Market Rhetoric Research Articles

Circe, the female hero. First-person narrative and power in Madeline Miller’s Circe

Abstract This article analyzes Madeline Miller’s Circe in relation to the contemporary trend of women’s mythological retellings of marginalized female characters. Because of Circe’s first-person narrative, Miller’s book has been interpreted and marketed as empowering and feminist; however, Circe’s narrative structure rather reaffirms the ideological assumptions underlying the ‘masculine’ Bildungsroman, where the female character’s individual experience is defined by romance and she is ultimately excluded from the social scene. The dichotomy between the marketing rhetoric of empowerment and the novel’s actual narrative structure stimulates a broader reflection about the ideological implication of this novelistic trend as a whole. On the one hand, these novels exploit the well-established exemplary value of Graeco-Roman antiquity to offer a new version of the classical canon which accommodates the critiques of radical movements like feminism; on the other hand, they appropriate the progressive aura of such movements to secure a broader audience while in fact leaving power imbalances unquestioned.

“I Feel Like I’m in a Box”: Contrasting Virtual Reality “Imaginaries” in the Context of Academic Innovation Labs

ABSTRACT As immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users’ experience at the University of Connecticut’s OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google’s VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab’s promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates “top-down” imaginaries that contrast with “bottom-up” imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.

The whiteness of markets: Anglo-American colonialism, white supremacy and free market rhetoric

ABSTRACT Building on the burgeoning raced markets literature, I examine the function of markets in colour-blind racism. I argue that ‘the market’ is a useful rhetorical mechanism in everyday political thinking that reproduces white supremacy. To demonstrate this, I look at the work of white supremacist and early American political economist: Thomas Roderick Dew. Focusing on his political economy lectures, I find that the emergent study of markets gave Dew the language to frame the American racial order as the product of natural laws that generate social good. I suggest that the efficacy of his pro-slavery argumentation is contingent on an imbalanced imagination of market histories that over-represents the white experience. Using an un-colourblinding historiography, I amplify the different experiences of Native Americans and enslaved Black Americans as well as challenging the idealisation of the white settler, which exposes the assumptions behind Dew’s pro-slavery rhetoric. Turning to a children’s podcast in the twenty-first century, I reveal how ‘the market’ is a reconfiguration of the same rhetorical strategy, where the white experience is over-represented and idealised, ultimately reproducing the material outcomes of white supremacy: maintaining and deepening the racial wealth divide.

ESG Fund Labels Matter: Portfolio Holdings, Flows, and Performance

This study investigates whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds have distinct features from conventional funds based on holdings-based ESG scores, flows, and performance. We find that ESG funds have significantly higher ESG scores than conventional funds; ESG funds with higher scores significantly weaken flow-performance sensitivity; and their scores are negatively associated with risk-adjusted future performance. However, there is no evidence to support better selection skills among ESG fund investors than among non-ESG fund investors. By conducting a comprehensive analysis, this study suggests that ESG funds have distinct fund attributes, and thus, “ESG” is not a mere marketing rhetoric in the Korean fund market.

The No Child Left Behind Act in the Global Architecture of Educational Accountability

AbstractAlthough chiefly framed in the context of domestic education policy, debates about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) echoed international education policy debates and the workings of global education governance. As this article demonstrates, both domestic and international efforts were shaped by three key features: tension between centralized goals and historically localized practices and authorities; links between education policy goals and a set of rhetorical arguments centered on human capital; and competitive comparisons among education systems that mixed market rhetoric with prestige dynamics. These common features can be attributed to the development of a “soft governance” layer, in which multilateral surveillance plays a major part. In the US, such development began before NCLB, accelerated during the NCLB era, and remained after NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Plataformização da pele? Tatuagens biométricas, dataísmo e a datificação do consumidor

Abstract This theoretical essay starts from the possibility of the platformization of the skin through the use of biometric tattoos to analyze the imminent risks posed by consumer wearables and their biopolitical marketing in the context of communicative capitalism. The theme is approached through a critical perspective that goes beyond the marketing rhetoric that focuses on individual improvement and self-care through consumer datification. The aim is to overcome the opacity of technological systems associated with communication and information technologies. The work discusses the consequences of biopolitical marketing associated with the consumption of wearables; for example, the formation of profiles informed by governmentality based on a belief in dataism, which fosters objective truth markets based on the capture and analysis of big data. The essay concludes that the consumption of wearables associated with the platform economy, datification, and dataism poses risks to privacy and democracy, especially in contexts such as the pandemic, in which dependence on communication and information technologies is evident.

