Market Rhetoric Research Articles

Making “World Machines”: Discourse, Design and Global Technologies for Greater-than-self Issues

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>The </span><span>world machine </span><span>is a new archetype for a socio-technical system drawing together a group of tools that combine computational powers with a social agenda of cross-world collaboration in resistance to dominant market rhetoric. Specifically, we look at how powers to connect, sense and infer can be combined and turned to crowd-sourcing public engagement with shared world issues - as an alternative to business-as-usual in the context of developing and deploying networked technology. We combine theoretical aspects of </span><span>world machines</span><span>, such as what a political entity of this kind might seek to do, and practical exercises that focus on design, with a view to exploring viability and examining what a related research agenda might involve. </span></p></div></div></div>

Reagan's legacy in a world transformed

Reagan's Legacy in a World Transformed. Ed. by Jeffrey L. Chidester and Paul Kengor. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp xvi, 229, notes. Cloth, $45.00.)Jeffrey L. Chichester, Director of Policy Programs at University of Virginias Miller Center, and Paul Regnor, Professor of History at Grove City College, have collected twelve scholarly essays dealing mainly with President Ronald foreign policy and its legacy. They also each contributed as essay to volume.The essays are divided into five units: Global Impact of Domestic Policy; Legacy in Global Democracy; Reagans Defense Policy Revisited: The Great Debate; Reagan and Negotiating End of Cold War; and Reagan and Multilateralism.The collection begins with a foreword by Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada from September 1984 to June 1993. He establishes overall tone of this collection by offering essentially a hymn of praise to presidents policy initiatives. He concludes his comments with a ringing endorsement of the golden achievements of era (p. xvi).The essays taken together develop three major themes. First, domestic economic initiatives, especially ones involving defense spending, helped reinforce his foreign policy goals. Second, Reagan's willingness to enter negotiations with USSR on nuclear issues ultimately paved way for agreements that reduced threat of nuclear war. Finally, pragmatism allowed him to deal with somewhat tangential issues, such as relations with United Nations and Law of Seas negotiations.The first three essays agree that Reagan's economic policies both helped nation's economy and speeded up rise of economic globalism. Alfred E. Eckes argues that and Margaret Thatcher's free market rhetoric and actions they took to deregulate and open markets ... brought political drive to globalization (p. 12). He does grant that ultimately American manufacturing jobs were lost in long run during process but that benefits far outweighed costs.The more immediate gains in Reagan's economic policies came in economic during his time in office. What Henry Nau calls the great expansion especially involved massive increase in military spending (p. 24). Although this led to increased budget deficits, it also was instrumental in pressuring Soviets. (Interestingly, himself regretted deficits but blamed Congress for not cutting spending in non-military areas. …

What’s in a name? Epistemic perspectives and Payments for Ecosystem Services policies in Nicaragua

As Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) continues to gain attention as a policy tool for securing efficient and effective environmental governance, a rising tide of criticism warns of the potentially detrimental social–ecological consequences of nature commodification and ‘green neoliberalism’. These concerns are also expressed at international policy fora, where the market rhetoric has met with political resistance from countries belonging to the ‘Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America’ (ALBA). But despite this ideological opposition, some ALBA countries are increasingly integrating PES into their environmental policies. In this article we consider the reasons underlying this apparent contradiction and relate it to the notion of ‘epistemic circulation’. On the basis of a study on the evolution of PES-thinking in Nicaragua (an ALBA member) and a reassessment of the supposed ‘success’ of an influential pilot project, we shed light on the forces driving the adoption of particular PES modes and contextualise practical difficulties to endorsing more critical approaches to the tool. Instead of either ideologically rejecting PES as a neoliberal evil or embracing it uncritically as the new panacea, we argue that it is precisely through the socio-political processes surrounding environmental governance debates that the application of PES is shaped. In practice, it may either contribute to an imposed and dispossessing form of capitalism, or tend towards a more negotiated and socio-culturally embedded version of it. Only through its reconceptualisation based on political–cultural primacy rather than market-fetishism can PES achieve its true potential within a broader strategy towards improved environmental governance.

