Disordering things

Disordering things

JANICE DENEGRI-KNOTT1 and ELIZABETH PARSONS2*1ECCH, Bournemouth Media School, Weymouth House W435, Talbot Campus, Fern Barrow, Poole, BH12 5BB, UK2School of Management, University of Liverpool, Chatham Building, Liverpool, L69 7ZH, UK

ABSTRACT

In this paper, rather than approaching disorder as a problem, we see it as being pregnant with ambiguity that can potentially be a resource fornew thinking and new ‘ordering’ work. We outline ways in which, within the domain of consumer behaviour, we can come to understandjust how dirt, which is usually conceived as something destructive, can be productive. We focus on disorder, because in disordering thingsand in disorder, ambiguity becomes particularly visible, as a problem that is either confronted by mobilising an existing order or exploited toproduce new ordering work. In this spirit, we explore ways in which disorder might be seen as suspended order, as destruction and as a stateprior to order. In closing, we apply this thinking to the interpretive consumer research academy. We observe that through current reorderingsand disorderings actioned in part through practice theory and actor network theoretical approaches, we are starting to glimpse the possibilityof radicalising our research agenda once more. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

DISORDERING THINGS

Enforcers of order are everywhere. A dedicated industry ofcloset organisers and life coaches as well as whole productcategories such as storage bins, vacuum pack bags andbespoke storage solutions exist for the sole purpose ofimposing order. And for good reason. When they are or-dered, businesses are said to be more efficient; homes moresanitary, homely and pleasing; and organised people morebalanced, efficient and happier (Abrahamson and Freedman,2007). Disorder, on the other hand, must be reined in. Mess,scholarship on the behavioural effects of disorder tells us,can lead to delinquency and criminality (Wilson and Kelling,1982; Keizer et al., 2008), whereas cleanliness conditions pro-social behaviours like generosity (Liljenquist et al., 2010;Mazar and Zhong, 2010). Psychologically too, much is to begained from order. The mind, we are told, is prone to wanderwithout a relatively ordered environment; it needs an externallyordered grid to keep it from straying (Csíkszentmihályi, 2001).

As a rare paper in our discipline noted, messy homes arelike a ‘child or adult who has soiled himself or herself’; they‘provoke disgust and precipitate guilt, shame and embarrass-ment’ (Belk et al., 2007: 134). Mess, in that paper and inthe broader literature, is positioned as polluting not only ofthe home environment but also of one’s emotional andpsychological well-being. The problem of mental entropybecomes more acute in light of the huge ‘pullulation ofobjects’ (Baudrillard, 1968/1996: 3) in contemporary con-sumer culture, which demands an ever more nuanced abilityof consumers to understand what things are and how tocategorise them accordingly (Csíkszentmihályi and Roberg-Halton, 1981). Given this proliferation of things, along withthe constant invitation to accumulate, it is understandable thatmany struggle to manage them physically and emotionally.Hoarders, for example, are represented in the literature aslacking the ability to ‘appropriately’ assign their possessions

to categories and therefore manage them (Cherrier and Ponnor,2010;Moghimi, 2013). At a cultural level, disorder is said to bedangerous and taboo. Too much disorder threatens the stabilitythat culture provides by challenging the common intelligiblelanguage through which social life is constructed and navigated(Douglas, 1966; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979). Given thegeneral disdain we feel towards disorder, it is not surprising thatwithin our discipline too, we have tended to black-box it orreduce it to peripheral, contextual matter. However, disorderis a social fact of some consequence. Routinely, consumersare confronted with disorder: They create it, they wrestle withit, they are frustrated by it and dedicate, according to someestimates, up to 4 hours a week to tame it (The Daily Telegraph,2012). Clutter is seen quite literally as ‘blocking the flows ofeveryday life’ (Cwerner and Metcalfe, 2003:229).

In this paper, rather than approaching disorder as aproblem, we see it as being pregnant with ambiguity thatcan potentially be a resource for new thinking and new‘ordering’ work. We outline ways in which, within thedomain of consumer behaviour, we can come to understandjust ‘how dirt, which is normally destructive, sometimesbecomes creative’ (Douglas, 1966:160). We focus on disor-der, because in disordering things and in disorder, ambiguitybecomes particularly visible, as a problem that is eitherconfronted by mobilising an existing order or exploited toproduce new ordering work. Our starting point is thatambiguity is a state of uncertainty that arises because thereis more than one possible interpretative frame available toclassify or order things, or because we simply do not havea knowledge system or classificatory grid that enables us todetermine what a thing may be (Douglas, 1966). We takestock from the practice turn in consumer culture studies(see Warde, 2005) and think, alongside Don Slater (in thisissue), about dealing with ambiguity as a social, relationalmatter concerned with patterns, practices and categories intowhich an object might fit. We approach disorder sympathet-ically, as did social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966: 6),as something not only that spoils pattern but also that‘provides the material of pattern’, that makes up order.

*Correspondence to: Elizabeth Parsons, School ofManagement,University of Liver-pool, Chatham Building, Liverpool, L69 7ZH, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of Consumer Behaviour, J. Consumer Behav. 13: 89–87 (2014)Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.1473

Order and disorderMuch of our intellectual labour as consumer researchers hasgone into the study of order, specifically how consumers actupon their possessions, their homes and others in ways thatensure a relatively neat ecology can be sustained. Con-sumers’ individual and collective efforts are seen as meansto create intelligible and meaningful universes (Arnouldand Thompson, 2005) via purification or sacralising ritualsand mundane practices (McCracken, 1988). Special empha-sis has been placed on capturing the many ways in whichconsumers go about maintaining and rendering visible thedifferences created by a particular system of order, for exam-ple, distinctions between mundane possessions and cherishedones, (McCracken, 1988; Belk et al., 1989; Richins, 1994)and efforts invested in transitioning goods from one categoryin their biography to the next (Price et al., 2000; Epp andPrice, 2010) and thus ‘moving things along’ (Gregsonet al., 2007) or indeed ‘not moving things along’ (Cwernerand Metcalfe, 2003; Maycroft, 2009; Cherrier and Ponnor,2010).

This emphasis is not surprising when we consider thatculture production itself is an exercise in creating and impos-ing a shared cognitive order to partition the phenomenalworld into intelligible parcels of meaning so that areas ofsimilarity can be distinguished from overall heterogeneity(Kopytoff, 1986). Typical of this perspective is culturalanthropologist Grant McCracken’s (1988) approach toconsumption as a vehicle to express what he terms the‘culturally constituted world’. This world is a composite ofcultural categories and cultural principles; both are the resultof systems of classification that subdivide the phenomenalworld into intelligible parcels of meaning. Categories spanmeasures such as time, space, flora, gender, age, social class,seasons and binary distinctions such as work leisure, sacredand profane. Principles, on the other hand, are the culturalvalues or moral underpinnings that determine how a categoryis expressed. It follows that certain consumption behavioursand objects correspond or fit to the available categories andprinciples. In consumer behaviour literature, this ‘fit’ is cap-tured in concepts like the Diderot unity effect (McCracken,1988) and ‘constellations’ (Solomon, 1986; Solomon andAssael, 1986), which are used to explain the cultural congru-ency that makes objects and brands fit well together. Solo-mon and Assael (1986) explain that product constellationscoalesce because products that ‘fit’ carry information and intheir unity they work more effectively; in addition to this,these constellations, in turn, fit or belong to particular cul-tural categories. To illustrate, a successful and independentwoman will have a ‘Celebration’ Tiffany ring and an Omegawatch and will drive a Mercedes-Benz CLK..

McCracken’s work is pursuant of the kind of Durkheim-ian analysis of social order undertaken by Mary Douglas,who saw in consumption a visible instantiation of a dominantclassificatory scheme. In Douglas’s classic text, ‘Purity andDanger’ (1966) order is described as a positive culturalpattern that mediates all individual experiences and tidilyorders ideas and values, providing a lens and blueprint foraction. There is a conservative bias in maintaining that orderbecause it guides the very act of perceiving, fulfilling a

fundamental psychological function of filtering a chaoticand shifting external world in providing labels or categoriesto give external objects depth and permanence.

This production of order is also a politically charged affairbecause labels and classifications used ultimately have aneffect on the way in which we make sense and act upon theworld and ourselves (Douglas, 1966; Bowker and Star,1999). The power in order production was best explainedby Foucault (1970, 1977) as a historically bound process thatmakes it possible to see relationships between things byvirtue of allocating meanings and values to them. This, inturn, determines what is to be known and how one may thinkand talk about it. In other words, order is facilitated byknowledge created. The production of knowledge comes toconstitute a set of discursive practices that embrace and de-limit ‘a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspec-tive for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms ofthe elaboration of concepts and theories’ (Foucault, 1977:199). In making something known, we are delimiting a cor-responding normative range of experiences for each cate-gory. For instance, a man of certain age will have a rangeof socially sanctioned options that can be pursued, a particu-lar type of life worth pursuing. While it is also well acceptedthat in contemporary societies, transgression is possible andeven encouraged (McCracken, 1988, 2006), there are stilldominant cultural norms which significantly shape lifestyles,goals and aspirations, and more specifically, means ofconsuming (Holt and Thompson, 2004).

More recently, our studies of order have opted for thelanguage of practice theory (Warde, 2005; Halkier, et al.,2011), in particular its actor network theoretical (ANT)variant (Bettany, 2007; Bettany and Kerrane, 2010; Eppand Price, 2010; Bajde, 2013), to consider order as anongoing achievement that relies not only on dominantsystems of classification or consumer agency but also on arange of heterogeneous human and non-human actors(Warde, 2005; Watson and Shove, 2008). A particularlyproductive branch of this work draws on the economicsociology of Callon (1998) to explore the shaping of markets(Aráujo et al., 2008; Aráujo et al., 2010), which are viewedas constructed through a range of materials, practices andknow-how. For example, Cochoy (2010) observes how ourbehaviour as consumers is organised and tightly framed bya series of material devices such as shop windows, packag-ing, baskets, signs and shelves.

OrderingHow consumers and market actors go about putting togetheror assembling order is described by Don Slater (in this issue)as a special situation where social actors topicalise theirbeliefs about relations between objects, categories and prac-tices and what things should ‘normally be’ and whether theycan be ‘categorisable or not’. For slater decisions of where‘things belong’ are a matter of social ontology because theydeal with the nature of objects and how they are to be actedupon. Order within the context of our study of consumptionand consumer behaviour can be seen as dealing with theprecariously stable and functional assemblages betweenconsumers, objects, knowledges, practices and other people,

90 J. Denegri-Knott and E. Parsons

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Consumer Behav. 13: 89–87 (2014)

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which produce particular patterns in the classification and useof goods. Here, it may be instructive to differentiate betweenkinds of ordering: ordering as the practices involved in‘putting things in their place’, and the normative orderpresent in other practices, such as cooking and DIYing,where knowledge, skills, level of commitment and materialobjects – a door, a paintbrush, a fast drying paint, and aDIYer – come together at the time they are carried out.

Ordering of materials is essentially what all housework isabout: ‘concerned with creating and maintaining order in theimmediate environment, making meaningful patterns ofactivities, people and materials’ (Davidoff, 1995: 75). Asfeminists have been telling us for some time, while oftennot recognised as such, these micro-practices of home order-ing represent a very significant amount of invisible physicaland emotional labour, which is central to the survival of thefamily unit (Oakley, 1974a, 1974b; Davidson, 1982; Hall,1992). This micro-ordering work (such as that involved incleaning and cooking) is equated with caring work, which,in turn, is socially organised as women’s work (De Vault,1991). As such, this hidden ordering work acts as a micro-cosm that reflects and perpetuates wider gender divisions insociety. In practices in general, like cooking, gardening andmotoring, there is a normative, desirable way of carryingout that practice, that is, a set of material devices to be used,and skills and knowledge to be deployed in a particular or-derly way (Warde, 2005). In either case, there is a systemof order in operation: in one, such system may be definedby normative conventions regarding cleanliness, order andbeing a good mother (O’Donohoe et al., 2014) and, inanother, by appropriate ways of carrying out a given practice(Warde, 2005).

Systems of order may produce classes on the basis of anobject’s relationship to the market and its owner. Much of thiswork recalls Appadurai’s (1986) essay on the relationshipbetween processes of singularisation and commoditisation.Studies explore the dynamics through which objects mightshift between marketplace and individualised calculations ofvalue and the differing ‘regimes and logics of calculation’(Slater, this issue) that frame these calculations such asEbaying (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2009), car booting(Crewe and Gregson, 1998) and antique dealing (Parsons,2008, 2010). Studies also explore how individualisedpractices of ownership and possession (Harwood and Garry,and Ross, this issue) create order and meaning such assecularisation and sacralisation (Belk et al., 1989), borrowingand lending (Jenkins et al., this issue), sharing (Belk, 2010),gifting (Belk, 1979) and collecting (Belk, 1995). All of thesepractices point to different ways in which we create a senseof order.

Drawing from this research, it might therefore be instruc-tive to explore the internal micro-geographies of ordering ofobjects within the home. In this micro-ecosystem, objects are‘nomadic’ (Cwerner and Metcalfe, 2003) appearing anddisappearing from use reflecting an ongoing negotiationbetween the inhabitants’ identity projects, relationships withothers and practical modes of dwelling at any one point intime. In her book, ‘Living with Things’, which was basedon an ethnography of 16 British households, Gregson

concludes that ‘being “at home” is achieved through livingamongst certain things and doing things with and to thesethings’ (2007: 177).

One particularly instructive mode of doing things to andwith things is collecting (Belk, 1995). Collecting can be seenas a particular form of storage, where objects are deliberatelytaken out of use. As Benjamin observes:

What is decisive in collecting is that the object isdetached from all its original functions in order to enterinto the closest conceivable relation to things of thesame kind. This relation is the diametric opposite ofany utility (1982/1999: 204).

The importance of the collection gains its significancethrough the operation of the series.

Collecting becomes a model for rigorously organising thedaily time of existence; the horizon of such an existencebecomes populated with those objects that still need to becollected, that remain outside the collection. (Sodermanand Carter, 2008: 33)

As such, the collectors’ own activity is organised by, andunderstood through, its relation to the collection itself.

These examples begin to uncover some of the possibilitiesof objects as consuming us as opposed to us consumingthem, or as Baudrillard observes, passion for private propertycan be a ‘regulating passion’ (1968/1996: 85). They alsoreveal subtle differences in processes and practices ofpossession that are all about ordering: ordering our environ-ment, ordering time and ordering ourselves. This materialinstantiation and narration of ourselves, Baudrillard argues,is essential to our existence as human beings:

the environment of private objects and their possession(collection being the most extreme instance) is a dimen-sion of our life which, though imaginary, is absolutelyessential…if it were possible to deprive people of theregressive escape offered by the game of possession, ifthey were prevented from giving voice to their controlled,self-addressed discourse, from using objects to recitethemselves, as it were, outside time, then mental disorderwould surely follow (1968/1996: 96).

Beyond the confines of consumption in a domesticcontext, we have the ordering work carried out by marketworkers such as advertising, marketing and branding practi-tioners. While brands are shot through with ontologicalambiguity (Kornberger, 2010) and as such are ‘terriblytroublesome’ (Brown, 2006: 51), what we can know andobserve is their effects or the traces they leave behind,which serve to simultaneously organise and give coherenceto (or summarise) meaning. As such, the brand operatesboth as a platform for the patterning of activity and, at thesame time, as a medium through which that activity isinterpreted and understood. Acting as a ‘dynamic supportfor practice’ (Lury, 2004: 6) both in organisations (Brannanet al., 2011) and in wider everyday life for consumers. Theirpower lies in their ability to not only represent but alsorespond to and absorb the difference that the market feedson. As such even

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the most creative, unorthodox, singularizing consumersovereignty practices are the most productive for thesystem. They serve as grist for the branding mill that isever in search of new cultural materials. (Holt, 2002: 88)

Brown’s consideration of the Titanic brand (this issue)nicely depicts the distributed nature of the brand as ‘splayedacross diverse contexts’ (Slater, this issue). These contextsvary in both time and space – underscoring the enduringability of the Titanic brand (and brands in general) to travel,both historically and geographically. As such, brands are‘moving assemblages’ – distributed objects, assemblagesthat span disparate social relations (Slater, this issue). Theyfacilitate the

Conjunction of the very distant and the here and now: abrand often shows its power to make the distant close(that is to abolish distance) and to make the close distant(through a sort of re-enchantment power over our dailylives) (Heilbrunn, 2006: 115).

The brand’s ultimate production and orchestration of culturalresources are obviously problematic, sanctioning particularprofitable orderings of social and cultural life over others.In this way making and marking divisions between those thatare and those that are not, those on the inside and those onthe margins. In addition, the interface of the brand is ‘reveal-ing of some relationships [those that celebrate consumption]but it keeps others [those of the conditions of production]very well hidden’ (Pavitt, 2000: 175, see also Klein, 1999).

One should not underestimate how resourceful and energyrich systems of order are. At any moment, the flow of ordercan be interrupted and ambiguity becomes suddenly very ap-parent.. Ambiguity, it follows, as Slater (this issue) tells us,arises because of our inability to assign order, it also hingesupon broader systems of meanings that underpin an existingorder, the material devices and the practices of others withwhom we share our home. Ambiguity emerges when anyone or many of the linkages holding a given order or clas-sification wane or change, making the categorisation of theobject uncertain. ANT studies give us important accountsof how readily objects come in and out of favour,depending on their location within a network of practice(Lehtonen, 2003; Watson and Shove, 2008; Epp and Price,2010). Specifically, these studies show how an existing or-der may be threatened by changes such as the introductionof new objects, spatial constraints, or shifts in individual orfamily identity projects. For example, Epp and Price’s(2010) study of a family kitchen table showed howchanges in familial networks, undermine an object’s pref-erential treatment and its integration into everyday familypractices. In Hand and Shove’s (2007) study of freezingpractices in the UK, a freezer acts as an orchestrating nodearound which practices of consumption and provision offood converge are enacted and negotiated. In sum, thereis a provisional or an ‘in the making’ quality to the orderachieved in these descriptions. Freezing, DIYing or usingnew technological devices such as mobile phones includeprocesses of continual transformation and reproduction,which are subject to a myriad of forces such as changes

in broader knowledge, things that do not work, people’schanging goals, lack of time, skills or commitment andso forth. That there is any kind of ‘stability’ or tempo-rary closure is a true achievement (Hand and Shove,2007; Lehtonen 2003; Slater in this issue, Watson andShove, 2008).

However, as Slater observes, part of this achievementstems from our ability as reflexive beings to ‘inhabit differentinterpretative frames, or regimes’, to operate within morethan one regime at once (Slater, this issue). In their studyof borrowing and lending, Jenkins et al. (this issue) observethat an object can be ‘simultaneously active in more thanone network; a good can often be different things to differentpeople at the same time’; equally, however, an object can bedifferent things to the same person. Both Ross and Harwoodand Garry (this issue) explore how the maintenance ofambiguous property forms in shared virtual environmentsinvolves users’ ability to simultaneously occupy and holdtogether different interpretive regimes. Both papers explorethe ways in which this can also be productive: for Ross’sFinal Fantasy players, it can resolve tensions betweenindividuals and make space for their competing priorities;for Harwood and Garry’s Machinima film makers, it acts asan enabler of creativity as they generate new cultural formsand languages. In the morally laden world of the productionof in vitro meat, Chiles (2013) similarly explores theconfluence of different ideological framings of a range ofstakeholders – rather than holding framings together, Chilesreveals some of the clashes and tensions between theseframings. Stability then is precarious and emergent,involving the coming together of a series of materialdevices, practices, routines and their associated interpretiveframings. If stability is precarious, then the threat of disorderis always imminent.

DisorderingWhile there is an inbuilt bias to preserving order and, hence,the ordering work that occupies consumers in creating andmaintaining an intelligible and navigable ecology is deserv-ing of attention received, there is also much to be gained instudying the outcomes and practices of disorder. Recentexperiments into the effects of disorderly environments onbehaviour concluded that while orderly environmentsencourage conventional behaviour, messy ones stimulatethe generation of new insights. Dutch students placed in amessy room and tasked with finding new uses for ping-pongsoutperformed their peers working in an ordered, unclutteredenvironment (Vohs et al., 2013). Liu et al. (2012), in a rareconsumer research study into the effects of messy environ-ments, concluded that a cluttered environment in decision-making may lead to favourable outcomes, such as efficiencyin the construction of choice options. Messiness, the authorsconcluded, was not symptomatic of a messy mind butactually produced ‘better’ thinking. Eric Abrahamson andDavid Freedman (2007), champions of the mess is goodmantra, see the maintenance of order as taxing to maintainand inefficient. Mess, they claim, can lead to efficiency andcreative thinking.



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Closer to our discipline, we can see how disorder isroutinely exploited by market actors. This is perhaps mostpotently revealed when we consider the hyper-tenuous linkbetween the signifiers and their associated signified mean-ings in some contemporary adverts. Consider, for example,the use of meerkats to promote an online car insurancecomparison tool called ‘Compare the Market’ throughthe ultimately meaningless slogan ‘Compare the Meerkat’.As Baudrillard would argue, ‘There can be no moreimpoverished language than this one, laden with referents,yet empty of meaning as it is’ (1968/1996: 192). Arguably,the two objects could not be more dis-similar, even a verybig stretch of the imagination would fail to identify in anydecisive manner how the natural category of meerkats mightrelate to the economic category of car insurance quotations.As such, the sign is utterly arbitrary, unyoked from itsreferent. Yet it is undoubtedly this very ambiguity, combinedwith a very clever harnessing of distinct literary genres tocreate a complete lifeworld for these make-believe furrycreatures (see Patterson et al., 2013) that has fuelled theirpopularity. We are collectively (as a consuming mass)invited to resolve the ambiguous and arbitrary relationbetween the meerkat and the car insurance in this advertthrough humorous interpretation. Indeed, Brown (this issue)highlights the intimate relationship between ambiguity andhumour that can be central to strengthening brands. The me-chanics of this can be read as very sinister indeed, asBaudrillard observes, ‘advertising is mass society itself,using systematic arbitrary signs to arouse emotions andmobilize consciousness, and reconstituting its collectivenature in this very process’ (1968/1996, 181–182).

Beyond these so-called hidden benefits of disorder(Abrahamson and Freedman, 2007), there is an instrumentaland expressive function to the act of disordering, whichcould help us to better understand ambiguity and morebroadly provide us with a new perspective to study consumerbehaviour. As an empirical context, disorder could poten-tially expedite the process by which we come to confront am-biguity. In facing disorder we are forced to reflect on the useof an existing system of order or even to create a new systemof order. This, too, may bring into sharper focus the scaffold-ing behind the edifice of order – meaning the principles ofclassification underpinning how things are organised andacted upon. In making sense of disorder, its spaces, practicesand its practitioners, the aim of our work is to better under-stand the many ways in which order is dismantledand how, from the ambiguous matter or disorder thatremains, new ways of thinking and practices can be dreamedup and enacted.

The creative potential of disorder is captured in anthropo-logical insights on rites of passage that transition people,communities and ecological conditions from one state toanother (Douglas, 1966; Turner, 1982, 1988). In thesedescriptions, disorder is rampant, in particular during theclimatic liminal period when people are stripped of theirstatus but have not yet been assigned their new identity.In liminality, subjects are described as being in an ambigu-ous state, unknowable and therefore outside the domain ofcultural order. The symbolism that defined these transitions

was described by Turner as bizarre; he tells of references tobiology of death, of negative physical processes, decompo-sition, catabolism, filth, and darkness. Douglas (1966)describes how disorder of the ‘mind, in dreams, faintsand frenzies’ is used in rituals to find truths not possiblevia other efforts – powers of divination are acquired aftergoing mad. The presence of disorder is recognised by bothTurner and Douglas as powerful and potentially transfor-mational. For both, disorder, while feared, was alsoexploited as the site of creative power. Disorder is definedby ambiguity, and this pushes us to reconsider our deepestheld biases and assumptions regarding how things shouldbe organised, and equips us to consider other possibilities.Ambiguity, then, not only threatens existing means ofcategorising things but also opens up new possibilities,new orders (Douglas, 1966; Turner, 1982, 1988). Addedto this, we might reflect on the possibilities of objects, inview of their affective value, as disorderly things existingoutside the values of use and exchange (Soderman andCarter, 2008), as facilitating dreaming. For example,Baudrillard discusses antiques as marginal objects that‘appear to run counter to the requirements of functionalcalculation, and answer to other kinds of demand such aswitness, memory, nostalgia or escapism’ (1968/1996:73). As such, they allow us to travel, to escape from every-day life into past times both our own lived histories andimagined histories of others. Dreaming exists outside theefficient rationalisation of time and space and therefore of-fers us an opportunity of escape. As such, dreaming mightbe a central motif of disorder.

In advancing our own study of disorder in consumerresearch, it is useful to understand it as follows: (i) ordersuspended; (ii) order destroyed; or (iii) a state prior to order.

Disorder as suspended orderDisorder as suspended order is a by-product of order – a statecontingent to the fluctuation of a range of heterogeneousforces, such as lack of space, time, skills, commitment andentry or departure of new human and non-human actors intoa system of order. Shifts in any of the links making up aconfiguration of order, be they ideas of what things are, ourinterest in them, storage constraints, or how things relate toother things and other people, may lead to its suspension.Grooming rituals, for instance, may be sustained in order tomaintain an objects’ cultural coherence and status ascherished. But over time, interest and practices slip to thepoint that objects are out of favour. Similarly, when anew object is introduced into the home, it produces dis-placements and disarray within an existing ordering prac-tice. For example, a new item of clothing, such as a pairof jeans, may temporarily rest over the arm of a chair andnot in the closet where it should belong (Coskuner-Balliand Sandikci, in this issue). Not only this, a new objectcan completely undermine an existing order, and thusrequire a space or existing relationships between people,and other material objects to adjust (Lehtonen, 2003; Ross,in this issue; Harwood and Garry, in this issue; Jenkinset al., in this issue). While a new order is put in place,



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the disorder that ensues is tolerated as working relationshipscan be worked out.

Hetherington directs attention to the direct correspon-dence between the placings and orderings of things and ourmanagement of relationships with other people. Drawingon Robert Hertz’s theorization of burial rites where there isa time lapse between an initial provisional burial and asecond permanent burial, Hetherington argues that adisposed object might also inhabit a gap between thefirsthand and the secondhand, observing

The gap is the space where things are held in a state ofdenying their wastage—where they are held at ourdisposal for a second time so that we can attain a settle-ment with their remaining value (p. 170).

Here, a mother storing baby clothes in the attic when the childhas grown up and left home is really about attaining a settle-ment with her feelings about her relationship with the child(Curasi et al., 2014). The suspension of order can be seen inspaces where disorder thrives – lofts, spare rooms, ironingcupboards and hidden closet spaces. Such disorderly spacesthat home yet to be ordered items have been termed euphemis-tically ‘cooling’ (McCracken, 1988), ‘liminal’ (Hirschmanet al., 2012) and ‘transitional’ spaces (Lastovicka andFernández, 2005). Such spaces are rife with ambiguitybecause all the items have been severed from a constellationor system of order and are usually placed in generallydisorganised piles that are tactically placed out of sight. Loca-tions within home boundaries such as garages, sheds, sparerooms and attics may store objects that remain unused for longperiods but which the owner is not quite ready to let go ofentirely. Maycroft (2009) explores the kitchen ‘rammel’drawer and the bottom of the garden in these terms. As such,they may act as cooling off zones as owners distance them-selves emotionally from these objects and ‘obtain settlement’(Hetherington, 2004) with them before they feel able to movethem on. This emotional distance also involves distancephysically in the sense that these spaces are often out of sightand they are reserved for storage and therefore not often usedfor other activities. Besides insights into the ritualistic functionof such spaces as reducing the emotive value of ‘hot’ objects aperson is unsure of its attachment to it, how consumers dealwith these disordered spaces is little understood.

Order wanes too because imposing order is a taxing andan ongoing practice, which, as we know anecdotally, it isoften resisted because it is deemed unfulfilling and tedious.Disorder is often tolerated, because the practices of orderingmay be too taxing and unappealing to undertake. Whileborrowers are well aware that borrowed items should beearmarked as ‘not mine’ and treated with a modicum of care,they are absorbed into the general mess of their own posses-sions (Jenkins et al., in this issue) because efforts needed inorder to do so are simply not invested. This speaks volumesabout these individual’s relationships to the lender as wediscuss earlier that the ordering and management of objectsis as much about our relationships and moral commitmentsto others as it is about the objects themselves.

However, for hoarders, storage represents the avoidanceof the anxiety of ordering or categorisation. In her study of

hoarders, Moghimi (2013) observes their inability to discrim-inate between Thompson’s (1979) categories of transientobjects and rubbish. This inability was not related to theircurrent or future possible uses but their function as ‘contem-plation objects’. Further, rather than achieving the order thatmight be sought through storage, hoarding might be viewedas a particular version of disordering in going againstaccepted norms of disposition (Maycroft, 2009).

Disorder as destructionWithin consumer research literature, we can tease out a nar-rative that deals with disorder as a generally destructive, pol-luting force. For example, in the multi-sited study of Belket al. (1989) on how American consumers transformedobjects into sacred possessions, they were often engagedwith purifying practices aimed at maintaining separationsbetween the mundane and the sacred. If a sacred status isnot maintained through purification rituals, what is cherishedand sacred runs the risk of being defiled. Disorder under-stood as a destructive agent is perceived as dangerous and ta-boo because it denies or confronts the power of order.Destructive disorder is akin to Douglas’s notion of dirt. Dis-orderly things are matter out of place, things rejected by asystem of order of classification, such as, to borrow Doug-las’s (1996: 37) example, ‘bathroom equipment in the draw-ing room; clothing lying on chairs; out-door things in-doors;upstairs things downstairs; under-clothing appearing whereover-clothing should be, and so on.’ Our unease that thesethings are out of place can be reduced to the fact that theyconfuse or challenge an existing order or classification.

This affront to the status quo, however, is actively sought,individually and collectively. For example, an existing ordermay be undercut by embracing disorder as a lifestyle.McCracken (1988) describes this as a particular type of Dide-rot effect, where disruption of order is used as means of per-sonal experimentation. The entry of a new object that doesn’tquite fit an existing order has a potentially revolutionary ef-fect because it disrupts the harmony of that order. Individualshave different ways of dealing with this disruption. In somecases they welcome it and it is reflexively absorbed into theirongoing lifestyle and identity projects. In other cases individ-uals might just learn to live with it, or ignore it.

Communities, too, are engaged in the destruction of order.Disorder, here, is referring to the disordering of wider socialnorms of behaviour and meaning making. In this respect,studies of subcultures of consumption highlight the variousways in which norms are challenged and new sets of valuesand orientations emerge. Consumer researchers haveexplored contexts as diverse as the goth (Goulding and Saren,2009), clubbing (Goulding and Shankar, 2011) and surfing(Canniford and Shankar, 2013) subcultures in this respect.These groups, tribes and communities are important in pro-moting alternative forms of value deliberately departing froma consumerism in which economic value is promoted ‘overall other kinds and sources of social worth’ (Slater, 1997: 63).

Turning to the marketplace, we think that secondhandsites and spaces of exchange might also be instructive inthinking through the reversal and transgression of dominantnorms or orders found in commercial market spaces. To take



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car boot sales as an example, the location of these spacesoutside the commercial marketplace both metaphoricallyand literally (as they are usually located on the marginsof towns and cities) offers interesting flexibilities inpractices of meaning making and ordering. Car boot salesare spaces that ‘subvert or transgress’ the experience ofthe shopping mall ‘by offering the possibilities of par-ticipation in unpredictable, unfixed and negotiable activi-ties’ (Crewe and Gregson, 1998, 41). Participation in thisspace is ambiguous,

Vendors are also buyers, and buyers in turn are alsobrowsers, sightseers, momentary tourists. This is a spacefor quasi-fun, quasi-leisure, quasi-work activities; anarena in which conventional boundaries are blurredand/or transgressed. (Crewe and Gregson, 1998: 50)

The objects for sale are similarly ambiguous. New objectsoffered for sale in shopping malls and high street storeshave a series of markers, which offers us informationabout how to interpret, categorise or read them. Thesemarkers include advertising, packaging, merchandisingand the brand itself as a carrier and orchestrator of mean-ing. The secondhand objects sold at car boot sales aresomewhat distant and disembedded from these systemsof meaning, their very mode of display often involvesdisarray, and cues can only really be sought from theindividual store holders as to their potential uses and pastlives. Car boot sales might be best described as alterna-tive consumption sites (Williams and Paddock, 2003),understood or categorised in relation to what they areclearly not, which is the predictable, sanitised and con-trolled environment of the shopping mall and high streetstore.

