Organics: marketplace icon

This essay explores and debates the status of organics as a marketplace icon. Organic products are somewhat unique in having a place in both mainstream and niche markets. The breadth of organic products and sales continue to rise, and certification processes have become more sophisticated, stringent and successful. Organics are loved and loathed by consumers, and loved and loathed (and often parodied) in popular culture. The market is both friend and enemy of organic products and organic consumers. What organics mean is complicated and confusing, and their benefits for both the natural environment and human health are contested. Scrutiny of organics allows us to explore how the relationship between regulations, the market and popular culture contribute to the development of an icon, firmly rooted in the marketplace, while also maintaining its status as ambivalent commodity. I conclude that organics are indeed marketplace icons – but decline to offer advice on whether or not I recommend becoming an organic consumer (despite my own avid purchase of all things organic).     

A willing slave: reflections on e-books

This text is a personal confession projected at the background and history of e-books. Like with any new technologies, their introduction evoked hopes and fears. As technical problems vanish, and new habits are forming, the readership of e-books grows.     

Mobile phone: marketplace icon

The mobile phone is an essential component of early twenty-first century societies, markets, and economies. The mobile handset in particular has become the synechdocal symbol of major socio-economic transformations the world over. Through an abbreviated history of mobile handsets, touching on each of the first three generations of mobile phones, this Marketplace Icon installment traces the evolution of the look, feel, and function of mobiles from the earliest analog “bricks” to the latest digital smartphones. Based on this history, the frictions of technologies, bodies, individuals, and institutions emerge as key forces in the construction of mobiles and mobility. In light of these, the possibility of an end to the iconic mobile phone era is augured and some contours for a new era of mobility are suggested, one in which handsets are less prominent and consumer embodiment is taken more seriously as the true heart of mobility, mobile technologies, and mobile markets.     

Vinyl record: a cultural icon

In this paper, we use the case of the vinyl record to show that iconic objects become meaningful via a dual process. First, they offer immersive engagements which structure user interpretations through various material experiences of handling, use, and extension. Second, they always work via entanglements with related material ecologies such as turntables, speakers, mixers, and rituals of object care. Additionally, these engagements are complimented by a mediation process which emplaces the vinyl historically, culturally, spatially, and also politically, especially in the context of digitalization. This relational process means that both the material affordances and entanglements of vinyl allow us to feel, handle, experience, project, and share its iconicity. The materially mediated meanings of vinyl enabled it to retain currency in independent and collector’s markets and thus resist the planned obsolescence and eventually attain the status of celebrity commodity with totemic power in music communities. This performative aspect of vinyl markets also means that consumers read closely the signals and symbols regarding vinyl’s status, as its various user groups and champions try to interpret its future, protect, or challenge its current position. Vinyl’s future, and the larger expansion of pressing plants and innovative turntable production around it, largely depend on processes of cultural and status mobility. In the current phase of market expansion, vinyl’s status might be challenged by its own success. Neither a fashion cycle phenomenon, nor simple market conditions explain vinyl’s longevity. Rather, cultural contextualization of vinyl as thing and commodity is crucial for avoiding symbolic pollution and retaining sacred aura.     

Movies

ABSTRACT

The movie has been with us in a variety of forms for over a century. During that time the movie as an artefact has played a number of roles from pure entertainment to political propaganda to a way in which we preserve or pass down memories. The movie moves. Getting its name from the innovation of having moving pictures, with the first film showing a horse galloping as the camera recorded a series of stills in quick succession; the movie is about physical motion, but also about emotional provocation and films have always been implicated in the market, in creating market demand and marketing ideology. So, movies show moving pictures and they serve to move us emotionally. This paper reflects on the development of the movie as a storytelling device, the role that they play in our lives, and why the movies can be viewed as a marketplace icon.     

德治·法治·市场经济

德治和法治的主要功能都是维护人际关系的和谐,维护社会的客观公正和保持社会的稳定.在市场经济条件下,由于人与人之间、市场主体与市场主体之间的竞争十分剧烈,因此更需要德治和法治双管齐下,发挥它们的互补作用.     

网络型厂商公司治理结构与市场行为机制的理论探析——基于资本结构与定价行为的视角

本文假设在不能有效地改变市场结构和维持价格管制策略的前提下,深入地分析了网络型厂商内部的结构和特征,以及执行管制价格同样会造成社会福利损失的问题。得出通过改变以资本结构为核心的公司治理机制,打通资本市场和产品市场之间的利益流,建立起网络型厂商内部和资本市场上的利益制衡机制,进而制约经理层以价格决策为核心的市场行为,达到弱化网络型厂商市场势力和垄断产品价格柔性下调的目的,运用这种微观治理的方法,将外部不可能实现的约束和制衡引入到网络型厂商内部,从而使全社会的资源和利益配置实现帕累托改进。     

Adoption of multiple electronic marketplaces: Antecedents from a grounded theory study

To achieve economies of scope, most motor carriers combine long-term contracts with shippers and brokers with periodic spot assignments found on electronic marketplaces (EMs). While previous research has addressed how carriers adopt an EM, we know little about factors that influence carriers to adopt multiple EMs. Given the rise of the platform economy of the trucking industry, we chose to address this gap and generate mid-range theory on adopting multiple EMs in a logistics context. To do this, we applied grounded theory and conducted 23 interviews with motor carriers and EM experts in North America and Europe until we reached theoretical saturation. Our findings reveal that many motor carriers adopt a portfolio of different EMs, and that their awareness of platforms, expected and realized benefits, attitude, and vigilance determine how they configure their EM portfolios. The implication for existing theory is that, while previous studies depicted EM adoption from a single-system perspective, we found that it is actually a continuous selection process that follows a portfolio perspective. Our paper also has implications for practice in that it illuminates the rationales behind EM portfolio development and identifies actionable factors that can help managers configure stronger portfolios.     

Big data

Big data is defined and distinguished from a mere moment in the “ancient quest to measure.” Specific discontinuities in the practice of information science are identified which, the paper argues, have large consequences for the social order. The infrastructure that runs on big data is described as diffusing with unprecedented speed but as being difficult to analyze and critique, and therefore the designers of society’s big data infrastructure, whether human or machines, play an unacknowledged legislative function of great consequence.     

Ad agencies

This article highlights advertising agencies as marketplace icons. The role of ad agencies in creating iconic brands can sometimes be obscured, yet ad agencies are central to how the contemporary marketplace works. While ad agencies are no longer the hegemonic instance of consumer culture that they were from the 1950s to the 1990s, they have adapted to today's democratic advertisingscape by shepherding cultural content produced elsewhere to market. Ad agencies have remained the engine behind significant shifts in consumer culture, such as the warming of relations between music and advertising, by acting as the ‘midwife’ between art and commerce, facilitating new cultural practices in the process.