Intermediary Work Research Articles

Content Curators as Cultural Intermediaries: “My reputation as a curator is based on what I curate, right?”

Content Curators as Cultural Intermediaries: “My reputation as a curator is based on what I curate, right?”

Science-policy intermediaries from a practitioner’s perspective: The Lenfest Ocean Program experience

Scientists often lament their lack of influence on environmental policy-making. Some proposed solutions, like teaching scientists to communicate more effectively, can be helpful, but are not necessarily sufficient. Instead, connecting science and policy may often require a separate kind of expert: full-time intermediaries who facilitate the complicated exchange of information among scientists, policy-makers, and other stakeholders. In this paper, we describe intermediary efforts by the Lenfest Ocean Program, a grant-making program that funds peer-reviewed research and connects scientists and decision-makers who can take action on an issue. We present case studies of intermediary work on three topics: first, sustainable methods of harvesting bull kelp in the US Pacific Northwest; second, the design of catch share programs in US fisheries; and third, management of forage fish. These case studies suggest that science-policy intermediaries can help scientists make meaningful contributions to public discourse.

I Can Haz Likes: Cultural Intermediation to Facilitate “Petworking”

I Can Haz Likes: Cultural Intermediation to Facilitate “Petworking”

The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling: Race, Sexuality, and the 1920s Stage Model

Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 65 Elspeth H. Brown The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling: Race, Sexuality, and the 1920s Stage Model In the transition to a consumer economy in the early twentieth century in the United States, the production of desire became central to the distribution of goods. Cultural and business historians ranging from Jackson Lears to Davarian Baldwin have charted the US transition in this period to what William Leach memorably termed the “land of desire” and have identified the cultural intermediaries—art directors , beauty entrepreneurs, advertising executives—who brokered manufacturers ’ pursuit of expanding markets.1 There has been less research, however, on the new forms of labor that emerged in the United States in the concurrent transition to a mass production economy, an economy that relied as much on the distribution and consumption of goods as on 1. See T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon , 1993). For cultural intermediaries, see also Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Goodwill,” in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 318–71; and Keith Negus, “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption ,” Cultural Studies,16, no. 4 (2002): 501–15. 66 Elspeth H. Brown their manufacture.2 The work of copy editors, window dressers, and art directors were forms of labor that required the production of specific emotional states in their audiences, commercialized feelings that were a necessary prelude to sales. Scholars working within the vein of sociology and political economy of globalization, particularly Michael Hardt and Sara Ahmed, have termed this work “affective labor”: a form of work that, Hardt argues, has recently assumed a dominant position within labor markets in a global capitalist economy.3 Yet, as is the case with so many aspects of globalization, capitalism’s dependence on affective labor is not a recent phenomenon. The shift to a mass production economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries necessitated the elaboration of new forms of labor required to expand existing markets and build new ones. This article explores one aspect of affective (and, therefore, corporeal ) labor that was a new phenomenon in the early twentieth century, but now is seemingly ubiquitous: that of the commercial model. Modeling is the quintessential occupation of a modern consumer economy, where goods and services are bought and sold through the medium of advertising and marketing; the history of modeling in the United States is deeply imbricated with the maturation of these industries in the wake of World War I. Models, whether performing live or through representational distance, as in photographic modeling, produce sales through the immaterial labor of posing for the lens or appearing with commodities in a real-time setting. Through the medium of their bodies, models coproduce public feelings whose dominant meanings are shaped by a commercial “common sense” that is naturalized by the other affective laborers of modern consumer culture: art directors, copy editors, magazine 2. Notable exceptions include Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen , Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Stephen J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood: Silent Cinema and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and the emergent scholarship on the labor economy of Wal-Mart, such as Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Nelson Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Remade American Business, Transformed the Global Economy, and Put Politics in Every Store (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 3. Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (1999): 89-100; Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39. Elspeth H. Brown 67 publishers...