Honesty and economy on a highway: Entanglements of gift, money, and affection in the narratives of Ukrainian sex workers

Sex work provides a particularly good example to consider the relationships of money, authenticity, and intimacy. Many scholars who research intimacy point to the fact that seeing sex work as an exchange of money (or goods) for sex is a simplistic and reductive approach. Building on the existing research that complicates the idea of sex work as an emotionally detached sex‐for‐money transaction, this article looks at the coexistence of references to gift exchange, informal economy, and service economy in the narratives of street sex workers from the cities of Kropyvnyts'kyi and Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine. Focusing on sex workers' attempts at discursive legitimization of sex work and on the narratives of their relationships with clients, I argue that the market rhetoric and the gift economy are not incommensurable for my participants. I show that though sex workers' local “workplace ethic” is permeated with references to competition and productivity, they still don't see sex work as qualitatively different from other forms of intimacy and don't treat their clients as mere customers because of multiple emotional and affectionate attachments that exist between them. I conclude by considering the coexistence of various economic narratives in relation to the economic self.

The limits of institutional convergence: why public sector outsourcing is less efficient than Soviet enterprise planning

This paper explores UK public sector outsourcing to offer a critique of the theory of liberal institutional convergence. The latter argues that NPM is a case of empiricist scientific rationalism but the neoclassical economics that justifies public sector outsourcing operates with a closed-system ontology of the economy that has more affinities with Stalinist central planning than to empirical political economic science, and this has real institutional consequences. The argument sets out the neoclassical logic behind outsourcing, the unanticipated risks in its conception and the deepening problems with its intensification as practice. It shows how, when we put the market rhetoric of NMP to one side, outsourcing necessitates the central planning of private actors, and the success of this venture hinges on the viability of the outsourcing contract as an effective junction of instruction and control. If there is institutional convergence in New Public Management it is with Soviet enterprise planning. It follows that it is not simply ‘second-best-world’ neoclassical theories that can shed light on outsourcing's chronic failures but also the critiques of Soviet central planning. The latter help explain why incomplete contracts in outsourcing are just the start of bargaining games that the state cannot win.

Developing the ‘best practices’ of virtual reality design: industry standards at the frontier of emerging media

In this article, the author analyzes the ways in which the practices of virtual reality design are being standardized, focusing specifically on the Oculus Best Practices Guide (OBPG). Instructional writings like the OBPG are fruitful documents from which theories of practice can be extracted and, for companies like Oculus, they serve as alternative mission statements, articulating what Oculus wants and needs the standards and practices of its nascent product-medium to be. The author argues that the OBPG serves to create standards and practices that emphasize and maintain virtual reality (VR) user immersion in order to mitigate the weaknesses in the technology and better conform with VR’s idealized, hypothetical presentation in fiction and marketing rhetoric. The Guide plays a key role in Oculus’s larger attempts to mitigate market risk through the standardization of content across its distribution platforms in order to shape an inchoate technological object into a stable and lucrative entertainment medium. More broadly, the OBPG serves as an example of the specific ways in which market forces act on the development of new media practices, turning ‘standards’ into ‘industry standards’.

Designing stories on social media: A corpus-assisted critical perspective on the mismatches of story-curation

At a time of increased monetization of social media, there is scope and need for critical-linguistic perspectives to go beyond the focus on users’ linguistic and multi-modal resources. Drawing on the project ‘Life-writing of the moment: The sharing and updating self on social media’ (www.ego-media.org), in this article, I make a case for a corpus-assisted critical perspective which allows the scrutiny of media companies’ design of stories as communication features in their apps. What definitions and views of stories underpin such story-features? What facilities are on offer for posting stories, how are they branded, and why? Who is positioned as an ideal story-creator and audience of those stories and why? I address these questions with reference to the recent story-designing spree on Snapchat and Instagram. The corpus analysis of how stories as an app feature are launched and discussed on online media, incl. keyword analysis and lexical and thematic associations of the term ‘story’, has brought to the fore three mismatches between the marketing rhetoric or branding of stories as a feature and the actual affordances offered for them. These involve tensions and trade-offs between: continuity of self and ephemerality; textuality and visuality; creativity and control for the user vs. pre-selection templates and customization. These mismatches are revealing of a re-designation of key-ingredients of stories, in particular time, memories and audience engagement, so as to suit the apps’ agenda of metricization of users’ lives and their ever closer links with advertising.