The Palestinian Middle Class in Rawabi

This article examines the neoliberal promotion of the idea of a Palestinian “middle class” that can lead to peace by transcending perceived Arab backwardness or irrationality through market logic and capitalist reasoning. The Palestinian city of Rawabi is used as a case study, as it is marketed as a middle-class city built with support from both Israeli and Arab businesses and as a project that will “eliminate radicals on both sides.” An analysis of the marketing rhetoric of Rawabi provides insight into the political and cultural subjectivities being articulated by this new middle class. Ultimately, while the middle-class ethos being cultivated by Rawabi views neoliberal capitalism and consumerism as a sign of modernity and a new form of resistance, it operates to depoliticize economic development under occupation, preclude alternative models for “resistance” economies, and make the occupation less costly, or even profitable, to Israeli and Palestinian elite.

Free markets and foreclosures: An examination of contradictions in neoliberal urbanization in Houston, Texas

Houston, Texas did not experience significant housing price increases during the national bubble in the early 2000s and its foreclosure rate remained comparatively low when the bubble burst in 2006. Free market advocates have proclaimed Houston a paragon of the “free enterprise” city and point to economic success and a relatively stable housing market as validation of a laissez-faire approach to local development. But this study relocates local practice within the contradictory and uneven processes of neoliberal restructuring in recent decades through examination of broader factors in Houston’s development outcomes which problematize free market rhetoric. Despite neoliberal repudiation of state intervention, for example, “free market” Houston has been heavily reliant on the federally subsidized oil industry and on the local state for protection from market externalities, like housing price instability and foreclosures. This study, thus, assesses the role of the state and other factors in neoliberal urbanization operating beyond and intersecting with idiosyncratic local practice.

Perspectives from the Field: Ecological Economic Perspective in Environmental Practice: Much-Needed Common Sense amid Overwhelming Market Rhetoric

There is widespread belief, currently, that financial markets are well equipped, and should be given the responsibility, to deal with environmental management. In this context, the commodification of nature would appear to serve useful purposes. This article argues that, from the viewpoint of environmental practice, these perspectives do not make a lot of sense, in large part because nature follows rules that are entirely different than those of financial markets and because the limited knowledge that specialists have of many natural processes prevents meaningful monetization. I also point out that, fortunately, within economics, a subdiscipline known as ecological economics tends to advocate caution in this area and offers much-needed common sense amid overwhelming market rhetoric. Environmental Practice 16: 1–3 (2014)

“Capture every moment” – the profane semiotics of surveillance advertisements

This article is based on a semiotic interpretation of advertisements marketing surveillance equipment, collected from companies in Helsinki, Finland in 1998 and 2010. By applying “profane semiotics”, the social, political and cultural meanings of these advertisements are opened up in the light of the contemporary security governance. The article concludes that within these 12 years, the emphasis of advertising had changed significantly. The politics of information had changed, descriptions of technological details being replaced by service ensembles, trustful expertise and interaction. Instead of the late 1990s futuristic connotations, the 2010 advertisements highlighted the everydayness of surveillance. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks were in the middle of the period, a surprising finding was that the emphasis in advertising has changed from presenting threats towards presenting human emotions and agency. In marketing rhetoric, politics of fear were replaced by politics of care.

Returns to Capital:

Returns to Capital:

Making sense of the Master Data Management (MDM) concept: old wine in new bottles or new wine in old bottles?

This paper presents an insight into the emerging concept of master data management (MDM) and highlights issues that both academics and business managers should consider to better understand the meaning of this ‘hot topic’. This critical reflection paper is forward-looking and uses the concept of the knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process to present an abstracted view of the potential steps constituting an organisation’s business intelligence (BI) initiative, in an effort to make sense of the MDM concept. We argue that MDM is effectively data warehousing branded with enterprise resource planning (ERP) market rhetoric and contains an added repository of ‘master data’. Furthermore, we view an organisational implementation of MDM as another attempt at data quality/integration due to the failure of previous data warehousing, and ERP and ERPII initiatives within the organisation. Finally, we argue that more research should be conducted to fully appreciate the true meaning of the concept of MDM.