This framing of car boot sales (and other secondhand sitesof exchange) as marginal is significant. This is because of thechallenge they present to the dominant mode of orderingthat is folded into capitalism. Practices of secondhandconsumption in general challenge capitalism’s ‘ceaselessand self-perpetuating creation of new needs, new consump-tion, and new production’ (Crary, 1990: 10) and its associ-ated and necessary linear orderings of objects as first new(valuable), then used (valued) and then useless (valueless).The practice of secondhand consumption and, therefore,spaces for second chances (Soderman and Carter, 2008) cutinto this linear mode of ordering in a range of ways slowingit down, reversing it and quite literally (re)cycling it. Here,the invisible hand of the market is replaced by a secondhand, that of the individual, which moves things onaccording to a different logic. For capitalism to operate effi-ciently, the category of the useless is necessary, but at thesame time, it must be rendered impotent, its capacity tointerrupt must be minimised, and it must be ‘held inabeyance’ (Hetherington, 2004).

Maybe because capitalism itself involves a disavowal ofthe useless and valueless, researchers also seem to havemis-recognised this category and the practices surroundingit. A series of scholars have argued for the vital importanceof re-theorising disposal (Munro, 1995, 1998; Hetherington,2004; Parsons and Maclaran, 2009). Hetherington (2004:

158) observes that ‘disposal, expressed through its materialforms, is part of the accomplishment of the ordering workthat goes into making a society’. Thompson also (1979)argues that the processes and contradictions involved inrecognising rubbish are crucial to social life. He has a partic-ular conception of rubbish, one which rather than seeing it aswaste or even as the unwanted, views it as necessary to thewider system of valuation. For Thompson, rubbish can onlyreally be understood in relation to the categories oftransient and durable. Indeed, these two categories representthe visible and valued elements of material culture asopposed to the invisible and unvalued ‘rubbish’. It is impor-tant to note that these ‘categories’ ideally represent ways ofseeing objects as opposed to substantive containers for them.The transient represents the usual state of commodities; tran-sients are objects which are declining in value and whichhave finite life spans. Whereas durable objects increase invalue over time and have (ideally) infinite life spans (1979:7). Thompson uses the example of a used car as a transientand an antique Queen Anne tallboy as a durable. He arguesthat rubbish represents an important possible ‘in-between’category in a ‘region of flexibility’, which is not subject tothe same control mechanisms of the valuable and sociallysignificant categories of transient and durable. Thereforethe rubbish category ‘is able to provide the path for theseemingly impossible transfer of an object from transienceto durability’ (1979: 9) in this way, Thompson suggests that‘a transient object gradually declining in value and inexpected lifespan may slide across into rubbish’ (1979: 9)where it has the chance of being re-discovered, brought tolight or cherished once again. There are real insights to begained from exploring how the category of the ‘durable’ isstabilised and how its boundaries are policed. Consider here,for example, the role of intermediaries such as the antiquedealer (Parsons, 2008, 2010), the advertising agency (Cronin,2004) and the fashion editor (Entwhistle, 2002) as workinghard at the edge of the durable category to keep some objectsinside and some firmly outside. Looking at moments andinstances of the movement of things and ideas betweencategories is particularly instructive, as well as the institu-tions, practices and ideas that facilitate this movement. Widerregimes of value can also facilitate movement; take, forexample, the role of vintage in revaluing ‘rubbish’ objects(Duffy, 2012).

A state prior to orderDisorder can also be considered as prefiguring order or as astate prior to disorder. Where order, as Douglas writes,‘implies restriction’ (1966: 95) in the selection of elementsto build up a pattern, disorder is unlimited in its potentialfor pattern. This potential is captured in Douglas’s (1966)commentary of Sartre’s description of a child’s first encoun-ter with honey. To the child, honey is an unknown, un-categorisable substance somewhere between a solid andliquid state. It is a substance that does not yield but is soft.When he grabs it with his fingers, it drips in long columns,and it is clingy; when submerged under water, it looksdifferent. In this state prior to being known, honey becomesa question-asking thing, which provides an enriching



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experience for the child. Similarly, disorderly things, thosethat are yet to be categorised, both culturally and at an indi-vidual level, can initiate process of discovery and creationthat we are yet to understand.

Disorder, as a state prior to order, can also be described asproto-structural (Sutton-Smith, 1972) in that it is a precursorof a new social order (Turner, 1982, 1988). Disorder pro-vides us with an opportunity to learn and interrogate anexisting cultural order and experiment with alternative waysof ordering. In this way, disorder for both Sutton-Smith andTurner could act as a seedbed of cultural creativity and innova-tion. Emerging objects and practices, of which there are manyin digital virtual spaces (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth,2010), could be identified as yet to be ordered at a meso, insti-tutional level. A good example of this is the collective output ofMachinima users – a platform where creators make and sharefilms they have created using real-time 3D games as the basesof their content (see Harwood and Garry in this issue).

As raw material of order, our study of yet to be orderedspaces and things could provide us with a particularly illumi-nating vista into the way order is erected and imposed. Thiskind of analysis can be undertaken at the micro-level of livedexperience and, also more broadly, at the level of how institu-tions and societies deal with a yet to be classified object. Atthe level of lived experience, one may start by asking why isit that in some cases disorder is tolerated and not acted upon,whereas in other cases it is, and how is it dealt with. A secondquestion may be to consider the historical genesis of disorderat a broader, cultural level where we unpack how things thatare yet to be classified are made known. For example, oneof the authors has spent some time looking at the ways inwhich the emergence of MP3s constituted a break in thedominant ordering of music as commodities, because theywere freely traded and dealt with more like public goods(Denegri-Knott and Tadajewski, 2010). See also the work byChiles (2013), which examines the highly politically contestedemergence of in vitro meat technology. In both cases, stake-holders draw on existing interpretive framings to make senseof technologies that have yet to be stabilised. These framingsare deployed in a bid to determine how these technologies areto be classified and, therefore, how they are to be acted upon.

CONCLUSIONS

In closing, we have some reflections about the possiblefunctioning of disordering and ambiguity in relation to theinterpretive consumer research community. We do this whilebearing in mind the strongly pluralistic (Joy and Li, 2012)and heteroglossic (Thompson et al., 2013) nature of thiscommunity. Turning first to the meta organising and orderingof the discipline, scholars have highlighted a real and pressingneed to reinvigorate our thinking around consumers andmarkets, observing that, recently, we have seen a move awayfrom an earlier period of ‘creative destabilisation’ promotedby postmodernity, which, as an underlying system of ordering,allowed us to see things differently for a while (Cova et al.,2013: 215). In moving into a post-postmodern phase, we havearguably lost this critical edge. Much research at present largely

unintentionally reproduces a subject position, which is alwaysand already embedded firmly within market relations, one thatonly sees the possibility of capitalist reproduction. So the callis to shift the debate outside the frame of the marketplace using‘modes of analyses that do not merely seek to interpret con-sumer culture, but that instead seek out and cultivate momentsof resistance and rupture.’ (Cova et al., 2013: 221).

On a more meso-level, we might briefly consider hownew modes of ordering and their associated theoretical toolsachieve stability within the interpretive research community.To do this (as others have pointed out – i.e. Peñaloza et al.,2009), it is necessary to take a genealogical perspective(Foucault, 1970). As communities mature, they initially markthemselves out in relation to earlier orderings, that is, inrelation to what they are not; in the interpretive community,this has resulted in a strong early positioning of interpretivework as not positivist. As the community has matured, ithas fragmented, and categories within the community andorderings of those categories have become increasinglyvisible. If we take the emergence of consumer culture theory(CCT) within the interpretive consumer research academy asan example, we can start to reveal some of the strugglesbetween framings of this new movement in various attemptsto stabilise it. In the past, CCT has variously been labelled a‘theory’ (Arnould and Thompson, 2005), a ‘community’ (Belket al., 2013) and an ‘academic brand’ (Peñaloza et al., 2009).Divisions have also been developed which aim to better encom-pass plurality seen as ‘theoretics’ (Arnould and Thompson,2007), ‘an epistemic community’ (Peñaloza et al., 2009) or‘an assemblage’ (Bajde, 2013). These cuts are all instructivein their effects as attempting to stabilise CCT, serving to frameit in specific ways and therefore direct us in how we are to actwithin and upon it. Some classifications, however, are more re-flexive in their tenor (theoretics, epistemic community, assem-blage) concerned to both embrace greater plurality andimportantly highlight the processes and practices through whichsome ways of knowing are privileged over others. The emer-gence of ANT (Bettany, 2007; Bettany and Kerrane, 2010;Epp and Price, 2010; Bajde, 2013) and practice theoretical(Warde, 2005; Halkier et al., 2011) informed approaches inthe academy might be viewed as offering alternative ontologiesand epistemologies through which to explore these modes of or-dering and privileging. While we do not have space to delineatethese approaches here, Bajde suggests that an ANT approachserves to ‘shift attention to how reality is concurrently beingproduced, stabilized and disputed’ also as part of ‘a push forepistemologies that do not succumb to a priori “status” hierar-chies and to a priori layering of reality’ (2013: 231, 237)

Whatever theoretical and methodological path we take, ifwe are to understand the emergence of new technologies inthe realm of marketing and consumption, it follows that weneed to embrace new ways of knowing and their associatedmethods. Here, we consider the possibility of embracingmess methodologically, promoting an openness that includesan ability to tolerate ambiguity, applying our categoriestentatively constantly questioning our beliefs about thenature of markets, consumers and consumption behaviour.It is all too easy to ‘internalize and reproduce dominantontological and epistemological beliefs’ and ‘resist innovations



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vital to our long-term development’ (Peñaloza et al., 2009: 25).It follows that we should engage our ability to hold interpretiveframes together and operate within more than one ‘ontologicalregime’ as reflexive researchers (see Slater, this issue). All thewhile, we should add, guarding against a form of relativism,which loses its political potency. In terms of the future horizonof interpretive consumer research, we agree with Peñalozaet al. (2009) and Cova et al. (2013) that the current directionof work in the academy is certainly promising. Throughreorderings and disorderings that at times might make us feeluncomfortable, we are starting to glimpse the possibility ofradicalising our research agenda once more.

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Ambiguous goods and nebulous things

DON SLATER*Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, 42 Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE

ABSTRACT

The paper argues that ambiguity is not a property of objects but of the relationships of things to classifications and practices. Ambiguity isconsidered at two levels: firstly, the capacity of things to be subsumed within multiple but equally valid orders, and secondly, the capacity ofsocial actors to articulate and act upon diverse beliefs about the nature of things and their proper relationship to classifications and practices.This opens up the idea of ‘social ontology’: how can we think about and research people’s understandings of objects, and how they engagewith ambiguity in everyday practices, both as a problem and as a resource and opportunity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

We can distinguish two levels at which we can think aboutgoods as ambiguous: Firstly, we can recognize ambiguityas a condition in which we do not know precisely what athing is because the concepts or practices we use to catego-rize it do not ‘fit’ or because more than one could fit; inHegelian language, the thing does not fall under a singleconcept. No one concept appears adequate while more thanone candidate presents as plausible. The object is up forgrabs, and there may be very explicit discussions betweenpeople as to ‘just what this is’. Moreover, in a condition ofambiguity, we cannot say decisively how this object relatesto other objects (whether it is ‘the same’, or ‘different’, or‘complementary’, or ‘competitive’ etc.). Because all objectsare polysemic and are connected to other things throughdiverse relations, these ambiguous situations are incipientpossibilities at any moment. Social actors may experiencethis possibility of ambiguity as a resource for innovation oras a danger to stability, but it is always there. What needsexplaining is not the ambiguity of things but their stabiliza-tion as just one thing or another.

Hence, there is also a second kind of situation in whichsocial actors topicalize their beliefs about the relationsbetween objects and categories or practices, and theirexpectations as to how categories should or should not, door do not, relate to things, about whether things should,normatively, be unique or not, stable or not, categorizableor not. This has provided a central thematic in anthropology,often identified with Mary Douglas [1966], in which theambiguity of objects invokes alternative cosmologies, andoffends against core cosmological distinctions, such thatambiguity motivates dramas of ‘purity and danger’ and col-lective rituals that both enact and resolve ambiguity

We could describe this second level as a matter of ‘socialontology’: what are the beliefs about the proper nature ofobjects that we act upon in everyday practices? How do peoplereflect upon and resolve the polysemic nature of things? What

are the practices through which we believe we can sort thingsout? Very schematically, modern westerners could be said tooscillate between a positivist social ontology of disenchant-ment, in which we expect things to be disambiguated in termsof their observable and measurable properties, and a romanti-cism that is obsessed with the ambiguous relation betweenthe object’s appearances and its authentic or real meaning.

A mundane illustration of these two levels of engagingambiguity is as follows: In doing home repairs, I am used tothe idea of bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, 1966; Hebdige, 1979), oftaking objects that are understood as fit for one purpose andusing them for quite another; I even know which old knivesin the kitchen drawer are the best to unscrew electric plugsand lever out the fuses inside when all the screwdrivers in thehouse have typically vanished. I have developed a low levelof confidence in my inventiveness in re-purposing, innovating,discovering new affordances. I can make strategic use of ambi-guity and recognize situations in which an object may usefullybe something other than what it was intended to be. And as anacademic student of consumption, I have come to give a centralanalytical place both to the creative agency of actors andthe interpretative latitude of objects, to ambiguation as aresource through which actors can render consumptionunder-determined by production.

However, I am also very used to the experience of walkinginto a DIY superstore, confronted by a vast number of mi-nutely categorised objects, stabilized into product categoriesthat the store intends to entirely disambiguate by subdividingthem into ever more specific functions and subsystems to theextent that I scarcely recognize or understand what they are.Given my academic day job, in that situation, I tend to meta-discourse on the nature of modern commodity systems, thecomplexity of a strategy of object specialization that servescommodification rather than domestic repairs and that taxesto breakdown the cognitive abilities of both sales staff andcustomers. I understand that the superstore wants me to accepta social ontology in which every thing has one purpose underheaven, one utterly unique function, so that I have to buy anew thing for every task I want to accomplish. I also wonderat unintended consequences: a classification system intendedto render all objects discrete and unambiguous has made themincomprehensible to the point that I return to my own

*Correspondence to: Dr Don Slater, Associate Professor (Reader) ofSociology Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, HoughtonSt, London, UK.E-mail: [email protected]



categorizations and carry on with my ersatz bricolage. So, bothat home and in the store, my object relations are bound up invarying degrees of ambiguity, and I can reflect on this at a metalevel. A more nerdish friend of mine might argue that the inten-sive disambiguation accomplished by B&Q exemplifies a mod-ernist sensibility that has properly rationalized my fuzzy logic,my bodging, into a thing of the past. That is to say, my friendand I have different expectations—and disagreements—aboutthe structure or aesthetic form of information, the logic of classi-fication and its relation to the logic of things; we have, anddebate, social ontologies that inform our practices.

This kind of story shows social ontology in everyday life:firstly, people routinely deal with objects that can be placedin different practical and interpretative frameworks; secondly,in their routine practices, people reflect on these situations ofambiguity; hence, they recognize not just different meaningsof a given object but also multiple and contradictory orcontested ontologies (in this sense, ‘ambiguity’ itself can beambiguous, seen under the aspect of different interpretiveframeworks such as those of my modernist friend and me).There are multiple social forms that can be imposed upon thesame object, and we know this and think about how this isdone in our social world.

Ambiguity, in this kind of story, is clearly not a propertyof goods, and no category of thing is essentially any moreor less ambiguous than any other. Rather, ambiguity is arelational matter concerning the patterns, practices orcategories into which an object apparently fits and the logicof that categorial work: if the same object shows up in morethan one place or in more than one relational order, we do notknow if it is this or that. We are used to the idea that goodsare polysemic or multivalent from numerous intellectual tra-ditions including semiotics, consumption studies, materialculture studies and actor–network theory: it is academiccommonsense that goods are interpreted differently bydifferent users and are therefore configured differently intheir use. However, it is helpful to define ambiguity rathermore specifically, or even technically, and not to treat it assimply another word for polysemy. Two points are importantin this respect:

Firstly, Empson’s (1949 [1930]) famous literary analysisclearly and usefully distinguishes ambiguity from mere inter-pretive flexibility as such, and from any sense of objects asinchoate, confused, anarchic or infinitely flexible in theirmeanings; Empson’s argument was not a deconstructiveone. To the contrary, for Empson, ambiguity denotes veryprecisely a state in which the same object could be equallyvalidly interpreted in two or more different ways, could fitwithin two or more legitimate categorical systems or fit intothe same system in different ways. Ambiguity is less relatedto Derridean ‘différance’ than to a Hobson’s choice, or toGestalt, to optical illusions such as the Necker cube whichfirst looks like two profiles facing each other and then, whenyou or your brain blinks, like a vase. Ambiguity is a questionof form: there are two (or more) distinct, legitimate andpractical answers to the question, ‘what is this thing in frontof me?’ Put a different way, ambiguity does not raise thenow-conventional questions of consumption studies aboutthe creativity and agency of consumers so much as

questions about how goods are stabilized and destabilizedby virtue of the different relational orders in which theymight be placed, and about the power to produce or resolveambiguity through the power to classify and organize things.

Secondly, however, ambiguity should not be treated aspurely a matter of meaning or of multiple meanings, as afundamentally linguistic problem. If ambiguity is understoodas relational, then goods may be experienced as ambiguousin terms of any or all of the lines that connect them to otherentities in the world—not just meanings but also systemsand practices. The ambiguity of my iPhone—it is a gamesmachine, social networking device, camera, status symbol,diary, music player, occasionally a phone, and usually differentcombinations of these and other things—arises not just frommy understandings or those of Apple designers and marketersbut also from the ways in which this object does and does notconnect to quite a range of systems and practices such asMicrosoft Exchange, Facebook, my partner’s everyday prac-tices, and 3G coverage. The ‘meaning’ of my iPhone or anyother ambiguous good is only one of its attributes and indeedonly appears as a separately identifiable property of the thingunder quite specific circumstances (such as when talking orlecturing about what the iPhone means in contemporary life,or how other people use it differently from me). We couldsay that ambiguity is an experience of multiple patterns orrelational orders into which a good might fit, which we oftenrecognize in terms in terms of the different names, categoriesor classifications that could subsume the same object. Anambiguous object in this sense is therefore close kin to a‘boundary object’ as defined by Star and Griesemar (1989)—objects may move across or be shared between differentorganizational practices and frameworks; the object itself isneither stable nor formless but simply has just enough identityand stability to keep its shape across different situations andpractices. Actors using ‘the same thing’ in different practicesare likely to agree less than they think they do as to whatexactly this thing is if they are asked to explicitly define it(cf Slater and Ariztia-Larrain, 2009; for the related conceptof ‘fudging’; the idea of ‘strategic ambiguity’ is alsoclosely related).

Ambiguity, then, is not just about multiple meanings ofgoods but about the ‘fit’ or relation between things andorderings of things; our relation to ambiguity involves socialontologies, normative understandings of how things andcategories should connect, and ambiguity is not a problemthat arises from ‘meanings’ but from the total social placeof the good. In the next section, on disambiguation andmodernity, we ask about these normative expectations; inthe following section, on nebulous things, we ask aboutambiguity as a resource for social actors (specificallymarketing and branding people); and in the final section, onresearch strategies, we put forward central research questionsthat arise from this formulation of ambiguity.

DISAMBIGUATION AND MODERNITY

Contemporary theories of social change have actually beenobsessed with social ontology for several decades. Narratives

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of transition to a service economy, post-Fordist or postmoderneconomy, and latterly to digital or network or informatio-nalised or liquid economy or society all rely on ontologicalassumptions about a transition from an industrial world basedon material goods with physical affordances to a world ofobjects whose affordances involve non-material logics suchas social skills, semiotic codes or psychological manipulationthroughmarketing. In such accounts, the interpretative framingof goods (e.g. through branding or design) is far more conse-quential than the good’s material or ‘intrinsic’ qualities (whichare regarded either as a rawmaterial for marketing or as the lostreality or authenticity of things that have been swamped by sig-nification or Baudrillardian ‘sign value’). The world, in suchaccounts, is increasingly populated by dematerialised objectswhich—because they are structured through interpretativeframing—are intrinsically ambiguous: the underlying assump-tion is that signifying things are more malleable or shapeshifting or unstable than the brute material objects of the pre-modern or of the industrial world, that we know what kind ofthing is a length of steel in a way that we do not know abouta downloaded music file or a tourist experience.

Earlier arguments about goods and meanings such asthose arising from Marxian critical theory were more likelyto raise epistemological than ontological concerns, aboveall to produce claims that increased signification producesincreased domination (the power of codes, manipulation,ideology); the problem for earlier critiques of consumerculture was not so much ambiguity as mystification and falseconsciousness. By contrast, the rise of branding andmarketing,particularly since the 1980s, followed by the rise of neweconomy in the 1990s, appeared to overturn the logic of capi-talism itself on the basis of the new dematerialized ontology.Drawing on an analysis that goes back to Chamberlin (1948[1933]), we can see that the very idea of a market and marketrelations relies on the disambiguation of goods, and this isformalized in neo-classical economics: the idea of a marketin cars or cameras or computers or music files requires theassumption of things that are consistently identifiable as carsor cameras or computers or mp3s with the same properties,which can be treated as ‘the same thing’, and therefore assubstitutable and competitive; the same applies to other marketrelations such as complementarity. We know of course thattwo cars are ‘the same’ only when viewed at specific scalesand contexts (the car my family has used for the past 10 yearsis clearly not the same as yours, but the two might be renderedsubstitutable as five door economy hatchbacks, or as Japanesecars, or as second hand or as leaving comparable ecologicalfootprints). Market structures and the quantitative relationsand transactions that can be accomplished within them all reston an anthropological framing of things (Slater 2002a, 2002b).Callon’s (1998) famous discussion of a strawberry market is acase study of the machinery of disambiguation that is neces-sary to accomplish a market: it is an assemblage designed tocategorize an object into different grades and weights such thatpunnets of the stuff can be regarded for all practical purposes asidentical objects that can be transacted at different prices.However, we can equally take the contrary approach andlook at the ways in which market processes involve notonly disambiguation and purification but also ambiguation

(Slater, 2002a): if market structures and relations dependon disambiguated goods, then advertising, marketing andbranding professionals work hard to strategically reorga-nize market relations by playing with the meanings andinterrelations of things and thereby constitute new com-petitive relations with other things, and new market struc-tures that will be more optimal for their sales. They seekadvantageous market opportunities not so much by com-peting within markets as by shaking up the interrelatedstructures of objects and markets.

If we follow this line of thought, contemporary marketingis not characterized by more ambiguous goods (strawberries,iron and mp3s can and must all be disambiguated in order toform markets) but rather by the increased use of ambiguity asa resource by a range of social actors, and the professionali-zation and prestige of that kind of expertise in marketing andbranding. It would be hard to imagine a 19th century steelmanufacturer engaging in viral marketing or creating a buzz;this is not because steel is unambiguously defined by itsintrinsic qualities but because marketers and consumers arenow more willing and able to make use of the wider andmore complex social life of the things they transact, andmore adept at living with the resulting instability of thingsand relationships.

Another way of putting this relates ambiguity to muchwider themes in western modernity: ambiguity is closelyassociated not only with instability and confusion but alsowith innovation, change, resistance to power and domina-tion, critique and other stances of opposition to modernityas a project of disambiguation. It is worth looking at thesethemes briefly. The Weberian diagnosis of modernity as aproject of disenchantment tells the story of the impositionof rationalization in which, much as with neo-classicalmarkets, all spheres of life become organized throughimpersonal and implacable or predictable rules and proce-dures such that individual entities have a clear identity asone of a kind or category (law, art, economy, religion etc.all end up rationalized according to apparently unambigu-ously separate logics and values). While the pathos of Weberstems from the arbitrariness of these orders, the advantagesof such order are rarely in doubt for him: to be modern isto assign things uniquely to their appropriate rule-governedspheres and for these spheres to evolve according to theirown inner logic.

Modernity as a project of disambiguation can further beconnected to positivism as an underlying social ontology,which is the basis of disenchantment. The modern westerncommonsense of object relations is Cartesian: put schemati-cally, the separation of subject and object means that to berational in a modern manner is to regard objects as inherentlymeaningless, and to regard them as a bundle of objectivelyobservable properties that are intrinsic to them and owenothing to the observing subject (Kolakowski, 1972). Thingshave no meanings, only observably predictable ways ofbehaving. By contrast, meaning is solely the domain ofhuman subjects who may use the properties of objects whenthey are able to grasp them factually, but the ends to whichthey use them evolve in an entirely separate logic that cannotbe grounded in things themselves: that is, the separation of

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facts from values. To the extent that humans perceive objectsas messily imbued with meanings they are being unscientific,or engaging in magical thinking; to the extent that the sameobject may fall under two alternative classifications, theoriesor data sets (i.e. that it is ambiguous in a strict sense of theword), then there is a technical issue that is to be resolvedby further research that will cure what is effectively problemof knowledge, not of objects. Ambiguity, then, is a matter ofbad thinking that is technically corrigible. In point of fact, fora positivist, ‘things’ are very straightforward. They cannotthemselves be ambiguous because they are already there intheir finality; they pre-exist their relationship with us.

Hence, the defining feature of positive science is theability to disentangle human meanings from the world so thatwe can observe the unambiguous properties of objects, andthe normative assumption is that observation will generateequally unambiguous concepts that are directly derived fromempirical occurrences. Once this epistemological therapy isaccomplished, meaning and value are recognized to be theunique properties of subjects who are (at least in this respect)as unambiguous as objects: humans are possessed of needs,interests and drives that can make rational instrumental useof (meaningless) things. Consumption itself provides a goodexample of these relationships between subjects and objects.Most views of consumption—whether critical or not—haveassumed a normative state of disambiguation. It seems com-monsensical to define consumption as acts in which ‘peopleuse things’, such that subjects and objects are unambiguouslyseparate. ‘People’ use things in relation to ends that aredefined in a state of autonomy or sovereignty. There aretwo versions of this at play: Either people have ‘needs’which are regarded as objective or existential (for food,clothing and shelter but also for things like love, societyand other properties of the world depending on how onedefines ‘people’), and consumption consists in finding thingsthat have properties that satisfy those needs. Or, people have‘subjective preferences’ that evolve within the realm ofculture or personality or randomly; preferences may beinexplicable but they are not ambiguous (nor are consumersambivalent) in that the consumer is deemed an unques-tionable (sovereign) authority as to their own tastes and theobject’s affordances. Critiques of consumption have tendedto revolve around the same normative position: the problemthey find with consumer culture tends to be that the objectworld interferes with needs (through advertising, designand ideological interpellation) such that the two are no longerseparate, and subjects become objects; or that the objects aredefined by human meanings (e.g. are re-enchanted throughadvertising) such that the object is no longer a factual bundleof objective properties.

Contemporary consumption studies, material culturestudies and actor–network theory have largely rejected thisentire problematic. Things are in fact ambiguous and peopleare ambivalent not least because they co-configure eachother, and they do so within fields of extensive interpretivepossibility. I become who I am partly through the kinds ofthings that enter into my way of life and my everyday prac-tices, and these things are configured through the ways inwhich we use them in practices. Hence, both subjects and

objects are emergent from specific contexts and assemblagesthat can variably frame both of them.

However, we can also say that critiques of disambigua-tion, and of modernity as a project of disambiguation, areas old as modernity itself, and our central critical traditionshave often been articulated through an assertion of ambiguity.We could start with Romanticism, from Rousseau onwards, asa rejection of crude materialisms that deny an intrinsic or au-thentic meaning to people and things, or that reduce meaningto their observable appearance and behaviour. The Hegelianversion understands true disambiguation, as opposed to thefalse and unhappy consciousness of modernity, as a worldhistorical problem of reconciliation between the world we havemade and the world that makes us (Miller, 1987, 2005). Onlywhen we can transparently experience our relationship withthe world through praxis can we overcome the disambiguationof things through alienation and reification, processes whichdeny things and people their historicity and dialectical duality.Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) develop this into the critiqueof identity thinking, in which the danger in enlightenment isprecisely the delusion that things can be identical with theirconcepts, can be unambiguously subsumed under positivecategories. Indeed, the only hope for critical consciousness liesin autonomous aesthetic practices that can express the ambigu-ity not only of social existence but of the forces that generate it.In this sense, for Adorno critical theory and autonomous art areboth ways of reflecting upon social ontology and of opening upnew ways of seeing objects and their conditions of existence.

Post-structuralism has also largely taken the form of acritique of the dangers of the modernist fallacy of disambig-uation. This arises from the very beginning of the tradition:although Saussure attempted a positive science of language,it was grounded in a profound challenge to positive or corre-spondence theories of meaning. If meaning arises relationallywithin codes, then the idea that words mirror the world, andthat real meanings arise from accurately naming unam-biguous entities, is clearly untenable. Moreover, it is sociallyand politically dangerous. Both Barthes’ (1986 [1957])ideology critique and Derrida’s (1976 [1967]) deconstructionare centrally concerned with the ways in which the endlessdeferral of meaning, the impossibility of arriving at finalmeanings within semiotic processes, is obscured by the natu-ralization of normative meanings. Positive and disambigu-ated meanings are a form of symbolic violence in that theyrender contingent and partial meanings as regulatory truths.Lacan’s tripartite division between the Real, the Imaginaryand the Symbolic similarly aims to capture the drama ofwholeness and fragmentation, of completed and unambigu-ous identity that is sought on the dubious foundation of fluidsemiosis. Foucault (1973) is most explicit in his critique ofpositive meanings as impositions of normativity; his earlierwork in particular is explicitly an attempt to show how arange of positive sciences could carry out their programmesof diambiguation by establishing specific conditions of truth(epistemes).

Finally, Latour (1993) has arguably produced the richestcritique of modernity as a project of disambiguation sinceWeber: We Have Never Been Modern is about modern ‘con-stitutions’ that seek to resolve fundamental categorial issues

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in an enduring way and as a consequence produce styles andforms of classification that relate to what I earlier called so-cial ontology, the meta level of experiencing ambiguity. Mo-dernity involves forms of purification that separate out thenatural and the social, objects and humans, much as in We-ber’s account. However, for Latour, modern classification isa virtuoso exercise in constant ambivalence involving a diffi-cult but productive dance of denial and acknowledgement: pu-rification both relies upon and denies a mess of ambiguity.Hybrids and monsters, like a Freudian id or Butlerian abject,haunt modern purity with all that it denies but which makeit productive. It is therefore a book about how ambiguity issystematically both produced and repressed. Modernitybelieves itself to be a project of disambiguation and thestrange register of the title brilliant evokes its constitutiveambivalence: modernity both is and is not what it sayson the tin. Ambiguity, in this arrangement, is not simplya leakage or technically corrigible defect; it is a systemicfeature of the modern arrangement, and the values placedon ambiguity and disambiguation are central to the waythe modern manages itself.

Although we have been looking at philosophical tradi-tions, the aim has been to elaborate different social ontol-ogies. We have been describing understandings of objectsand our relations to them that infuse everyday life. Forexample, we can experience ambiguity as a problem againstthe backdrop of assumptions that things should have uniqueand stable identities, should present themselves as naturalfacts. On the other hand, we can understand the instabilityof meaning as an opening, as an opportunity to innovatepractices, reconfigure objects, discover new affordancesof our selves. And of course, we can spend some of ourtime relying on disambiguation in order to get on withroutine practices while being equally capable of throwingobjects in doubt in order to change our practices (we are‘multi-lingual’ in our everyday ontological discourse). Thisis also to say that the ambiguity of objects is an everavailable resource as well as a danger and that the occa-sions and ways in which we use it should be treated as avery complex empirical question rather than as somethingto be decided theoretically.

NEBULOUS THINGS

Latour is explicit that hybridity is not merely the unacknow-ledged unconscious of a modernity that is obsessed withpurification and disambiguation; hybridity is also the realbasis of modern innovation and its explosive production ofnew objects and new people. Things promiscuously connectand combine and thereby reconfigure. Ambiguity is articu-lated as a problem or impurity but is in reality a resourceon which we rely. We could argue that this resource is in factincreasingly acknowledged and exploited and in ever moresophisticated ways. If ambiguity is always a possibility, forall objects, then it may well be a possibility that increasinglylies at the centre of the social ontology on which we act inmany contemporary societies and many important socio-economic processes.

