Kodak Man 1: ‘So have you figured out a way to work the wheel in?

Kodak Man 2: ‘We know it’s hard, because wheels aren’t really seen as exciting technology, even though they are the original’.

Don Draper: ‘Well, technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in-house at a fur company. This old-pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. Creates an itch. Put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. We also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent…

[Projects slides of his children, his wife and himself eating on holiday, a shot of his wife pregnant.]

… Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and round and back home again. To a place where we know we are loved.’

‘The carousel, a time machine, something that takes us to a place where we know we are loved’. These are evocative themes. And Draper’s is a beguiling, seductive performance designed to play on the emotions – the sentimentality – the private memories and desires – of the client.

There is more to say about the scene. It conforms to a particular idea of the creative process in advertising as resting on the insights of unique, gifted individuals and also sets into play the idea of the ‘creative pitch’ as a drama of revelation and the sanctifying of a selling idea. It also suggests that what ad men and their agencies do is to forge connections between material objects and cultural values and ideals. In Draper’s pitch, he is not selling the product per se, but what it can contribute to – in this case, the generation of memories. And he uses a powerful fantasy of private life, of family life, to invoke a set of tender feelings. In doing so, Draper draws upon his own biography and literally the raw material of his own life – the pictures of his wife and family. What is so telling about these images – and this is evident from their context in the wider series narrative – is that they represent a powerful form of wish-fulfilment and evasion on Draper’s part. This is, after all, the man who is a serial adulterer, seeking to relocate himself in the mythology of the ‘happy family’, to use the power of fantasy to negate the more messy reality of his private life and sexual adventures. There is no easily available, positive public narrative for the complexities of his life, so he falls back upon the allure of idealized, conjugal matrimony.

Draper’s subjectivity, and the drama of the advertising pitch, offers some broader clues as to the role played by advertising agencies. I want to use the scene to draw out further insights into the conceptualizing of advertising. In particular, I want to use the scene to test the value of conceptualizing advertising as a ‘market device’. This is an idea associated with the French sociologist, Michel Callon. Capturing the range of market devices – generated from both the supply and demand sides of the market – is central to Callon’s project to produce ‘ethnographies of socio-technical devices’ (see Callon et al., 2002; Callon and Muniesa, 2005; Callon et al., 2007).

Advertising as a Market Device
What are the implications of Callon’s arguments for understanding advertising? I think we can draw on Callon’s work in a number of ways. Firstly, his account of the ‘qualification of goods’, the process which helps to establish and fix the characteristics of goods so that they can circulate gives a large role to what Callon calls the ‘professionals of qualification’. Advertising practitioners fit squarely into this category, along with designers and other market professionals. They are certainly involved, in Callon’s terms, in the associated process of disentangling goods from the world of producers and attempting to entangle them in the world of consumers. In the scene from Mad Men, Draper effectively helps to ‘qualify’ Kodak’s new piece of technology, shifting it from its representation as ‘the wheel’ to the carousel. This shifts its meaning and helps to fix a new set of association around the product.

Developing this argument about qualification and entanglement further, we can see that advertising agencies use a number of different forms of expertise and technologies to perform this role. One device is market research. Market research enables agencies to generate knowledge of the world of consumers; to produce what Miller and Rose (1997) call an immense ‘cartography of consumption’. That is, a map of consumer’ habits, rituals and subjective investments in the world of goods. The knowledge of consumers generated by market research enables agencies to find ways of forging connections between the goods which they are advertising and the practices of consumers. It helps agencies to ‘make-up’ or ‘mobilize’ consumers – to use Miller & Rose’s evocative terminology. In the 1950s and 60s advertising agencies were drawn to deploy a set of psychological knowledge to understand consumer motivations. This knowledge offered new and inventive ways of forging connections between consumers and goods. One of the most celebrated practitioners of this new kind of market research was Ernest Dichter. Dichter deployed in-depth interviews with consumers in order to understand the symbolic meaning of goods and the deeper psychological needs they might serve. His Freudian approach not only introduced a thicker idea of human subjectivity into market research. It also worked to segment consumers less by social class or sex or age (though these categories were often still part of his consumer research), than by psychological disposition.

Dichter’s conception of the psychology of consumers was informed by his own highly positive view of consumer society. He saw the whole process of market research as therapeutic for the consumer and not only useful for the selling of goods. In fact, Dichter was driven by a wholly positive conception of the private pleasures of consumption and saw his work as contributing to the unblocking of feelings of guilt about consumption within the population that derived from the puritan culture of self-restraint. Dichter argued that the central aim of advertising was to give the customer the permission to ‘enjoy his life freely’ and ‘to demonstrate that he is right in surrounding himself with products that enrich his life and give him pleasure’ (Nixon, forthcoming).

