of political ideology.

Water Transfers and the Imperfect Water Industry in California

Market ideology often obscures public choices about rea­ sonable and beneficial uses of water. Current debates in California water policy reflect the tug of war between the potential efficiency and flex ibility of water transf ers (often called ·water marketing) and the desire for a stable andre­ liable Calif ornia water system. The water industry's para­ mount concern remains the protection of the reliability and stability of operations of its complex socio-technical sys­ tems for delivering water, particularly at a time when envi­ ronmental concerns over instream uses of water are increas­ ing. Loosening restrictions on water transf ers while protecting appro priative rights is a flexible approach to meeting long-term water demand. But given such market imperf ections as oligopoly and redistributive land rents, state regulation of transf ers of California's most political natural resource-for example, through a drought water bank-remains likely in the future.

Informal Urbanism and the Taste for Slums

This paper explores the aesthetics and politics of slum tourism – what are the attractions and what are the dangers of aestheticizing poverty? We first present eleven images of slums and informal urbanism in south and Southeast Asia and suggest a complex mix of attractions for Western tourists. On the one hand informal urbanism can be picturesque with elements of nostalgia and a quest for authenticity; on the other is the shock of the real, the spectacle of intensive labyrinthine urbanity and an uneasy voyeurism. We suggest the attraction is more the anxious and awe-filled pleasure of the sublime than any formal beauty. The paper then changes scale to connect such imagery to the political economy and geography of the city where the visibility of slums and urban informality is linked to state and market ideologies. Informal settlements generally have negative symbolic and political capital; the developing state paradoxically needs tourists yet seeks to control the urban image for purposes of branding and to signify law and order. The slum is often hidden from the public gaze in a manner that is complicit with the reproduction of poverty. While the voyeuristic gaze of the Western tourist produces an aestheticization of poverty this does not depoliticize so much as it opens up new connections and potential transformations.

Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld

Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld

Chestnuts and Spring Chickens: Conflict and Change in Farmers Market Ideologies

The taxonomy of farmers markets requires an update to encompass the expanding range of available options. Also absent from the literature is an appreciation of the connection between market types, ideological stances, social characteristics, and conflict—necessary for understanding the social processes, motivations, and expectations that create a farmers market. Our study of a long-standing farmers market on the verge of municipal revamping aims to unite these interests, with a focus on the diverse demographics and values of the social groups involved. We propose a synthetic two-dimensional scheme to classify U.S. farmers markets. Bourdieu's theory of distinction is instrumental in making sense of the diversity encountered.

Book Review Symposium

Introduction Debtscapes, Double Agents and Development: Reflections on Poverty Capital It is an honor for me to introduce this series of reflections on Ananya Roy’s important book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (2010). Her work is an extraordinary inspiration to many geographers, and so it was no surprise that the session about her book at the 2010 meetings of the Association of American Geographers generated a giant audience that spilled out into the corridor. Vicky Lawson, Katherine Rankin, Michael Watts and Stephen Young all provided provocative readings informed by their own diverse ethnographic and intellectual insights into microfinance and millennial development. And to these, Roy responded with more new insights and provocation of her own. The result was a highly energized and engaging encounter which—thanks to the editorial support of Vinay Gidwani—we are now pleased to be able to share with the wider community of Antipode readers. At the conference a number of audience participants remarked on how generative the collective effort at review and criticism had been. Yes, “author meets critics” sessions can degenerate into “author meets sycophants” or “author meets attack dogs” spectacles, but this was neither. Instead, persistent critique—the Spivakian idea that our writings have essential limits that are best made open to the antiessentializing enquiry of others—was enacted with care (and without picky pointscoring about who reads Spivak most correctly). Indeed, this included care about our complicitous double agency as academics, our organic intellectual aspirationscum-cooptations, and our ongoing struggles to think and engage outside of the privileged, albeit besieged and debt-disciplined, box of the university. More substantively, but relatedly, the session further provided reports from the frontlines of development and debt beyond the university. This is a world in which, as Roy argues and as her commentators discuss, academically trained double agents also play an influential role, a world where intellectual debts to Gramsci and Grameen go hand in hand with the financialization of microcredit as microfinance by the world’s biggest banks. And it is a world, therefore, that is better understood and navigated by those who can come to terms with how their own complicities compare with those of other double agents working in capitalist organizations that range from the World Bank to Hezbollah. By recording and amplifying the key notes of the conference conversation the following commentaries provide readers with an opportunity to do some critically comparative self-reflection of their own. Yet by connecting the concern with academic double agency to the double agents of microfinance, the main

“The Making of” California’s Energy Crisis

This article examines the origins of the California Energy Crisis through the lens of economic and political theory. The key turning points leading up to deregulation of the State’s energy markets are reviewed. The origins of the crisis are then framed in free market ideology and the garbage can model of political decision-making. Specifically, it is argued that California’s case exemplifies a process of deregulatory capture. A few interest groups used a window of political opportunity to shape the rules governing the process and create new economic opportunities, while shielding themselves from economic risk. These insights regarding the origins of the crisis highlight the need to enrich planning discourse with positive theories of market and polity interaction, and to adopt a more entrepreneurial role for planners during periods of dramatic reform of public infrastructure and services.