The Role of Knowledge Intermediaries in the Management of Experience Knowledge

Effectively collecting, sharing and cultivating experience‐based knowledge in work organisations is demanding. As the challenges are getting more intensive, there is a need for dedicated personnel who are able to steer, enable and support knowledge sharing activities. In the knowledge management literature, these types of individuals may be characterised as knowledge intermediaries.This paper presents results from an empirical study of an inquiry into the work tasks of knowledge intermediaries. The study focused on exploring the challenges and demands knowledge intermediaries experienced in enabling experience knowledge sharing and reuse. The study was conducted in two industrial enterprises that both manufacture complex machinery products and provide after sales installation and maintenance services for the machines at clients' sites. Empirical data were collected through interviews with technical support personnel who serve as knowledge intermediaries in after sales services.The study analyses and describes prototypical activity episodes that illustrate the nature of knowledge intermediary work and the information interaction challenges faced in their work. Typical demands and challenges for the management of experience knowledge include the following: (i) problem space assembly and narrowing in urgent support request situations; (ii) assembly of the hidden experience‐based knowledge; and (iii) new component and product knowledge acquisition and updating. The paper contributes to the understanding of the needs for and practices of knowledge intermediaries, and it offers some guidelines for the enhancement of experience knowledge sharing in workplaces. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Grassroots innovations in community energy: The role of intermediaries in niche development

Community energy projects are attracting increasing attention as potential sources of innovation to support sustainable energy transitions. Research into ‘grassroots innovations’ like community energy often recognises the difficulties they face in simply surviving let alone in growing or seeding wider change. Strategic niche management theory is potentially helpful here as it highlights the important roles played by ‘intermediary actors’ in consolidating, growing and diffusing novel innovations. This paper presents the first in-depth analysis of intermediary work in the UK community energy sector. New empirical evidence was gathered through interviews with 15 community energy intermediaries and a content analysis of 113 intermediary-produced case studies about community energy projects. Analysis finds intermediaries adopting a variety of methods to try and diffuse generic lessons about context-specific projects, but that trying to coordinate support for local projects that exist amidst very different social and political circumstances is challenging. This is exacerbated by the challenges of building a coherent institutional infrastructure for a sector where aims and approaches diverge, and where underlying resources are uncertain and inconsistent. Applications of relatively simple, growth-oriented approaches like strategic niche management to grassroots innovations need to be reformulated to better recognise their diverse and conflicted realities on the ground.

Working with previously anonymous gamete donors and donor-conceived adults: recent practice experiences of running the Dna-based voluntary information exchange and contact register, UK Donorlink

This article describes recent practice experiences with donor conceived adults, donors, non-donor-conceived adult children of donors using the voluntary DNA-based register, UK DonorLink. It highlights additional complexities faced when using DNA rather than paper records for searching, in particular from the risk of false positives, low chances of success and potential inclusion of biological parents’ DNA. Professionals’ experiences in supporting those being “linked” suggest challenges as well as rewards. Registration carries the potential to be therapeutic for donor-conceived adults and donors and to enhance their political awareness regardless of links being made. Registrants value both peer and professional support, providing the latter can respond flexibly and be delivered by staff experienced in intermediary work. Given that the majority of those affected by donor conception internationally come from anonymous donation systems, these findings are highly pertinent and argue the need for political and moral debate about such service provision.

How do Beginner Strategists Use Strategy Tools? – The Role of Objects in a Creative Company

Strategy tool use and sociomateriality have become essential elements in strategy as practice research. We combine recent studies on strategy tools with theories on objects in collaborations in a nine month ethnography at a fashion design brand. Our contribution states that strategy tools can be used effectively when they correspond to the theoretical categories that exist for objects, in a hierarchy of infrastructure, communication and motivation objects. We use the insights from a creative field to suggest a model that shows managers how they can enable professionals to collaborate by translating strategy targets into intermediary work objects.

Cultural consumers as “new cultural intermediaries”: manga scanlators

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand participatory consumers who are involved in translating and distributing overseas cultural commodities, without the permission of copyright holders. It intends to conceptualize them as a new breed of cultural intermediaries and discuss implications of their activities for the cultural industries.Design/methodology/approachThe paper conducts a case study of “manga scanlators” who voluntarily translate manga (Japanese comics) to English and share translated manga online with other fans, without authorization from copyright holders. In addition to literature review and analysis of the text of selected scanlation web sites, the author interviewed ten manga scanlators and eight manga industry practitioners and experts in the UK, the USA and Japan.FindingsIt is found that participatory consumers, as new cultural intermediaries, challenge the cultural industries by transferring a substantial part of the industries’ intermediary work to the realm of cultural fandom and by developing their own logics of organizing the intermediation process and distributing fan‐translated products.Originality/valueConsidering the lack of research on fan‐translation and dissemination of cultural products, this paper's findings will be a valuable addition to the existing account of participatory cultural consumption. The copyright infringement aspect in manga scanlation is seen as part of the bigger picture of the gradual decoupling of intermediation activities, which are required to bring cultural products to overseas markets, from the market economy of translated manga production and distribution.