This process of mobilizing the consumer, however, also involves other technologies – specifically, the technologies of print culture, poster, TV, cinema and on-line media to reach consumers. It is evident that these are historically specific and contingent means for entangling consumers – with their own histories and genres of representation and they seek to engage consumers and enter their worlds in different ways. What constitutes advertising as a particular kind of market device or assemblage of devices, then, will vary with the media technologies, bodies of expertise and styles of representation that are deployed. This set of market devices, however, is designed to both shape the ‘qualification’ of goods and to mobilise or entangle the consumer.

There is a final theme in Callon’s work which we can usefully draw on to understand the practices of advertising. This is the broad notion of ‘agencement’, a hybrid device combining human and non-human elements. This means that agency within the business of advertising – such as that pursued by Don Draper in the ‘creative pitch’ with Kodak – depends upon a set of material and technical supports. As Liz McFall has put it in describing the development and presentation of advertising ideas, the genesis of a campaign depends upon ‘materials, tools, equipment and organisational settings’. In Draper’s case, it is the office space of Stirling Cooper and the slide projector itself which enable him to realize the communication of his ideas. Draper’s brilliant pitch is not from this perspective, simply the product of a gifted individual, but reliant upon these technical elements.

And yet the assemblage of Draper and a set of technical devices should not blind us to the fact that who Draper is – his capacities and social formation – does matter. The subjective aspects of Draper are not sufficiently well caught by Callon’s approach. The minimalist conception of the human material upon which social processes work found in Callon’s ANT approach resists the possibility that there might be deeper subjective processes at work. And surely, as the fictional instance of Don Draper illustrates, subjective process and desires animate and inform social practice. Human beings project a set of feelings onto the objective world – including the world of goods – and these material objects in turn are set in a realm of human relationships with all their complex psychological dynamics. It is not that this focus on deeper subjective processes fully accounts for the work of cultural production which goes on in advertising or that we should reduce the study of advertising to the subjectivity of its key practitioners. Rather, it is about the articulation between subjectivity, the social trajectories and social formation of individuals and the socio-technical devices that we need to grasp – rather than seeking to privilege one conception or approach to advertising over another.

References
1. Callon, M. and F. Muniesa (2005) ‘Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices’ Organization Studies 26(8): 1229–1250.
2. Callon, M., C. Meadel & V. Rabeharisoa (2002) ‘The Economy of Qualities’ Economy and Society 31(2): 194–217.
3. Callon, M., Y. Millo & F. Muniesa (eds.) (2007) Market Devices, Oxford: Blackwell.
4. Miller, P. and N. Rose (1997) ‘Mobilising the Consumer’, Theory, Culture & Society 14(1): 1–36.
5. Nixon, S. (forthcoming) Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Trans-Atlantic Relations circa 1951–69, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

But in this pair of youtube clips, we see middle aged men at work, in their high-vis vests, still able to glide – subject to the constraints of those trainers and workboots, and the absence of talc-covered floor. It aint as pretty as in the old days at the Twisted Wheel or the Wigan Casino. But once you’ve got it, you don’t lose it. “Keep Going, Tommo”.

References

1. Paul Hodkinson (2011) ‘Ageing in a spectacular ‘youth culture’: continuity, change and community amongst older Goths’. The British Journal of Sociology. Volume 62 Issue 2, pp262-282.
2. Hodkinson, Paul (2002) Goth : identity, style, and subculture. Oxford : Berg.
3. Andrew Wilson, (2007) Northern soul : music, drugs and subcultural identity. Cullompton : Willan Pub.

More interesting though are the subtle manifestations of work within the lifeworlds of the people I studied, all British, all playing something loosely describable as ‘Americana’. The project became a photographic one, and in a minute I’ll write a few words about the daftness and delights of exploring the work of a musician using a silent medium. In the meantime, take a look at the clothes worn in the photos below. Style inspiration from Tom Joad: checked shirts aplenty, bought from Top Man or Urban Outfitters in imitation of a homespun Americana, this ‘plaid’ workwear was previously worn by a class of white agricultural workers who’ve since disappeared. The echoes are still seen and heard in the backrooms of pubs and on the small stages of provincial theatres, and have been for some years. Nowadays such check shirts, with their connotations of hard, masculine, manual labour can be seen on the backs of all sorts of folk, not just the musicians. But the Americana revival in Britain has played a role in this fashion, and is tied in with a notional claim to authenticity whereby the aesthetics of clothing suit the aesthetics of the sound.