The Invisible Hand? Using Tax Credits to Encourage Institutional Investment in Social Housing

Over recent decades many developed countries have commercialised the provision of state-subsidised housing, and introduced a stronger role for market forces. Government financial support now often aims to leverage debt or equity investment. Spearheading this policy change is a quest for the ‘Holy Grail’ of contemporary social housing policy: private equity investment, sourced from large institutional investors such as banks and pension funds. For comparative housing research, this opens up exciting new territory. Recent Australian developments using tax credits to incentivise investment – based on a successful US scheme – provide a valuable opportunity for comparison. This exploratory paper contrasts the two countries’ housing tax credit schemes, highlighting outcomes for investors, tenants and the wider housing system. Foregone corporate taxes provide governments with a powerful ‘invisible hand’ to incentivise flows of private equity, replacing direct public grants. Yet despite free market rhetoric, tax credit schemes still rely on additional government intervention - especially during financial market turbulence.

Poverty Politics and Crime Control in Europe and America

The growth of prisons and jails over the last thirty years transformed the social experi- ence of American poverty. Penal confine- ment became commonplace for poor men of working age. Incarceration added to the unstable home life of poor children and their mothers, whose own imprisonment rates had also grown rapidly. LoicW acquant'sPrisons of Poverty (in part, first published in French in 1999) can be read as a forerunner to the author's trilo- gy, Urban Outcasts (2007), Punishing the Poor (2009), and Deadly Symbiosis (2009). Together, these works describe a new urban poverty embedded in the institutions of criminal punishment. In the main thesis of Prisons of Poverty, punitive crime policy joined with a stingy welfare state to propel neoliberal political projects in the United States and Europe. Though regularly trafficking in free market rhetoric, the neoliberal state assumed a muscular role in the lives of the inner-city poor through the agency of the police and penal institutions. In Wacquant's account, the punitive man- agement of urban poverty was set in motion in the late 1960s. Richard Nixon, in the pres- idential campaign of 1968, touted a law- and-order message that resonated with white voters discomfited by urban riots and Civil Rights protest. As the problem of urban dis- order was thrust into the political spotlight, penal policy experts—and their commitment to rehabilitation—were marginalized. The political and cultural backlash to the tumul- tuous 1960s ran headlong into the economic collapse of the ghetto. In describing how the jobless ghetto contributed to mass incarcera- tion, Wacquant (pp. 155-56) writes that,

The Politics of Economic Policy Making in Britain: A Re‐assessment of the 1976 IMF Crisis

Many accounts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis argue that British policy was determined by the exercise of structural power by markets, either through the creation of currency instability and the application of loan conditionality, or by acting as a catalyst for policy learning. This article reassesses economic policy making in Britain during the 1976 IMF crisis to show that policy change did not occur as a result of disciplinary market pressure or a process of social learning. It argues that state managers have to manage the contradictions between the imperatives of accumulation and legitimation, and can do so through the politics of depoliticization. It shows, via archival sources, how elements of the core‐executive had established preferences for deflationary policies, which were implemented in 1976 using market rhetoric and Fund conditionality to shape perceptions about the issues within the government's discretionary control.Muchas explicaciones sobre la crisis del FMI sostienen que la política británica fue determinada, o bien, por el ejercicio de poder estructural vía el mercado a través de la creación de la inestabilidad cambiaria y la aplicación de préstamos condicionados, o por el intento de demostrar que sólo las políticas monetarias mantendrían la confianza, un reconocimiento que se espera alcanzar a través de un proceso de aprendizaje político. Este artículo reevalúa el diseño de políticas económicas en Gran Bretaña durante la crisis del FMI de 1976 para demostrar que el cambio en la política no ocurrió como resultado de una presión constante del mercado o un proceso de aprendizaje social. Argumenta que los administradores del estado deben manejar las contradicciones entre los fundamentos de la acumulación y legitimación y pueden hacer eso a través de la depolitización. Señala, como, en base a fuentes provenientes de archivos, los elementos del poder ejecutivo habían establecido preferencias por las políticas deflacionarias, las cuales fueron implementadas en 1976 utilizando la retórica del mercado y la condicionalidad del FMI para ubicar dentro del control discrecional del gobierno las percepciones acerca de asuntos públicos importantes.