In this sense, it would be hard to deny that the paradig-matic objects through which we increasingly think and actin commerce, politics and much social life could be termed‘nebulous things’. All objects, as we have claimed, can beambiguous, but the kinds of objects that are often deemedsymptomatic of our social order are increasingly defined inpractice by their ‘nebulousness’. Nebulousness as I want todefine it here arises from the way in which an object isconstructed across numerous fields and practices, is neverquite stable and is never the same for all participants. Anyobject can be regarded as nebulous in the same sense thatany object can be treated as ‘networky’ in ANT: any objectis really a congealed or stabilized set of relations withinnetworks of actors (condensed networks), and we can alwaysblow it up again, disperse the object back into all the relationswhich comprise it. We then see it as ‘nebulous’ rather thanstable, material, monadic. I find the idea of ‘nebulousness’useful because, somewhat differently from ambiguity, itemphasizes the ways in which objects gain or lose definition,shape or stability at their borders or boundaries, because ofthe ways in which they are connected to the things aroundthem; where ambiguity tends to focus on the problem ofmeaning, nebulousness concerns the whole relational field inwhich an object seeks a solid identity.

In two previous papers, Entwistle and I (Entwistle andSlater, 2012, 2013) looked at fashion models (or, moreprecisely, at the model’s ‘look’) as a nebulous thing in thissense, as a construct that is distributed across multiplepractices and institutions, as a moving assemblage. Themodel’s ‘look’ is routinely experienced by social actors as‘nebulous’ in the same sense as a range of other ratherarchetypal contemporary objects. The paradigm case isdoubtless the brand (Lury, 2004, 2009; Moor, 2007, 2012).Other particularly nebulous objects that come to mind arefashions and fashion trends; genres, aesthetic styles andmedia formats; celebrity; and national and ethnic identitiesor national values.

Brands—to take this as our example for discussion—haveoften been thought of semiotically, as coherent constellationsof meaning embodied in specific signs such as brand names,logos and more broadly styles or designs delivering a specificand reliable experience. On this basis, the move to an in-creasingly branded culture is associated with an increasinglydematerialised or semiotic quality of the object such that forfigures as diverse as Baudrillard (1968, 1981, 1998 [1970])or Holt (2004), brands mark the reduction of thing to signor sign value. This makes them malleable or morphable, assigns can be more easily reframed and reconfigured. For thisreason, much discussion of brands and other nebulous ob-jects has focused on their semiotic power in the sense of theirideological functions and role in fashioning subjectivities.

This is to understate the materiality and practical accom-plishment involved in fashioning objects such as brands,something that was clearly acknowledged in earlier mar-keting in which branding involved the coordination of highlydiverse elements such as packaging, pricing, transport, pointof sale material, sales forces, advertising and design—abroad ‘marketing mix’ through which a product could begiven a consistent and coherent identity across ever-wider



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regional, national and transnational markets (Slater, 2011).This older notion of branding is a clear instance of modernistdisambiguation, but it also demonstrates awareness of thevast range of affordances that need to be fashioned, calcu-lated and managed across highly diverse contexts of saleand consumption. Drawing on work by Lury (2004),Entwistle and Slater (2012, 2013) discuss brands and othernebulous things as ‘moving assemblages’—brands are dis-tributed objects, assemblages that span disparate socialrelations. While marketing and branding seek the greatestpossible control over the whole assemblage, and to configurethe assemblage for optimal strategic positioning, no firm (orconsumer) can entirely own or control its brand. To use theterms of Callon et al. (2002), the process of qualificationdescribes a situation in which the value, meaning, form andtrajectory of a good emerges continuously from a distributedprocess of testing and qualifying it through innumerablepractices. And this also generally involves the applicationof diverse and conflicting logics of calculation in which thesame good evolves within various producers and consumers’practices and interests. The brand is therefore never fullystabilized, or only provisionally; it is a moving assemblageor ‘happening object’ (Lury, 2004) or an event. The properquestions about nebulous things like brands is not quite‘what is it?’ so much as which actors have an interest instabilizing or destabilizing it, and in what form? And whatpower (in the sense of practices and knowledges) do differentactors have to stabilize it in the form they desire?

And yet despite the fact that nebulous objects like brandsappear to be highly unstable and splayed across diversecontexts, nonetheless, brands have a kind of ‘objectivity’(Lury, 2004), and—like Star and Griesemar’s ‘boundaryobjects’—despite their nebulousness or ambiguity, they keepenough shape or identity such that ordinary marketers andconsumers can say that is an Apple product and that is aMcDonalds. Even if they disagree radically as to what ‘it’is or should be, they can get on with the practicalities ofinteracting with it (consuming it, contesting it and marketingit) in everyday life. That is to say, ambiguity is not incom-patible with objectivity—we can all act as if there issomething out there that emerges from and can orientongoing practices.

Finally, arguably much of what is considered new orprogressive in marketing and capitalist commerce could beconstrued as acknowledging the inevitability of, and makingresourceful use of, the distributed and therefore ambiguousnature of nebulous things: branding practices (above allsocial media based ones) increasingly assume that brandshave an independent ‘cultural’ existence in which they aregiven meanings within contexts over which producers havevery little direct control.

AMBIGUITY AS A RESEARCH STRATEGY

Despite the abstract language, the intention of this piece hasbeen to open up a problem space that might generate inte-resting empirical questions. If ambiguity is not a propertyof objects but of complex relations between things, and if

people reflect on the ambiguity of things as both a problemand a resource in their everyday activities (includingmarketing-related ones), then the ways in which ambiguityarises and is dealt with are matters of empirical investigationnot theoretical debate. Above all, how do social actorsthemselves (including sociologists) understand what anobject should be, and how do they make use of the stabilityor instability of objects in the various projects and practicesthey pursue (such as modernity or marketing)? I wouldlike to conclude with a (clearly not exhaustive) list offour promising research questions or strategies openedup by this approach:

1. Ontological regimes and experiences

We need to investigate empirically the extent and ways inwhich ambiguity actually forms a part of social experiences,understandings and practices. When is it acknowledged andby whom, to what purpose and with what normative asse-ssment? Is ambiguity a problem, a source of disquiet, aresource, an uncertainty to be denied or a pleasure to beenjoyed? What cognate and complementary terms are sociallydeployed (interpretive latitude? surreal and dreamlike uncer-tainty? the decline of traditional and normative frameworks?the rise of a postmodern sensibility?)? What kinds of objectsare particularly associated with ambiguation or disambigua-tion (e.g. utilitarian versus symbolic objects?) What are thelimits and latitude of ambiguation and the tolerance ofdestabilization (every marketer fears the point at which theirproduct definition has stretched to breaking point and it losesidentity not only for consumers but for retailers, sales staff andthemselves)? Whose ambiguity is important and for whom?(e.g. radical re-interpretation of an object by a marginal con-sumer group may be unimportant, problematic (for Hilfiger)or the basis of complete product renewal (the rise of designerjeans in the 80s) a)

This question is partly a response to the kinds of claims Idiscussed earlier to the effect that we are living in new timesand new markets, characterized by new kinds of things (lessmaterial or more ambiguous ones). Who—if anyone—actually believes this to be the case, and in which aspectsof their lives? To what extent are particular actors (e.g.marketing people) actually engaging with the world on thebasis of mobilizing ambiguity as a central resource and logicof calculation? These are clearly empirical questions to beresearched rather than conceptual ones to be decided bysocial theorists, and they are investigations of what I havecalled ‘social ontologies’: I tentatively offer the idea of‘ontological regimes’ as a space in which to research howdifferent beliefs about objects and their stability enter intodifferent forms of strategic logic and practice as well aseveryday practices.

2. Reflexivity and multi-linguality

Clearly, no ontological regime ever dominates the entiresocial field (or even individual practices); social actorsencounter and deploy different logics and calculations, andoften have to make explicit choices between them. Thefamous ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai, 1986) argumentpresents this clearly: the same object may be valorised within

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quite different regimes at different points in its life, forexample, as cherished object passed on to me by my deadparent or as an antique with a market value. Ambiguity, asusual, resides at two levels in this simple example: firstly,is this object an invaluable personal legacy or an alienableexchange value for which I want top dollar (and thereforeis it gift or commodity)? At this level, ambiguity resides inthe availability of two alternative frames of interpretation be-tween which I must decide on diverse grounds (moral,personal, financial etc.). However, at the second and metalevel, ambiguity plays a different role in each of these two‘ontological regimes’: in classic notions of gift exchange,the object unambiguously enters into the reproduction of aspecific substantive relationship (this legacy enacts con-tinuity and the preservation of values and identities acrossgenerations; it is precisely on this basis that the legacy isgenerally deemed inalienable); by contrast, as a commodity,there is no commitment to the substantive identity either ofthe object or the people exchanging that object; rather, thelogic of market exchange depends on the ability to definethe object as whatever will allow it to enter a market on themost advantageous terms and to obtain the highest pricefrom a buyer.

In other words, an empirical study of ambiguous goodsinvolves studying both what are the alternative framings ofgoods (as in gift versus commodity) which might render themambiguous, and what role or values does ambiguity itself havein different regimes and logics of calculation. FollowingNicholas Thomas’ (1991) exemplary analysis in EntangledObjects, we should also ask what happens when the sameobject is regarded by two parties to the same transaction assubsumed in quite different ontologies, in which ambiguityitself has different values. In Thomas’ case, at stake weredifferent regimes of exchange governing pre-contact ‘indi-genes’ and European explorers who consequently inhabiteddifferent universes of value and exchange, but the sameempirical concerns daily govern exchanges between market-ing consultants and consumers (or indeed marketers andtheir clients).

In such situations where there are multiple and conflictingontologies underlying calculation, we can expect people tobe ‘multi-lingual’. That is to say, they routinely have tochoose between different available ontological framings andassociated logics (indeed, you could say that people are rou-tinely in a position of having to resolve ambiguities in orderto get on with life; to decide that this legacy, e.g. isinalienable and cannot be governed by a logic of impersonalexchange; or alternatively to reframe it so that they can sell itto a stranger). The point is not simply that people have tochoose but that they are able to see different interpretativepossibilities, to acknowledge ambiguity, and this implies theability to inhabit different interpretative frames, or regimes,and to be multi-lingual in the sense of being able to articulatedifferent ontological logics. Indeed, there is an extreme formof this multi-linguality that is highly valued: the connoisseurand the cosmopolitan are figures that are built on an enjoymentand valorisation of ambiguity itself, a state of mind or sen-sibility that is to be prolonged and savoured as the ability toappreciate diverse objects in a context of diversity.

Being multi-lingual and in an ambiguous position with achoice between ontological regimes implies reflexivity onthe part of social actors, if only in the sense of knowing thatthey could choose differently and therefore incur someobligation to (potentially) give good reasons for their choiceif called upon to justify it, as in Habermasian discourseethics. This does not imply a standpoint in which we assumeconscious or even extensive agency and rationality on thepart of actors, but we do have to assume that some degreeof meta-discourse, of reflexion on ontological options, willempirically be part of the social action we are trying tounderstand. If I am deciding whether or not I can or shouldsell the watch I inherited or whether my P2P music down-loads are a form of theft, I will certainly be reflecting onthe properties of goods in relation to possible categorizationsof them. Hence, empirical studies of how actors understandand articulate ambiguity (rather than deploying an analyti-cally a priori definition of ambiguity) seem pretty important.These empirical questions concern the extent and ways inwhich social actors acknowledge, experience, valorise andarticulate multiple interpretive framings of ‘the same thing’.

3. Ambiguity as a diagnostic and research tool

Particularly because ambiguity arises when there aremultiple valid classifications of an object, ambiguity—andabove all ambiguity as an experience of discomfort, ontolog-ical insecurity or moral danger—is a sensitive barometer ofcosmological conflict. This is the force of Mary Douglas’(1966) investigations of ‘matter out of place’ and of thetaboo attaching to things which are neither one thing oranother. The point about ‘purity and danger’ is that dangeris deeply symptomatic: an object would not be dangerousor polluting if it was not situated at an explosive pointbetween two cosmologies, or—as in initiative rites—at adangerous point of biographical transition between twocosmological regimes, or—as in Bloch and Parry (1989)—moving between the secular and the sacred such that theobject has to be purified of its previous classicatory status.The anthopological focus on ritual emphasizes preciselythose moments where ambiguity has to be managed througha technology of transformation and purification.

In terms of ambiguous goods in a consumer society, thisraises two consequential empirical research questions:

Firstly, can we use ambiguity—as do Douglas (1966), orBloch and Parry (1989)—as a diagnostic tool that pointsup the fault lines between concurrent cosmologies (eitherwithin identifiable cultures or— importantly—cross cul-turally and globally)? Which kinds of ambiguities, orwhich ambiguated goods, carry a serious charge, and whatcosmological issues produce explosive situations in somecases but not in others (e.g. some people really are notbothered at all, or are even happy, to find that they havebeen criminalized by some of their everyday consumptionpractices like downloading mp3s; others are horrified andhave to ritually purify these objects if they receive them).

Secondly, what rituals exist in a contempoary consumerworld to purify, or quarantine or defuse or otherwise



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disarm objects that are liminal and dangerous? Again,there are issues about when do we bother (there is lotsof ambiguity which does not bother most of us most ofthe time); when we do bother, what ritual resources areavailable for managing ambiguity or for disambiguatingin socially conventional ways? The idea of routine,practice, habit and other ways of fixing objects in taken-for-granted and stabilized social forms has been widelystudied, and it is one very good answer to the question(Shove et al., 2009).

4. Ambiguity as a cultural or informational ‘form’

The preceding three points all point our attention toambiguity as a variable part of everyday social action andreflection; they therefore raise an obvious fourth focus forresearch: ambiguity needs to be empirically studied as a vari-able cultural form or trope that has a complex and conflictedhistory. This empirical investigation might embrace intellec-tual histories (such as the treatment of ambiguity withinformulations of modernity, as earlier); the articulation ofambiguity in literature, music, art and popular culture; the lan-guages, narrative structures and visual forms through which weperform ambiguity; the ways in which types of people, institu-tions, events and actions are characterized and explicated asambiguous or otherwise; and the kinds of collective dramasand panics that are assembled around ambiguity (debates aboutimmigration, multi-culturalism and cosmolopitanism are obvi-ous cases where ambiguous culture and identity constitute cul-tural forms that organize politics and conflict in particularways). How are cultural formulations of ambiguity linked toother significant tropes? For example, how is the supposed am-biguity of goods in postmodern arguments linked to argumentsabout the ambiguity, or ambivalence, of subjectivity, and to thedematerialisation of time and history and representation? (thiswas the logic of Jameson’s (1984) classic article which soughtin the same moment to articulate ‘postmodern’ ambivalenceand to contain it within a reformulated Marxism: an extraordi-nary rhetorical struggle).

CONCLUSION

In this article, we have—I hope—moved very far away fromthe idea that some goods are ambiguous or that more goodstoday are ambiguous, because they are more polysemic orsignifying or dematerialised. Ambiguity is rather a resourceor possibility that arises in the relation between things andclassifications and practices, and it can be drawn upon as anontological issue or a resource within different ‘ontological re-gimes’. Moreover, people can speak and reflect upon differentontological regimes; they have rituals for dealing with thedangers and possibilities that arise from ambiguity and fromthe cosmological conflicts it can energize; and they generatediverse cultural forms and languages through which they canexpress and configure the kinds of ambiguities that have cometo matter for them. This should generate a stunningly rich fieldof empirical investigation with unpredictable and surprisingresults, and ones which lead directly from the most apparently

banal moments of mundane consumer life to the most pro-found beliefs about what things are and how they come tobe, and therefore about who we are and how we come to be.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Don Slater is an Associate Professor (Reader) in Sociology at theLondon School of Economics. He has published extensively on con-sumer culture, marketing and market society, including ConsumerCulture and Modernity (1997), Market Society (with Fran Tonkiss,2001) and The Technological Economy (with Andrew Barry, 2005)and was a founding editor, with George Ritzer, of the Journal ofConsumer Culture. He has also researched extensively on media,communications and technology, including his most recent book,New Media, Development and Globalization: Making Connectionsin the Global South, and The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach(with Daniel Miller, 2000). He is currently developing a researchprogramme called Configuring Light/Staging the Social (HYPER-LINK “http://www.configuringlight.org”www.configuringlight.org),a series of investigations into light as material culture that isconfigured into the infrastructures of everyday life and built formswithin various practices, knowledges and institutions. He is also theeditor-in-chief of the British Journal of Sociology.

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I’m buying, Jack! Fooling around an ambiguous brand

STEPHEN BROWN*Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Ulster Business School, University of Ulster, Jordanstown, Co. Antrim BT37 0QB, UK

ABSTRACT

Within consumer research, ambiguity is often regarded as something to be avoided or eliminated. This article argues that ambiguity shouldbe embraced, appreciated and understood as a multifaceted phenomenon found in manifold forms. An empirical study of one of the world’sbiggest brands, RMS Titanic, reveals that one of ambiguity’s most characteristic forms, humour, is everywhere apparent. Titanic brandculture is comedic to the core, absurd though this seems on the surface. Three categories of ambiguous brand amusement are identifiedin the vast cultural complex surrounding Titanic and the oceanic implications for branding’s received wisdom are considered. The articleconcludes with the contention that ambiguity strengthens rather than weakens unfathomable brands such as Titanic. Copyright © 2013 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot.―Charlie Chaplin (attrib.)

Paul Tillich (1952), the eminent theologian, definesmaturity as an ability to tolerate ambiguity. If this is correct,then branding qualifies as a mature marketplace practice. Theearly certainties of branding, encapsulated in Rosser Reeves’(1961) USP, are giving way to cultural and critical perspec-tives that are more oceanic, more polysemic and moreamorphous than before (Kates and Goh, 2003; Bengtssonand Ostberg, 2006; Beverland, 2009; Puntoni et al., 2010).As Rose (2011) explains in his study of popular culture ina digital age, ambiguity is a defining feature of 21st centurytelevision (Lost), cinema (Inception), literature (1Q84),computer games (Gears of War) and, not least, iconic brandadvertising (Coke’s ‘Happiness Factory’).

Ambiguity, of course, is not simply an indicator ofadulthood. For Tillich, ambiguity is evident in humankind’smost exalted achievements and prodigal failures. That beingthe case, the purpose of the present paper is to explore anespecially exalted form of ambiguity, humour, surroundinga particularly prodigal brand, the Titanic. I begin with a briefhistory of branding, noting its ever-increasing nebulousness.The nature and meaning of ‘ambiguity’, with particularreference to its comedic manifestations in marketing andconsumer research, are then examined. A succinct summaryof the Titanic’s tragic tale duly follows, and my literary/cultural research methods are recounted. After briefly consid-ering Titanic’s ambiguous brand credentials, the paperfocuses on three domains where ship-shaped humour is evi-dent: the sinking and its aftermath, cultural representationsof the catastrophe, and contemporary consumer behaviour.The implications of my findings for the theory and practiceof cultural branding are thereafter discussed, as are somelines of future research enquiry.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRANDING

Although the prehistory of branding dates back several thou-sand years (Belk and Zhou, 1987; Simòes and Dibb, 2001),the great take-off occurred in the mid-19th century (Blackett,2003; Moor, 2007). Mass production, mass consumption andmass communications, coupled with the introduction oflegally binding trademark legislation, created conditionsconducive to the ascent of brand (Strasser, 1989; Koehn,2001; Petty, 2012). The contemporaneous emergence ofadvertising agencies, as well as radical breakthroughs inpackage design, gave rise to legendary brands such as Heinzbeans, Kellogg’s cereals, Levi’s jeans and Gillette razorblades that remain icons to this day (Sivulka, 2011). As Petty(2011) shows, the principles of marketing management andbest branding practice—P&G’s fabled brand managementsystem in particular—were firmly established by the GreatDepression and widely adopted thereafter. Originallyconfined to FMCG and similar staples, the B-word has beenapplied to an ever-widening array of activities, everythingfrom hospitals, universities, art galleries and police forcesto politicians, celebrities, utility suppliers and religiousdenominations (Olins, 2003; Lury, 2004). There is nothingthat is not a brand nowadays, or so it sometimes seems(Muñiz and Schau, 2005).

Alongside the broadening of the branding concept, itsdomain has been colonised by ever more academics. AsHeding et al. (2009) explain, our attempts to theorise,classify and empirically investigate the brandscape haveevolved through three main phases: the first, characterisedby a focus on features, benefits and the communication ofUSPs, was company-centric; the second, where brand mean-ing was situated in the recipient rather than the sender, wasconsumer-centric; and the third, which considered brands tobe a cause and consequence of shifting socioeconomiccurrents and contradictions, was culture-centric.

Appealing as it is, Heding et al.’s (2009) three-stage modelof brand evolution is far from perfect. Casual observationsuggests that all three perspectives operate simultaneously,possibly in accordance with Williams’ (1977) contention thatcultural formations are characterised by dominant, emergent

*Correspondence to: Stephen Brown, Department of Marketing, Entrepre-neurship and Strategy, Ulster Business School, University of Ulster,Jordanstown, Co. Antrim, BT37 0QB,UK.E-mail: [email protected]


Journal of Consumer Behaviour, J. Consumer Behav. 13: 108–121 (2014)Published online 19 December 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.1448

and residual elements.1 Just as the USP is still part of brandmanagers’ lexicon, consumer-centred concepts, such aspositioning, never go completely out of fashion. Hedinget al’s evolutionary typology, nevertheless, illustrates theincreasingly ambiguous nature of brands and branding. Thenarrow functional preoccupation of the late 1950s has givenway to more macro perspectives from a widening array ofacademic disciplines, each with its interpretations to peddle(Holt, 2002; Stern, 2006; Hales, 2011). In such circumstances,it would be surprising indeed if brands and branding were asunambiguous as they used to be (Sherry and Schouten, 2002;Grant, 2003; Keller, 2003).

ADVANCING AMBIGUITY

Ambiguity, for many authorities on branding best practice, isnot a desirable trait. It is, rather, a one-way ticket to oblivion.As most mainstream textbooks make clear, clarity has longbeen the watchword of branding and advertising both. Inhis formal statement of the USP, for example, Rosser Reeves(1961: 39) states that the reality principle of brandinginvolves a single, clearly expressed claim or concept that isstriking and easy to remember. In their concise classic,Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind, Ries and Trout (1986)advise brand managers to keep things simple by eliminatingas much ambiguity as humanly possible. In a recent radicalreinvention of branding, Pearson (2011) rethinks the whys,wherefores and what have yous of outstanding brands, butcleaves to the old idea that clarity is king. Aaker andJoachimsthaler (2009: 40, 54) likewise maintain that leadingbrands not only possess ‘a rich, clear identity’ but that ‘less am-biguity’ is always better when it comes to the branding crunch.

The gurus’ views are supported by Nobel Prize-winningpsychologists, such as Daniel Kahneman (2011), who showsthat the human brain is hard-wired to avoid ambiguity.Behavioural economists concur (Harford, 2011). Consumerresearchers, however, have revealed that ambiguity—definedby the OED as ‘a state of doubtful meaning’—can proveadvantageous for advertising and marketing purposes(Holbrook and Stern, 1997). Ambiguous advertisements,such as those involving puckish puns, comic captions andplayful wordplay, are processed more deeply by consumers,who are motivated to ‘get the joke’ or ‘solve the puzzle’thereby enhancing their equanimity (McQuarrie and Mick,1992, 1996; Meyers-Levy and Malaviya, 1999; Toncar andMunch, 2001; Dimofte and Yalch, 2007). Marketingpractitioners, too, are more than capable of turning ambiguityto their advantage, as Brannan et al. (2011), Diamond et al.(2009), Dickinson et al. (2010), Johnston and Sandberg(2008) and Brown’s (2006) analysis of Ryanair’s ‘ambi-brand’tactics bear witness.

Such findings suggest that thought leaders’ opposition toambiguous branding should be tempered in light of latter-day research findings and the realities of current practice,where brand meanings are increasingly negotiated betweencompanies and consumers (Fournier and Avery, 2011),within vocal social networks (Cova et al., 2007) anddetermined as much by representations in popular cultureas the communications strategies of command-and-controlcorporations (Holt, 2004). Possibly more so (Schroeder andSalzer-Mörling, 2006). Branding, in short, is becomingincreasingly blurred, whether managers like it or not andregardless of gurus’ sagacious advice.

If the need for reassessment is conceded, our field couldbenefit from the insights of literary theorists, especially thoseof the so-called New Criticism. A prominent school of mid-20th-century lit-crit, New Critics abandoned the thenprevailing approach to poetry—the presumption that anauthor’s intentions provided the key to literary meaning—fordetailed line-by-line analyses of ambiguity and analogousfigures of speech, such as paradox, oxymoron, irony andcaesura (Eagleton, 1983; Stern, 1989; Davis, 2008). TheNew Critics famously focussed on the words on the page,identifying their incongruities, noting their contradictionsand teasing out their ambiguities. They thus started the ballrolling for subsequent, even more radical, schools of literarycriticism such as Deconstruction and Post-structuralism(Lentricchia, 1980).

The line of descent from New Critics to Deconstructionistsis not continuous, admittedly. New Critics, by and large,believed in conciliation, inasmuch as the paradoxes, tensionsand ambiguities within a work of literature are resolved withinthe confines of the ‘verbal icon’ itself (Wimsatt and Beardsley,1954). A successful poem was a harmonious, balanced, self-justifying entity, a little piece of perfection (Logan, 2008).Poststructuralist deconstructionists, by contrast, maintainedthat meaning was wild, untrammelled and chaotic, with atendency to spin off into ever more complex spirals of inerad-icable indeterminacy (Eagleton, 1983).

In between these seemingly irreconcilable interpretationsof ambiguity—centripetal versus centrifugal—lies thewonder-work ofWilliamEmpson (1930). Now largely forgotten,Empson was once regarded as the greatest literary critic of hisday. His landmark text, Seven Types of Ambiguity, was writtenwhile he was a precocious undergraduate student atMagdaleneCollege, Cambridge, and promptly hailed as the literaryequivalent of splitting the atom (Haffenden, 2005). Readtoday, it is clear that Seven Types of Ambiguity anticipated boththe Post-structuralist and Reader-response schools of literarycriticism, while remaining true to the ‘close reading’ thatcharacterised New Criticism (Sutherland, 2010).

Despite its title, Seven Types of Ambiguity is not aninventory. The seven types of the title lack specification.Aptly perhaps, the book that aims to delineate the spectrumof ambiguity—and explicate its principal forms—is itselfambiguous. What Empson does show, though, is thatambiguity is variegated. It is not just a variable that can bemanipulated in experimental treatments by consumerresearchers, where ambiguity is ordinarily regarded assomething that is present or absent, high or low, and strong

1A Venn diagram might be a better way to think about this issue, because ithighlights the overlaps between the various perspectives (company and con-sumer in the brand-relationships paradigm of Fournier (1998), company andculture in Holt and Cameron’s (2010) ideological approach, culture and con-sumer in the tribal angle espoused by Cova (1997)). Whether Heding et al’sseven schools map onto the seven segments in a three-circle Venn diagramremains to be seen.

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or weak (Gershoff et al., 2007; Lee and Suk, 2010; Bagchiand Li, 2011). For all his faults, Empson (1930) demon-strated that ambiguity comes in very different forms, rangingfrom simple confusion to complex wordplay, such as thatperformed by the masters of amusement, badinage andraillery (Boston, 1974).

THE UNSINKABLE BRAND

If it were not for the iceberg, no one would remember RMSTitanic or care a whit for ‘the most famous ship since Noah’sArk’ (Cameron, 2011: 11). Although the legendary WhiteStar liner is nowadays limned as the largest, most luxurious,technologically sophisticated vessel ever to sail the oceanblue—and unsinkable to boot—the reality is rather different.Titanic was the second of three ‘Olympic class’ steamshipsbuilt by Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland. Atthe time of its construction, Titanic was overshadowed byits pioneering predecessor, the Olympic. Whereas the launchof the latter attracted enormous worldwide publicity, Titanicslipped almost unnoticed into Belfast Lough. In fact, thedoomed liner’s transatlantic dash was designed to attractthe publicity that had been conspicuously absent up to thatpoint (Ward, 2012).

As for its fabled size, luxury, technological sophisticationand purported unsinkability, it is true that Titanic was thelargest moving object on earth.2 But only by a whisker and,in any event, its record would have been beaten byHamburg-Amerika’s Imperator within a few months ofentering service. Luxury-wise, it was no more resplendent thanthe liners of Norddeutscher-Lloyd, White Star’s principalcompetitor for the transatlantic carriage trade. Technologically,furthermore, it was far behind the twin greyhounds operated byCunard,Mauretania and Lusitania. The myth of unsinkabilitywas retrofitted afterwards, as Howells (2012) shows inpainstaking detail, since no such claim was made by itsnorthern Irish manufacturers.

What is indisputable, is that Titanic set sail fromSouthampton on 10 April 1912 and, after picking up additionalpassengers in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland,steered a course for New York city. It was supposed to arriveon Tuesday 16th but close to midnight on the 14th Titaniccollided with an iceberg. Less than two and a half hours later,the spanking new steamship, which still smelled of fresh paint,sank beneath the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. Therewere insufficient lifeboats for the 2227 men, women andchildren on board and, those that there were, were lowered lessthan full. More than 1500 people perished that night, mainlyfrom hypothermia, a disproportionate percentage of whomwere either second class or steerage passengers. It was not only

the men who went down with the ship—stoic and stiff upperlipped, according to legend—it was the lower orders as well.

What is equally incontestable about Titanic is that itscatastrophic maiden voyage hit Anglo-American WASPculture like a megatsumani. It was much more impactful,Wade (1986) asserts, than the assassinations of Lincoln andKennedy, not to mention the sinking of the Lusitania, thebattle of the Somme, the immolation of the Hindenburg,the cataclysmic Challenger disaster of 1986 and just aboutevery appalling occurrence until 9/11, Titanic’s 21st centuryequivalent (Pellegrino, 2012). The sense of shock anddespair was so great, especially in cities with a direct connec-tion to the ship, such as Belfast, Southampton, Liverpool andNew York, that many vowed never to forget that fateful night(Hammond, 2004).

In reality of course, the sinking was soon overshadowedby the horrors of the First World War (and, for that matter,the Second). Titanic, in fact, effectively disappeared fromcultural memory until the mid-1950s, when Walter Lord(1955), an advertising copywriter for JWT, published hisbestselling account of the 1912 tragedy. A Night to Rememberwas subsequently made into a much-admired British movie,starring Kenneth More as Second Officer Charles Lightoller,and after a brief flurry of interest in all things Titanic, theunsinkable sank from public view once more. Until, that is,Dr Robert Ballard discovered the wreck in September 1985and whose stunning undersea photographs of the near intactghost ship precipitated a whole new epoch of exploration,fascination and mania (Lord, 1995). This gave rise to touringexhibitions of artefacts retrieved from the wreck, tidal wavesof tie-in merchandise, from T-shirts to tea sets, and lengthycourt battles over ownership, salvage rights and theshipwreck’s status as an American historical monument(despite its location in international waters).

The discovery wave duly ebbed as well, when a degree ofTitanic fatigue set in. So much so, that when James Cameronbegan work on a blockbuster movie—which was pitched tostudio executives as seafaring Romeo and Juliet—hismultimillion dollar celluloid folly was widely expected togo the way of its iron and steel predecessor (Studlar andSandler, 1999; Bergfelder and Street, 2004). But, far fromsinking without trace, Cameron’s Titanic sailed to the topof the global box office, where it dropped anchor for severalweeks and eventually cast off with a record haul of $1.8bn. Italso reeled in 11 Oscars, which placed it on a par with goldenage Hollywood classics such as Gone with the Wind and BenHur (Lubin, 1999).

Cameron’s cornucopia, however, paled beside the world-wide celebration of the sinking’s centenary. The event wascommemorated in copious works of popular culture—movies,musicals, miniseries, murals, plays, poems, paintings, photo-graphic exhibitions and so on—and the cities most associatedwith the tragedy pushed the boat out, big time (Economist,2012). Southampton built a brand new Sea City Museum;Cobh (formerly Queenstown) constructed a Tourist Trail andHeritage Centre; Liverpool, Titanic’s port of registration,retold the terrible tale with the aid of a parade of giant puppets;and Belfast, the city that once turned its back on the blacksheep of the White Star Line (Hill, 2004) went wild and crazy

2Just to clarify, the Olympic was a wonder of the world. When it waslaunched in October 1910, it was half as big again as the next biggest steam-ship. Titanic was almost identical to the Olympic—the two are often errone-ously transposed in published photographs—but because a number ofembellishments were made to the second string ship, Titanic was the largestman-made moving object on earth at the time of its maiden voyage.

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for the catastrophe. A striking, six-storey, steel-clad, £100mncommemorative centre has been built beside the formerlyderelict slipway, graving dock and drawing office of theimmemorial vessel. Constructed to the same dimensions asthe original liner, Belfast’s ‘Signature Building’ showcasesthe world’s most famous ship with artefacts, replicas,interactive displays and innovative dark ride technology.