Is the Market Moral? Protestant Assessments of Market Society

Is the market moral? Do different Protestant traditions have competing views of “market society”? Despite the increasing diffusion of market logics in American society, scholars of religion have little empirical data on these questions. Employing discourse analysis of market-related topics in two prominent Christian periodicals over a twenty-year period, this paper compares evangelical and mainline Protestant evaluations of markets. We find that neither group views markets as redeeming, self-regulating, or value neutral, and both groups argue that markets require constraints. Evangelicals prioritize moral constraints on markets, while mainline Protestants prioritize governmental and democratic constraints. The degree of difference between the groups varies considerably by topic, however, depending on the degree of potential state intervention. We close by discussing our findings in light of recent debates over the relationship between religious conservatism and economic conservatism. We find that economic conservatism among evangelicals is driven at least as much by a commitment to collective voluntarism as by atomized individualism or free market ideology.

Privatization and Commercialization of Public Education: Consequences for Citizenship and Citizenship Education

My purpose is to examine and evaluate the implementation of market ideology and practices in education through the prism of both modern democratic theory and the discourse of rights. I examine the essence and defining characteristics of public schooling in modern democratic theory, explore the democratic purposes of education, and the unique mission of public schools. I also analyze the vision of public schooling that surfaces from the discourse of human rights and children’s rights, examining relevant UN declarations and conventions. I then proceed to discuss some major manifestations of markets in education, question their congruence with the democratic vision of public schooling, and examine their consequences for both citizenship and citizenship education. My conclusion is that markets in education, and the formulation of education policies and practices through decision-making processes dominated by business and parents, are not necessarily fashioned in the best interest of a democratic society.

Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should not Be for Sale. The Moral Limits of Markets

There are free market ideologues who believe that opening markets always create new opportunities for welfare improvement, and egalitarians who are suspicious of all markets in which the participants have unequal endowments. Debra Satz, in this cogent book, argues for a more complex approach in which not all markets are the same, and some are more problematic than others. In her theory, there are four aspects of a market that can, independently or jointly, make it “noxious”: first, some marke...

Methane Found in Well Water Near Fracking Sites

In a study of 68 private drinking water wells in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York, methane contamination rose sharply with proximity to natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) sites.1 The average methane concentration in shallow groundwater in active drilling areas fell within the defined action level (> 10 mg/L but < 28 mg/L) for hazard mitigation recommended by the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the maximum (64 mg/L) was well beyond that threshold, according to the report. However, the researchers found no evidence of fracturing fluids. Principal investigator Robert B. Jackson of Duke University says fracking has been conducted in the sampled region since about 2008. The team sampled the water supplies in 2010. The researchers measured concentrations of gases and certain isotopes of carbon in methane and other hydrocarbons to distinguish the ancient thermogenic gas stores sought in drilling operations from methane generated by microbial degradation of organic matter. The closer the well was to an active drilling site, the more likely it was the methane detected was thermogenic. Flammable levels of natural gas are common in water supplies, and explosions—even reports of flammable drinking water—have occurred near fracking sites, says Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for Propublica who has investigated gas drilling across the United States. But no peer-reviewed studies have investigated health effects of chronic ingestion of small amounts of methane, Jackson says.2 John Hanger, a former head of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), blames poor gas well construction or design, not fracking, for methane contamination noted to date. He says repairs or plugging of gas wells eliminated contamination in 14 of 19 previously contaminated water wells tested in 2010 by the DEP. But Jackson maintains fracking cannot be ruled out as a cause, given the high pressures used in the practice. Just how likely are leaks? Based on a non-peer-reviewed survey of the five states that systematically report incidents at wells where fracking occurs and where complaints have spurred inspections, Ronald E. Bishop, a lecturer in chemistry and biochemistry at the State University of New York, Oneonta, estimates nearly 2% of such gas wells may end up contaminating groundwater with fracking fluids.3 Bishop says 50% of new natural gas wells recently inspected in Quebec leaked methane.4 Hanger says Pennsylvania has enacted strict standards for design, construction, and materials used in gas wells, which became effective in February 2011.5 The state also requires testing, monitoring, and disclosure of chemicals used in fracking. But Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says state fracking regulations vary widely, and a federal law passed in 2005 exempts fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act and companies from disclosing chemicals used during the process.