Pro-poor Ethnic Tourism in the Mekong: A Study of Three Approaches in Northern Thailand

If “pro-poor tourism” (PPT) is about changing the distribution of benefits from tourism in favour of poor people, it is not the same as ecotourism or community-based tourism, nor is it limited to these niches. In the area of the Greater Mekong Sub-region, six developing countries where ethnic minority peoples are poor have actively promoted ethnic tourism, initiated from local to international levels, since 1998. The research questions are: (1) Can ethnic tourism in the Mekong Region actually be made pro-poor? (2) What are the success and failure factors? This paper aims to examine whether PPT can be applied to differing policy approaches – top-down, intermediate and bottom-up – on ethnic communities. The research results show that PPT initiatives can involve non-government organizations in reducing poverty through volunteer tourism activities. The research findings suggest that ethical issues for PPT need to be addressed in order for pro-poor initiatives to succeed. The way tourism businesses do their business with ethnic communities needs to be reassessed and regulated with an inbuilt poverty reduction/community development programme. This paper affirms that the principles of pro-poor tourism must be sensitively and efficiently implemented – and not comprise no-more-than-convenient marketing rhetoric for top-down exploitative economic “development” of poor marginalized people.

Marketisation of education: marketing, rhetoric and reality

Further and higher education have witnessed something of a paradigm shift in recent years. This article aims to examine the reasons behind, and the possible impact on, academic staff and students of one aspect of the so‐called marketisation of education – namely, the increased importance of institutional marketing. Aspects of marketing theory are used to argue that gaps have developed in some cases between the marketing rhetoric and the experienced reality of staff and students. It is suggested that such gaps can create tensions and difficulties, that action needs to be taken to bridge any such gaps, and that there is a need to reaffirm some of the previously valued aspects of further and higher education.

Boundaries, Values and the Contested Nature of Market Expansion

The expansion of markets and market rhetoric constitutes two interconnected trends in an epoch under the hegemony of neoliberalism. The ideological and political salience of this process might have...

Tempering universities' marketing rhetoric: a strategic protection against litigation or an admission of failure?

The changed dynamic between tertiary students and universities has resulted in much discussion about consumer rights and obligations. Whilst some consider the change from students to clients to be simply an accurate reflection of changing times, others believe the trend to be a covert blueprint for radical change imposed by forces external to the academy. In either case, the discussion is more concerned with rights, responsibilities and obligations rather than pedagogic issues. With the shift in focus comes the possibility of consumer‐based litigation based upon contractual obligations. To some extent, the success of such litigation will be based upon legalistic interpretations of the marketing rhetoric universities use to describe their product. As public statements, such rhetoric is part of the contract into which students enter with universities. This paper considers one of the ways in which universities have responded to the potential of being sued by unsatisfied customers: a tempering of hyperbole in their advertising. But how does the implication of such a strategy impact upon the perceived or actual standards of teaching? The paper begins with a brief overview of how universities have responded to students recasting themselves as customers, with the concomitant demands for satisfaction. It follows with a consideration of how these trends have become manifest in Australia. The focus narrows to consider how one university has responded to the changing environment, and then uses the example of one faculty within that university to exemplify the change in strategy. Finally, the paper considers the potential future relevance of that response.

Bodies, cybercars and the mundane incorporation of automated mobilities

Cars are technologies that re-shape corporeal existence, material environments and social temporalities in diverse and complex ways, with impacts on all people, spaces and times, not only those that are explicitly ‘automobilized’. This article aims to interrogate claims that the new technologies of mobile data processing, information transmission and wireless communication that have been brought into the ‘banal’ performance of car driving are affecting not only the driving experience but the entire body-person. The first part reviews recent phenomenological approaches to the embodied car driver–road assemblage, including claims that kinaesthetics and haptics are significantly transforming ‘movement-space’. The second part presents a content analysis of US corporate advertising, car industry websites, sales brochures and media reports on new technologies to consider whether and how reconfigurations of mundane mobility systems might be impinging upon the performances, practices and materialities of the human and the car, in particular the habituation of the luxury car driver to new technologies. In contrast, participant observation in the Philadelphia International Auto Show (5–13 February 2005) and analysis of local advertising markets suggests that changes in the embodied experience of driving have been minimal. The third part draws on internal industry reports and publications by road safety and oversight agencies in the USA (with some attention to Europe) to show that the most significant changes are actually taking place in less visible software-driven systems, automated communication, surveillance and ‘intelligent transport systems’, which are transforming the quotidian infrastructures and ‘infostructures’ of cars, streets, highways and cities in ways that are more mundane yet more far-reaching than the individualistic and personalized rhetoric of commodity marketing would suggest.