Fire in the Bronx: Austerity, Quality of Life, and Nightlife Regulation in New York City Post-1975

America’s underground economy has grown strikingly since the 1970s, reflecting consumer demand for cheap prices, workers’ search for alternative sources of income, and government intervention. Far from unregulated, this economy has been managed in crucial ways, revealing a fundamental paradox in free market rhetoric. This was particularly striking in New York City in the latter decades of the twentieth century, where a set of uneven responses to the underground economy expanded its boundaries through new licensing, zoning, and permitting requirements that many businesses could not conform to. A tragic fire at an immigrant social club in March 1990 revealed the problematic turns in municipal policy taken in the aftermath of the city’s fiscal crisis. The lead up and response to the Happy Land Social Club fire by city officials demonstrated a rise in punitive regulation aimed at New York’s marginalized residents in an era of alleged deregulation and small government fetish.

Emoji rhetoric: a social media influencer perspective

ABSTRACTSocial media require a marketing rhetoric that embraces emerging language use and shifting communication norms. Emojis have become quintessential elements of social media communication; yet, their role in supporting persuasion attempts has not been systematically analysed. Drawing on general rhetoric literature, this paper dissects, portrays and labels social media influencers’ persuasive attempts to initiate engagement through emojis. The focus on influencers is justified because of their dual roles as marketers and active social media users. 600 Weibo posts by the top 200 Weibo influencers were collected to develop a taxonomy of emoji-based verbal moves aimed at encouraging responses in followers. The resulting taxonomy demonstrates that emoji use by social media influencers is complex and strategic and serves multiple persuasive and communicative purposes.

First-Best-World Economic Theory and the Second-Best-World of Public Sector Outsourcing: The Reinvention of the Soviet Kombinat by Other Means

This paper examines how public sector outsourcing has performed in the UK, one of its leading exponents. It sets out the theoretical economic logic behind it, the unanticipated risks in its conception, and the deepening problems with its intensification. It shows how, when we put the market rhetoric of New Public Management to one side, outsourcing necessitates the central planning of private actors, and how the success of this venture hinges on the viability of the outsourcing contract as a fully effective junction of instruction and control. As contract theory tells us, however, the more complex and dynamic the good, the less a contract can guarantee effective control over its production. Moreover, as the critical economics of Soviet central planning teaches us, the resulting asymmetries in information and leverage are just the start of bargaining games that the state (and taxpayer) cannot win. As the paper shows, a state that outsources its complex tasks puts itself at a chronic informational disadvantage, renders itself dependent on poorly controlled private monopoly service providers for essential services that form part of a matrix of interdependent services, and cannot exit failing contracts under acceptable terms. In the USSR a remarkably isomorphic set of hazards had driven Nikita Khrushchev back to the drawing board by 1965.

Make data sing: The automation of storytelling

With slogans such as ‘Tell the stories hidden in your data’ ( www.narrativescience.com ) and ‘From data to clear, insightful content – Wordsmith automatically generates narratives on a massive scale that sound like a person crafted each one’ ( www.automatedinsights.com ), a series of companies currently market themselves on the ability to turn data into stories through Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques. The data interpretation and knowledge production process is here automated, while at the same time hailing narrativity as a fundamental human ability of meaning-making. Reading both the marketing rhetoric and the functionality of the automated narrative services through narrative theory allows for a contextualization of the rhetoric flourishing in Big Data discourse. Building upon case material obtained from companies such as Arria NLG, Automated Insights, Narrativa, Narrative Science, and Yseop, this article argues that what might be seen as a ‘re-turn’ of narrative as a form of knowledge production that can make sense of large data sets inscribes itself in – but also rearticulates – an ongoing debate about what narrative entails. Methodological considerations are thus raised on the one hand about the insights to be gained for critical data studies by turning to literary theory, and on the other hand about how automated technologies may inform our understanding of narrative as a faculty of human meaning-making.