But you can’t see the sound. Plaid shirts are one of the clues as to what you might imagine the sound is, assuming you have any sense of what Americana might sound like (and if not, there are plenty of recommendations on http://www.americana-uk.com).

(Click on image to see full photograph with analytic notes).

I started taking the photos in order to see differently the forms of work that made up performance: unloading, setting up, sound checking, and the transformation of the body needed to go from hefting amps to winning the attention of an audience. The first shots were in colour, the second and subsequent ones in black and white. Black and white seemed more fitting, given how in using photography (not video, not sound recording) I’d already removed enormous amounts of sense-data anyway. Reduction is the aim of most social research – take the complexity of the social world and make it manageable. Removing colour, movement and sound leaves the focus on the bodies at work, how they move, how they are held. So I built four sets of images of performances, all to focus attention on the body as it works on stage.

“Silence and immobility underpin the authority of the photography” suggests Lury (1998: 173). But I think she’s wrong. It’s impossible not to notice the silence here, and this is destabilising as it makes clear the utter partiality of what a photograph can ever claim to represent. Like all forms of social research, using photography as a way of gathering data and analysing the world produces only a small story of a sort of truth. Any reminder of the partiality of any representation is an important and useful form of humility. Noticing what is missing matters as much as remarking on what is there. And thinking about what might be there in addition to what can be seen is more than a parlour game, it is an act of imagination.

Reference

Lury, C. (1998) Prosthetic Culture: Photography, memory and identity. London: Routledge.

The beginnings of a banner in the creative area

During term time days quickly gained a routine, involving large evening meetings as well as smaller morning ones both concerning our strategy. Here tasks were decided upon and divided up between the group to volunteers who would report back on them at the next meeting. By the end of the first full day it was decided to form taskforces for certain areas such as communication through Twitter and Facebook, direct action, and poster and banner making. There was some resistance to this separation of tasks at first for fear of creating static committees and wider divisions within the Occupation. It was decided that these groups should remain fluid in order to allow new members of the Occupation to join in, and thereby stop any entrenched division of labour and also maintain lines of communication across them. Within these groups there was never a discussion of ability. Instead, anyone who wished to do a task or help with something was welcomed to do so regardless of previous skills. This worked both to enable the development of new skills but also their synthesis with existing skills, as well as the deployment of skills in ways which were unexpected by allowing the space for this creativity both in actions and ways of working. This was something refreshing for many students used to working individually or in highly prescriptively organised ways.

Interestingly despite the organisation of these tasks there was a stronger resistance to the organisation of domestic tasks, with many preferring instead to see that these activities would simply get done on an individual and informal basis. As such, the majority of these daily tasks would be carried out individually or by a small group of people, apart from large clean-up operations which were conducted most mornings, or when members of the Occupation had simply had enough of the coffee cups littering the building. This was in part a reflection of the group resistance to any pressure for certain members to perform certain jobs through the enforced expectations of a cleaning rota or cooking duties for instance. Although this became an effective system where the tasks did get completed it still lead to an unequal system where some spent a significant amount of time cleaning up after others. This small group, which would do regular water collecting, cleaning and on some occasions cooking, was composed of both males and females although women were often more strongly represented within these tasks and in expressing concern over these tasks, bringing them up in the organisational meetings. The group dynamics concerning these issues were giving rise to a certain amount of resentment from those conducting them leading to an unsustainable situation in the long term. In many ways resistance to organising these tasks and so taking responsibility for ensuring the equal spread of work can be seen as reflective of society as a whole. This created a disappointing situation where despite other efforts to challenge wider norms, forms of domestic work were still seen as lowly making them beneath discussion and organisation.

Group meetings

After several days of lobbying we were able to open up one of the downstairs conference rooms. This became a quieter sleeping area at night and our study space during the day. This was felt to be a huge priority of the Occupation due to its aims but also due to the timing of the actions which took place just days before many students’ end of term deadlines, so we recognised the need to help students work for their study commitments whilst making their political statement. This was demonstrated in the image here which shows that whilst meetings were ongoing some were unable to tear themselves away from their work but at the same time continued to contribute to the decision making process. Notice members on laptops continuing to work whilst also contributing to decision making but also the use of laptops within the meetings to check information or write notes.