Race, Nation, and Market: Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico (review)

Reviewed by: Race, Nation, and Market: Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico Danny J. Anderson Weiner, Richard . Race, Nation, and Market: Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2004. 167 pages. In Race, Nation, and Market: Economic Culture in Porfirian Mexico, Richard Weiner provides an innovative exploration of turn-of-the century Mexican economic history. Focusing on the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, Weiner analyzes the way that the market functioned as contested signifier. Rather the empirical approaches to Mexican economic history that characterize the scholarship of John Coatsworth or Stephen Haber, Weiner examines the discursive construction of various meanings associated with the concept of the market and emphasizes the relationship among these constructions and political positions in the larger social field. In the first chapter, Weiner describes his methodology, explaining that he "analyzes discourse," or more specifically "public discourse" (7), in order to examine the competing notions of market that circulated in the Porfirian period and the rhetorical defects achieved by these notions in the struggle for power. Inspired by the scholarship of Albert Hirschman and of Ricardo Salvatore (the latter also examines economic discourse in Latin America), Weiner notes that "the market is not a physical place where goods are exchanged but a symbolic site where the identities and programs of social movements are constructed" (5). Following from this insight, he identifies a series of different markets that are discursively contested during these decades: "land, labor, capital, commodity, and international markets" (8). According to Weiner, at this particular historical moment, the market and economic discourse became central for a variety of reasons. Unprecedented political stability had finally allowed for attention to economic matters. International economic changes underscored the importance and impact of modernization processes. State emphasis on material progress directly linked the nation to notions of market success and competition. And discourses critical of the state also used the market rhetorically to formulate justifications for dissent and opposition. In order to follow through on this analytical model in the ensuing chapters, Weiner identifies principal symbolic uses of the market formulated from three particular social positions: developmentalist liberalism, social Catholicism, and radical liberalism/anarchism. Throughout, Weiner emphasizes the ways that the symbolic conceptualizations of market participate in the notions of identity, serve to construct racialized identities (especially of Mexico's indigenous population), and supposedly affect behavior depending on the social power attributed to the market. In chapters two and three, Weiner examines the establishment discourse of the group known as los científicos, the members of the ruling elite who were "scientific" because of their positivist legacy. Weiner takes a term from Alan Knight and characterizes this group as "developmentalist liberals" (21–22): they were interested in [End Page 107] the creation, not distribution, of wealth as the key to Mexico's progress. In chapter two Weiner attends particularly to the domestic policy implications of developmentalist liberalism: market rhetoric emphasizes discipline and control with the goal of creating a manageable, educated labor force able to increase national productivity. Weiner concludes that although nineteenth-century market theories such as those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo attributed power to the market and the inevitable emergence of homo economicus, the Mexican versions of this liberal discourse attenuated the power attributed to the market and noted the failure of the market to conjure individuals economically driven to maximize profit. Indians in particular, with communal lands and misunderstood behavior, were outside the market system and thus developmentalist liberals supported state intervention through practices such as forced labor, vagrancy laws, mandatory consumption, labor contractors, and education. The hacendado class and the hacienda system were diagnosed as needing more forceful state intervention to inculcate a capitalist ethic of productivity. In chapter three, Weiner keeps his focus on the científicos, but turns toward international markets. With the dramatic changes in global flows of capital, labor, and goods in the late nineteenth century, the international markets had an immense impact on Mexico. Whereas nineteenth-century liberalism ascribed to the concept of competition in a free market, Weiner notes that developmentalist liberalism, influenced by social Darwinism and the desire to consolidate national sovereignty, called for strong state intervention...

Teacher education

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Market Rhetoric and the Ebonics Debate

Using a method of topical rhetorical analysis, inspired by K. Burke, to discuss the Ebonics debate, this article demonstrates that conversations about education, particularly writing instruction, have adopted a market rhetoric that limits teachers’ agency. However, reappropriation of this market rhetoric can help writing teachers to imagine and actuate a more empowered and long-sighted agency for themselves. Rhetorical analysis can therefore help educators to understand how local language practices shape their interaction with the rapidly changing material environment of fast capitalism.