METHOD

The research reported herein began in the bosom of thefamily and gradually expanded to encompass Titanic’sgigantic cultural complex. My great-grandfather, a cabinet-maker in Harland & Wolff’s Belfast shipyard, helped buildRMS Titanic alongside 8000 Irish coworkers. Mygrandfather and father also worked for Harland & Wolff, asa plater and welder, respectively. Accordingly, the ill-starredship has always been part and parcel of our family’s inter-generational discourse. My father, in particular, was alifelong Titanic fanatic. A great-aunt, moreover, owns a smallcollection of authentic Titanica, fittings from the great vesselthat mysteriously failed to make the maiden voyage (havingbeen ‘liberated’ from the shipyard by my light-fingeredforefather!).

Almost serendipitously, therefore, the present researchprogramme adopted the multimethod approach recommendedby cultural marketing theorists (Hackley, 2003; Holt, 2004;Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling, 2006; Cross and Gilly, 2012).It is a research approach that became ever more wide-rangingand increasingly eclectic as the study progressed, employinga combination of qualitative research methods, including inter-view, observation, introspection and archival immersion(Witkowski and Jones, 2006). The formal phases commencedin the mid-2000s, when ambitious plans were made totransform Belfast’s abandoned shipyard into an enormous‘Titanic Quarter’ of smart apartments, boutique hotels, river-side restaurants, office blocks, incubator units, entertainmentfacilities, film studios and, not least, the above SignatureBuilding, which was the money-no-object centrepiece of thecity’s regeneration project (Neill, 2006).

Accordingly, my study started with the excavation offamily history, firming up on what I vaguely recalled fromcasual conversations. The Titanic archives, an impressivecollection of which is held in Belfast’s Public Record Office,were then consulted to provide necessary backgroundinformation, as were the exhaustive accounts of Titanic’sgigantic cultural impact, both at the time of the sinking andsubsequently (e.g. Heyer, 1995; Foster, 1997). The greatship’s representations in popular culture—movies, books,miniseries, documentaries, musicals, artwork and so on—were thereafter collated and content analysed, as was thesecondary literature on such representations (the manifoldbooks about the making and reception of James Cameron’sblockbuster movie, for instance). This was supplemented witha collection of 74 introspective essays written by Irish con-sumers of various ages, genders, religious denominations andattitudes towards the vainglorious vessel, both pro and anti. Sitevisits to Titanic-themed exhibitions in Las Vegas, London,

Orlando and Holywood (Co. Down) duly followed, as did a‘passive’ (Kozinets, 2010) netnographic collation of onlinecomments concerning Titanic-related news stories andEncyclopedia-Titanica postings.

As the centenary of the sinking drew nearer and the grandopening of Belfast’s brand museum loomed large, a third andfinal phase of the research programme began. This comprisedfurther analysis involving four focus groups with non-Irishconsumers (conducted by a colleague, albeit under instruc-tion from the author) and one-on-one depth interviews with12 Titanic stakeholders (undertaken and analysed by yourstruly). These ranged from property developers, touristofficials and heritage consultants to fund raisers, publicrelations executives and the marketing manager of Harland& Wolff, which is still in existence though no longer a majorplayer in the shipbuilding sector. Accompanied andunaccompanied site visits to Belfast’s Titanic building—andrelated attractions—were also made by the author after theofficial opening, at both peak and off-peak times.

A combination of archival endeavour and empiricalinvestigation, my dataset is fairly catholic in form andcontent and is thus in keeping with prior research predicatedon the methods of the liberal arts rather than the socialsciences (see, e.g. Holbrook, 1995; Thompson and Tian,2008, and especially Sherry and Kozinets’ (2006) paper oncomedic aspects of Burning Man). All told, it comprisesaround 1200 A4 pages of text, plus assorted photographs,videos and memorabilia. This was subsequently analysed inaccordance with the close reading guidelines of Barbara B.Stern (1988, 1989), the late great literary theorist whointroduced the methods of New Criticism into marketingand consumer research. That is to say, the assembled textwas read and reread and re-reread with a view to pickingup, then unpicking, the metaphors, paradoxes, oxymoronsand assorted ambiguities of our unfathomable brand. Suchan approach, it must be stressed, stands in marked contrastto the ethnographic and/or phenomenological methods thatpredominate in Consumer Culture Theory research (Arnouldand Thompson, 2005). Whereas the latter are essentiallybottom-up, inasmuch as meanings emerge from researcherengagement with the raw data, literary criticism isimpositional in ethos and thrust (Scott, 1994). Texts areordinarily approached from a stated theoretical stance—beit Marxist, Psychoanalytical, Post-colonial, New Historicistor whatever—in a predetermined, top–down manner (Brownet al., 2000). This does not mean that literary criticism isinflexible, let alone doctrinaire, because to-ing and fro-ingbetween text and theory tends to prevail in practice. In fact,it was this back-and-forth process that raised the incongruousissue of humour. The Titanic tragedy, it hardly goes withoutsaying, is not a laughing matter. Yet, humour repeatedly bub-bles to the surface. The cultural complex surrounding the shipis awash with mockery, merriment and mirthful foolingaround. Irreverence was evident at the time of the sinkingand is equally apparent today. During the centennial commem-orations, for example, the manager of Belfast’s stupendouslyexpensive visitors’ centre made a claim that some might findamusing, not to say preposterous. Namely, that Titanic is oneof the three biggest brands in the world (Kincade, 2011).



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AMBIGUOUS FINDINGS

The centre manager’s claim to branding fame is unlikely toworry Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola and Co., which ordinarilyoccupy the world’s top branding rankings. His bold as brassassertion, what is more, may well have been tongue-in-cheek,though the interviews conducted with Titanic Belfast’sbuilders and boosters suggest that they believe their own pub-licity. Others are not so sure, however. As part of my empiricalresearch programme, informants were asked about Titanic’sbrand credentials. In all four focus groups, the proposition thatTitanic is—or could be considered—a brand was met withamused bemusement. The marketing manager of Harland &Wolff was equally dismissive, largely because the wordTitanic is generic and cannot be trademarked (it therefore failsto meet key legal criteria). A heritage consultant contended thatthere is a fundamental distinction between marketingprofessionals’ perceptions—most of whom have no problemwith Titanic as brand—and the views of ordinary people,who are inclined to see it as a tragedy, a movie or, unsurpris-ingly, a boat instead of a brand. Quite a few consumers,though, accepted that Titanic was being branded and marketedwith vim and verve but considered the whole ghastly processto be disrespectful, distressing and depraved:

In all the Titanic hype, where is the memorial to the victims?That is a good question. The answer is that there isn’t amemorial because it’s all about the money honey.(TJMcClean107, netnography)

It thus seems, then, that Titanic’s brand credentials areequivocal, uncertain and ambiguous—a bit like branding itself.In a world, as we have seen, where just about everything isregarded as a brand, or potentially brandable, Titanic qualifiesfor membership of the catch-all club. In a world, however,where everything is branded, near enough, the meaning ofbranding is increasingly meaningless. Indeed, there issomething deeply ironic about branding’s distinguishingfeatures—uniqueness and differentiation—becoming evermore ubiquitous and undifferentiated. Branding’s triumph isa disaster, as it were.

The Titanic too is ironic. Not only is it the unsinkable shipthat sank because of watertight bulkheads that were not butits calamitous failure is the reason for its imperishable fame.Titanic is inarguably the most unsuccessful new productlaunch of all time, yet cities such as Belfast, Southampton,Liverpool and Cherbourg are building their place brandsaround the biggest branding failure in history. It is the civicequivalent of using the Edsel to sell Detroit, boasting aboutBhopal’s links to Union Carbide or emphasising Atlanta’sproud association with New Coke. A brutal crime novel setin Belfast captures the irony perfectly:

“Look at that,” McKenna said, indicating the stretch ofland around the cranes. “They’re calling it the TitanicQuarter now. Can you believe that?”Fegan didn’t answer.“There’s a fortune being made out of that land. It’s good

times, Gerry. The contracts, the grants, all that propertythey’re building, and everybody’d got their hand out. But,

Jesus, they’re naming it after a fucking boat that sank firsttime it hit the water. Isn’t that a laugh? This city gave theworld the biggest disaster ever to sail the sea and we’reproud of it. Only in Belfast, eh?” (Neville, 2010: 20)

The black humour in Neville’s debut novel, The Twelve,is nothing new either. Comedy may be tragedy plus time(Carr and Greeves, 2006), but very little time elapsed beforethe tragedy tickled humankind’s funny bone. Just as theChallenger disaster precipitated a spate of tasteless quipswithinminutes of the explosion; just as the death of LadyDianatriggered innumerable sick jokes about her untimely demise;just as 9/11, for that matter, was an excuse for inexcusableLOL levity,3 so too Titanic had them weeping with laughterfrom the outset, appalling though this appears. Cruel humour,admittedly, is integral to the human condition (Mukherjee andDubé, 2012). Some theorists maintain that black comedy—people’s propensity to make light of tragic events—is anego-maintaining mechanism of sorts (Jacobson, 1997).Others consider gallows or graveyard humour to be thestandard response of oppressed minorities in authoritariansocieties (Berger, 1997). But for the purposes of the presentpaper, it reflects the fact that wisecracks are predicated onambiguity, inasmuch as comic wordplay exploits semanticslippages for humorous effect (Blake, 2007). Not every formof comedy relies on witticism or repartee. Nevertheless,from the bon mot to the double entendre, humour dependsupon linguistic equivocation, not least in marketing commu-nications (Myers, 1994). Puns, for one leading literarytheorist, ‘embody ambiguity in its most crystalline form’(Sutherland, 2010: 9).

The really funny thing about Titanic, though, is that fromfirst to last, from then till now, from every stance, almost,that is been taken towards the brand in all sorts of culturalforms, comic relief rears its irreverent head. So much so thatthis misbegotten mound of maritime mirth can be crudelysubdivided into three categories for convenience: sinkingand since, cultural representations and consumer humour.In practice, these categories overlap and intermingle but theyare useful for the purposes of explication.

Sinking and sinceComedy, according to Jacobson (1997), is a black spider’sweb of misanthropy, vengeance, subversion and morbidity.Ant and Dec may beg to differ, but there is no denying that‘we all enjoy a brackish laugh’ (Jacobson, 1997: 31),whether it be circus clowns’ encounters with custard pies,the slapstick pratfalls of silent movies or the offensivehumour of Viz, Smut and analogous scatological magazines.4

Titanic too was tragi-comic from the outset. The ship’sname raised eyebrows on the day of its launch. As a bemusednewspaper editorial pointed out at the time, the titans were a

3On reflection, I have decided to delete my tasteless examples of sick hu-mour. They are easily tracked down, if you are interested. The CostaConcordia tragedy of January 2012 also got the sick joke treatment, manyof which allude to Titanic.4The less said about the ‘gastric distress’ scene in Bridesmaids—or indeedthe ‘zipper malfunction’ moment in There’s Something About Mary—thebetter!

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legendary race of giants who waged war against Olympusand, roundly trounced, found themselves sequestered in awatery limbo beneath Tartarus (Lord, 1986). The name,therefore, was either a tasteless joke or terrible temptationto fate. Equally fateful, perhaps, was Titanic’s near collisionwith a tethered ship in Southampton harbour, though it waslaughed off at the time, as was the ‘Joker in the Stack’incident (Foster, 1997). Fooling around while waiting forthe ship to depart Queenstown, a boiler room stoker poppedhis head above the fourth (dummy) funnel, then called out tothe crowds below. The dusty apparition caused pandemo-nium among the boarding passengers, some of whomenjoyed his effrontery, many of whom treated it as a terribleomen (Behe, 1988).

When the famous picture of the funny-man in the funnelis examined, however, it is hard to imagine what all the fusswas about. Ditto the equally famous picture of the guiltyiceberg with an incriminating streak of red paint at its base.At the time of the collision, certainly, many of those on boardtreated the accident and its aftermath in a light-hearted fash-ion (Lord, 1955). Several high-spirited steerage passengersplayed football with chunks of ice on the promenade deck,others threw blocks of ice into their friends’ beds for fun,yet others dropped fragments into their drinks to freshenthem up. Numerous passengers made frivolous remarksabout the life-jackets’ fit or fashion or figure flattering effectprior to putting them on, or wondered whether appropriateprovision had been made for young children and companionanimals. The bandsmen played a selection of jolly music hallditties as the disembarkation proceeded and did not, despiteclaims to the contrary, resort to ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’as the end drew nigh (Howells, 2012). The process ofabandoning ship provided more than a few pratfall moments,at least in the early stages, since many ill-prepared passen-gers tumbled inelegantly into swaying lifeboats, much tothe amusement of bystanders. Even the radio operators jokedwith Captain Smith about the most appropriate distresssignal, whether to employ the traditional C-Q-D or thenew-fangled S-O-S. One of them recommended the latter,with a laugh, ‘since it might be our only chance to use it’(Bartlett, 2010: 130).

For Pellegrino (1988: 38), in fact, the radio operatorsPhillips and Bride were the Abbott and Costello of thesinking, exchanging idiotic quips and irreverent insults asthe dark waters rose around them:

“I don’t know much about watertight compartments,” Phillipssaid. “But I’m beginning to think we’re in a tight pickle.”“You think we’ll be having sand for breakfast?”“I’m afraid so.”“I’ve got an idea.”“Uh-oh. Look out, everybody. Bride’s got an idea.”“The boat’s got a hole in it, right?”“Right.”“So, make another hole.”Phillips’s nose wrinkled. “–another hole?”“To let the water out!”That broke the ice, as it were. Phillips chuckled, and the twooperators continued saying many funny things to each other.

The comedy did not go down with the ship, furthermore.It is true that few of the crew’s dependents were amused byWhite Star Line’s decision to dock the pay of Titanic’semployees, who had failed to complete the voyage they didsigned on for. However, the ensuing public enquiries revealedthat the words ‘watch out for small ice’ had been used a jokeysalutation between the officers and their underlings (Wade,1986). They likewise revealed that lifeboat occupants kepttheir spirits up with copious jokes and comic songs, not leastwry renditions of ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’ (Wilson,2012). The chairman of the American inquiry, what is more,was dismissed as a buffoon by the British press and dubbed‘watertight’ on account of his occasionally fatuous lines ofquestioning. When, for instance, Senator Smith asked fourthofficer Harold Lowe what an iceberg was composed of—andreceived the laconic reply, ‘Ice, I suppose, sir’—he becamethe butt of every punster and pundit in Britain (Ward, 2012).Compared, though, to some of the risible schemes to raisethe wreck from the seabed, most notably the preposterousproposal to fill the sunken ship with ping pong balls and floather to the surface (Lord, 1986), William Alden Smith was aparagon of American common sense.

The same cannot be said for the often farcical plans to findthe Titanic in the early 1980s (Foster, 1997). The firstexpeditions were mounted by Jack Grimm, an affluent Texanoilman, who had cut his teeth searching for Noah’s Ark, theAbominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster and more.Although he recruited the world’s preeminent oceanographicexperts and hired the most advanced undersea equipment, thewildcatter’s preferred search patterns owed more to ridiculouschance than they did to rigorous science:

Before the ship left port, Grimm did his best to turn theexpedition into a publicity carnival. He arranged for a monkeyby the name of Titan to go on the trip…The monkey had beentaught to point at a spot on the map indicating where theTitanic was. Grimm believed this was a remarkable accom-plishment that would add immeasurably to the movie he wasmaking out of the search. The scientists, especially theillustrious Dr. Spiess, thought the idea bizarre, insane, andcircus-like, which could only detract from and hold up toridicule what they regarded as a very serious endeavour. Theylaid down the law: ‘It’s either us or the monkey’. ‘Fire thescientists,’ was Grimm’s reply. Saner heads prevailed. Themonkey was left behind. (Ballard, 1995: 73)

In fairness to the oilman, Robert Ballard was far fromaverse to irreverent antics. A former dolphin wrangler andfast-talking oceanarium emcee—who once threatened to giveup oceanography for accountancy—Ballard was a self-confessed practical joker. His account of the discovery ofthe wreck makes clear that the expedition’s ethos was morelike a locker room than scientific laboratory (Ballard,1995). If not quite a laugh a minute, Ballard’s 1985 missionwas never knowingly solemn. When the wreck was finallyfound, many thought that their colleagues on watch wereplaying a practical joke to relieve the boredom. And,although academic sober-sides were appalled by the funnyface Ballard pulled on his triumphant return to Woods Hole,the thumbs-up, tongue-out image was transmitted around the



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world and helped establish his reputation as a populistscientist with the common touch.

Ballard’s pious yet playful account of the discovery didmore than earn him the honorific epithet ‘Bottom Gun’, areference to the gung-ho Tom Cruise movie then packingthe multiplexes. It set the narrative template for ensuingapproaches to, and encounters with, the wreck, the icon andthe brand. Thus, Steven Biel (2012), a serious historian ofthe sinking in popular memory, dryly recounts his dealingswith Titanic’s commercial complex of mass media and crasssalvage. A humorously hapless tale of sea sickness andprerecorded ‘live’ television, the yarn climaxes with GeorgeTulloch’s failed attempt to raise a large section of the wreck.Far from downcast, Biel’s fellow crew members soonsported T-shirts bearing the irreverent legend ‘George Can’tGet it Up’.

Ribaldry notwithstanding, Biel (2012) concludes his talltale with a lament about Titanic’s cultural commodification. Ithas become an all-purpose metaphor for any pride-before-fallhuman endeavour, from political misfortune to managementmalpractice (Molony, 2012). Iceberg avoidance, rearrangingdeckchairs and captaining Titanic have been reduced toclichés of everyday discourse and stock mockery, such asthe following far from atypical tale of comeuppance, whichwas reported in The Sunday Times (under the headline‘Titanic Goes Down off Dorset’):

With hindsight, it probably wasn’t a good idea to head off tosea in a boat called Titanic II. Sure enough, MarkWilkinson’s 16ft cabin cruiser went down on its maidenvoyage under his ownership.The vessel was entering West Bay harbour, Dorset, after asuccessful fishing trip when it sprang a leak in the hull andbegan taking on water. The lone sailor made frantic attemptsto save the boat, but had to abandon ship. He was pulled fromthe water by the harbour master.“I got pretty fed up with people asking me if I’d hit aniceberg,” he said. “It’s all a bit embarrassing.” (SundayTimes, June 12, 2011: 10)

Whether the latest Titanic II—an exact replica of the 1912original that is currently under construction in China and isexpected to set sail in 2016—will suffer the same fate asMr Wilkinson’s, remains to be seen (Sheridan, 2013).

Cultural representationsThe Titanic, then, has transitioned from tragedy to trope. It isa trope that pervades popular culture, frequently in humorousform. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in The Onion’sspoof retelling of the 20th century, year by year, decade bydecade (Dikkers, 1999). Our Dumb Century’s headline for1912 is ‘World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg. Titanic,Representation of Man’s Hubris, Sinks in North Atlantic.1500 Dead in Symbolic Tragedy.’ The accompanying copyincludes a fake telegram—TITANIC STRUCK BY ICYREPRESENTATION OF NATURE’S SUPREMACY STOPINSUFFICIENT LIFEBOATS DUE TO POMPOUS CER-TAINTY INMAN’S INFALLIBILITY STOPMICROCOSMOF LARGER SOCIETY STOP—as well as exaggeratedeyewitness accounts of a night to caricature (‘Stewards Kindly

Ask Third-Class Passengers to Drown’; ‘Well-to-do DowagerGets Hair Dishevelled for First Time’; ‘Did Jazz Sink theGreat Ship?’).

Titanic, in truth, has become a go-to trope for commentators,columnists, cartoonists, comedians, subeditors, speech writersand after-dinner speakers. It is the name of a satirical magazinein Germany. It figures regularly in irony-heavy critiques ofwestern capitalism, too big to fail banks, Britain’s health ser-vice, the music industry, network television and other sectorsbesides (Parker, 2011; Street-Porter, 2012). It rose from thedeep during the recent financial crisis in the Eurozone andEstonia’s earlier attempts to join the single currency (Womack,2011). It accompanied the commodified centennial commemo-rations of the catastrophe, where cities competed for ‘share ofsinking’, and a Sunday Times cartoon showed a retail salesassistant drowning under a sea of tie-in tomes. It even raisesits rusty head in marketing textbooks. ‘As the Titanic shipfound on its maiden voyage,’ de Chernatony (2010: 16)informs us, ‘there is a significant impact from the unseen partof the branding iceberg’. Meanwhile, the ZMET method ofconsumer research concludes with the immodest contentionthat those who fail to recognise the importance of deep meta-phors in marketing management are headed for a Titanic-styledisaster, akin to Captain Smith himself (Zaltman, 2003).

Hubris, clearly, stalks the halls of Harvard, not least thoseof the Widener Library, which was built in memory of abibliophile alumnus who went down with the ship with a stiffupper quip. A more recent alumnus also got in on the ironicact, according to Smartest Guys in the Room, an eye-openingaccount of the Enron scandal (McLean and Elkind, 2003).During the congressional hearings, Senator Byron Dorganobjected to a Titanic joke told by former CEO (and HarvardMBA) Jeffrey Skilling (McLean and Elkind, 2003: 281).Referring to the rolling blackouts in California caused byEnron’s market manipulation, Skilling wisecracked: ‘What’sthe difference between California and the Titanic? At leastthe lights were on when the Titanic went down!’ For Dorgan,though, it ‘looks to me like the captain first gave himself andsome friends a bonus, then lowered himself and the top folksdown in the lifeboat, and then hollered up and said, “By theway, everything’s going to be just fine”’.

Skilling’s joke may have gone down like bathyscaphe infree fall, but there is plenty more where that came from.Pop culture representations of the Titanic are so plentiful—everything from films, operas and iPhone apps to cocktails,hairstyles and hard-core pornography (McCaughan, 1998;Ward, 2012)—that it would be surprising indeed if comedydid not figure prominently. The first Hollywood talkie aboutthe tragedy had the band playing ‘Oh Dear, What Can theMatter Be?’ as the majestic steamship slipped under. JeanNegulesco’s Titanic of 1953 was nominated for an Oscar inthe children and animals category but unexpectedly lost outto Lassie. Raise the Titanic was not only a hugely expensivebox office disaster, whose 55 ft model for long shots costmore than the original liner, but it provoked the legendaryquip from producer Lew Grade, ‘it would have been cheaperto lower the Atlantic’.

For all its painstaking attention to historical detail, further-more, the much-loved British film of Lord’s A Night to

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Remember resorts to several egregious officer-class squibsabout the lower orders in steerage. Such celluloid snobbery,however, was as nothing compared to its two-time humiliationof Lawrence Beesley. A second-class passenger who survivedthe actual disaster, then promptly penned a bestselling cash-inaccount of the accident, Beesley served as an eager advisorduring the shoot. Overly keen to appear in the sinking scene,despite his complete lack of acting credentials, he wasbanished from the set by the director, RoyWard Baker, thoughthat was not enough to stop Beesley trying. As Julian Barnes(1990: 175) puts it in his hilarious History of the World in10½ Chapters:

Right at the last minute, as the cameras were due to roll, thedirector spotted that Beesley had managed to insinuate him-self to the ship’s rail; picking up his megaphone, heinstructed the amateur imposter kindly to disembark. Andso, for the second time in his life, Lawrence Beesley foundhimself leaving the Titanic just before it was due to go down.Being a violently-educated eighteen-year-old, I was familiarwith Marx’s elaboration of Hegel: history repeats itself, thefirst time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But I hadyet to come across an illustration of the process. Years laterI have still to discover a better one.

When it comes to James Cameron’s multiple awardwinning, box office breaking blockbuster, the movie is sofull of in-jokes, gross-out humour and knockabout moments(e.g. Cal Hockley’s dismissive remarks about Picasso and theImpressionists; Bruce Ismay’s philistine reaction to Rose’smention of Freud, ‘is he on the passenger list?’; TommyRyan’s Wayne’s World-esque line ‘Aye, and angels mightfly out of your arse,’) that some film analysts maintain itowes much to the screwball comedy genre (Lubin, 1999).The deleted scenes include an outtake where the UnsinkableMolly Brown asks a bar steward for more ice as bergs loommenacingly in the background. Better yet, Jack’s infamousspitting tutorial caused considerable consternation amongstudio executives prior to the movie’s release. They beggedCameron to remove the crass scene, but Rose’s ‘hawk itup’ moment scored so well in test marketing that expectora-tion stayed in. Even without the spitballs sequence, though,the film still takes longer to watch (191min) than the originalliner took to sink (160min).

As if that weren’t ironic enough, a spike in cruise linebookings was reported in the aftermath of Cameron’s disastermovie, albeit passengers’ attempts to strike the ‘I’m Flying’pose in ships’ prows caused several serious accidents andled to its official prohibition (Howells, 2012). The practicelives on, nonetheless, not least in Google images, where co-medic photographs of cute cats, naked pranksters, Lego char-acters, WWE grapplers, Lord Voldemort/Harry Potter andSarah Palin/Hilary Clinton are captured or composited inthe arms outstretched posture.

Above and beyond cinematic moments of light relief(cf. the ship’s cameo appearances in humorous movies suchas Ghostbusters 2, Time Bandits, Cavalcade and Alvin andthe Chipmunks: Chipwrecked), the ironic Titanic is found inmany other cultural forms. These include the tourist industry’sannual Titanic Awards for the worst holiday resort; spoof

academic articles on the psychopathology of the iceberg; asong cycle about Shine, an African-American trickster figurewho survives the Anglo-Saxon sinking; and the inevitable listsof top 10 online Titanic jokes (Biel, 2012). The latter, equallyinevitably, were not in short supply when theCosta Concordiacapsized off the coast of Italy in January 2012. Manymedia re-ports drew unprompted parallels with the Titanic—Cameron’sTitanic especially—in their accounts of the tragedy, as did thetraumatised passengers themselves (Hooper and McVeigh,2012). Certain cyber cynics suggested that it was a tastelesspublic relations gimmick to draw attention to the centennialof the sinking:

It beggars belief that such a tragedy should occur 100 years –minus a few months since the horrific 1912 tragedy of theApril 14 sinking of the Titanic. Could have been a stunt tocommemorate the tragedy if it wasn’t so real. (JohnHynds,netnography)

Consumer humourSome readers might consider such remarks to be in badtaste. There is nothing wry or ironic about the drowning of30 innocent people (let alone the 1500 unfortunates whoperished in 1912). Tongue-in-cheek tastelessness goes withthe Titanic territory, however, particularly at the consump-tion/consumer end of things. The memorabilia, collectibles,souvenirs and so forth, frequently come from a land thatdignity forgot (McKeown, 2012). Classics include swizzlesticks, ice-cube moulds and bath-time playthings in the shapeof the ill-fated vessel; electric toasters that burn images of thefour-funnelled steamer onto slices of bread; bars of Titanicbrand chocolate that taste better after being kept for a whilein the fridge; brands of traditionally brewed, high-ABV realale that purport to leave the beer drinker ‘wrecked’,‘smashed’ and suchlike; or T-shirts that proudly proclaim ISurvived the Titanic (and in much smaller letters) Exhibitionat the National Maritime Museum, which also sold soap-on-a-rope in the shape of an iceberg (Deuchar, 1996).

In Ireland, where most of my empirical research wasconducted, there are several Titanic-themed restaurants,including a chain of oriental eateries called Thai Tanic. AnIrish television commercial for Guinness claims that theperfect angle for pouring pints was inspired by the list ofthe leviathan. An irreverent Belfast poet said that rather thancommodify the unsinkable ship, an iceberg should be towedinto town and allowed to melt symbolically beside the oldslipways. Other Irish wags have noted that the city’smassively expensive Titanic brand museum looks like aNorth Atlantic iceberg and suggested that an ice sculptureof the steamship (or, better yet, the iceberg) should greetvisitors on arrival. Instead they are expected to make do withTitanic fridge magnets, ready-mixed ‘Gin and Titonic’ kits,T-shirts that assert ‘She was fine when she left here’ (eventhough it demonstrably was not), Titanic baseball caps thatboast ‘Made in Belfast’ (even though the head-gear isactually made in Beijing) or replicas of the Heart of theOcean necklace that figured so prominently in Cameron’smovie (and, as McCracken (2005) reveals, helped put theAmerican mail order giant J Peterman out of business):



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Wandering round the retail store, I take in the tasteless exploi-tation of Titanic’s legacy. Every imaginable tie-in, from teddybears to jigsaw puzzles, is on display. Pride of place, rightbeside the cash registers, is an impulse rack of replicanecklaces. Cameron’s Heart of the Ocean is alive and welland selling like nobody’s business. When I interviewed asenior executive prior to Titanic Belfast’s grand opening, hetold me that nothing but the best would be on sale. He was par-ticularly sniffy about Heart of the Ocean replicas, even thoughthey were flying out the door, apparently, in Titanic exhibitionsthe world over. Belfast would never stoop to that, though. Ourcentre was going to be a class act. “Tell us another,” assceptics say around here .(Researcher field notes)

In fairness to the gift shop concession, its change of hearton Heart of the Ocean may have been prompted by an earliercustomer relations fiasco. From a cultural branding perspective,the most striking thing about Belfast’s Titanic brand museum isthat it makes very little of the ship’s representations in popularculture. It focuses on the production and destruction of the craft.The metal is what matters to the management, not the movies orminiseries or manifold works of art. Customers feel differently,however. The building contains an exact replica of the ship’sgrand staircase, which is situated in a banqueting suite on thetop floor and is not open to the paying public. Access is limitedto wedding parties and fat-cat corporate functions. The upshot isthat ordinary consumers are denied the opportunity to reenact aJack and Rose moment on the staircase that provided the settingfor one of the most romantic scenes in Cameron’s movie. Aconsumer revolt ensued and, although the controversy couldhave been defused by the simple act of rigging up a replica prowfor the movie’s other iconic moment, ‘I’m Flying’, the discrim-inatory policy remains in place. The grand staircase, like the oneon the original vessel, is for first-class customers only, who sipchampagne and listen to string quartets, while the punters insteerage are locked down below paying hand over fist forship-shaped knick-knacks. I’m Buying, Jack.

Humorous as it is, the brand museum’s branding misstepreflects the fact that, for most consumers nowadays, Titanicmeans the Cameron movie not the historical event.5 Thisemerged very strongly during the interviews. All four focusgroups, for instance, associated the ship with the cinema, asdid a movie producer who considered Cameron’s classic tobe the principal catalyst for the latter-day redevelopment ofBelfast’s riverside and docklands (see also Barczewski,2004). From the oldest person interviewed, a 78-year-oldTitanorak who’d watched the film 10 times (only to seethe ship break up, not for that daft love story!), to an intro-spective account about Titanic’s youngest enthusiast, theOscar-laden movie looms large in consumer imaginations:

I don’t have any real interest in the Titanic but my seven yearold cousin has huge affection for the brand. It leads me toask myself just why a little seven year old girl would be sointerested in the Titanic. She watches the film about twice aweek, sings the soundtrack continuously and recently begged

my uncle and aunt to take her to a Titanic dramatization inthe Grand Opera House, which, by the way, she thoroughlyenjoyed. Surely a seven year old girl should be moreinterested in dolls or colouring books? It seems not in mylittle cousin’s case. She can regularly be seen performingTitanic related role plays with her friends, for example, thescene in the film where Jack and Rose are at the front ofthe ship with their arms stretched out, this is one of herfavourites. (Aaron, introspection)

This is not to suggest that the movie is universally lovedby consumers. On the contrary, many make mock of itscinematic absurdities, especially Celine Dion’s trill-a-minutetheme tune. Yet, for all that, most informants concede thattheir perception of the Titanic is shaped by the celluloid.More than a few, in fact, find the commodification of thedisaster deeply distasteful, an insult to the memories of thosewho died, or downright absurd, because the city of Belfast isblowing its trumpet about, and building its brand around, thebiggest new product failure since records began:

Don’t get me started on that film! I haven’t seen it, neverwant to, and in fact I would rather spend an evening cuttingmy arm off with a blunt, rusty knife than watching that film asit would probably be more fun! I think it’s that bloody song –you know the one. Celine Dion standing on the bows of theTitanic warbling how her heart will go on and on and onand on and on and on, seemingly incapable of delivering averse without going through every single musical note everinvented (and a few more besides). It’s probably the songwhich I hate most in the world and I wish Celine Dion hadgone down with the Titanic. (Mark, introspection)

Sometimes when I think about the Titanic it’s hard to think ofanything other than the movie and I know this may soundextremely silly, but sometimes I forget that it was somethingthat actually happened. I think we are so fascinated by theglamorisation of it that we forget what actually happened andhow many people died aboard the ship. (Nicola, introspection)

Why does anyone want to be associated with this overhypedleviathan? I mean,Titanic represents the most famous maritimedisaster ever. Fair enough, by all accounts it was an impressiveship. But at the end of the day it didn’t even manage to makeone journey. It was built in Belfast and sank on its first properouting. If I had helped to build it I would deny everything to mydying day. How can you be proud of helping to build a shipthat ultimately didn’t do what it was meant to? Which isbasically to stay above the water. Titanic sank. End of story.Run for the hills and hide your embarrassment behind a bigtree. (Shaun, introspection)

Consumer irreverence is not confined to the city’s asinineexploitation of its ‘dark tourism’ attractions (Lennon andFoley, 2000), or the news that Titanic Belfast’s employeeswere forced to undergo X Factor-style auditions instead ofjob interviews (Mulgrew, 2012), or indeed the architectural‘accolade’ that was bestowed upon the breath-taking building(a shortlisting for the less than prestigious Carbuncle of theYear award). Laughter features in countless off-the-cuff

5When Cameron’s blockbuster was rereleased in 3D, to coincide with thecentenary of the sinking, many teenage cinema-goers were unaware thatthe movie was based on an historical event (Daily Mail, 2012).