Embeddedness and Restructuring: Case Studies from Singapore

Free market ideology has continued its hegemonic reign notwithstanding considerable opposition. Under capitalism, the relationship between the political and economic realms is intricate. This inquiry on corporate restructuring in Singapore between the late 1990s and the early 2000s scrutinizes how a dominant state collaborated with the multinational corporations to reconstitute their accumulation regimes to outlast the business cycles. Based on six cases, the findings underscore the critical role of the state on the subject of restructuring. The peculiar configuration of the relations between the state and labour in Singapore shaped how they negotiated the restructuring process with the companies. While those involved reckoned that training, research and technology were pivotal, the foregoing were not the panacea that optimistic consultants had made them out to be. The interactions among capital, labour and the state remained the underpinnings of solutions.

Gramsci in green: Neoliberal hegemony through urban forestry and the potential for a political ecology of praxis

The US Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources coordinate the distribution of urban forestry grants to nonprofits and citizen groups. These granting agencies increased state funding during a period of neoliberal, fiscal austerity in order to channel ecosystem services provided by urban forests. Increased funding is an instance of rollout neoliberalism whereby the fiscally austere state builds market capacity to harness these services as part of an ecologically modernist agenda. A Gramscian perspective and data gathered from 20 in-depth interviews with foresters are used in this paper to theorize how rollout policy is deployed through urban forestry to extend market hegemony to new geographies. This is anything but a smooth process because the public’s perception of urban trees is highly varied. State bureaucracies must build civil sector capacity to educate people about the ecosystem services trees provide as market commodities. In doing so the state’s market-oriented regulatory legitimacy is consolidated through the apparently benign act of promoting urban forestry. This dialectical process limits participation in urban forestry because markets are inherently selective. Yet it potentially gives rise to an alternative political ecology of praxis beyond market ideology when grant recipients participate in the production of urban ecology and recognize their relationship with nature.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance

The Internet has become part of our everyday lives. Many of us use it for work, hobbies, entertainment, politics, staying in touch with friends and family, learning to know new people and other cultures, for getting all kind of information, etc. In the past 10 years, we have seen the emergence of platforms like Facebook and Myspace (social networking sites), Wordpress and Blogger (blogging) Twitter (social networking, microblogging), YouTube (video sharing), Wikipedia (wiki-based encyclopaedia), or the Pirate Bay (filesharing index site). The notions of ‘web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ have been used by some scholars to describe features of such sites such as community-building and maintenance, continuous communication, user-generated content production and diffusion, collaborative authoring, and distributed content classifications (the latter mechanism is also called folksonomy). Most web 2.0 platforms collect, store, and share a lot of personal user data and data about usage behaviour. Therefore, questions about privacy violations and online surveillance have arisen in public discussions, especially concerning Google (for example the discussions about Google targeted advertising, Google Street View, Google Buzz, etc.) and Facebook (for example the discussions concerning Facebook targeted advertising, Facebook beacon, the Facebook privacy policy, Facebook places, etc.). The field of web 2.0 surveillance studies critically asks questions about the data protection aspects and power dimensions of the contemporary Internet. It is crucial for students and scholars, who are interested in the contemporary media landscape, and who study in fields such as media ⁄ communication studies, cultural studies, political science, law, computer science, social informatics, information science, sociology, business studies, advertising, marketing and public relations, philosophy, ethics, science and technology studies etc., to also engage with web 2.0 surveillance studies.

‘Tomorrow's Schools’ in New Zealand: from social democracy to market managerialism

This paper uses one national case to illustrate how diverse ideological agendas of central state agencies contest the discursive space within which major education policy reforms are developed. In Aotearoa New Zealand in 1988, ‘self‐managed’ schools were promoted ostensibly to allow parents more say in their children’s education and local school administration. The Tomorrow’s Schools reform policy texts included an existing social democratic partnership rhetoric, positioning principals as professional leaders working collaboratively with elected parent boards of trustees. However, the new ideology of ‘parental choice’ of school within a local schooling marketplace, underpinned by a chief executive or market managerial model of principalship, was later operationalised through mechanisms of ‘steerage’ from the centre. To explain this shift, we examine selected policy text pre‐cursors to the reforms and identify how contrasting forms of ‘principal’ and ‘teacher’ identity emerged within social democratic, neo‐liberal and market managerial ideologies. We further show that while radical (Treasury) market liberal arguments for labour market deregulation and consumer choice failed to gain widespread support, the State Services Commission preferred market managerialist strategies for promoting public accountability of schools (based on aggregate student achievement outcome data and centrally determined national educational priorities) were successfully embedded during the 1990s.