The Deserving and The Under-Served: A Comment on the Oversupply of Law Graduates, Diversity in the Legal Profession, and Access to Legal Representation

Most law students, graduates and young lawyers have become all too familiar with how dismal the graduate employment market has become for aspiring lawyers – particularly thanks to the non-stop barrage of negative news stories which serve as a recurring reminder of how there is not nearly enough employment positions to cater for the oversupply of law graduates. Due to this oversupply, the idea of using a law degree to ‘pick something else’ by way of a non-legal career has become an increasingly common selling point used by several new and old law schools. Many are now perpetuating the idea that the law degree has become an increasingly generalist degree with transferable skills to other industries and professions, and that it is no longer inevitable that those who undertake a law degree will become lawyers. Despite these law schools’ attempts to comfort prospective law graduates, this marketing rhetoric has done little to assuage law students’ and graduates’ employment concerns. This paper seeks to examine the current oversupply of law graduates, drawing upon survey results received by ALSA as well as other published pieces, which highlight key areas for concern arising from the current market. The paper also seeks to explore the impact (or lack thereof) that the current oversupply of law graduates may be having on issues pertaining to access to justice and access to legal education.

Sailing a Ship through Stormy Waters Requires a Compass

Whereas many scholars have concluded that neoliberalism as well as deregulation was among the key causes of the financial crisis of 2008, much less work has been done on particular reforms and the specific political rhetoric which justified them. This is a comparative study of the political justification of financial deregulation, examining two spectacular cases: the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and the passing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000. There was a widespread, outspoken uncertainty about the consequences of financial deregulation in the 1990s public debates. Building upon Mark Blyth’s seminal work on economic ideas, this article traces the free market ideas and rhetoric that were invoked to reduce this uncertainty about financial derivatives and deregulation, thereby serving as an enabling factor for deregulation.

Gentrificação turística em Lisboa: neoliberalismo, financeirização e urbanismo austeritário em tempos de pós-crise capitalista 2008-2009

Resumo Neste artigo pretendo identificar forças motrizes importantes da financeirização do ambiente construído e do setor imobiliário que estão na raiz da onda de gentrificação turística que está ocorrendo em Lisboa na última década. Será analisada a viragem neoliberal recente na política urbana em Portugal, responsável por ter criado as condições para um urbanismo austeritário, legitimando a ideologia da necessidade "natural" e "inevitável" da turistificação nos bairros históricos de Lisboa, no período do pós-crise capitalista de 2008-2009. Nas narrativas de marketing urbano e racionalidade neoliberal, a viragem neoconservadora no governo da cidade tem como objetivo tornar Lisboa uma cidade mais competitiva, atraindo investimentos estrangeiros, visitantes e turistas, amarrando os fluxos de capital imobiliário ao seu ambiente construído, em um quadro da globalização da concorrência entre cidades e lugares.

Envisioning the power of data analytics

ABSTRACTIt could be argued that the power of data is located in what they are used to reveal. Yet we have little understanding of the role played by the emerging industry of data analytics in the interpretation and use of big data. These data analytics companies act as intermediaries in the digital data revolution. Understanding the social influence of big data requires us to understand the role played by data analytics within organisations of different types. This particular article focuses very specifically upon the way in which data and data analytics are envisioned within the marketing rhetoric of the data analytics industry. It is argued that to understand the spread of data analytics and the adoption of certain analytic strategies, we first need to look at the projection of promises upon that data. The way that data and analytics are imagined shapes their incorporation and appropriation into practices and organisational structures – what I call here the data frontiers. This article draws upon a sample of 34 data analytics companies in order to explore the way in which data analytics are envisioned within that increasingly powerful industry.

What's for Sale at Canadian Universities? A Mixed‐Methods Analysis of Promotional Strategies

AbstractThe current fiscal environment has driven Canadian universities to become more entrepreneurial, seeking out and competing over new sources of funding. Despite such intensifying competition, little effort has been made to document the promotional tactics that Canadian universities are using to render themselves appealing to external audiences. This study examines the contents of the home pages of English‐speaking universities in Canada. It finds that, though there are some differences in the tactics that primarily undergraduate and research‐intensive universities employ, both generally strive to emulate the same institutional ‘template’. Moreover, the usage of more unorthodox promotional tactics, drawing on labour market rhetoric or discourses of inclusivity, is limited. These findings are theorised in relation to contemporary work within organisational sociology and strategic management.

Jamming market rhetoric in Wisconsin's 2011 labor protests

ABSTRACTTaking the case of the 2011 protests at the Wisconsin state capitol, this essay theorizes a model of political culture jamming. When 100,000 people swarmed downtown Madison, I argue, they jammed both Governor Scott Walker's market-based rhetoric and organized labor's typical response to such attacks. This case study, then, extends culture jamming as a way of understanding resistance to the marketization of realms that extend beyond the vaguely cultural. It demonstrates that when expanded to include embodied, political action, culture jamming offers a particularly useful lens through which activists may challenge rhetorics that promote ever-expanding markets.