The space provided more than a chance to do the solitary work often expected for essays. We saw many students working together in ways sadly often not witnessed within our current higher education system, with students from first year to PhD being able to help one another. One particular example was an experienced French speaker and two native French speakers helping to coach someone who had taken a French wild module and was feeling unsure about his chances of success in an upcoming test. Visitors and occupiers in the Senate also built their own library, and encouraged seminars both by staff and students. The feeling was very much focused on attempting to recreate the Senate as a free space of learning. The emphasis lay on an encouragement for all to join in as much as they could. There was never a compulsion to do so, instead there was an understanding that all would contribute what they could, however they could.

After two weeks of Occupation free access to the building and connection to the internet was denied by the University after the commencement of legal proceedings. From this point on, numbers were radically reduced as were the activities of those inside. Communication needed to be organised around a phone tree of close outside supporters and dongles with reduced internet access. The key work inside at this point noticeably shifted towards courting the media where the focus was on communication and publicity. Interviews were even conducted through windows and articles were written in national newspapers. This came to a head with the decision to end the Occupation attracting wide media attention. Yet the question of future actions was also discussed as those inside undertook a large scale clean-up operation to return the building to its former meeting room character and plans began to be made for meetings for the new term.

These working patterns were particular to this space providing a fluid dynamic but one which was reflective of wider hierarchies of intellectual, political and domestic work. Now that the group is working outside of this space it remains to be seen if the same fluidity and lack of demands can be made of individuals for tasks and how stable organisation will take place.

*All photos have been allowed for public use and where possible the photographer’s permission has been granted for their use within this post.

At the risk of getting sentimental, I’d like to say thank-you to my wife, Kathy. Not only for all her support and encouragement, but because she asked me to mention her.

My dad always used to say, and I’m sure he’ll say it again before the night’s out,

“Being a writer, in particular a poet, is all well and good. But it’s no way to make a living.”

Of course, as in most other things, he’s absolutely right.

Routines are supposed to feel demeaning, to destroy our imaginations. I like routine, perhaps because whatever routines I have are not imposed by anyone else. In Ways of the Hand David Sudnow (1993) reflects on learning to play jazz piano. The routine of practice gives him a baseline from which being creative becomes possible. His fingers learn where they need to be to make certain chord shapes, and that means they know where they need to go next to make certain sounds. Unpredictability — new sounds — relies on this knowing. It’s a process that becomes un-thought, and once it is un-thought, Sudnow says creativity is possible.

Nick Dunn is a freelance shoe designer.He draws shoe after shoe after shoe, tiny variations, maybe 50 at a time.Then he takes a few of the best and refines them. It’s someone else’s job to build a prototype, to make them real. There is joy in seeing the prototype, sure, especially as the trainer moves from the page into three-dimensionality, and Nick is fully engaged in the conversations that make this happen. But the biggest pleasure of his work is in the routine, the repetition and the refinement of the sketches. Nick describes drawing as therapeutic, occupying a calm space beyond thought. Creativity needs the routine; creativity is in the routine; the routine permits flow.

In the sketches, this flow is present in the pencil lines that outline the shape of the trainer, and that mark the details. I didn’t expect from Nick’s description that each idea comes in three sketches, showing the left side, back and top. Whilst he draws on flat, seemingly translucent, paper, the three dimensional trainer that ends up on your foot is already in his imagination. It’s not that routines end up with creativity; to say that would be to viciously misrepresent the experience of controlled, routinised work such as that portrayed in Pravda. It’s that creativity is not well-conceived when it’s seen as a product of free-floating inspiration produced by a romantically starving artist. It stems from practice, skill and routine.

References

1. Austrin, T and West, J (2005) ‘Skills and surveillance in casino gaming: work, consumption and regulation’. Work Employment and Society. 19 (2) 305–326.
2. Braverman, Harry. (1998) Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York : Monthly Review Press.
3. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
4. Sudnow, D. (1993) Ways of the hand: the organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

After all, he’s the man who faked his CV, laying claim to having studied at the University of Perugia, when really he’d attended the (fabulously named) ‘Universita per Stranieri’, a language school. He also did a few in-house nightschool courses at GEC Marconi, though these were spun as having attended “Dunchurch College of Management” on his CV. Is this legitimate creativity to produce distinction in an overcrowded labour market?

Although in Brilliant CV by Bright and Earl, potential employees are reminded that “lying about any aspect of your life during recruitment can be grounds for dismissal if uncovered” (2001: 246), it’s possible that under the new Duncan Smith regime there’ll be more scope for potential recruits to creatively embellish their job applications. After all, if the man at the top can do it…

References

Bright, J. And Earl, J. (2001) Brilliant CV: What Employers Want to See and How to Say it. Prentice Hall.