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accounts of Titanic encounters. One informant tells of herfather’s response on picking her up from a showing ofCameron’s film (Well, did the ship sink and everyone die inthe end?…ha, ha, ha? He thought it was so funny because heset us off into a fit of sobbing again!). Another reports on hisexperiences as a barman in a pub designed to look like thesteamship’s first-class lounge (People kept asking for moreice or claiming to feel a bit seasick as they staggered acrossthe floor). Yet others, whose forefathers formerly worked inHarland & Wolff, jokingly blame the sinking on their ances-tors’ bad workmanship (And, oh my God, the bolts shot offthe side of the ship…My great-great-granddad didn’t do agood job there!) or tell tales of filling tiny terraced houses withmagnificent fixtures and fittings purloined from the luxuryliner (Visitors used to ask us What time do we set sail?). Eventhe marketing manager of Harland &Wolff acknowledges thatjokes and banter about Titanic are not unusual when clients arerelaxing after a hard day’s negotiation over multi-million dollarcontracts (‘Titanic is a foot in the door’, he concedes). By farthe most common reaction, though, is a simple refusal to takethe selling of the sinking too seriously:

A while back, I was making a presentation to a gathering ofpotential investors in America. I’d made up little gifts forthem. They were bits of wood from the blocks that supportedTitanic’s keel during construction. They were polished up,with an inscribed brass plate, and placed in a nice velvetbag. All very classy. However, the person who introducedme to the crowd said that the blocks had come from theTitanic itself. That I’d been down to the wreck at the bottomof the Atlantic to pick them up! He made it up on the spot. Hetold the crowd what they wanted to hear. He was a market-ing man. Like you. (Laughs). (Property developer, interview)

Informant: The Signature Building is designed to havesomething for everyone, whatever their depth of interest inthe Titanic. We use a swimming metaphor to describe thedegrees of visitor interaction with the displays. Some visitorsare content to paddle in the shallows, and that is okay. Butsome want to immerse themselves in the whole Titanicexperience. We’ve got something for them as well.

Interviewer: Do you think a swimming metaphor’sappropriate when you’re talking Titanic?

Informant: Very funny.

(Tourism official, interview)

RMS REFLECTIONS

Citing Christianity, Marxism, Humanism, Liberalism, Roman-ticism and the western myth of progress, neo-nominalistphilosopher John Gray (2013: 130) states that ‘any system ofideas that aims to be clear and self-consistent breaks down inambiguities and contradictions’. Branding ideology, if ratherless intellectually entrenched, could be added to Gray’s

inventory. The pronouncements of eminent thought leadersportray a utopian branding world of clarity, consistency,coherence and concision. A growing corpus of consumer re-search, however, reveals that complexity, opacity, uncertaintyand ambiguity are on the up and up (Thompson et al., 2013).The logosphere is neither as lucid as gurus would like it to benor as controllable as normative textbooks pretend. Today’scluttered, cocreated, consumer tribe-colonised brandscape isa perplexing place, where ambivalence and polysemy prevail(Banet-Weiser, 2012).

Although great care must be taken when drawing generalconclusion from a single case—even a case as resonant asRMS Titanic—our in-depth study of this unfathomablebrand indicates that ambiguity is not only everywhere appar-ent but also potentially advantageous. Received brandingwisdom regards ambiguity as a bad thing, something to beeliminated or minimised. But the manifold ambiguities thatsurround Titanic, not least its equivocal brand standing,appear to add to rather than detract from its universal allure.Titanic is the maritime equivalent of Sasquatch, Stonehenge,spiral mazes, the Turin Shroud, the Salem witch trials andsuchlike, an imperishably intriguing phenomenon. It is theSphinx of the sea, the Bigfoot of branding.

More pertinently perhaps, Titanic the brand, belongs to noone and everybody. There are no management puppeteerspulling the branding strings, authorising the communications,itemising core competencies or moulding the marketingstrategy. There is no brand book, official look or logocopcaptain controlling creative self-expression, much less shapingconsumer behaviour. Premier Exhibitions, Harland & Wolffand several other corporate entities have very significantinterests in Titanic, which they pursue with vigour, but theydo not own the brand outright. Unlike Apple, Disney,McDonald’s or J.K. Rowling, they cannot unleash intellectualproperty lawyers upon unsuspecting Titanoraks. The brand isan open source resource, akin to Linux, Wikipedia or theabandoned Apple Newton (Muñiz and Schau, 2005; Pittet al., 2006), which can be mocked, maligned, manipulatedand mashed up as consumers see fit. The libellous, lascivious,lavatorial laughter that Titanic attracts is neither on brand noroff brand because nothing is off limits or on target.

Far from resulting in chaos, however, this all-hands-on-deck branding has done Titanic no harm whatsoever. Theoutcome may be ambiguous, confusing, irksome and jocose—cruelly humorous board games were on sale within weeks ofthe sinking—but uncertainty, bafflement, aggravation andhilarity are hallmarks of the human condition. As Aspden(2012: 9) rightly notes, ‘humour does not just consist of LOLescapism. It is a tool with which to make sense of the world,and one that has more relevance than ever today. Thecontemporary world is one of fragmented values, joltingdislocation and head-spinning velocity…However seriousour predicament, the ability to laugh, in most cases, helpslighten the road and reveal broader truths’.

Brand Titanic, to be sure, is sui generis. Nevertheless, itadheres to the iconic branding principles espoused by Holtand Cameron (2010) and consumer culture theorists moregenerally (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). Apart from theprofoundly important influence of pop culture representations



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on consumer behaviour, the iconic Titanic brand was born in,as well as shaped by, moments of societal rupture and ideolog-ical opportunity. In his detailed study of the sinking’s culturalresonance, Biel (2012) stresses that the tragedy was not somuch timeless as timely. The accident attained iconic statusbecause it coincided with contemporary concerns overfeminism, immigration, religiosity and class conflict and, byhighlighting these issues in a dramatic fashion (e.g. ‘Womenand Children First!’), Titanic served as a lightning rod forsociety’s sense of self. The second wave of Titanicity,similarly, transpired in the mid-1950s when the sudden deathvisited upon the steamship’s passengers resonated with asociety worried about no-warning thermo-nuclear immolation.The third wave, which surged in the wake of Ballard’sdiscovery of the wreck using advanced undersea technology,struck a chord during the new dawn, hi-tech, rip-roaringReagan years that were pricked by the Challenger disaster, inan awful echo of 1912 (Howells, 2012). The contemporarytsunami, what is more, cannot be divorced from the nostalgiaboom that has permeated western society in the first decadeof the 21st century (Reynolds, 2011) and which is related inturn to a series of tumultuous events – from the Iraq invasionto the Occupy movement – that has shaken western culture toits core and triggered a turn to times past, tragedies included(Lowenthal, 2013).

For all that, though, Titanic is an unfathomably ambiguousbrand, an oceanic riddle wrapped in a mystery inside anenigma. It is myriad, mutable, multifarious and mystifying.This article has examined one aspect of the brand’s rainbowof ambiguity, arguably the most illuminating. However, asthe principal analyst of ambiguity’s spectrum shows, thereare seven types of ambiguity in total (Empson, 1930). Thereis thus ample opportunity for additional research into ambigu-ous branding, titanic or otherwise. The nature and extent ofbrand ambiguity in all sorts of domains or sectors—luxury/discount, convenience/speciality, high involvement/low involve-ment, hi-tech/low-tech, global/local and iconic/mundane—iswell worth investigating in detail, as is popular culture-mediated consumer response to equivocal offers, polysemousads, pun-premised brand names and so on (Brown, 2006).Genealogical consumer research into memorably ambiguousmoments of marketing’s premodern past (Twitchell, 2002),such as Ogilvy’s ‘Hathaway Shirt’ campaign, HowardGossage’s wonderfully incongruous copy, wilfully equivocalslogans like ‘Does She or Doesn’t She?’ or indeed fabledfeatures and benefits claims that were never actually made(e.g. ‘the unsinkable ship’), would not go amiss either.Awry, perhaps, but not amiss.

CONCLUSION

In his seminal article, ‘The Work of Art in an Age ofMechanical Reproduction’, the German social theoristWalter Benjamin (1973) argued that the indefinable aura ofartworks would be denuded by their incessant reproductionin newspapers, magazines, movies, picture books and analo-gous mass media. If anything, the opposite is true (Instituteof Cultural Inquiry, 2001). Artworks’ auras are enhanced

by representational dissemination, because the originalbecomes ever more impactful when copies proliferate andauthenticity is at a premium. This is abundantly clear in thecase of RMS Titanic, whose cultural manifestations havebecome ever more intriguing, ever more mysterious, evermore ambiguous as reproductions and representations andresearch findings proliferate.

This paper has explored one aspect—an admittedly incon-gruous aspect—of Titanic’s brand ambiguity. Employing arange of cultural research methods, Empsonian literarycriticism in particular, it explored the side-splitting side ofthe sinking and argued that the brand has not suffered as aconsequence. To the contrary, it is been strengthened byconsumer irreverence, iconoclasm and impertinent merriment.Paraphrasing Samuel Beckett, Gray (2013: 142) contends that‘pure critique is but an articulated laughter’. If so, Titanic is theultimate critique of mainstream brand management, aconsumer cocreated beacon for the voyage ahead.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Stephen Brown is a Professor ofMarketing Research at the Universityof Ulster. He has written numerous books, Free Gift Inside and TheMarketing Code among them. His articles have appeared in all sortsof journals, from the Irish Marketing Review to the Harvard BusinessReview. He is currently co-editing a book on brand mascots.

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The aura of new goods: How consumers mediate newness

GOKCEN COSKUNER-BALLI1* and ÖZLEM SANDIKCI21Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University, Beckman Hall, Orange CA 92866, USA2School of Management and Administrative Sciences, Istanbul Şehir University, Istanbul 34662, Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article investigates newness and how it informs consumer practices. Past consumer research has primarily explored a technical sense ofnewness with attention to attribute novelty and consumer intrinsic factors for novelty seeking behavior. These studies, however, have not fullycaptured the culturally ambiguous and shifting meanings of newness. To address this oversight, this article explores newness as a liminal phasein the social and material life of objects. Our analysis unpacks the experiential and identity value of newness, identifies a set of practicesconsumers engage in to mediate newness, and discusses different modalities of newness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

An insatiable desire for the new permeates contemporaryconsumer culture (Campbell, 1992; Baudrillard, 1998; Belket al., 2003). In the era of mass production and consumption,consumers continuously encounter and acquire new goods.Given this omnipresence of new objects in the marketplace,we are interested in understanding why consumers areattracted to new goods and how newness informs consump-tion practices. Psychological explanations of consumers’attraction to newness focus on either an inherent desire fornew items such as novelty seeking (e.g., Hirschman, 1980,1982) or the positive effects of novelty on pleasure (Berlyne,1960) without necessarily accounting for the socioculturalsignification of new goods. Sociological discussions linknovelty seeking to a motive for social distinction (Veblen,1899/1979; Campbell, 1992) without much attention to thenature of newness per se. Moreover, despite the rich litera-ture on exploring the identity value of sacred, singular, andold goods (Belk et al., 1989; Price, Arnould and Curasi2000; Lastovicka and Fernandez, 2005), the signification ofnew goods for consumers remains less explored.

We believe that the lack of a socioculturally embeddedunderstanding of the value of newness and its implicationsfor consumption stem from the prevailing attribute-centricapproach to new products. From this perspective, newnessrefers to the degree of unique and novel attributes that a prod-uct has (for a review, see Garcia and Calantone, 2002).Although this attribute-centric framework has been usefulfor classifying new goods and theorizing consumers’ adop-tion of new products, it conceptualizes newness as a fixedset of features located in the object. Yet, the state of newnesscan be more ambiguous with shifts in object meanings anduses. For example, goods that are once perceived as newbecome old and then are reintroduced in the market as new(Brown et al., 2003). Highlighting the importance ofchanging social meanings of products, Hirschman suggeststhat newness might arise “not from the novelty of [products’]tangible features …, but rather from a change in the social

meaning … assigned to the product” (1982, p.538). In otherwords, a product that has existed for a long time can still be“new” as a result of a redefinition of its social meaning. Sim-ilarly, Campbell notes that newness results not from prod-uct’s tangible attributes but rather from “a judgment, whichan individual makes on the basis of previous experience”(1992, p.55). Distinguishing between experiential andtechnical senses of newness, he suggests that experientialnewness is related to the unfamiliarity of the item and isexhausted in the consumption act itself; that is, it disappearsrapidly as the consumer becomes familiar with the product.These theoretical conceptualizations mark the ambiguity ofnewness, yet they leave the shifts in meanings of consumergoods as new and related consumer practices understudied.

The ambiguity of goods as authentic, fetish, or old andconsumers practices to singularize, authenticate, and divestobjects are well documented (e.g., Beverland and Farrelly,2010; Fernandez and Lastovicka, 2011; Price, Arnould andCurasi 2000). For example, consumers may find authenticityin what can be considered fake objects (Rose and Wood,2005) or imbue replicas with power and value them as fetish(Fernandez and Lastovicka, 2011). Studies also show that thesearch for authenticity and fetish in the marketplace is linkedto identity goals and consumers actively undertake practicesto authenticate or fetishize objects (Grayson and Martinec,2004; Beverland and Farrelly, 2010). Similarly, research ondisposition demonstrates the shifts and ruptures in the valueof old goods as they move from being a singularized posses-sion to an inalienable object, gift item, second-hand good, orgarbage and reveal the range of practices consumers engagein while departing from their belongings (e.g., Lastovickaand Fernandez, 2005; Cherrier, 2009; Ture, 2013). Forexample, in their study of elderly consumers’ disposition oftheir old possessions, Price et al. (2000) document how con-sumers attempt to mobilize these objects in their networks tocreate inalienable wealth. Lastovicka and Fernandez (2005)trace how meaningful possessions migrate from their formerowners into the hands of strangers and discuss multiple pathsof disposition.

In line with previous research on authentic, fetish, and oldobjects, we adopt a consumer culture theoretical perspectiveto interrogate the value of new goods and consumer practices

*Correspondence to: Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, Orange, CA 92866, USA.E-mail: [email protected]



to manage newness. Specifically, we draw upon Appadurai’s(1986) work on social life of things and conceptualizenewness as an ambiguous and liminal state in an object’sbiography (also Kopytoff, 1986). As Appadurai observes,goods are “things in motion” that acquire and lose valueand change signification in their “social lives.” We focuson the moments in object biographies when they are regardedas “new” and examine the social, material, and temporal re-lationships and practices that enable, constrain, and manageobjects’ state as new.

In the Turkish consumer culture setting, the empiricalcontext of our study, we find that the attraction of new goodsis linked to their identity and experiential value; in particular,their role in enacting a modern identity, renewing self, andcreating enchanting experiences. We discuss several prac-tices through which consumers seek to prolong and generatenewness. Akin to objects’ journey between commodity andsingular, profane and sacred, and authentic and inauthentic,we observe that goods can fluctuate between being newand not-so-new as consumers mediate object trajectories.Furthermore, we discuss different modalities—material, tem-poral, experiential, and social—of newness and show thatnewness is neither an inherent property of a product nor astable state but a liminal moment in the social life of an object.

METHODOLOGY

To study newness and consumer practices related to new-ness, we focused on clothing consumption. New clothes pro-vide an illustrious context for two reasons. First, clothes areamong the most commonly desired, purchased, and usedconsumer goods. Second, their status as “innovation” isambiguous. Unlike technological products that dominate

the literature on new products, the newness of clothes isrelated more to their symbolic than technical aspects.

We employed a multistage, multimethod data collectionprocedure that involved projective techniques and in-depthinterviews. Informants were selected through purposeful/purposive sampling. To ensure that the sample consisted ofequal numbers of male and female participants with variationsin age, education level, and occupation, we administered abrief background questionnaire. In total, 24 informants partic-ipated to the study (for informant profile, see Table 1).

At the first stage of data collection, collages and metaphoricportraits were used. The goal was to encourage the respondentsto go beyond rational and cognitive responses and express theiremotions and desires (Branthwaite and Lunn, 1985). Wewanted to attain more personal, idiosyncratic responses andobtain data that is rich and deep in content (Levy 1995). First,the informants were instructed to collect images of what cameto their mind when they think of “old” and “new.” The infor-mants were then inquired about the images they chose toinclude and were probed to explain them. Second, they wereasked to associate new and old with a color, taste, sound,texture, and emotion. Finally, semistructured in-depth inter-views were conducted. We inquired about the practices infor-mants engaged in while shopping for clothing and using theirnew and old clothes. The interviews lasted 2 to 3 hours andwere tape recorded and transcribed verbatim, totaling 271pages of text. All interviews were conducted in Turkish andhave been translated into English by the authors.

Our analysis sought to identify conceptual categories andthemes through open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin1998). We independently read both sets of interview tran-scripts several times to gain a perspective of contexts for con-sumers’ experiences and their strategies to manage newness.Each of us identified emergent themes first on our own; we

Table 1. Informant profile

Informant Age Gender Education Occupation

Ali 40 M High school Photo studio assistantAlp 42 M PhD ProfessorAyse 29 F MA InstructorBaris 28 M MBA Financial consultantBeril 27 F MS Research assistantBerrin 52 F MA Chemical engineerCebrail 36 M Few years of primary school DoormanCem 28 M MS Research assistantElif 30 F MS Research assistantGul 42 F MA Agricultural engineerGulden 56 F Secondary school HousewifeGural 46 M PhD ProfessorHusnu 38 M High school ServantKemal 36 M Secondary school HairdresserKerim 23 M BA Mechanical engineerKezban 27 F Secondary school HousewifeMahmut 62 M MS Civic EngineerMeral 28 F High school ReceptionistMetin 30 M Secondary school HairdresserNur 39 F High school HairdresserSemra 54 F PhD ProfessorSimge 29 F High school HousewifeSuleyman 38 M Secondary school PhotocopierZehra 44 F Few years of primary school Cleaning lady

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then compared notes and identified and resolved any disputes.As our interpretations unfolded, we searched for commonpatterns of meanings, practices, and experiences informantsreported in relation to their new possessions. The patternsemerging from the data, then, directed us toward theoreticalconstructs generated by previous research that offered relevantinsights into interpreting consumers’ meanings and experi-ences. The analysis continued iteratively between twoauthors as we moved back and forth between observed pat-terns and theoretical constructs. To ensure the validity ofanalysis, we adhered to the “criteria of trustworthiness”formulated by Lincoln and Guba (1985). Overall, throughbeing reflexive, systematic, and thorough about the researchprocesses, triangulating our findings across sources,methods, and researchers, and conducting iterative analysis,we sought to produce findings that truthfully reflect ourinformants’ experiences and can be transferred to othercontexts and situations.

FINDINGS

New objects have an aura that makes them appealing toconsumers, and akin to search for authenticity and fetish,consumers seek newness in the marketplace. We find that theallure of new garments is linked to their identity and experien-tial value, in particular, their role in enacting a modern identity,renewing self, and creating enchanting experiences. In theTurkish cultural context, newness helps reflect a “modern”self, somebody who is in line with the contemporary consump-tion ethos and knowledgeable about latest trends and offerings.Collages depicting old portray village life with mud brickhouses and donkeys and feature people dressed in rural“traditional” outfits and engaged in manual labor. In contrast,the collages of new involve images of women wearing makeupand “stylish” dresses, skyscrapers, and objects such as com-puters, cars, and mobile phones that informants conceive asrepresenting the “modern” city life (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Informant collage depicting “old.”

Figure 2. Informant collage depicting “new.”

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For modern consumers, renewal of the self is also a keycomponent of their relation with consumer goods. Depictedthrough images such as babies, trees, and flowers in the col-lages, newness represents joyful and hopeful beginnings andchanges. Old, on the other hand, generates feelings of sor-row, unhappiness, and endings. Informants’ accounts suggestthat as people adorn themselves in their new clothes, theyfeel renewed and transformed. Associated with the “best ofeverything,” newness represents the possibility of a betterself, although the sense of renewal may only be temporary,until the item loses its aura. A sense of enchantment often ac-companies self-renewal. Informants’ narratives are repletewith a strong fascination toward new objects. There are fre-quent references to the longing they feel for new outfits andthe constant search for something new. The pleasure andlivelihood they experience when they acquire somethingnew represent a stark contrast to the boredom and fatiguethey feel using the “same old.” However, similar to the senseof renewal, the experience of enchantment driving fromusing new objects is an elusive one; it needs to be reproducedover and over again. In the next two sections, we will discusshow consumers work through the elusive nature of newness,interfere with the social life of objects, and mediate their stateas new. In particular, we will demonstrate two set of strate-gies through which newness is sustained, valued, protected,and transformed: prolonging and regenerating.

Prolonging“The period of newness” as Baudrillard (1998, p.113) notes “is… the sublime period of the object and may, in certain cases,attain the intensity, if not the quality, of the emotion of love.”In essence, prolonging is about extending the sublime periodof an object by slowing down the inevitable and eventual ero-sion of newness. An object cannot stay as new forever; never-theless, the object’s trajectory can be tampered by interferingwith its material features or social visibility. A common prac-tice for prolonging newness is to delay usage of new posses-sions. Informants report delaying using their new garmentsfor days, sometimes weeks. Mick and Fournier (1998) discussdelay as one of the pre-acquisition avoidance strategies con-sumers use to cope with the paradoxes of technology. Whenconsumers have concerns over the new technology’s benefits,they may postpone purchase of the product. We find that delaycan also happen after purchase and some consumers deliber-ately postpone using their new possessions. However, ratherthan a concern over the new, a desire for enchantment under-lies our informants’ decision to delay consumption of theirnewly acquired possessions.

When informants delay usage, they often engage in ritual-istic behaviors that accentuate the symbolism of the waitingperiod. For example, Beril mentions that she generally waitsfor a week or more before she wears her new clothes, andduring that period, she always keeps price tags on. Similarly,Kerim indicates that he waits for a while before wearing hisnew outfits, and until, then he does not place them in thewardrobe:

I pay special attention to not wearing them [new gar-ments] the next day. If I buy a pair of jeans, for example,

I don’t wear them the next day, I wait for a couple of days.If I buy shoes or something I don’t wear them right away.

Interviewer: How long do you wait?

Not too long, for a day or two. They wait for a while, onthe armchair in my room.

Interviewer: So you don’t place them in your wardrobe?

No, until I wear them they wait on the armchair. Theywait to be used.

Belk et al. (1989) report that separating sacred from pro-fane minimizes the likelihood of unwanted contamination.In a similar fashion, Beril and Kerim devise various tacticsto separate new and old, hoping that such physical interfer-ences will render newness of the object intact.

Another strategy to prolong newness is preserving thepristine condition of the object as long as possible. Thiscan be achieved in several ways. One way is taking goodcare of the new acquisition. For example, several informantsstate that they pay special attention to how they store theirnew possessions. Gul explains

When I buy something new I look after it really well. Itstays in the box. Let’s say I buy a pair of sandals. I wantthem to preserve their shape. I put them in the box. …Also my new hand bags. After I use them I put them intheir [protective] cover and place them in the wardrobevery carefully so that they stay new.

Previous research shows that consumers experiencehigher levels of situational involvement with their recentpurchases, and during the initial phases of new product use,involvement leads to increased product care (Richins andBloch, 1986). However, Gul’s behavior goes beyond takinggood care of her possessions. By putting her sandals backin its box or placing her new hand bag in its cover, she makessure that her new possessions physically stay apart from theconstellations of products that she already owns. Lastovickaand Fernandez (2005) report that people prepare for separationfrom their meaningful possessions by placing them in“transition places.” By removing possessions from their every-day lives, people are able to depersonalize and eventually dis-pose them. In a similar fashion, we interpret the heightenedinterest in the proper storage of the new clothing item as anattempt to create a protective zone around the product. As theobject remains in its original packaging and is physicallyseparated from rest of the belongings, it stays new despite thefact that it might have been already used several times.

Another way of preserving the pristine condition of theitem is restricting its usage. Research on usage frequencyand rate (e.g., Ram and Hyung-Shik, 1990) indicates thatseveral consumer-related, context-related, and technology-related factors affect the degree of usage of a new product.We find that consumers’ motivation to prolong newness ofan object also influences usage rate. For example, some con-sumers impose limitations on how often and for how longthey use their new garments. Restricting usage helps prolongnewness in two ways. First, the less an item is worn, the lessthere are physical traces of usage. A common practice isrestricting the use of new goods in domestic settings. The



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distinction between public and private usage appearsfrequently in informants’ accounts. Gural, for example, takeshis new clothes off as soon as he arrives home from work be-cause he wants them to “retain their freshness.” Informantsalso note retiring their old clothes for solely domestic useindicating importance of enactment of modern identity insocial networks.

Restricting usage also delays the time that the garmentneeds cleaning. Many informants mention that a new gar-ment has a special kind of luster that disappears immediatelywhen washed. Avoiding and postponing washing a new gar-ment to extend its perceived newness present an interestingcontrast to the practice of ritual cleansing of new possessions(McCracken, 1986; Belk, 1988; Wallendorf and Arnould,1988). These studies report that consumers spend consider-able time cleaning their new acquisitions, which, beyond itsfunctional purposes, helps consumers claim objects as theirown. We suggest that ritual cleansing depends on the mean-ings associated with newness. If the consumer perceives thenew object as physically and/or symbolically contaminated,washing helps appropriate the item. But if the consumer isdriven by the aura of newness, then washing may beregarded as a threat to the newness of the item and, hence,is avoided as long as possible.

Consumers also seek to prolong an object’s newness byrecontextualizing their use. Prior research demonstrates thatsocial contextual factors influence consumers’ intentions toadopt new products (Fisher and Price, 1992). Perceived visi-bility, which refers to “the perception that the new productwill be noticed by referents” (Fisher and Price, 1992,p.481), is one such contextual factor. As Fisher and Price(1992) show, perceived visibility of a new product is asignificant antecedent to consumers’ expectations of socialapproval and influences their adoption decision. We find thatperceived visibility also plays an important role inpostadoption usage stage; it affects consumers’ assessmentof the newness.

Informants’ accounts indicate that irrespective ofpurchase timing, a garment can still be regarded as new ifit is used in a particular social context for the first time. Assoon as it is worn in a particular social gathering, its newnesswithin that social sphere erodes. However, as Guldenexplains, the same garment can be worn in another socialcontext and continues to circulate as new:

… if they haven’t seen me in it then I can pretend that I havejust bought [it]. Because they see it for the first time it is newto them. I mean if I don’t tell them that I already had it theywouldn’t know.…when we come together with my friendsfor afternoon tea I like to wear something new. Somethingdifferent. Like a new blouse or something like that. Andthey say “Oh, is this new? Did you just buy it? Where didyou buy it? It looks nice on you.” Things like that. Wepay attention. We talk about these things. I don’t want towear the same thing next time we meet.

For Gulden, impressing her friends through the way she isdressed is important. She enjoys the attention she gets whenshe wears new clothes and considers the ability to follownew trends as integral to a modern identity. As Baudrillard

(1998) notes, cultural recycling is one of the characteristicdimensions of our society. He asserts that everyone must bewith-it and must recycle themselves—their clothes, belong-ings, or cars—on a yearly, monthly, or seasonal basis. If theydo not, they are not true citizens of consumer society. Guldenacknowledges the imperative to be “with-it” and skillfullymanages newness by recontextualizing use of her clothes indifferent social spheres. Informants’ accounts indicate thatrecontextualizing can continue as long as the object stays inpristine condition; sometimes new sometimes not new, theobject travels in different states across different social groups.

Overall, by playing with the material features and/or visi-bility of the object, consumers can and do interfere with its“social life” (Appadurai, 1986). We argue that, beyond theirovert functionality, practices such as keeping a new pair ofshoes in its box or placing a new handbag in its containerallow consumers to minimize the extent of personal imprinton the object and bring it closer to its commodity state. More-over, a successfully recontextualized object can be reclaimedas new even after many uses. These practices suggest that anobject can reside in an ambiguous state, fluctuating betweenbeing new and not new and that newness derives more fromsocial and material relationships than purchase time.

RegeneratingDespite all the efforts, newness eventually erodes. The objectceases to be perceived as new and becomes part of theexisting constellation of garments. As research on objectattachment shows, familiarity is a positive experience;personalized possessions provide comfort to consumers. Yet,familiarity also breeds boredom. Many of our informants com-plain about the boredom they feel as they wear their existingclothes over and over again. Some even say that they get boredseeing their partners in the same clothes. Boredom with theexisting outfits, the desire to impress others with new clothes,the urge to keep up with fashion changes, the so called lackof something to wear, or simply the attraction of having some-thing new may trigger purchase of a new garment. However,our informants’ practices suggest that, besides purchase, thereare ways to acquire new products and enjoy newness.We iden-tify two commonly employed practices: borrowing garmentsfrom significant others and modifying an existing product tomake it new again.

Consumer behavior literature looks at consumer borrow-ing either in the context of financing consumption expensesand debt management (Feinberg, 1986) or retail borrow-ing–returning a non-defective product for a refund subse-quent to its use for a specific purpose (Piron and Young,2000). Our analysis indicates that borrowing is more exten-sive in daily life, and consumers often borrow garments fromfriends and family. Consider, for example, Ayse:

I was going to attend a wedding with my friends. And Idid not have anything that I could wear. I mean therewas nothing that I wanted to wear. Nothing trendy. ButI didn’t want to spend money. So I asked my friend andshe lent me clothes that I could wear.

Ayse explained that the wedding was of a distant friend.She considered the social significance of the occasion to be



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relatively low and did not want to purchase a new dress. Herand other informants’ experiences suggest that consumersborrow garments from their significant others when theywant to wear something new without making a commitment.In such situations, borrowing helps overcome lack and disen-chantment and achieve a modern and trendy look. Moreover,borrowing provides a solution to the social embarrassmentassociated with wearing the same outfits all the time. Baris,for example, borrows garments from his roommate becausehe does not want to be seen wearing the same clothes overand over again:

Baris: This (borrowing) generally happens if I have notshopped recently, if I do not have something new, if myclothes are seen by everybody and if I want to wear some-thing new. It happens when I go out at night. I wear thethings I like very frequently. I avoid wearing those that Ithink I have worn too frequently and I go and borrowfrom his wardrobe.

In their study of the clothing behavior of British women,Clarke and Miller (2002) suggest that it is ultimately anxietyover potential social embarrassment that determines whatpeople actually wear. They report that women are frequentlytoo anxious about their clothing choices and seek for supportfrom people they trust to ease their concerns. Our findings in-dicate that both men and women refrain from feeling socialembarrassment due to wearing the same outfits and seek toimpress others by new clothes. Borrowing operates as ahelpful strategy for overcoming such anxiety and allowsconsumers enjoy, even only temporarily, wearing somethingnew. Overall, the practice of borrowing highlights the rela-tional nature of newness. As an object travels across differentusers, its “cultural biography” (Kopytoff, 1986) changes. Agarment, which might be a familiar and even old object forsomeone, becomes a new outfit for another person. On theother hand, borrowing also implies that newness can berented. One does not need to purchase a garment to havesomething new to wear; she can experience newness withoutmaking a commitment.

Besides borrowing, consumers generate newness byphysically modifying an existing garment. The practice ofmodification involves elements from both creative consump-tion (Burroughs and Mick, 2004) and craft consumption(Campbell, 2005). Through modifying, consumers createnovelty; the object is “used, changed, or combined in amanner that is contrary to typical forms and applications,including possibly the manufacturer’s intent” (Burroughsand Mick, 2004, 403). Consumers who have the skills asCampbell (2005, p.28) explains “take any number of mass-produced products and employ these as the ‘raw materials’for the creation of a new ‘product’, one that is typicallyintended for self-consumption.”

There are several examples of modification in our data.Informants report redesigning collars, taking off sleeves,and knitting and sewing things on their existing garments.What is common in these practices is that, the need foralteration is triggered not by a failure in the performanceand functionality of the product but a desire to renew one’sself through refreshing an existing object. Beril explains

For example, I had a denim skirt. I dyed it this year and itbecame trendy again. I do such things. I extend my pants’length, I add something [to an outfit], I change the collar.If only I had the time; it is fun to do these things. Even if Idon’t do, I imagine doing it in my mind.