Alpha nerds: Cultural intermediaries in a subcultural scene

Recent studies of cultural intermediaries demonstrate that economic activity in even the most rationalized organizations and industries is thoroughly cultural. However, they may not do justice to contexts where production and mediation are embedded in communities with distinctive traditions and aesthetic standards. This article offers an ethnographically informed account of intermediaries working within one such context: namely, the organizations and stores composing the ‘nerd-culture scene’ in a Canadian city. Retailers and group organizers enable geeky cultural practices by providing spaces where individuals can develop their interests and hobbies. Their labour is analysed in terms of their subcultural careers, gatekeeping functions within the scene and dispositions towards the ‘mainstream’. They are not simply economic agents but also culturally and socially situated actors motivated to do this work for its intrinsic rewards. Subcultural scenes cut across industrial sectors and cultural industries, making them a special context for the work of cultural intermediaries.

Beyond cultural intermediaries? A socio-technical perspective on the market for social interventions

Marketing has long been considered part of cultural intermediary activity, but still sits a little oddly alongside the ‘cultural’ TV producers and ‘quality’ journalists and critics originally used to typify the category. This article argues that such a tension is productive, and uses an underexplored aspect of marketing – social marketing – to pursue some more conceptual questions about the nature and usefulness of the term ‘cultural intermediaries’. It employs a framework loosely derived from actor-network theory to describe the emergence of social marketing in Britain, paying particular attention to the efforts to construct a market for such services, the need to consider material and non-human forms of agency in cultural intermediary activity, and the value of understanding cultural intermediary work in terms of ‘culturalisation’ – that is, as a process by which some areas of life are designated as belonging to the problem of culture, and others not.

This Research does not Influence Policy

This article concerns a study whose questions, methods and analytical conclusions were the work of a group of Karimojong in Uganda. Its report included text and photographs, plain language, direct voices and faces, and little theorising. When it was disseminated it appealed to local people and to a development consultant concerned with inclusion, but was dismissed as useless by a donor concerned with influencing government policy. This article looks beyond social discrimination and power in understanding these reactions, and explores the communicative encounter itself, asking what makes work relevant, meaningful and influential? This research doesn't influence policy, but it does influence local action and the work of reflective intermediaries which, after all, is important.

Information Ecosystems of Policy Actors – Reviewing the Landscape

Information Ecosystems of Policy Actors – Reviewing the Landscape

Provenance as a filtering and framing device in the qualification of wine

This research examines how provenance – where a product was produced, by whom, how and when – features in the work of cultural intermediaries in the Australian premium wine market, at two different stages in the career of a wine. First, evaluations of provenance attributes (in terms of sincerity, tradition and transparency) serve as filters through which wine promoters identify market-worthy wines; second, those attributes are strategically deployed to frame the wine as a worthy choice for consumers (focusing on the use of the winemaker as a framing device). The article offers a distinctive account of the qualification of wine, and makes the case for a cultural economic conceptualization of provenance as a negotiated, accomplished quality. In foregrounding wine promoters’ emotional attachments to provenance attributes of wines they choose to promote, the research highlights the affective dimensions of markets, which are made, in part, through the consuming passions of cultural intermediaries.

Opening the black box of “relevance work”: A domain analysis

In response to Hjorland's recent call for a reconceptualization of the foundations of relevance, we suggest that the sociocognitive aspects of intermediation by information agencies, such as archives and libraries, are a necessary and unexplored part of the infrastructure of the subject knowledge domains central to his recommended “view of relevance informed by a social paradigm” (2010, p. 217). From a comparative analysis of documents from 39 graduate-level introductory courses in archives, reference, and strategic/competitive intelligence taught in 13 American Library Association-accredited library and information science (LIS) programs, we identify four defining sociocognitive dimensions of “relevance work” in information agencies within Hjorland's proposed framework for relevance: tasks, time, systems, and assessors. This study is intended to supply sociocognitive content from within the relevance work domain to support further domain analytic research, and to emphasize the importance of intermediary relevance work for all subject knowledge domains. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Building Inclusive Markets in Rural Bangladesh: How Intermediaries Work Institutional Voids