I recently co-organised an exhibition work : place exploring the experience of work at the University of Essex. We produced a collective artistic intervention to describes the University on ‘What a Day’, the 18th March 2009. We received almost seventy entries into a competition that asked for an artistic representation of the working day. People submitted photographs, poems, videos and sculptures produced alone or with their colleagues. They are funny, revealing and surprising.

image by Idlan Zakaria

So many occupations are represented at a University; its staff have skills as mechanics, researchers, negotiators, managers, chefs, librarians, administrators. work : place explored how these occupations intersect and co-depend. It made visible the complexity of work in a vast organisation by making visible the employees and how they communicate.

criticising compulsory creativity

One reason for this project was to consider scope for creativity in the contemporary workplace. Whilst universities might well be described as part of the ‘creative industries’, by and large the dominance of a romanticised concept of ‘creativity’ as the act of a free individual (see Toynbee, 2000, ch 2 for a critique), renders creativity as something outside of market or employment relations.

Yet management discourses celebrate and push towards creativity as the hallmark of the successful employee, the value added by the reflexive, self-monitoring worker of the 21st Century: see Bilton (2007) or http://www.creativitycentre.com/.

This sort of thing leads Thomas Osborne to describe creativity as a moral imperative: ‘for who could imaginably be against creativity?’ (2003: 508). He describes a doctrinal ‘compulsory creativity’ as something to stand against, for its promotion of compulsory individualism, innovation, self-performativity and the quest for the new.

Orvar Löfgren offers an alternative critique of the unthinking use of creativity as a new means of production as ‘the striking paradox of trying to domesticate the imagination while at the same time trying to preserve its magic aura of unbridled energy’ (Löfgren, 2003: 246). Here the suggestion is that the institutionalisation of creativity risks making it disappear. So, here are Toynbee, Osborne and Löfgren criticising simplistic accounts of the creative soul; they almost convince me that creativity is overrated; just a step away from exploitation.

‘Leaf Cells’, by Mike Fryer

But on the other hand, I’m a hippy and I think people have great capacity to be creative if they feel like this is within the possible for them. And this was borne out by some of my experience on the work : place project. What surprised me was precisely what Toynbee’s critique of creativity as hyper-individualised might have lead me to expect, had I thought it through: that some people felt they could not participate alone. It was not for them, they didn’t have an artistic bone in their bodies. But let them be in a group, let the group not the individual be described as creative, then all sorts of things became possible.

collaborations

We did not suggest that respondents might submit collectively, but 17 were collaborations from those already working together. Some of the productions were a result of the competition being used as an excuse for management to work on ‘team building’, but there are two I’d like to talk about which came from the work groups themselves, as a form of play interrupting the working day.

The first, To Boldly Go came from a team of cleaning staff in one of the university residences. Here, the youngest of the workers is dressed with the accoutrements of her job, and the poem sits alongside, reflecting the engagement of this group of staff with students and the mess that student’s produce.

ready for work

I’m standing here outside the door and offering up a prayer,
That when I walk inside the flat its not messy everywhere.
Have they had a party with food and lots of drink?
Will the washing up be sky high and blocking up the sinks?
Or could there be a budding cook who made a spag bowl for all,
Then dished it out for all his mates and left mine up the wall.
So now I’ll open up the door, I’ll tell you what I find.
Oh the little darlings have been very, very kind…

The second A Crystal Ball Moment is a photograph of a sculpture made by the course records team. Each worker made a model of themselves out of found office supplies, plastic water cups were chairs and the figures were made from blue-tack. Faces and clothes differ, and one of them is glued to the phone. The piece refers to a (creative) problem-solving discussion about procedure.

A Crystal Ball Moment, by Course Records Team

What both of these, and many others, suggested to me is how the possibility for creativity exists because of the existence of the group; it is not embodied in the individual. Toynbee would probably agree with this, but Löfgren would not approve of the project, precisely because it is the work group who in this instance provides the group identity. Osborne, though somewhat curmudgeonly, might see that creativity is far more appealing — “post heroic” and non-romanticised – when it is not seen as an attribute of the individual.

More on work : place in the future. Thanks to the rest of the project team: Karen Bush, Veerle van den Eynden, Gavin Sandercock, Matt Softly, Richard Stock and Dave Suggett.

references

1. Bilton, C. (2007) Management and creativity: from creative industries to creative management. Oxford, Blackwell Pub.
2. Löfgren, O. (2003) ‘The New Economy: A Cultural History’. Global Networks. A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 3: 239–254.
3. Osborne, T. (2003) ‘Against Creativity: a philistine rant’, Economy and Society 32(4): 507–525 .
4. Toynbee, J. (2000) Making popular music: musicians, creativity and institutions. London: Arnold.