Beril gets pleasure from altering, or even, from imaginingaltering her garments. For her, adding or subtracting things isa creative and playful assault on the dullness and outdated-ness of the old clothes. Indeed, we observe that it is oftenthe feeling of boredom that triggers alteration. By playingwith their material characteristics, informants seek to revivetheir garments in different forms. Modification regeneratesan old item as a new, exciting, and trendy one. As a formof creative consumption, modifying involves both practicaland aesthetic dimensions. However, there is also a social as-pect to it. Modifying allows the consumer to appear in a“new” garment that would have been otherwise remainedas outdated and old and, thus, contributes to keeping up withtrends and constructing a modern look. By changing its phys-ical attributes, the consumer does not only craft a new pieceof clothing but also changes how the outfit is perceived byothers. Overall, alteration brings production and consump-tion together and enables individuals to be both producersand consumers of their new possessions and experiencenewness without actually purchasing something.

DISCUSSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH

Writings on consumer culture have often commented on theallure of new goods in the contemporary marketplace buthave not elaborated the nature of the relationship betweenconsumers and newness. We contribute to this literature by(i) outlining the experiential and identity related value ofnewness, (ii) identifying a set of practices consumers use tomediate newness, and (iii) discussing different modalitiesof newness (Figure 3). Overall, we show that rather than afixed product attribute, newness takes many forms and ismediated by consumers.

Consumer research has documented the ways in whichconsumers attach value to authentic, fetish, and old objects(Beverland and Farrelly, 2010; Lastovicka and Fernandez2005; Ture, 2013). Building on this literature, our researchpresents the signification of newness to consumers. Incontrast to the common view that reduce the desire for thenew products to personality traits such as novelty seeking(Hirschman, 1980) or sensation and uniqueness seeking(Burns and Krampf, 1992), we show that the attraction ofnew goods lies in their identity and experiential value withinthe modern consumer culture. In the Turkish socioculturalsetting, newness helps consumers enact a modern identityand experience self-renewal and enchantment. It is suchpotentiality that motivates people to interfere with the sociallife of an object and mediate its state as new.

Our study identifies a set of practices consumers adopt toprolong and create newness. These practices cover a richspectrum ranging from delaying usage of a garment tophysically modifying it. Studies show that disposition of



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meaningful possessions involves various boundary-crossingrituals through which the object gets detached from the self(Lastovicka and Fernandez, 2005; Parsons, 2008; Cherrier,2009; Maycroft, 2009; Parsons and MacLaran, 2009). In asimilar manner, facilitating an object’s movement betweennew and not new entails undertaking a comprehensive“consumption work” (Miller, 1987). Consumers undertakeconsumption work such as restricting use, delayed washing,and preserving to extend a material sense of newness;recontextualize the use of their goods and borrow fromothers to help create a social sense of newness; and delaytheir use to mediate a temporal sense of newness andmodify their possessions generating an experiential senseof newness.

Importantly, by moving away from an attribute-centric toa cultural approach, we show that newness is neither an in-herent property of a product nor a stable state, but a liminalmoment in the life of an object. Our analysis indicates thatobjects fluctuate between being new and not new as theytravel across different users and contexts. They can lose theirnewness and then again acquire newness. As we demon-strate, consumers mediate with object trajectories renderingan object new or not new. Such mediations reveal differentmodalities of newness—material, temporal, experiential,and social—and suggest that newness assessment emergeswithin a network of people, objects, relationships, andtemporalities. For example, when our informants borrow anoutfit from significant others and pretend to be wearingsomething new, they interfere with the object’s biography.The item, perceived as a familiar and used garment in onesociotemporal context, becomes a new outfit for alternativeaudiences.

Understanding different modalities of newness and con-sumer practices to create newness has managerial implica-tions. Marketers are often criticized for producing plannedobsolescence to ignite desire for new products. Ourfindings show that consumers adopt strategies to grapplewith the feeling of disenchantment and seek to prolongand generate newness. Although our study used clothing

to identify the modalities of newness, it can offer insightsas to how managers can mediate newness in various productcategories most directly for fashion and accessories, homegoods but also for technological products (e.g., phones andcars), and intangible or digital products (e.g., films, books,and music). Market practices of customized phone covers,new car fragrances, and gradual release of media content onfan sites are few examples whereby marketers prolongnewness of their products. Understanding how these marketofferings promise different forms of newness, and how theyare experienced by consumers will prove useful for marketingpractitioners.

Furthermore, consumers’ desire for newness and relatedpractices offer new insights into how alternative forms ofexchange relations and systems can offer value. For example,the growing shift to access from ownership and theemergence of barter networks such as Freecycle allow con-sumers to create a sense of enchantment through accessingnew goods at no or low cost. Similarly, the increasing digitalvirtual consumption allows consumers to access new goodswithout the material ownership (Denegri-Knott andMolesworth, 2009, 2010). Firms can think about fosteringbarter brand communities, offer opportunities for modifica-tion of their products, and reevaluate ownership models tooffer different modalities of newness to consumers.

Our findings also reveal areas that require further investi-gation. We focus on the aura of newness and explore whyconsumers are attracted to new objects. However, newnessmight also have a dark side. As research on new technologiessuggest, innovations might disrupt everyday routines andcreate interpersonal conflicts. Further studies can look atthe disruptive potential of newness and investigate how con-sumers deal with it. Furthermore, our study looks at thepunctuated moments in the biographies of objects, when theyare regarded as “new.” Future research can adopt a longitudi-nal approach to look at how the state of goods informs con-sumer practices throughout the consumption cycle. We alsoreport that the aura of newness motivates people to find waysother than purchase, such as modifying and borrowing, to

Figure 3. Newness and related consumer practices.



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have new objects. Future research can investigate practicesof modifying and borrowing as well as explore consumers’perception of newness in multi product (digital, technical,etc.) contexts.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Gokcen Coskuner-Balli is an Assistant Professor of Marketing atthe Argyros School of Business and Economics at ChapmanUniversity. Her research explores sociocultural shaping ofconsumer–market relationships. She investigates the ways inwhich these relationships are embedded in new meaning systemsand social networks that are generated by marketplace dynamismin contemporary consumer culture, with a particular focus onpolitical implications for consumer identity projects and market-place structures. Her work has been published in the Journal ofConsumer Research, Journal of Consumer Culture, MarketingTheory, and Association of Consumer Research.

Özlem Sandıkcı is an Associate Professor of Marketing at theSchool of Management and Administrative Sciences, Istanbul ŞehirUniversity, Turkey. Her research focuses on the relationshipbetween globalization, markets, and culture. Current researchinterests include religion–consumption–market interaction, fashionmarketing and consumption, and branding in emerging markets.Her work appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journalof Business Research, Marketing Theory, Business History Review,Fashion Theory, Journal of Islamic Marketing, Place Branding,and Space and Culture. She authored several book chapters and isthe lead editor of the Handbook of Islamic Marketing (EdwardElgar, 2011).

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The messy social lives of objects: Inter-personal borrowing and the ambiguityof possession and ownership

REBECCA JENKINS*, MIKE MOLESWORTH and RICHARD SCULLIONECCG, The Media School, Bournemouth University, Talbot Campus, Fern Barrow, Poole BH12 5BB, UK

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we position inter-personal borrowing as a form of non-market mediated access-based consumption, a distinct form ofexchange that is complex and inherently ambiguous, and a form of consumption that is under researched. We argue that the temporarytransfer of possession is a defining feature of borrowing, which causes ambiguity to arise out of an object being simultaneously active inmore than one network; a good can often be different things to different people at the same time. From our empirical data, we establishtwo emergent themes or forms of ambiguity inherent in borrowing. First, we consider the ambiguity of relationships with goods and people.We note that borrowing is significant in forming and maintaining relationships, but also that relationships to goods are significant indetermining lending and borrowing practices. Second, we consider the ambiguity of ownership and find that borrowers make appropriationattempts, such that borrowed items may be temporarily treated as profane, before being re-sacralised by the borrower and thenre-incorporated by the lender into their active network of possessions. The unique characteristics of borrowing identified in our study offer anopportunity to better understand the ambiguity, or ‘messiness’, within an object’s social life that is not contained within existing work on thebiography of goods. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Borrowing reveals ambiguities in much of what we take forgranted about consumption, including issues of exchange,ownership and possession, the meaning of goods and howgoods mediate relationships. Further, borrowing complicatesour understanding of a good’s biography by being active inmore than one network simultaneously – a borrowed objectis also, always, a lent object and as such it may be part ofdifferent assemblages of reality for each party (Law, 2004).When it comes to borrowing, for example, a lender mayexperience a good as an owned but absent possession, whilstthe borrower may experience the use of a possession withoutownership. Complexities in the practices of borrowing revealhow these ambiguities arise and may be resolved withimplications for other forms of access-based consumption.

In light of the increase in commercialised and formalisedsystems of access (Botsman and Rogers, 2010), such aslibrary loans and car pools, or newer approaches such asShare Some Sugar and Twilbee, we suggest that it is impor-tant to acknowledge lending and borrowing between friendsand relatives as the foundation of such models and markets.Our interest is ‘inter-personal borrowing’, defined here as apervasive form of non-market mediated access-basedconsumption and a distinct form of exchange. For brevity,we simply refer to ‘borrowing’.

Borrowing is a form of exchange with characteristics andconventions that mark it as distinct. Borrowing can bepositioned as a non-market mediated form of access, basedon two core principles; the temporary nature of possession(limited time with/access to an object for the borrower) andthe absence of ownership (possession without ownershipfor the borrower) (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012). However,

complexities arise out of the personal and social nature ofborrowing that make it different from market-mediatedaccess-based consumption. Through appreciating these com-plexities, we can know more about our attachment to goods,their social lives and how goods mediate social relationships.

For Belk (2006, 2007), lending and borrowing areincluded in the broad definition of sharing, demonstratinghow the two forms of exchange may be similar. Sharing isregarded as the ‘process of receiving…something fromothers for our use’ and lending means ‘distributing what isours to others for their use’. Yet, it is also possible to makedistinctions between the two forms of exchange. Tinsonand Nuttall (2007) separate sharing and borrowing, position-ing inter-familial borrowing as different because of itsvoluntary nature and more complex rules. Borrowingidentifies two parties – ‘lender’ and ‘borrower’ – which leadsto the key factor differentiating it from other forms ofexchange and access-based consumption, the nature of thetransfer (and non-transfer) of ownership and possession. Wealso recognise the potential for a double obligation in thepractice – to return the borrowed object and to return thefavour, by allowing the lender to borrow something in the future.

Although commodity exchange and gift giving alsoinvolve a transfer of ownership, and sharing involves jointownership (Belk, 2010), borrowing involves a temporarytransfer of possession, in which the borrower does notbecome the legal ‘owner’. This temporality leaves room foran object’s interpretation to be open to ambiguity becausethe object is experienced in an unstable environment(Kopytoff, 1986; Slater, 2002). This invites reflection onboth our relationship with the object and with the personwe are lending to or borrowing from. For instance, we mayreflect with uncertainty about what we may lend and towhom, and then the nature of what will be returned andwhen, and where this leaves our relationship with the borrowerand lent item.

*Correspondence to: Rebecca Jenkins, ECCG, TheMedia School, BournemouthUniversity, Talbot Campus, Fern Barrow, Poole, BH12 5BB, UK.E-mail: [email protected]



POSSESSION AND OWNERSHIP

Research documents how we make sense of possession andownership as goods graduate from commodity tosingularised possession and from the latter, back to commod-ity or an unwanted possession (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff,1986; Lastovicka and Fernández, 2005). Emerging concernshave also seen material objects as facilitating and modulatingour relationships to others, either as means to initiate andmaintain stable relationships (Mauss, 1990 [1950]; Douglasand Isherwood, 1979; Miller, 1987; Douglas, 2001), tomemorialise significant relationships (Csikszentmihalyi andRochberg-Halton, 1981; Belk et al., 1989), or as a vehicleto make visible existing social hierarchies and arrangements(Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Douglas, 2001). However,within these enquiries, practices of borrowing and lendingare remarkably absent.

Consumer research tends to consider the movement ofobjects in terms of their changing status. A biography isenvisaged whereby a good is likely to be transformed fromcommodity to possession as it is incorporated into the ownersworld (Kopytoff, 1986; Miller, 1987) through commonplacepractices and rituals (Rook, 1985; Kopytoff, 1986;McCracken, 1988; Sherry and McGrath, 1989; Coupland,2005). Once this is achieved, objects are valued more fortheir personal meanings, than for latent exchange value(Kopytoff, 1986), but a good’s new status as singularisedremains in potential flux as the owner’s social relations orother rituals have the potential to change its value or evenrecommodify it. Borrowing, however, suggests that thereare more ambiguous activities taking place in relation to thesocial lives of material goods ‘in-between’ their status assingularised possession and re-commodification. AlthoughKopytoff’s (1986) work notes ambiguity in objects ever-changing biography, we highlight the possibility that theymay be viewed as more than one thing at the same time astheir biography unfolds. Borrowing has its own set ofcharacteristics and negotiations that impacts the social livesof objects. This invites us to consider a multiplicity in anobject’s status that as we classify goods, we might recognisethat they are sometimes, or often, different things to differentpeople at the same time, similar to the sorts of multipleassembled realities described by Law (2004) when anactor (in this case the lent/borrowed object) is present indifferent networks.

In previous research, ownership is relatively clear; com-modities, once incorporated as private, personal possessions,become extensions of their owners (Belk, 1992); as sharedgoods, they are owned by family or ‘in group’ members(Epp and Price, 2008, 2010), and as accessed goods, theyare used and enjoyed but not owned (Chen, 2009; Bardhiand Eckhardt, 2012). Although biographical approaches togoods have generally been linked to individual or familyidentity projects (e.g. Epp and Price, 2008, 2010) wherepossession and ownership are well-defined, in borrowing,ownership and possession are made messy by episodes oftemporary possession marked by appropriation by more thanone person. The value of understanding borrowing is that itgives us new insights into what temporary transfer of

ownership reveals about how individuals relate to borrowedobjects, whether or how a temporary owner can alter anitem’s biography and the role of the good in mediatingembedded social relations of borrower and lender.

OBJECT–PERSON RELATIONSHIPS

Modes of consumption shape ‘consumers’ relationship toproducts and services’ (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012: 882).In comparison with ownership, access produces a differentobject–self relationship, and the rules that govern andregulate this relationship are different (Chen, 2009; Bardhiand Eckhardt, 2012). Bardhi and Eckhardt’s (2012) studyof access-based consumption found that ‘the work of con-sumption’ is absent in this model of market-mediated access,in that consumers do not engage in appropriation practiseswith accessed objects. In their study, perceived ownershipwas not experienced; objects did not form even a temporaryextension of the self due to limited time with the object, fearof contamination due to others’ use of it, and especially theinvolvement of the marketplace. In market-mediated accessthen, the over-arching object–self relationship is one ofuse-value; objects are ‘nobody’s’ but everyone’s to use.(Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012). However, if something isaccessed over a longer period, then a sense of ownershipmay be experienced and appropriation practices follow(Strahilevitz and Loewenstein, 1998). Just as an individualcan own without possessing, because of failing to lay claimto the symbolic properties of a good (McCracken, 1988), it isalso the case that, despite not legally owning something, indi-viduals invest energy in an object such that it becomesmeaning-ful to them (Belk, 1988). It may be the case then that borrowerscan possess (make meaningful) an object without owning it.

When some objects become singularised possessions,they may also become sacred (Kopytoff, 1986). We mightassume that a lent item (which has been singularised by theowner) may also be treated as sacred by the borrower andtherefore treated differently from other profane items (Belket al., 1989). However, singularisation ‘does not guaranteesacralization’ (Kopytoff, 1986: 74), and this leaves openthe possibility that a borrowed object may not be held in suchhigh regard. Given the ambiguities of the borrowing process,there is potential for the borrower not to treat the object as sa-cred (to the lender), risking the object’s original meaning, byeither singularising as their own possession, or treating it asprofane. Although singularisation is desirable for an owner,and not for market-mediated access, in borrowing, things areless clear. Indeed, the pro-social nature of borrowing suggestssomething more complex than market-mediated access due tothe wide range of relations with the owner (lender) thatsurround the practice, as well as potential for recognition ofthe owners relationship with the object being borrowed/lent.

OBJECTS AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

The temporary exchange and use of goods mediates socialrelationships, with borrowing being partly understood in terms

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of ‘cultural norms’ (Tinson and Nuttall, 2007; Bardhi andEckhardt, 2012) that distinguish what is socially accepted.Tinson and Nuttall (2007) emphasise the ambiguous natureof borrowing’s blurred rules of ownership and structure byintroducing the idea of ‘covert borrowing’ (wherebyindividuals borrow without permission). Other behavioursin relation to the treatment of the borrowed item may alsooccur that are not necessarily regarded as appropriate, soalthough aware of social norms, borrowers may sometimeschoose to ignore them.

In terms of market-mediated access, an individual’srelationship with and behaviour towards others are markedby anonymity (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012). In borrowing,however, it is on a personal basis. This relationship is likelyto be important for borrowing to take place. For instance,the degree of trust between borrower and lender and experi-ence of borrowing in the past, all contribute to its inherent‘in flux’ character.

Pro-social forms of access have been found togenerate a range of social relationships. For example,Ozanne and Ozanne (2011) investigated not-for-profittoy libraries and found consumers to be sensitive andresponsible towards each other and the objects they areaccessing. In contrast, Bardhi and Eckhardt’s (2012)study finds car scheme users to be opportunistic, in thatthey look out for themselves at the expense of the objectand of other (anonymous) users. Because of the personalrelationship between lender and borrower, we mightexpect borrowers to be responsible and sensitive towardsthe object and the lender; however, research into sharingand borrowing between sisters indicates that suchresponsibility or care is not always practiced (Tinsonand Nuttall, 2007).

BORROWING AND AMBIGUITY

We have attempted to illustrate that borrowing alerts usto a variety of ambiguities when it comes to possessionand ownership, person–object relationships and socialrelationships. We draw on Law’s (2004) work on ActorNetwork Theory and epistemology to highlight thatambiguity may result from an object being simulta-neously active (i.e. an actor) in more than one networksuch that it assembles multiple realities. In this case,for example, we might recognise that a borrowed itemis also always a lent item. This has repercussions forissues relating to the experience of possession andownership as well as the role of goods in mediatingsocial relationships. Singularisation and sacralisation alertus to ambiguities regarding possession and ownershipand object–person relationships that are seen to varydepending on the mode of consumption that either invitesor resists sacralisation. With borrowing, such ambiguityis heightened by the temporality and social nature ofthe practice. Overall then, we see ambiguity as stemming fromtwo key characteristics of borrowing, social relationships andobject–person relationships.

METHODS

This research combines two datasets. The first focussed on bor-rowing and lending in the context of first year undergraduatessharing accommodation (18 interviews), and the later studylooked specifically at the experience of borrowing across abroader sample, ranging from students to retired grandparents(10 interviews), to explore a greater range of borrowing experi-ences and environments. Both studies used in-depth interviewstogether totalling 45 h of data across 28 interviewees (Table 1).All participants were recruited in the South of England usingthe personal and professional networks of the researchers.

Interviews drew on principles of phenomenology, in thatwe were interested in collecting detailed stories that focusedon lived experiences of borrowing and lending, together withbroader stories about participants’ lifeworlds (Thompsonet al., 1989; Van Manen, 1990; Thompson, 1997). At the timeof interviewing, the participants in the student-based studywere actively negotiating new social relationships and livingarrangements (they were in shared accommodation with peersfor the first time), although they contrasted these recentexperiences with previous lending and borrowing experiences.

Interviews were conducted in the participant’s homes andwe encouraged them to show us the borrowed and lent itemsthat they talked about to help us see and better understandhow such goods were integrated into their homes and lives. Thisoften highlighted a discrepancy between what individuals saidand what they actually do that was challenged in the interviews.For example, we find a tendency to initially offer a rationalisedpresentation of themselves as borrowers and lenders. Not onlydid they talk about wanting to be seen as a ‘good’ person in theirlending and borrowing but also in their accounts, they wanted tobe seen this way, despite later ‘confessions’ that they sometimeswere not good borrowers (or lenders).

The data from both groups were analysed together by theauthors. Interviews were transcribed, and idiographic profilesof individual participants were produced; emerging globalthemes were then identified (Thompson et al., 1989) andsynthesised amongst the team of researchers. Overall, ourdata highlight that accounting for borrowing encourages par-ticipants to think carefully about both their possessions andtheir relationships (actual and ideal) with others.

FINDINGS

We first consider the nature of relationships between lendersand their possessions and between lenders and borrowers,highlighting how relationships construct and are constructedby on-going practices of borrowing (and lending). Second,we note that in borrowing, the boundaries of ownership andpossession easily become blurred, resulting in a tensionregarding how such goods should be treated by both parties.

AMBIGUITY OF RELATIONSHIPS WITH GOODSAND PEOPLE

Efforts to develop and maintain social relationships (actualand desired) are in part mediated through goods. Practices

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of borrowing bring to the fore some of the nuances of ourfluctuating and sometimes uncertain connections with others,manifest in decisions we make about what goods might beborrowed/lent and to whom.

Forming and maintaining relationships with peopleBorrowing requires the formation or maintenance of socialrelationships in subtle ways. For example, participantsexplained that although reciprocation is apparent when bor-rowing, it is less ritualised than gifting (Mauss 1990 [1950]),as it can seem non-reciprocal, when in practice forms of recip-rocation are expected. Further, borrowing has a double obliga-tion; not only is a borrower expected to return the lent object

appropriately but also to lend back in the future. Here, Julie,a first year undergraduate, notes a desire for reciprocation:

I say if you lend something to someone you’re more likely toget something back in return later on if you need something…

She then explains a negotiation over the return of aborrowed item:

…I offered my laptop again, and I gave her the charger aswell because I knew I was running low on battery. I askedher ‘are you going to be around tomorrow?’ and she saidshe has to be out by 8.00 so she said she’d leave it in thekitchen, so it was here when I woke up. So you’ve got toplan when you get stuff back as well…

Table 1. Participant profiles

Name Age Gender Occupation/life stage Lending/borrowing profile

Julie 19 F Student Willing lender but likes to set boundaries/organise the return of lent objects. Cautiousborrower.

James 18 M Student Doesn’t lend or borrow very much but happy to lend and borrow inexpensive objects (e.g.kitchen/household items and CDs).

Dee 19 F Student Happy to lend, hesitant borrower, and likes to return borrowed objects as soon as possible.Jessica 18 F Student Lends regularly but not always willingly. Doesn’t tend to borrow from others very much,

except her sister.Graham 18 M Student Generally a regular and happy lender and borrower but also cautious lender due to bad

experiences in the past.Tony 21 M Student Happy to lend but sometimes his willingness to lend gets taken advantage of, so he lends

less then he used to. Doesn’t borrow very much from others.Betty 19 F Student Generally happy to lend to and borrow from people she is comfortable with (friends and family).Lara 19 F Student Hesitant borrower, doesn’t trust herself with others possessions unless she knows the

lender well (e.g. family or close friends). Willing lender but reluctant to lend (andborrow) expensive things.

Helen 18 F Student Happy to lend and borrow.Dan 19 M Student Lends and borrows regularly and without reservation. Reluctant when it comes to

borrowing clothes.Rachel 18 F Student Freely lends and borrows within her student household, especially clothes, make up and

jewellery. More reluctant with expensive items.Rob 19 M Student Doesn’t lend or borrow very much. Particularly reluctant when it comes to expensive

items, and doesn’t trust self as a borrower and wants to avoid arguments.Dave 18 M Student Lending and borrowing quickly became sharing in his student accommodation because of

strong relationships amongst flatmates.Brian 21 M Student Regular borrower and happy to lend, especially when people need something.May 18 F First Year Student Happy to lend things and lends regularly. Regularly lends and borrows clothes from friends.

Often conscious of how some borrowers (housemates she likes less) may treat her items.Hannah 19 F First Year Student Heavy borrower and lender, especially clothes with friends. Often offers to lend things.

Willing to lend more expensive items to those in need (e.g. laptop)Donna 43 F Mature student Somewhat reluctant lender, worries about objects she lends. Bad past experiences of

‘changed’ objects being returned. Tends to ‘gift’ lent items to the borrower to avoiddealing with such changes.

Simon 25 M Mature Student Happy to lend, but often uncomfortable when it comes to borrowing unless knows thelender well.

Felicity 22 F Final Year Student Regular borrower, especially clothing.Rosie 20 F Unemployed Frequent borrower, from sister and friends.Jack 23 M Ski Instructor At ease borrowing. Conscious to return objects in good condition, although doesn’t

always do this in practice.Roxie 21 F Final Year Student Loves borrowing but very conscious of the lender, a ‘good’ borrower.Amanda 22 F Final Year Student Lots of borrowing experience, at ease borrowing but conscious of the lender.Lauren 21 F Student Conscientious borrower, often uncomfortable borrowing, even from family due to bad

experiences in past (damaging borrowed items).Bella 26 F Social Worker Reluctant borrower, bad experiences borrowing in the past (broken borrowed objects).

Sees self as a ‘bad’ borrower.Diane 51 F Full time Mother Bad lending experiences in the past. Reluctant borrower, rarely borrows.Craig 29 M Mature student Reluctant borrower, feels uncomfortable borrowing.Lesley 64 F Retired More a lender than a borrower, despite numerous bad experiences lending. Finds it hard

to say no.



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The implication is that borrowing creates and maintainson-going relationships between people. Whereas a gift isselected and then given, in expectation of reciprocation, inborrowing, expectations for return must be decided and/ornegotiated and this must be enacted, in addition to anexpectation that there will be appropriate reciprocation.

Borrowing may also offer a starting point in negotiatingsocial relationships. Although participants often didn’t knowabout the sorts of relationships they aspire to form, theydemonstrated the sociality of goods in a variety of waysincluding trying to fit in, be liked and be thought of highly.It became clear that participants are socialised into culturesof borrowing and lending. An individual’s personal biogra-phy impacts on the ways they use goods to build or maintainrelationships. Positive experiences of borrowing and lendingmake it easier to do so again, whereas bad experiences resultin reluctance to engage in future acts. Our relationship withthe people we borrow from, or choose not to, impacts onsuch practices. For example, knowledge of the other peopleinvolved makes borrowing more likely and less stressful. Inthe quote in the succeeding texts, Lara, a first year student,told us how she wouldn’t ask to borrow from someone unlessshe knows them well, she needs to feel comfortable with theperson so that there is little risk of damaging the relationshipeven if something goes wrong in borrowing;

I borrowed a DVD from Chris, I only really borrow frompeople I’m really comfortable with because I break stuff, Ilost it and it was new and I’ve still lost it, I’ve got theempty case in my room at home and he still asks me aboutit and he’s like ‘you should buy me a new one’ but I guessbecause I know I’m not going to lose contact with him anytime soon I don’t bother but if it was one of my newflatmates I would re-buy it….

Borrowing often becomes a form of bonding bydemonstrating similarities through goods; people tend toengage with others who have common characteristics andpersonality traits – we can see this as a way of trying toreduce the ambiguity of the act. Nonetheless, we foundtensions even in situations where high levels of mutualunderstanding existed, demonstrating how borrowing createsdelicate and fragile social situations, such as when a persondoes not want to lend a specific item and is faced with havingto say no, and where an issue emerges as a result of lendingor borrowing. In the aforementioned quote from Lara, we seehow a careful calculation of risk to the relationship isevident. It was evident that even if you trust someone, youmight still not lend an item because you wouldn’t want tohave to ask for a replacement if it was lost or broken.Participants explained that by asking for the return of anobject a relationship might be damaged.

Relationships with thingsReluctance to approach a borrower may centre on thetransformative potential of such acts, from friend-to-friendrelationship to a lender-to-borrower relationship; however,an existing relationship with a good helps to determine likelypractices. For example, here, a 19-year-old student, James, istalking about his watch:

I got mine for my 18th birthday from my Nan andGranddad and it’s quite expensive as well so if I brokeit I’d feel responsible. If I lent it out to someone and theylost it and broke it I’d be gutted I think....I know Iwouldn’t be able to afford to buy a new one, maybe that’sit as well. It’d cause an argument if they lost it…Yes, it’llcause some sort of issue that I wouldn’t want to have so Iwouldn’t let it happen.

James is not merely trying to protect the material objectinvolved but crucially to preserve his relationships withothers by avoiding potentially anxious situations that mayrisk both friendships and sacred objects. His use of the terms‘gutted’ and knowledge that ‘arguments’ and ‘issues’ withina relationship would arise demonstrates how lending andborrowing can put strain on a relationship. This storyillustrates how borrowed goods reveal the inherentuncertainty contained within consumption where symbolicmeanings are increasingly personal and where there is insta-bility and flux in the social conventions and classificationstructures active in such networks.

We also see how relationships with goods can continueeven when ‘lost’ through lending. Jessica, a first year student,told us about a friend who borrowed a Playstation game andsubsequently moved away, causing them to grow apart; theyare no longer friends. Six years on, even though she doesn’thave the game in her possession, Jessica still feels that sheowns it and is reluctant to buy a new one. The nature ofher ownership has been placed in a state of flux;

I really regret lending to her because I didn’t realise itwas precious to me until I didn’t have it. It was aplaystation game, like quite an old one, so it’s like quiterare… six years down the line I still haven’t asked for itback. I’m actually considering buying a new one ratherthan asking for it back just because it would be reallyawkward… I keep getting the urge to play it and then think‘oh I don’t have it’… it feels kind of stupid to buy anotherone when I already own one, it feels a bit wasteful.

As possession is transferred, not ownership, the borrowerbecomes a ‘guardian’ of the item, taking responsibility for it,such that third parties might assume that it is owned by theborrower. Thus, a form of restricted ownership emerges.For instance, Tony carried a book he had borrowed from atutor with him so that housemates could not access it, heeven kept it in a separate pocket in his bag to ensure hepreserved its sacredness – we can see this as a form ofsacralisation by designating a particular space to theborrowed (sacred) object and keeping it separate from otheritems (Belk et al., 1989). Similarly, Graham described howhe treated his flatmate’s Playstation;

When I first borrowed stuff it like stayed on my desk and Inever went near it, like D’s Playstation, for the first weekI like just stared at it cos I’m not very good with games, Ididn’t want to break it… it probably won’t break, we’renot two anymore. I always make sure I treat it with caution.

Experiences of borrowing may therefore produce a senseof burden, a desire or need to treat borrowed objects carefully



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– to sacralise them. Although the objects may not be sacredto the borrowers in terms of personal meaning, the object isgiven sacred status on the basis that it is someone else’s,and so the strength or type of relationship to the lenderinforms borrowing practices.

AMBIGUITY OF OWNERSHIP

There is usually a degree of clarity about ownership inrelation to commodity purchases. When commodities arepurchased, they are thought of as both owned and possessed.Alternatively, market-mediated access results in possessionwithout ownership and without a desire to treat an item asif it is owned (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012). However, far lessprecision concerning possession and ownership is apparentin our data. The boundaries of ownership were not clear-cutsuch that this very idea – so central to capitalist objectrelations – became problematic.

Using borrowed itemsParadoxically, participants also revealed that borrowed itemsmay be thought of as sacred, based on knowledge ofsomeone else being the owner but end up integrated with aborrower’s belongings and treated as profane. For example,Diane, a middle-aged mother of three, at first told us shewould treat borrowed items carefully, keeping them separatefrom her own belongings;

I do tend to keep those (DVDs) separate from our own, forfear of forgetting to give them back probably, or whosethey were […] They tend to sit on one side […] I willput it specifically away from the DVDs.

However, when asked to show the interviewer the DVDmentioned, Diane found it mixed in with her own DVDs,placed in alphabetical order. This incident was not isolated.A similar situation occurred with a hedge trimmer aboutwhich she said;

We are very careful with it. And we store it very carefully.Unlike the rest of our stuff which is just heaped in!

In the garage, however, the hedge trimmer was on thefloor scattered amongst other items. Her view of howborrowed items should be treated was quite different frompractice. Such contradictions are the result of blurred bound-aries of ownership. There is recognition of how individualswould expect people they lent to, to behave, for examplenot to singularise a borrowed item because it is not actuallytheirs, but practices do not necessarily play out in this man-ner. Borrowers are aware of and sensitive to the person theyhave borrowed from (and the legal status of a borrowedgood), yet often do not enact this when they use a borroweditem. Thus, participants often think about and enact borrow-ing differently. Borrowers may readily use borrowed items asif they were their own, appropriating them into their networkof possessions and consequently not treating them as sacred.We also heard stories of individuals using borrowed itemsmore than they use their own so as to ‘make the most of it’before having to return it. Here, as with other access-based,

market-mediated consumption, use-value is maximised(Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012). In this instance, Rosie talkedabout her borrowing from close friends;

‘these socks, they are a friend’s […] I wonder what that is,when you have someone else’s things and you use themmore than you do with your own stuff. You know that oneday you have to return it, so you want to make the most of it’.