Gathering in threads in the insensible global world: the wicked problem of globalisation and science education

This volume of CSSE brings to a close the three edition special series on globalisation and science education spread out over the past several years. Beginning in 2008 with Volume 3, Number 1, the intention of the series was to help address the paucity of science education scholarship that investigated globalisation, that meta-narrative and practice of our times, in which science education is embedded. The first volume focussed on ‘‘why and how the notion of identity can be helpful in tracing the trajectories of people teaching and learning science’’ (Lee and Roth 2008 p.14) and the second produced last year (Volume 5, Number 2) worked the theme of globalisation as ‘‘authors explored ways in which individual teachers, students, and their communities were experiencing the affects of globalization on science education within differing local contexts’’ (Martin 2010 p. 264). The collection makes an interesting body of work, which exemplifies how globalisation shapes and abounds within science education just as science education circulates and perpetuates globalisation. To recap, we can understand globalisation as the recent transformations of information, capital, labour, markets, communications, technological innovations and ideas stretching out across the globe that have become fundamental for constructing our understandings of the contemporary world. The everyday consciousness is now one of a global imaginary, making us feel connected to far-flung places and events. Gerard Delanty (2000) is amongst the many theorists who broadly group the various characterisations of globalisation into political economic transformations and sociocultural changes. Within the former, the processes of convergence foster an increasingly hegemonic homogenisation embodied in the growth of neoliberal market ideologies and of

DIFFERENT WAYS, SAME OUTCOME? LIBERAL COMMUNICATION POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING

1. Introduction After the restoration of independence Estonia chose, compared to the other Central and Eastern European countries the most liberal way of development (Knell and Srholec 2007, Holmes et al. 2008). The latter was chosen for rebuilding the state as a whole, as well as designing the new media landscape. If to benchmark Estonian outcome with other Baltic states, new democracies in Central and Eastern European countries and 'old' Western European states, the question arises--are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with low daily viewing numbers of PSB on media landscapes far ahead of the rest of Europe, or are these countries so badly falling behind that (Western) European standards can never be achieved? This research shows that a country's economic development (valued as Gross Domestic Product) is one characteristic which has a strong correlation with PSB performance in the past and most probably also in the future. When analyzing the development of the public service broadcasting, according to the concepts of Blumler and Gurevitch (1995), the main characteristic of Baltic broadcasting landscape can be presented: media policy bias towards economic welfare of commercial broadcasters, whereas the public service interests are secondary. The implementation of the European Union media regulation and the economic situation of television stations, conditioned by the size of the Estonian television market, led to the enforcement of the legislation which was economically advantageous and protectionist towards commercial TV-stations owned by international corporations. As a result, profit for private television companies was guaranteed but, at the same time, the value of the offered contents diminished. From the end of the 1980s, Eastern and Central European countries had the noble aim of changing from the communist regime towards free democratic welfare states. Among important aspects of development were changes in media systems. In transition states, commercial broadcasters were founded, state-owned print media was mainly privatized, state radio and television companies were turned into public service broadcasters. It has been challenging to reform vast communist party propaganda machines into efficient public service media. The European Union legislation had major impact on this process (Harcourt 2003, 2005, Jakubowicz 2003, 2004a, 2007a, 2008a, Joesaar 2005). 'Europeanization', as defined by Jakubowicz (2009), took place. Even when the Pan-European media policy aims--preserving cultural diversity and safeguarding media pluralism--were common, the ways chosen by countries and the achieved results vary a lot (Jakubowicz 2007a, 2007b, 2009, Ognyanova 2009, Richter 2009, Svendsen 2002, Wyka 2009). EU media policy is grounded on common market ideology. The former Television Without Frontiers Directive (TVWF), now the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), does not take into account country-specific circumstances such as size of the national (and media) market, economic conditions, cultural and historical specific context. However, these are important factors which have a strong influence on media development and performance. Implementation of the same EU legal framework in different circumstances gives in different member states different results. The size of the market determines available resources. In smaller member states there are fewer resources available for national channels compared to niche channels of large states (Doyle 2002). In the first place, commercial broadcasters focus on broadcasting main stream programming. If a market is big enough for profitable business, and resources are available, the launch of niche channels will follow. Due to the market limitations, it is unprofitable to launch niche channels on smaller markets. The diversity of programming offered will be lower in smaller states than on large markets. Therefore PSB on a smaller market is even more responsible for delivering diversity programming and for high-quality information. …

Financial crisis: the myth of free market ideology and current regulatory reforms

This paper attempts to show how free market ideology is articulated as a mythical discourse, demonstrating its main moments, and indicating the circumstances under which, despite its current dislocation, it continues to function as the hegemonic economic construction. The main argument put forward is that the consensus on the new system of financial supervision, which emerged in order to manage the current crisis, even though it highlights some of the shortcomings of free market ideology, does not seem to threaten its dominance.