Much effort goes into building markets as a tool for economic and social development, often overlooking that in too many places social exclusion and poverty prevent many, especially women, from participating in and accessing markets. Building on data from rural Bangladesh and analyzing the work of a prominent intermediary organization, we uncover institutional voids as the source of market exclusion and identify two sets of activities – redefining market architecture and legitimating new actors – as critical for building ‘inclusive’ markets. We expose voids as ‘analytical spaces’ and illustrate how they result from conflict and contradiction among institutional ‘bits and pieces’ from local political, community, and religious spheres. Our findings put forward a perspective on market building that highlights the ‘on the ground’ dynamics and attends to the ‘institutions at play’, to their consequences, and to a more diverse set of ‘inhabitants’ of institutions.

Gender Equality in Interface Organizations between Science, Technology and Innovation

The article addresses the question of gender equality in the context of interface organizations between science, technology and innovation, focusing on gendered work practices in science parks. Drawing upon the notions of gendered work practices, feminization of work and feminist science and technology studies, the article explores: 1. Key aspects of work practices in science parks; 2. Gender segregation embedded in these practices; and 3. Practices which help to promote gender equality in intermediary work. The study is empirically based on interviews with top managers and female experts of four Finnish science parks, complemented by one focus group interview with representatives of funding agencies, ministries and intermediary organizations. The study demonstrates that work in science parks is simultaneously future-oriented knowledge work and service work characterized by features of feminization and care (i.e. sensitivity to the needs of clients). Gender segregation commonly seen in the science, technology and innovation sector is reproduced in novel ways in the work practices of the science parks, especially due to the gendered patterns of professional recognition and male networking. This implies that - in spite of the feminised work practices - women do not find easy careers in science parks. The data show, however, that there are also several practices which are used to counteract segregation and promote gender equality, including a number of positive actions developed by women themselves in order to promote recognition and networking in science parks.

INTERMEDIARIES, USERS AND SOCIAL LEARNING IN TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

This paper explores the role of intermediaries in the development and appropriation of new technologies. We focus on intermediaries that facilitate user innovation, and the linking of user innovation into supply side activities. We review findings on intermediaries in some of our studies and other available literature to build a framework to explore of how intermediaries work in making innovation happen. We make sense of these processes by taking a long-term view of the dynamics of technology and market development using the social learning in technological innovation (SLTI) framework. Our primary concern is with innovation intermediaries and their core roles of configuring, facilitating and brokering technologies, uses and relationships in uncertain and emerging markets. We show the range of positions and influence they have along the supply-use axis in a number of different innovation contexts, and how they are able to bridge the user-developer innovation domains. Equipped with these insights, we explore in more depth how intermediaries affect the shape of new information and communication technologies and the importance of identifying and nurturing the user-side intermediaries that are crucial to innovation success.

The personal is professional

The article examines the discursive construction of personal training as a case study of the characteristics of cultural intermediary work. Based on an analysis of US personal training occupational texts from 1990 to 2000, the article employs a cultural economy perspective (du Gay and Pryke, 2002) to examine the importance of normative codes of professionalism, the investment of personal resources and aesthetic labour, and the tension between cultural and economic categories in representations of the work. Personal training is a particularly revealing case because of its explicit tensions between cultural factors (e.g. a professional, service-oriented ethic) and economic parameters (e.g. the entrepreneurial aspects of selling services). In response, trainers are encouraged to adopt a vocational attitude, suggesting how cultural intermediary work more generally invokes particular dispositions, which are the outcomes of negotiating between economy and culture, and the personal and the professional, in specific occupational contexts.

Making Water Work: Intermediating between Regional Strategy and Local Practice

Since the early 1990s there has been a proliferation of calls for integrated water resource management as a strategy for sustainable water management. While literatures have examined the extent to which institutions can adapt to management defined by hydrological zones, the significance of other sociotechnical spaces to sustainable water management has been overlooked in these debates. In this paper, having demonstrated the hybridity of the hydrological cycle, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the interaction between regional, network, and fluid spatialities in sustainable water management. More specifically, we examine the fluid work of intermediaries in between regional and network spaces in the translation of regional strategies into local practice. We conclude by looking at the implications of understanding the relationship between regions, networks, and fluids for water governance specifically and environmental governance more generally.