Felicity, a student who has a keen interest in fashion,also provides an example, of ‘abusive’ use of a borroweditem – a scarf:

I was absolutely petrified! But I still borrowed it… Therewere times where I had a toothbrush and I was trying toget things out […] It had so much embellishment on it thatyou couldn’t tell things. And she couldn’t tell what she’ddone and what I’d done.

Felicity left marks and stains on the scarf, contaminatingit, just as second hand goods are by previous owners(Gregson and Crewe, 2003). Felicity has appropriated thisitem through her abuse and contamination of it. She justifiesthis by explaining that she felt that the lender had also treatedit similarly. Her knowledge of the use of the item by theknown lender informs how the borrower treats the item.

Re-sacralising before returningWe use the term re-sacralisation to refer to the act ofreturning something to a state of sacredness. Re-sacralisationoccurs by cleaning, mending and erasing traces of use beforereturning it to a lender, in order that the temporary appropri-ation by the borrower is removed. When a borrowed item isdue to be returned to a lender, social norms come to the fore,and individuals feel the need to be seen as a good borrower.Amanda, a final year undergraduate, explains how sheremoves signs of her use of clothing:

If you wash it with detergent, it will smell of detergent, itwon’t smell like you. I think you want to give it back inthe same condition, or in a nicer condition. I think if some-thing smells freshly washed, it’s nicer for them to receive.

Great efforts are made by consumers to address ambigu-ous states, and so we witnessed with our participants many‘successful’ outcomes of re-sacralising. In another example,Jack told a story of covertly borrowing a bike and trying toremove the evidence of his use by cleaning it and returningit in a better state than when he took it.

In these stories, the cleaning of an object attempts toremove signs of appropriation in line with McCracken’s(1988) divestment rituals, which individuals use to emptythe meaning they have invested in an object when preparingfor disposal. Rather than strip an object of all meaning so thatit is no longer personalised, the borrower attempts to removetraces of their possession – what has been added to its biog-raphy via the process of borrowing – and can be interpretedas re-sacralising the object in order to make it like theborrower believes it used to be. For the borrower, the separa-tion of object with its owner (the lender) that allowed forappropriation is ended.



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Reincorporation once returnedFinally, when a borrowed object is returned, the lender facesthe possibility that it still shows signs of appropriation by theborrower. Just as second hand goods may be perceived ascontaminated by the previous owner (McCracken, 1988;Gregson and Crewe, 2003), lent items may be perceived ascontaminated by the borrower. For instance, mature studentDonna spoke about how weird her car felt once a friendhad returned it after borrowing it. Seats had to be readjusted,settings changed and the paraphernalia they left behind hadto be removed. Similarly, Lesley, a retired nurse who at thetime of the interview had her son’s family living with hertemporarily, described how her laptop was different aftershe had let her son borrow it;

I let my son use my laptop for a few days because he hadproblems with his and when I went to go on the internetthe layout was all different and I had to figure out howto change it back, well, I had to get my daughter to do itfor me, because it wasn’t as I liked it and it’s still not quiteas it used to be. The address bar was in a different placeand there were none of the usual icons and things with it,I couldn’t find where my favourites were, and the desktopwas different too.

Here, we see how borrowed items have to be cleared ofmeaning when they are taken back by the owner in the sameway that individuals erase meaning associated with aprevious owner (McCracken, 1988), although this may notalways be successful.

DISCUSSION

Apart from the obvious use-value of borrowed goods,borrowing is about relationships with others, and with lent/borrowed objects. Such practices are manifestations of howwe demonstrate empathy, trust and connection throughmaterial objects. Indeed, the double obligation – and relatednegotiations – makes lending practice potentially morecomplex than gift giving. Reputation may be formed on thebasis of practices of borrowing, lending and returning items(or not). The extent of harmony achieved in the ‘movementof possessions’ through borrowing affects both anindividual’s reputation (Appadurai, 1986) and the state ofrelationships with others. The stories we heard werecharacterised by diversity, from family borrowing whererules were implicit and deeply flexible, through to borrowingfrom a tutor where extraordinary care and attention was paidto the object. This variation in borrowing practice furthercontributes to its ambiguous status.

Practices of appropriation, re-sacralisation and reincorporationreflect the movement between states of ambiguity and clarity,of singular and multiple meanings, and serve to raise concernsabout the idea that goods have a biography or singular fixedcategories. Indeed, the certainty of a possession granted bylegal ownership and singularisation is problematized inborrowing. Like other singularizing rituals described byMcCracken (1986) and others (Lastovicka and Fernández,2005) as necessary to empty undesired meanings, and those

which Belk et al. (1989) assign to the preservation of sacred-ness, lending too involves physically involved processes thathelp re-incorporate lent possessions. Such efforts can beunderstood as attempts to impose order on goods, where thehierarchies of value and meaning can be maintained (Douglas,1996; 2001; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979). The creation andmaintenance of order requires the functioning of rules ornormative held conventions (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff,1986), which become fluid in borrowing.

The practices of borrowing direct us to reflect on ambigu-ities related to the meaning of goods to us, the role goodsplay in our relationships with others and on what it meansto both possess and to own something. Such ambiguities alertus to the fact that borrowing complicates the biography ofgoods and to recognise that one good can be a different thingto different individuals, with different meanings associatedby different actors. This can sensitise us to a more generalcondition in which actors experience goods differently sothat even in market exchange, multiple realities are likely.Our current narratives of biographies of goods might berevised to include the broader networks goods may besimultaneously active in.

Although the legal owner is acknowledged, andborrowers recognise that there are social norms associatedwith borrowing (Tinson and Nuttall, 2007), when in theirpossession, borrowers may treat the borrowed items as ifthey were their own. This practice of separating theirrelationship with the good from their idealised view of whatit is to be a ‘good borrower’ is based on a projection offeeling towards their own lent items and on their relationshipwith the lender. It seems that once mixed with existingpossessions, objects are no longer sacred. The blurring ofboundaries in borrowing practices result in a number ofpoints of ambiguity that need to be resolved.

In terms of the singularisation of borrowed items, thereare contrasts with market-mediated access research that findsconsumers are likely to treat accessed objects differently totheir own – not engaging in appropriation processes (Bardhiand Eckhardt, 2012). However, we find that borrowers maytreat goods as if they are their own yet also know this isnot quite the case – an inherently ambiguous cognitive state.In some cases of appropriation, the notion of opportunism, asfound in Bardhi and Eckhardt’s (2012) study, is evident.Singularisation does not prevent appropriation, dependingon the relationship to the borrower, it may even invite it.Maybe then, singularisation is dependent on the relationshipwithin which lending/borrowing takes place.

The re-sacralisation process tells us something about thesocial norms associated with practices of borrowing, as wellas the relationship between lender and borrower. Althoughthis offers structure to the process, this is far from ridged.Although the abusive treatment of borrowed goods is similarto market-mediated access, the efforts individuals go to inorder to re-sacralise may be in contrast to market-mediatedforms. The concept of ‘divestment rituals’ (McCracken,1988), where possessions are emptied of their prior mean-ings, erasing personable qualities, easing dispossession, ishighly resonant here. Despite attempts to re-sacralise, we findthat lenders may still have to make efforts to re-incorporate



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items into their possession. Like other singularizing rituals,borrowing and lending involve physical processes that helpre-incorporate lent possession and so preserve sacredness(Belk et al., 1989). In Tables 2 and 3, we offer an initialsummary of the various resolutions of ambiguities that arisefrom borrowing and lending.

More broadly, our analysis of non-market mediatedborrowing tells us more regarding the development of mar-ket-based and non-market-based systems. If people are lookingto access rather than own (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012), theymay do so outside of the market – indeed, there is a growthof formalised inter-personal, community borrowing schemes(Botsman and Rogers, 2010) – and this might be easilyoverlooked in the analysis of access-based markets. Incommercialised forms of borrowing, we might recognisehow market structures formally resolve the ambiguitiesidentified here. For example, a commercial exchange replacesthe need for personal relationships or reciprocation, and a legalcontract resolves negotiations over return and the blurring ofpossession and ownership. Further, we might reflect on themore general issue of goods being active in more than onenetwork. For example, in addition to the consumer’s network,

a mobile phone remains active in both the service provider andhandset manufacturer’s networks as they provide updates andwarranties. Here, again, we might consider how these multiplerealities are maintained and resolved by market and legalmechanisms that replace inter-personal obligations.

CONCLUSION

Our attempt to conceptualise borrowing has demonstratedthat it is a sufficiently distinct and complex form of exchangethat tells us more about aspects of consumption littledocumented to date in terms of the social lives of goods.Regarding the biography of goods, we see that the act ofborrowing extends our knowledge and understanding of thealways in flux nature of possessions. Another way of seeingthis is that the status of goods has a multiplicity that is often‘manifest absent’ in existing categorisations (Law, 2004).Goods are usually seen as being in one state or another(commodity or singular, sacred or profane, and owned or not)because the focus in such categories tends to be the individual,or single network (e.g. the home). Borrowing shows us that

Table 3. Resolution of ambiguity in lending for borrower (treatment of the lent item)

Table 2. Resolution of ambiguity in lending for lender (decisions marking the moment of lending)



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goods may be two things at once as they inhabit differentnetworks simultaneously, and this is recognised by bothlenders and borrowers. It also illustrates the importance ofthe legal category of ‘ownership’ in how goods areunderstood, but also the tenuous nature of this often takenfor granted status. Looking at goods through the lens ofborrowing helps us to recognise their movement withinand between different networks, and this idea may beapplied to other situations to enrich our understanding notonly of the biographies of goods but also the growing rangeof access-based contexts.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank their research students whoworked on the borrowing project: Elen Clement, JohnFossett, Laura Mihai and Amy O’Connor.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Rebecca Jenkins (Becky) is a lecturer in Consumer Culture andBehaviour at Bournemouth University. She is part of the EmergingConsumer Cultures Research Group. Her PhD was a study of howconsumption gives shape to everyday imagining. She is currentlydeveloping papers and further projects based on her PhD thesisand pursuing projects on the consumerisation of the wedding.

Mike Molesworth is a senior lecturer in Consumer Culture andBehaviour and Interactive Media at Bournemouth University. Alsopart of the Emerging Consumer Cultures Research Group, hisresearch interests include online consumer behaviour, digital virtualconsumption, the consumer imagination and everyday practices.

Richard Scullion is a senior lecturer in Advertising and MarketingCommunications and member of the Emerging Consumer CulturesGroup at Bournemouth University. His research interests include avariety of cultural practices and experiences including politics,citizenship, consumption and advertising.

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What is ambiguous about ambiguous goods?

SANDY L. ROSS*Department of Sociology, Higher School of Economics, Office 421, 3 Kochnovsky Proezd, Moscow, Russia

ABSTRACT

Ambiguous goods are not a category of things. No goods are ambiguous by default, not even digital virtual ones. Ambiguity may arise inmany ways, but this article examines one specific process: ambiguity that occurs when entities appear as objects that blur categoryboundaries. Ambiguity is created around pre-existing categories through socio-material entanglements. This article explores how a centralcategory in consumer capitalist societies—property—takes on ambiguous forms in distributions and recirculations of prestige items in themassively multi-player online role-playing game Final Fantasy XI. Prestige objects are powerful, sought-after armour and weaponsacquired in the game world by completing difficult battlefields or tasks, often in large groups. When discussing these items, respondentsare not confused actors trying to make sense of slippery things. Instead, they produce ambiguities around property by blurring distinctionsbetween gifts and commodities. Blurred boundaries help resolve tensions arising from different orderings of people, relations and things.Hybridised property forms allow selective alienation of goods, allowing participants to privilege some relations and connections over others.With this article, I hope to spark further debate on building a conceptual toolkit to explore ambiguities, and contribute to increasing interestin non-dyadic gift relations in consumer culture research. ‘Ambiguous goods’ is not a viable category for thinking about things, people andrelations or digital virtual objects. But ambiguity can be a useful way to think about how people and things—whether they are digital, virtualor neither—are related. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

There are no ambiguous goods, yet all objects are at somepoint, in some way, ambiguous. No objects, even digital vir-tual ones, are ambiguous by default. Ambiguous goods arenot a category, but this idea becomes analytically useful onlywhen we explore how objects become uncertain. Instead ofbeing a category, ambiguity is better conceived as being gen-erated around already existing categories, produced throughsocio-material processes and interactions involving object,human and network agency—although this paper focuseson human agency. This paper offers one example of ambigu-ity created around a culturally central category in consumercapitalist societies, property, in a nearly ideal typical caseof digital virtual goods (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth,2012:2–4)—prestige objects in the virtual world of FinalFantasy XI (FFXI)—bringing together anthropological workon property forms (Strathern, 1996a, 1996b, Kopytoff, 1986;Bird-David and Darr, 2009; Mauss, [1954]1970) and divest-ment (Strathern, 1999; see also Parsons and MacLaren, 2009),and consumer culture literature on possessions (Marcoux,2001; Epp and Price, 2009) and digital virtual goods(Slater, 2002; Denegri-Knott andMolesworth, 2012; Ross, 2012).

As digital virtual objects in a proprietary, pay-to-play virtualworld, FFXI’s prestige items are almost ideal type examples of‘ambiguous goods’, objects that might be categorised as ambig-uous by default because they are associated with digital,networked technologies, or because they exist primarily withina virtual world (Slater, 2002; Lehdonvirta, 2010). If prestigeobjects in FFXI were innately ambiguous, respondents wouldstruggle to categorise them. Instead, research participants usedprestige goods to produce ambiguities by blurring boundariesbetween two categories: gift and commodity. These contingent

hybridisations are not new categories so much as temporaryfixes creating a patchwork binding people, things and relations.These compromises create partial connections (Strathern, 1991;Law and Mol, 1995) between different orderings of entireworlds or ontologies. In FFXI, players do not struggle tocategorise objects but to join fractal worlds and maintainsemblances of material and social order, because categoriesmay seem to be shared, but their forms vary.

Thinking of ambiguous goods as a category risks obscuringhow ambiguities are produced, maintained and resolved.Ambiguous goods as a category makes it difficult to ask whatqualities of things are ambiguous; what is meant by ambiguity;how ambiguousness is produced through socio-materialentanglements; and how objects, people and assemblages resist,facilitate or maintain ambiguities. In this paper, ambiguity meansboundaries have become blurred between identifiable, conceptu-ally related categories, such as gift and commodity, which areimagined as distinct, and sometimes oppositional, property formsimplying different orderings of social relations and obligations(Mauss, 1970; Carrier, 1991, 1995; Strathern, 1999; Weiner,1980; Kopytoff, 1986; see also: Marcoux, 2001; Giesler andPohlmann, 2003; Epp and Price, 2009; Belk, 2010; Belk et al.,2004). Framing ambiguity as a concept allows us to ask whatcategories are being altered; why these particular categories;and how things, people and relations are classified, maintainedand mutually constituted. In FFXI, making sense of an object asboth gift and commodity rather than one form or the other allowsplayers to be selective about who is connected to them throughobjects and who is not. Transferable prestige goods lendthemselves to these selective alienation efforts as they havequalities that can be linked to both property forms.1 These items

*Correspondence to: Sandy L. Ross, Department of Sociology, Higher Schoolof Economics, Office 421, 3 Kochnovsky Proezd, Moscow, 125319, Russia.E-mail: [email protected]

1Detailed consideration of FFXI’s rather Byzantine material world is beyondthe scope of this paper, as is a more nuanced discussion of technologicalaffordances, both at the systemic level of FFXI as a massively multi-playeronline role-playing game and at the micro-material level of what can andcannot be performed with things, characters, people and code in-world.


Journal of Consumer Behaviour, J. Consumer Behav. 13: 140–147 (2014)Published online 17 December 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.1454

are generated through collective labour, circulate within densesocio-material networks and are part of a larger category ofgoods of which the majority are inalienable—qualitiesresembling ceremonial exchange or gift-like objects (Weiner,1980, Carrier, 1995). Transferable prestige goods havecommodity-like features also: they are fungible, alienable andexchanged amongst anonymous transactors (Carrier, 1995).

I am also concerned about the possibility of thinkingabout digital virtual goods as somehow ambiguous bydefault, or considering ambiguity as a special quality ofsuch objects. New technologies do not necessarily meannew categories or property forms (Slater, 2002). We mustattend to actors’ and objects’ interactions that reshape,reproduce and maintain already existing categories. Digitalvirtual objects—as opposed to virtual things such as theEucharist (Shields, 2003:6) or indulgences—present them-selves in social and technological interstices, but they arenot an altogether new form of materiality (Slater, 2002).These technologies bring together actors with diverseontologies. In FFXI, ambiguous property forms arise frommultiple orderings and ontologies that are enacted throughshared practices. Actors must make partial connections(Strathern, [1991]2005) between disparate worlds, piecingtogether a shared world with space for multiple ontologies.This is also not a matter of technology creating new kindsof unclassifiable things, people or relations. Instead, we haveactors using digital virtual entities that they perceive as ‘justlines in a database’, as interviewee Squiggle said, to createambiguous property forms.

I hope this paper sparks further efforts to refine the con-cept of ambiguous goods by exploring blurred boundaries,particularly those relevant to key concepts in consumer cap-italist societies, such as property and its subcategories, giftand commodity. Property is a central anthropological preoc-cupation, and this paper engages with established literatureson property forms, categories and relations. I am concernedby a narrow, dyadic framing of gift relations in studies ofconsumer culture (Carrier, 1991; Giesler, 2006), which doesnot at all reflect either foundational anthropological work ongifts and gift exchange systems (Mauss, [1954]1970) or con-temporary debates on gifts, kinship and relatedness, whichemphasise multiplicities and networks of relations betweenpeople and things (Strathern, 1996a, 1996b, 1999; Weiner,1980; Holbraad, 2011). Insofar as it explores ambiguitiesaround gift and commodity categorisations, this work alsosupports Bird-David and Darr’s (2009) tentative explorationof objects that are simultaneously gift and commodity.Finally, this paper also offers examples of ontologicalmultiplicity in action (Strathern, [1991]2005; Law, 2011;Law and Mol, 1995) showing fractal worlds partially,contingently connected through the efforts of people andthings in relation.

METHODS AND FIELDSITES

This paper is based on over 8 years of engagement with FFXIplayers. There were two participant observation periods—2003–2005 and 2006–2008—involving multiple linkshells

(player-run organisations such as guilds in other onlinegames), including Yukikaze, Azalea, OotakaraNakama,Sleipnir and Gobbue. Empirical materials are mostly fromSleipnir and Azalea but include informants from othergroups. In addition to 32 one-on-one qualitative interviewsin 2005, and 37 from 2007 to 2009, I also conducted ninepanel interviews with respondents who regularly playedtogether. All names are pseudonyms. Most fieldwork wasconducted in English; some discussions were in French orJapanese. Transcripts and field notes were coded manuallyand indexed by theme or concept. Some central or frequentlyrepeated themes and ideas were cross-indexed.

Final Fantasy XI is a game-oriented virtual world with aninternational player base. It is owned and maintained bySquare-Enix, a Japanese corporation. Users create a characterand devote hundreds of hours to developing its skillsand powers. Players may participate in multiple linkshellsat the same time, a distinctive feature of FFXI. Linkshellmembers co-operate to earn powerful weapons and armour,generated by killing monsters and referred to as drops (slainmonsters ‘drop’ items they carried). Creatures generatingprestige goods are elusive. Some appear every 72 hours,others spawn under particular conditions (e.g. during acertain virtual weather condition or upon completing quests).Most prestige objects are not generated reliably; multiplevictories may be needed to gain desired items. Dropallocation rules are listed on linkshell websites and aretied to points systems. Players earn points by participatingin scheduled events and helping other linkshell members.Voluminous forum, website and blog postings aboutregulations include conduct and attendance guidelines,linkshell philosophies and myriad social, economic andmaterial details. Yet linkshell leaders and organisers whoproduce these documents refrain from codifying propertyrights.

New prestige goods are introduced regularly. In 2003,few prestige goods were non-transferable. By 2008, abouthalf of prestige items were inalienable, and by 2012, mostcould not be transferred. This paper’s ethnographic presentis during this transition, between a time when recirculationof wealth was normative for many players and one whererecirculation became quite difficult. Transferable prestigegoods are a declining population of things in FFXI, partlybecause of player complaints about item-related conflicts.Some objects in this paper are transferable prestige goods,and some are inalienable.

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

In consumer capitalist societies, property produces ambigui-ties because it is relations, owning and disowning people,relations and things; and rights, disposition, usufruct or pos-session (Strathern, 1999:140–141). Property forms constitute‘Euro-American views of what is appropriate to relations be-tween people and things’ (Strathern, 1999:4). When FFXIplayers disagree over who may give, make claims or receive,they are having ontological disputes. Judgements about theappropriateness of claims are judgements about who and

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what should be related (Strathern, 1996a; Carrier, 1991;Douglas and Isherwood, [1979]1996). These are momentswhere partial connections (Strathern, [1991]2005; Law andMol, 1995) painstakingly negotiated and maintained throughshared practices may fall apart.

Few things exist in FFXI that are neither property norabout to become property—monsters and players excepted.Drops reside in collective loot pools for only momentsbefore being allocated to a player. In this liminal time, itemsare becoming property, whilst party members carry outpreviously agreed allocations, cast lots or negotiate. Thecontentious issue in FFXI is not whether an object is propertybut how it is property (Strathern, 1999:18). For example,objects crafted by another player are perceived as closerto commodities than gifts because they are alienable andfungible—although purchased prestige goods confer less sta-tus than earned items.

Once I receive a commodity, it is mine to do with as Iplease… Those involved with the commodity’s productionor with the transaction in which I acquired it have noclaim on me once the transaction is completed. (Carrier,1995:33)

Dispositional rights accrue to possessors of commodity-like objects, not to alienated linkshell members, friends andfictive kin, who have no basis for property claims.

Drops generated with friends’ help lean towards classifi-cation as gifts. Such objects are embedded in dense socio-material networks characterised by relations of obligation(Ross, 2012), which often extend into other game worlds(e.g. League of Legends and Half-Life) or everyday ex-changes (e.g. buying pizza and carpooling).

… in gift relations people are not free, autonomous indi-viduals, but moral persons, identified and bound by therelations in which they exist. (Carrier, 1995:158)

Members may feel that they have claims on wealth theyhelped produce because these objects flowed to their posses-sors through relations between that person, the object (andprevious drops), the linkshell and its members (Strathern,1999; Weiner, 1980). When items are recirculated—especiallyif the holder is leaving FFXI—some players believe objectsshould return along the routes through which they came,affirming the ‘effectiveness of relationships’ (Strathern,1999:16) within the group. Such relations are neither dyadicnor directly reciprocal.

Giesler (2006:286) has observed similar gift-like relationsamongst peer-to-peer music sharers.

Napster seems to reflect an ideological transition frommusic ownership (property) to music access (gift). At[sic] Napster, it is not important to own the copyrightbut to have unlimited access to a web of shared music.

Unlike digital music files, prestige goods in FFXI cannotbe duplicated, and each object is embedded in its ownsingularised history (Carrier, 1995; Kopytoff, 1986) andrelations (Weiner, 1980). This example from digital musicsharing suggests a shift from alienable personal property

towards shared public good. But in FFXI, ambiguous prop-erty forms are not necessarily indicative of novel understand-ings of property. Respondents’ accounts include collectivewealth, ownership as access to a shared good, or access asgift (which can be rescinded or bestowed elsewise), whichhave echoes in peasant resistance to enclosures of thecommons in 16th and 17th century England (Linebaughand Rediker, 2000:15–25) and 18th century corn riots(Thompson, 1971:83).

Commodity and gift are ‘ideal polar types, and noeconomic system could conform to either’ (Kopytoff,1986:69–70), yet these categories are often positioned as‘fundamentally contrastive and mutually exclusive’(Appadurai, 1986:11). Objects may transition between giftand commodity during their biographies (Kopytoff, 1986;Carrier, 1995:112–114) but may not be both simultaneously.Divisions between gift and commodity recreate another falsedichotomy: economy and society, or economy and culture(Slater, 2002). Gift and commodity are not mutually exclu-sive (Bird-David and Darr, 2009) but are different ends of aspectrum of property forms. Most objects in FFXI, as ineveryday life, are clustered at the extremes of this continuum.Commodity-like objects may be made-to-order by a linkshellcraftsman from materials earned through group effort. Gift-like objects may be gained by paying strangers to help killa monster or by paying a group for drops they do not needor want. Prestige goods’ qualities and engagements withpeople, not their substance, facilitate blurring categoryboundaries. Both things and people exercise agency in gener-ating ambiguities, although the example featured in this arti-cle focuses on human action.

Property implies entire worlds, and in FFXI, these worldsare multiple; objects participate in multiple simultaneousframings and categorisations. Users from disparate regions(Japan, Asia, the Americas and Europe), using differentdevices (gaming consoles and desktop PCs), had staggeredentries to FFXI, sometimes years apart. Japanese playersarrived first and developed practices, particularly in elitelinkshells, that later arrivals emulated. With each new waveof users, existing practices and categories were modified tosuit different ontologies. Law and Mol (1995:290), borrow-ing from Strathern ([1991]2005), argue that such multiplicityis not

… isolated and fragmented worlds. Instead… there arepartial connections. Partial and varied connectionsbetween sites, situations and stories. This, then, is thepatchwork option. It’s to imagine that materials andsocial—and stories too—are like bits of cloth that havebeen sewn together.

Following this metaphor, ambiguous property forms areone of many threads that bind different ontologies, creatingshared worlds from fractal ones. Law (2011) describes plural,juxtaposed worlds as ‘fractiverse[s]’, which he rejects infavour of ‘contingent and heterogeneous enactments, perfor-mances or sets of relations’. Fractiverses and contingencymay not be incompatible. Ambiguous property forms arecontingent and temporary, but the shared worlds theyfacilitate by smoothing over ontological differences are

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relatively stable and enduring. To be a FFXI player is to be anegotiator, to understand that all players do not interpretcategories in the same ways and to accept that objects, peopleand relations are multiply ordered. Ambiguous propertyforms create partial, contingent connections betweenacknowledged and enduring fractal worlds.

BOTH GIFT AND COMMODITY

Objects that become property may be simultaneously gift andcommodity (Bird-David and Darr, 2009). This section showshow FFXI prestige goods take on qualities of gifts andcommodities through their interactions and entanglementswith people and other objects. Prestige goods’ propertyforms depend upon the world a player has built aroundherself; the relations she or he believes exist between thisobject, her, and other people and objects; and forms ofagency and interaction ascribed to things and people.Property forms demonstrate the quality of relations playersproduce and maintain, especially in magnanimous prestations(Strathern, 1999:16). In FFXI leavers’ divestments, magna-nimity is enacted by blurring boundaries between gift andcommodity, permitting recipients to reproduce relations andorderings of people and things as required. Such perfor-mances require tractable objects, things that are desirableas gifts and alienable. Telling a friend they may sell anexpensive object or keep it affirms respondents’ commitmentto relations and people over digital virtual objects. For manyplayers, asymmetrical privileging of people over thingsconstitutes a locally desirable rejection of instrumentalattitudes. Rain, an enthusiastic collector in FFXI, describeshis treasures as ‘mere Bits & Bytes :D’, comparing prestigeitems to snack food (Bits & Bites).

In panel interviews, I asked players whether items receivedthrough linkshells were better understood as wages or as gifts(these designations were used by respondents in participantobservation). Two responses to this question show differentblurring of gift and commodity categories. These inter-viewees from Sweden, Australia, Puerto Rico, Canada andthe United States have all been Sleipnir members.

Lodegrance: yeah maybe both, or maybe not like that atall. I mean the LS works together to get the stuff. Youdon’t work for someone and get something back.Lair: almost every LS has a points system to make sureyou worked hard to get the item you wanted, that’s mostlyto stop people from being greedy. Really a LS needs towork as a group, and the game is more fun when you’reall friendly then fighting over items. There are LSs withoutpoints systems that function fine because they know theirmembers well and are always trying to help each other.Kaido: you don’t work FOR someone, but rather WITHsomeone.Lair: Lot[s] of people play FFXI to get a good character,to have good gear and be good at a job. But really itsthe most fun to work together with people you know andcooperate. I’d much rather be playing FFXI with a bunchof my friends all helping each other and me with bad gearthen having the best gear and no-one wanting to help me.

Lodegrance’s comment reflects the challenges of workingin diverse groups for weeks, months and even years. Inlinkshells, there are people towards whom players donot mind being obliged and connected—friends and fictivekin—and others they tolerate on sufferance. But players mustco-operate even with people they dislike. Characterisingdrops as ‘pure’ gifts would place players in unwillingrelations of obligation and reciprocity with all groupmembers. Yet making drops appear as commodities impliesalienated things and instrumentally motivated people, asin Lair’s nightmare scenario. For Lair, having friends whohelp one another is more important than having digital virtualwealth.

Kaido emphasises ‘working with’ not ‘for’, embeddingprestige goods in co-operative relations, yet he disagrees thatsociability is more important than prestige goods.

Kaido: I think both parts [wealth and friendships] areessential Lair, otherwise there’s no point in playing.You lose one of them and you get tired of playing…Lair: if your gear is never moving forward what[’]s thefun? But I think what I’m trying to say is people oftenget too caught up on the item side of things

Kaido and Lair’s exchange draws on long-standingdebates about balancing different orderings of people, thingsand relations in FFXI. For Lair, obsession with ‘good gear’disrupts social relations, echoing sociological concerns aboutmaterialism and social cohesion (Durkheim, [1902]1960;Bauman, 2001; see Trentman, 2009, for critique). Kaido ar-gues that both orientations are needed. Framing prestigeitems this way balances tensions between players focusedon accumulating wealth and those who prioritise relation-ships. Ambiguity wraps goods in a protective fog,circumventing corrosive instrumentality associated withcommodity/wage formulations and potential stagnation fromover-emphasis on sociability.

Shukudai, Riddaraan and Qanael initially disagreed aboutprestige item property forms. Shukudai says these goods arenot gifts, but Riddaraan disagrees, on the basis of his experi-ence with Wyrmal Abjuration (Legs). Wyrmal Abjuration(Legs) is an abjuration traded to a non-player character,along with Cursed Cuisses, to produce Crimson Cuisses.Cursed Cuisses are alienable objects crafted by characterswith advanced alchemical skills. W.Legs and CrimsonCuisses are non-transferable.

Shukudai: Closer to ‘wage’ than to ‘gift’. You can’t call ita ‘gift’ if you work towards it, now can you. I went towork for 8 hours, the boss ‘gifted’ me 8 hours of pay.Riddaraan: Although it’s kind of like, your ‘wages’ can beusurped by someone else in the same department. Wehave this awesome example that I love to talk about goingon in our LS right now. I feel I’ve been working, overall,decently hard, as often as I can be on, to earn points foran item in sky, Wyrmal Legs. And yet, when I try to cashmy ‘paycheck’ others nullify my work and say, ‘me first!’Qanael: Well, there’s only so many W.Legs that drop, andoh so many people that want them.



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Shukudai: They are spending their ‘credit’, that theysaved up for said item. Just gotta wait.Riddaraan: The difference with a paycheck and the waypoints work is that the bank is open 5 days a week, witha nearly limitless supply of money. That’s all I’m saying.You can’t cash your ‘paycheck’ when you want.

Having accumulated enough points, Riddaraan should beeligible receive W.Legs according to Sleipnir’s rules. Hisaccusation of favouritism implicates Qanael, one ofSleipnir’s junior leaders. Qanael argues that poor supplyand high demand are the problem, reinforcing a wage/commodity framing. Shukudai emphasises appropriateclaims and credit. This is the conversation’s turning point,when W.Legs may take form as both gift and commodity.Relations of mutual obligation characterise gift economies(Carrier, 1995; Strathern, 1999:16–20), but legal frameworksof rights and obligations are central to contractual relationsand commodity forms in contemporary consumer capitalistsocieties. Shukudai has bridged Riddaraan’s and Quanael’sdifferent worlds, with different relations between W.Legsand Sleipnir members, the linkshell as a whole, andthose who receive or are excluded from digital virtualwealth. Riddaraan builds on this compromise, suggestingthat virtual prestige items may be like wages, butmultiple claims and priorities require negotiation, whichinterferes with a direct commodified-labour-to-wage rela-tionship. He neither accepted nor entirely rejectedShukudai’s both/and framing. Blurring gift and commoditycategories legitimises Riddaraan’s sense of being unrewardedand explains why he has been passed over. Shukudai’seffort to render these categories ambiguous makes partialconnections that avert an argument between Quanael andRiddaraan.

When BigWig quits FFXI, he gave his Maneater axe toJagermeister. These friends had never met in person butplayed FFXI and Half-Life together for many years.

BigWig: man u can keep this[,] sell it whateverJagermeister: sweet!!BigWig: if u need diff[erent] stuff sell. just take & use ormake gil. i want u to have itJagermeister: lol dont need 2 tell me 100x

They generated the axe together, and now that BigWig isleaving, Maneater flows back along that relationship toJagermeister, affirming their friendship. By making the formManeater should take ambiguous—potentially commodity orcherished gift—BigWig offers Jagermeister the possibility oflater reinterpreting the form of this object without changingthe nature of the relationship it continues to reproduce andmaintain. Giving the axe to Jagermeister is more importantthan what happens to it afterwards. Like Kaido, who arguesboth instrumental and sociable relations are needed in alinkshell, and like Shukudai, who introduces the possibilitythat W.Legs can be wage and gift, BigWig blurs boundariesbetween categories. Ambiguity for Kaido, BigWig,Shukudai and other FFXI players arises from socio-materialentanglements and actors’ efforts to maintain relationsbetween people and things.

PROPERTY CLAIMS, RELATIONSAND OBLIGATIONS

Thus far, we have prestige goods taking on ambiguous formsto create patchwork solutions: Shukudai defusing an argu-ment, Kaido’s resolution of oppositional framings of FFXIand BigWig’s axe whose property form may change withoutaltering relations it maintains. Ambiguous property formshelp stitch together multiple orderings of people and things,but when objects become neither entirely gift nor commod-ity, ascertaining appropriate relations between people andthings becomes difficult. When prestige goods re-enter circu-lation, players grapple with an old anthropological question:to whom does a person have obligations to give? Alterna-tively, who may make claims upon an object? The formerframing suggests gifts and relations of reciprocity, and thelatter encompasses both gift and commodity relations. It isin these latter terms that FFXI players think aboutrecirculation. Having briefly examined how, and to some ex-tent why, ambiguity is co-produced, this section explores therelational consequences for people and things of ambiguousproperty forms.

When items are recirculated, claims are based on myriadways of ordering people, things and relations. Faced withnearly irreconcilable differences, linkshell leaders avoidregulating divestments and recirculation. I asked Peep(Gobbue) about the absence of such rules.

Peep: it would be a crazy idea, telling people what to dowith their stuff. Nobody could agree. I’ll decide who is myfriend, who helped me. Like Vim, he’s a douche. We[were] in the same LS once. If there had been some rulethat said I had to give back all my stuff to the LS if I quit,he’d get most of it because we’re both Rangers. That’sbullshit. I’d make some massive drama over that.[Author]: So not having rules about this means avoidingarguments?Peep: No, it’s like not making an LS auto-destruct button. Who could even make rules like that? God?

Peep equates redistribution rules with dictating the formand nature of socio-material relations. He argues that rulesforcing him to return prestige goods to the linkshell couldmean giving to someone he detests. Rather than owning a re-lation that does not exist, Peep would fight back. Peep’s mostimportant relations of obligation are to friends, to people who‘helped’ him. Those ties are stronger than any he might haveto a group or linkshell leaders.

Peep also questions whether anyone could developrecirculation rules, invoking ‘God’ as an entity that could knittogether fractal orderings of things and people. Luckily forPeep, FFXI players usually manage to make such partialconnections themselves when new property and non-propertyrelated issues are at stake. The daily round of a FFXI userbrings her or him into contact with hundreds of other gamers,each of whom has their own way of making sense of andengaging with this digital virtual world. To be a player ofFFXI is to be a negotiator, settling questions about partyorganisation and set-up, battle procedure and item distribution,or deciding whether to invite someone’s best friend, eventhough there is only one party slot left and that person does

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not have the right skills, or is the wrong level, or has notcompleted a prerequisite task. Players debate which ways arebetter or worse but acknowledge multiple ways of knowingand ordering the game world. Generally, these differentworlds can be assembled through negotiation and sharedpractices—which have themselves been shaped over years ofdebate and discussion. Fudging categories can be useful forsmoothing over differences, but secondary distributionsinvolve objects that have already taken on an ambiguousproperty form, neither gift nor commodity. Once categorieshave been blurred, relations are in question as well.Reaffirming objects as both gift and commodity as they arebeing divested—as BigWig did with his axe—becomes away to manage previous ambiguity whilst allowing recipientsfreedom to change an object’s form without altering relationsthrough which it flowed.

Conflict within linkshells and between friends over appro-priate allocation of goods upon leaving FFXI is not uncom-mon. Such disputes are as much about objects as relations.Before giving Maneater to Jagermeister, BigWig gave hisKirin’s Osode to Fig, who was not in Azalea linkshell.Kirin’s Osode is transferable body armour dropped by Kirin,whose appearance requires objects from four other beasts,each of which requires special items collected from a thirdtier of creatures. The linkshell had fought Kirin four times,winning only thrice and collecting only two Kirin’s Osodes.

K: Bigz, you gave Fig your [Kirin’s] Osode!BigWig: yea hes a go[o]d guyK: we helped you earn that. you got it with usKasha: Biggie w[hat]t[he]f[uck]!!! we only have 2 osodesJagermeister: dude keep it in LSBigWig: but its mineJagermeister: u didnt give him ur maneater?BigWig: nah thats for u manJagermeister: sweeeeeetR2D2: well thats betterK: dam[n] strai[gh]t. did u ask mush[room] or deathabout [the] osodeKasha: bet he didntBigWig: no. cant i give it if i want to?K: you should of askedR2D2: aren’t we your friends too?Kasha: guess not R2Kasha: we[’]re just dum[b] nob[o]dysKasha: no prob[lem]

When K revealed BigWig’s gift to an outsider, Azaleamembers were angry and confused, but for different reasons.Kasha, R2D2 and K perceive different relations betweenthemselves, BigWig and his Osode than BigWig does. Heperceives his connections to other linkshell members, butfor him, the Osode has no such relations, it is an alienatedcommodity, and no one has claims upon it.

For Jagermeister and R2D2, the linkshell has a claim onBigWig’s armour, as it was generated through collective ef-fort and because linkshell members are his friends—BigWigmet R2D2 and Kasha in person at an FFXI fan festival, andsometimes, they join his Half-Life matches with Jagermeister.In this world ordering, friendship and comradely heroic

endeavour are strong relations that create an obligation togive, or at least provide, grounds for a collective propertyclaim. A linkshell is obligated to bestow collective wealth asindicated in its rules, whether distribution of new property islinked to a points system or is negotiated in other ways. Thus,when members no longer need goods, they also have anobligation to recirculate. Some respondents phrased thisobligation as a moral duty. Strummer described refusal torecirculate goods as ‘taking away from the community’—echoing Giesler’s (2006:287–288) file-sharer’s frustrationswith leechers who download but do not share music. K askedwhether BigWig consulted with Mushroom and Death,Azalea’s founders. For Kasha and K, approval from Deathand Mushroom would have recognised the linkshell’s collec-tive claim on the armour. Death and Mushroom becomedistributors or gatekeepers of prestige items, such asMelanesian Big Men. In this world ordering, stronger relationsof obligation exist between BigWig and linkshell leaders thanbetween him and the group as a whole, or some other personto whom he might wish to give the Osode.

Giving Maneater to Jagermeister was lauded as a gooddecision because the object remained in Azalea and wasgiven to someone approved by linkshell leaders, as repre-sented by K. Although BigWig admitted he made a mistake,this conflict escalated when a complaint was made toMushroom. Although Azalea survived this controversy,some members quit. Leaving property obligations unsettledis risky business, but explicit rules would formalise relation-ships between linkshells and their members by specifyingnormative relations between people and things. As Peepargued, and the debate over BigWig’s Osode divestmentillustrates, consensus would be hard to achieve. Fudgingcategories and making objects distributed through linkshellactivities both gift and commodity allows participants toframe objects and relations multiply according to their ownontologies and desired relations. But when objects arerecirculated, such patchworks may unravel, revealingconflicting perceptions of things, relations and people.

CONCLUSION

This article began with a question: what is ambiguous aboutambiguous goods? My aim was not a refutation of ambiguousgoods. Rather, I wanted to think carefully about what ambigu-ity does, how it might be produced and how we can conceptu-alise it, by exploring ambiguous property forms in FFXI. Thisis not a functionalist orientation but an interest in negotiation,local practices, contingencies and social processes that consti-tute things and people—although I have focused on humanagency, as this reflects respondents’ own asymmetricalaccounts. I also wanted to consider how ambiguity might bedeveloped into a multi-dimensional concept for interrogatingconsumption practices, property forms, materialities andeconomic life. Ambiguity as a concept, rather than a category,provides more scope for examining people, things and rela-tions in multiple rather than singular forms. To address theseconcerns, I made some bold assertions, and have supportedthem with an analysis of digital virtual prestige goods in FFXI.



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My first contention was that ambiguity is not an innate ora default status; it is produced through socio-material entan-glements. Making prestige goods both gift and commodityallows players to negotiate their own relationships betweenpeople and things. Prestige goods frame the terms of theseinteractions in various ways, like being alienable or inalien-able, fungible or non-fungible, or through social relationsembedded in their production. BigWig decided that otherAzalea members had no relation with his Osode, but K,R2D2 and others perceived themselves as connected to theobject. Whilst BigWig continued to play FFXI as an Azaleamember, the armour’s ambiguous property form could re-main unresolved. Diverse orderings of its relations with otherthings and people could exist in parallel. When the Osodewas recirculated, different normative framings of socio-materialrelations were brought into conflict. Gaps and overlaps betweenfractal worlds needed to be smoothed over and renegotiated.Peep also highlighted the importance of relations, arguing thatmaking rules about recirculation would mean dictating whatrelations should exist between linkshell members, leaders andprestige goods. In both instances, ambiguity arises fromsocio-material entanglements between people and things, andit is relational and unstable. We cannot understand why certaincategories are made ambiguous by actors in a given setting,through particular objects that may facilitate or resist these ef-forts, without considering how relations are ordered betweenpeople and things in that place, by those actors at a given time.

Players accounts’ also reveal that they are not creatingnew categories but rather producing contingent, perhapseven temporary, hybrids that bridge ontological differencesover well-established categories. Thus, ambiguous goodsare not a new category of things. Prestige goods gainedthrough linkshells are both gift and commodity, but thebalance between the two is negotiable. It is no accident thatproperty forms have become a means of bridging differentworlds in FFXI. In consumer capitalist societies, propertyforms are entangled with entire worlds, encompassing moral,material, social and economic sortings of things, relationsand people. Property is a fecund category, but sociologicalconceptual resources are concentrated at extremes. Morework is needed on intermediate positions (e.g. Bird-Davidand Darr, 2009), and not only between these two propertyforms. Further research should also explore how objectsmay resist or facilitate efforts to blur category boundaries(e.g. Holdbraad, 2011; Strathern, 1996a; Jansen, 2013).

This brings us to the third point: digital virtual objects areno more or less ambiguous than other goods. Dematerialisedentities appear in FFXI as property that takes on ambiguousforms through interactions between things and people. Evena new species lauded as ‘previously unknown to science’produces ambiguity because scientists attempt to make thisentity fit within Linnaean taxonomy or cladograms. A previ-ously unnamed amphibian goes about its business withoutmuch concern for herpetologists struggling to determinehow it should be classified. Its relations with others, its posi-tion vis-à-vis existing categories, are sources of ambiguities.The importance of relationality strongly suggests that con-sumer culture studies must break free of narrow, dyadic con-ceptions of gift relations, and simplified notions of giving to

a community. As Peep’s unwillingness to acknowledge Vimsuggests, giving to a ‘community’ may not include everyone.Some relations within a network of people and things aremore privileged than others. Such efforts should engage withongoing anthropological debates on ceremonial exchange,gifts, property and relatedness (Bird-David and Darr, 2009;Holdbraad, 2011; Strathern, 1991[2005], 1996a, 1996b,1999; Weiner, 1980).

Virtual objects have different, analytically interestingforms and configurations, but they are not an altogethernew form of materiality (see Slater, 2002, for a critical over-view). What is most interesting, and analytically fruitful,about digital virtual goods is how they present novel config-urations of familiar ideas, categories and concepts. Ambigu-ity created by blurring categorical distinctions is only oneexample of old wine in new bottles. Studies of consumer cul-ture have rich explorations of property forms—gifts (Giesler,2006; Giesler and Pohlmann, 2003; Pearson, 2007), com-modities (Besnier, 2004; Slater, 2002), cherished possessions(Marcoux, 2001; Epp and Price, 2009) and singularisedgoods (Kopytoff, 1986)—and there is burgeoning literatureon intellectual property, creative commons and collabora-tion. Yet the foundational concept of property remains ratherunder-emphasised. I have emphasised property as relations,but property as rights yields equally rich analytical materialsfor exploring category ambiguities, such as ownership andcategories of possession. Changing consumption practicesand technologies are reconfiguring the contours of property,both as relations and as rights. This is an interesting time tobe thinking critically about how property—as a classificatorycategory, as an everyday practice and as a way of orderingrelations—is being produced, reproduced and maintained inconsumer capitalist societies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Feedback and comments from Don Slater, Daiana Beitler,Lili di Putto and Aigul Mavletova improved the early draftof this article. Constructive, insightful comments from anon-ymous reviewers and the editors were also appreciated.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Sandy Ross is the current sociology fellow at the Laboratory forStudies in Economic Sociology at the National ResearchUniversity–the Higher School of Economics, in Moscow (RussianFederation). Her research interests include economic lay theories,digital property and property forms, consumer society, and thesociology of money. She is currently working on a book abouteconomic lay theories in virtual worlds.

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Co-creation and ambiguous ownership within virtual communities: the case ofthe Machinima community

TRACY HARWOOD1* and TONY GARRY2

1De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK2Department of Marketing, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand

ABSTRACT

This research contributes to a gap in our understanding of value and its cocreation by empirically investigating issues related to ambiguitiesof legal ownership of cocreated outputs from a virtual experience environment and the subsequent consequences of these on value creation.The context is Machinima, the making of original content using the content of computer games engines wherein a games developer andmembers of a virtual community simultaneously collaborate to generate and distribute content thus potentially creating tension aroundownership and authorship. The investigation had three aims. The first objective was to provide a holistic gestalt of how value is cocreated,transformed, transferred and consumed when the roles of consumer and producer become ‘blurred’. The second objective was to examinehow legal ‘ambiguity’ of ownership potentially acts as an enabler of creativity within such contexts. The final objective was to develop abetter understanding of the social, economic and legal determinants and consequences of such ambiguity on ownership as both anexperience and an implicit legal arrangement. Taken holistically, the findings suggest the ambiguous nature of ownership from a legalperspective contributes and informs creative endeavour from both an organisational and community perspective. Within the context of thisinvestigation, ownership ambiguity paradoxically may provide an on-going environment in which value creation processes beneficial toboth participant and developer flourish. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Recognised as a complex and multidimensional concept,differing interpretations and perspectives of value includevalue as an economic or financial unit (e.g. Srivastavaet al., 1999), value-in-use (Vargo and Lusch, 2004), valueadding processes (Woodruff and Flint, 2004), value chains(Porter, 1980) and symbolic value (Shankar et al., 2009).That said, the notion of ‘value’ cocreation and the ‘owner-ship’ of the outputs of such productive labour is increasinglybecoming one of the most controversial issues within the dig-ital marketing literature (Pongsakornrungslip and Schroeder,2011). Consequently, there are increasing calls to disentan-gle the conceptual complexities of how value is cocreated,transformed, owned and consumed when the traditional rolesof consumer and producer become ‘blurred’ (Cova et al.,2011). More specifically, linkages among value cocreation,value capture and the legal ownership of such productivelabour remain ambiguous and are variously cited as requiringa deeper and more comprehensive understanding (cf. Payneet al., 2008; Cova and Dalli, 2009). Drawing on thecocreation, immaterial labour, property rights and consump-tion community literature, this paper attempts to shed lighton these issues by considering three specific research objec-tives. The first objective was to provide a holistic gestalt(Zott and Amit, 2008:4) of how value is cocreated,transformed, transferred and consumed when the roles ofconsumer and producer become blurred. The second objec-tive was to examine how legal ‘ambiguity’ of ownershippotentially acts as an enabler of creativity within suchcontexts. The final objective was to develop a better

understanding of the social, economic and legaldeterminants and consequences of such ambiguity onownership as both an experience and an implicit legalarrangement. To this end, the paper applies theories ofvalue and ownership to the Machinima context (see alsoresearch context in the succeeding texts). Machinima(pronounced ‘muh-shin-eh-mah’) is a combination of film-making, animation and games development where creatorsmake and share, sometimes in formal exposes, their own filmsusing real-time three-dimensional virtual environments(games) as the basis of their content. It is a phenomenon thathas grown out of the internet and online communities formedaround specific games engines (e.g. World of Warcraft© andHalo©) and now has an estimated following of over 2.4billion (see http://machinima.com). Despite games ownershipbeing clearly stated in end-user licence agreements (EULAs),few developers have asserted their rights over machinimators,with some openly supporting the creative endeavour of theircommunity of followers and others merely observing the ap-parent value created at a distance. For this reason, Machinimais an ideal platform for exploring ownership ambiguity withindigital contexts. Our paper is structured as follows. Initially,there is a synopsis of the salient literature pertaining to valuecreation, immaterial labour, property rights and consumptioncommunities. Subsequently, the interpretive research method-ology is outlined to address the research aims. Findings arethen presented and discussed in two key areas: value creationand productive ownership.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Processes of value production and creation are rapidly evolv-ing away from product and firm centric perspectives frequently

*Correspondence to: Tracy Harwood, De Montfort University, The Gateway,Leicester LE1 9BH, UK.E-mail: [email protected]


Journal of Consumer Behaviour, J. Consumer Behav. 13: 148–156 (2014)Published online 4 March 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.1437

embedded within value chains (e.g. Porter, 1980) towards amore phenomenological and experiential orientation associ-ated with ‘idiosyncratic’ determination where the locusincreasingly lies with the consumer (e.g. Belk, 1988;Grönroos, 2008; Vargo and Lusch, 2008). Primarily based onthe emerging discursive power model incorporating conceptssuch as consumer agency, empowerment and resistance,cocreativity between consumer and firm implies value isuniquely and contextually interpreted by the beneficiary (e.g.Denegri-Knott et al., 2006; Vargo and Lusch, 2008;Pongsakornrungslip and Schroeder, 2011). Indeed, withinmany contexts, the original producer may now be completelyomitted from the value producing experience insofar as afirm’s value proposition is accepted and integrated with aconsumer’s ‘value foundations’ to create value disjunctive ofthe original producer (e.g. Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Grönroos,2008; Plouffe, 2008). Such value foundations comprise skills,information and knowledge, which are transformed throughvalue generating processes encompassing physical activities,mental effort and sociopsychological procedures into value-in-use or ‘value-in-context’ experiences (Ballantyne andVarey, 2008; Chandler and Vargo, 2011).

Social transformations such as the emergence of theInternet and, in particular, user-generated content areincreasingly common exemplars of cocreative and experien-tial contexts. Virtual information is not ‘destroyed’ as it isconsumed. Its value-in-use resides in its ability to bereformatted and redistributed as ‘mash-ups’ (Lash, 2002;Arvidsson, 2005). Such Web-based technologies haveenabled communities to emerge that may be defined in termsof use and interest rather than [geographic] proximity. Froman organisational perspective, Payne et al. (2008) view therole of the firm within such contexts as one of providingopportunities for ‘experiential interactions and encounters[including consumer to consumer] which customers perceiveas helping them utilise their [operant] resources’ (p.87).Indeed, if one considers markets to be socially constructedstructures (e.g. Krippner et al., 2004; Fligstein and Dauter,2007), then such virtual communities may be interpreted as‘market configurations’ whose aim is ‘creating harmony,consonance and fit between the configurative elements’(Storbacka and Nenonen, 2011: 243). Increasingly, there isa realisation by firms that consumer participation in suchvalue creation processes may provide opportunities insofaras consumers will often possess a wide range of skills,sophistication and interests that offer an untapped source ofknowledge (Blazevic and Lievens, 2008).

However, such interactions between organisations andconsumers resulting in generating value have evoked callsfor a greater recognition of the contribution of consumers’immaterial labour as active participants in productionprocesses within organisations (Baym, 2000). Reflective ofthe cultural industry’s ‘work as play mantra’, the boundariesbetween ‘play’ and ‘content provision’ subtly dissolve, andimmaterial labour in the form of creativity, communication,emotion, cooperation and values are ‘put to work’ (e.g.Terranova, 2000; Lazzarato, 1996). For example, fancultures have potential to build brands by contributing toproduct developments and in reaching untapped audiences

(e.g. Jenkins, 2007; Milner, 2009). Fans are often notrecompensed for their labour with resultant ethical implications(e.g. Terranova, 2000), and yet, they are willing participants(De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2005; Kucklich, 2005). Assuch, organisations then face a delicate balancing act betweenexploitation of their loyal cocreators and losing control overtheir property (Jenkins, 2006). Consequently, some firmschoose to innovate with customers rather than to customers byactively involving them in the product innovation process(Blazevic and Lievens, 2008; Storbacka and Nenonen, 2011).For example, organisations operating in digital environments(e.g. Google) often seek to appropriate content over which theyhave no control (such as search behaviour) to derive profit de-spite the fruits of labours being neither owned by the organisa-tion or consumer participants. By subsuming the productivityof consumers’ immaterial labour, firms are able to ensure thatthe outputs of such processes become productive labour.Whilst it has been argued that the incorporation of knowledgederived from consumers into organisational processes(‘knowledge workers’) has shifted the balance of power insuch a way that organisations need to find alternative meansof managing such collaboration (Cote and Pybus, 2007;Borchard and Dickens, 2008; Milner, 2009), there has beenlittle research of this within digital creative contexts.

This resultant shifting of focus by some firms fromownership and control to one of openness and sharedparticipation implicit within such a participatory culturerequires a reconsideration of the foundations that underlievalue and ownership within such market configurations(Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007). Technological innova-tion frequently outpaces legal innovation within suchcontexts (Stephens, 2002) and tensions and ambiguitiescreated through participatory cultures in relation to legisla-tive processes associated with such productive outputs is acase in point (Denegri-Knott et al., 2006). We thereforeexplore legal ownership and how it may apply to a contem-porary creative and participatory culture.

Concepts of ownershipHistorically, copyrights and patents have determinedownership and protected intellectual property (Becker andKipnis, 1984). The economic rationale behind suchlegislative processes provides a mechanism for securingmonetary incentives through a set of exclusive rights. Suchan approach assumes that copyright law will determineownership and hence the way in which resources areproduced, distributed and reused. More recently, suchcopyright legislation has been vigorously pursued in thedigital arena strengthening digital copyright and culminatingin legislation such as the digital rights management system,the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act and the Copyright TermExtension Act (Postigo, 2008). However, many view thisexpanding copyright regime as a barrier to the emergingparticipatory economy and indeed the essence of cocreation.Such legislation serves as an obstacle between consumersand the content they wish to access (Jenkins, 2006).Advocates of a ‘public domain’ approach to digital informa-tion cite copyright legislation as a growing threat to culturalautonomy. Indeed, Elkin-Koren (2005) suggests,

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‘The market as a decision-making process is likelyto produce different content than grassroots contentcreation generated by individual creators who aremotivated by a wide range of idiosyncratic factorsand are voluntarily engaging in communicativeactions, self-expression and social protest’ (Elkin-Koren,2005: 386).

Indeed, such legislation is viewed by many as beingsymptomatic of a legal process that has been ‘captured bythe content industries’ whose copyright ‘fundamentalists’are persistently pressuring for even stronger propriety rights(Landes and Posner, 2004).

However, within digital contexts, many argue it isunclear what ‘property’ is being protected or whom hastrading rights. Digital works, for example, are abstract as-sets lacking physical boundaries, and therefore, traditionalcriteria for assessing when a property right has beenviolated may be flawed. Historically, the term propertyencapsulated the ‘relationship’ between a person and aphysical ‘thing’ and covered legal issues related to theft,fraud and ownership (Sheldon, 2006). However, in physi-cal form, virtual property is ‘no more than an arrangementof digital information in the memory of a server’ renderedthrough lines of code (Kennedy, 2008:99). Hohfeld (1913)extrapolated this relational concept by analysing propertyin terms of the relation of people to each other with respectto a thing. Possession may therefore be interpreted as asocially sanctioned cognitive state rather than theownership of a physical thing (Rudmin, 1990). Litwinski(1913) argues that acts of ‘having, holding, saving, makingselling, modifying and so forth’ are ambiguous in differen-tiating between possession and property and consequently,so are associated rights with these such as ‘the right toexclude, the right to use and the right to transfer interestto another’ (Sheldon, 2006). Within a contemporaryparticipatory culture, where creative endeavour results ina change to the original thing, possession and ownershipbecome more ambiguous potentially resulting in theevocation of tensions between cocreators. In an attemptto resolve this, an ‘open source’ movement known as thecreative commons initiative argues for a broader spectrumof ownership and transfer of greater property rights to thepublic domain. Jones (2009) argues that legal ownershipshould be based on a pluralism of rights of society, culturalheritage and ‘sui generis’ (uniqueness) and not purely therights of copyright holders given that current legalframeworks discourage and impede innovation and culturaldevelopment.

This raises a series of interesting questions: How isownership understood and attributed by participants? Whathas led to such a divergence in interpretations between thelaw and participants? Even more pertinent, why doparticipants within such contexts assume they have the‘right’ to confront the ‘rhetoric of ownership’ legitimisedby copyright law? This research contributes to thisdiscussion by examining how value is cocreated withinvirtual communities, the ambiguities surrounding legalinterpretations of ownership and the consequences of this.

METHODOLOGY

The technology mediated medium of Machinima wasselected as an appropriate context for our investigation usingthe criteria of relevance, modes of interactivity andengagement it encompasses, its significant size and, finally,the potential heterogeneity of its market actors (Kozinets,2010). Given the nature of the research objectives, a mixedmethods qualitative research design was deemed to beappropriate so as to enable an examination of the livedexperiences under investigation (Miles and Huberman,1994) and to enable triangulation of findings from a rangeof different data sources. Previous investigations into Web-based phenomena suggest the approach is pertinent in‘confirming, contrasting and contributing to’ academicliterature (Garver, 2003) and to capturing contextual richnessembodied within such environments (Strauss and Corbin,1990). To this end, data was collected using three modes ofinvestigation in a ethnographic tradition: participant observa-tion over 5 years between January 2007 and December 2012with entrée effected during the conduct of a film festival thattook place in October 2007, 44 subsequent interviews withkey informants taking place over an extended period andcontent downloaded and analysed from Machinima blogsand social networking sites between January 2007 andDecember 2012 (for a summary, see Appendix A). Datawas analysed iteratively using content analysis in a qualita-tive mode of investigation, to draw out convergent andemergent themes within the dataset (Berelson, 1952;Krippendorff, 2004).

More specifically, extensive documentation was collatedon the basis of participant observation (Fletcher, 2002) byone of the researchers who became a part of the communitywhilst directing a Machinima film festival. Subsequently,interviews were conducted with key informants (McCracken,1988). Drawing on pertinent literature, a discussion guidewas constructed and used as a basis for semistructuredinterviews but with scope to explore interesting aspects thatemerged during the data collection phase (Miles andHuberman, 1994; Maxwell, 1996). Interviews with ageographically dispersed purposive sample of respondentswere conducted using Skype (internet recording) technology,whereas face-to-face interviews were tape-recorded.Interviews lasted between 1 and 2 hours and were transcribedto facilitate content analysis. Given the nature of the researchobjectives, it was deemed imperative that a range of perspec-tives and interpretations were included, and so, representa-tives of the consumption community, games developers andmembers of the community employed by game developerswere included. Finally, data were collated from socialnetworking sites and community blogs to support convergentfindings. Content analysis was used to reduce data to keythemes (Krippendorff, 2004). Initially, a data familiarisationprocess was performed. By repeated reading of transcripts,postings and other related documentation, the authors wereable to ‘immerse’ themselves in the data ‘searching formeanings and patterns’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 87).Subsequently, data was systematically organised throughthe generation of codes. The coded extracts were

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subsequently collated into categories and subcategoriesthrough a process of property identification, comparisonand abstraction (Spiggle, 1994). Ethics was considered tobe an implicit part of the research design (Hair and Clark,2007). Participant observation was overt. A code of conductfor participation was published, and written consent wassought from all participants in the film festival. Permissionwas also sought for all recording of interviews. All theidentities of informants, community members and firms areprotected to preserve confidentiality, anonymity and privacy.Content (films, social networking sites, blog postings, etc.)collated was user published and widely accessible over theInternet; although where comments can be attributed toidentifiable community members, these are protected.Finally, research findings were discussed with informants.

THE RESEARCH CONTEXT

Machinima is defined as ‘film-making within a real-time 3Dvirtual environment, combining three creative contexts: film-making, animation and games development’ (Academy ofMachinima Arts and Sciences, 2008). In essence, it is atechnology mediated medium that enables the disseminationof user-generated content through second-generationcommunity specific websites or more mainstream websitessuch as Vimeo and YouTube (for an example, see http://vimeo.com/5543976 – this is a short animated film, producedby Lainy Voom, not real name, and filmed in Second Life©,screenshot at Figure 1). The medium has grown increasinglypopular in recent years and is now incorporated into digitalarts and contemporary film festivals worldwide with acommunity currently estimated at more than 2 billionparticipants (machinima.com). Machinima is the process ofmarket actors manipulating a computer game by integratingthe resource base supplied within the game by the developerwith their own resources to render animated films(Payne et al., 2008). By such actions, players can ‘transformthemselves into actors, directors and even camera operatives’(Lowood, 2005). The firm’s value offering manifests itself inthe game platform, and more specifically, the productiontools (such as script editors, camera angles, demo recordingand games levels) and game attributes (characters, avatars,skins, textures, backgrounds) embedded within the game.As Lowood (2005) comments, ‘When a computer game isreleased today, it is as much a set of design tools as a finished

game design’ (p15). The implication of such processes is thatonce released by the developer, the way the product may beexperienced is largely beyond the control of the originalauthors thus mitigating traditional concepts of ownershipand authorship. In effect, a disparate group of market actorsaccess resources they do not own or unilaterally controland implicitly or explicitly challenge traditional proprietary-based legislative concepts. For this reason, it is ideal forexploring ownership ambiguity within digital contexts.

FINDINGS

The Findings Section is structured so as to reflect key themesidentified in the course of the research. Initially, and in orderto fully comprehend subsequent findings, it is deemedimperative to explore the value creation processes withinthe community of practice that potentially contribute toresultant ambiguous ownership; second, we examine thecharacteristics of ownership within the research context;and third, we explore the implications and outcomes ofambiguous ownership for cocreators.

Value creation processes and the Machinima experienceCommunity members’ resources manifest themselves in thepossession of a wide range of skills, sophistication, interestsand savyness. Their collective value-in-use culminates in thecreativity, diversity and agility of community members. Suchcreativeness is exemplified by one blog post commenting onthe extent and variety of manipulations on only one game byplayers, ‘This game has literally turned into a kind of site-specific theatre extravaganza. It has been shaken up withcut-scenes, lighting effects, slow motion camera, fake filmand granularity…when you are a hammer, the whole worldseems to be full of nails’ (Machinimafeed.com). Highlightingthe scale of participant interaction, another games developerstates, ‘We have fans uploading these stories at the rate ofabout 400 a day. We have about 18,000 stories that the fanshave written for the game’ (Games developer A). Thisintimates collaboration between consumers and developers:For the developer, such interaction adds brand value throughcommunity involvement, awareness and promotion potential,whereas consumers derive value from participation inbuilding content and the community as a useful resource.Value is also derived in the socially inclusive and reciprocalnature of online participation in the pursuit of ‘somethingbetter’ and the ‘constructive’, ‘nonjudgmental’ and‘democratic’ consumption environment within which suchactivities take place (key informant A). Such evoked feelingsof camaraderie and solidarity among machinimators are allan implicit outcome of this value creation and seen by thecommunity as a reciprocal exchange arrangement of labourarising from creative endeavour for implicit reward. Forothers, value-in-use relates to enhancing self-esteem throughearning peer recognition of their creative and technical skillsas they optimise such digital artistic medium. In essence,participants exhibit their creative writing, editing, directingand producing skills together with their technical virtuositywithin an experience environment that encompasses an

Figure 1. Machinima screenshot: Push by Lainy Voom.



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appreciating audience of enthusiasts. Reflective of criticalacclaim that may be found in other artistic contexts, onecommunity member commenting on a particular uploadsuggests, ‘This movie is so interesting because it shows justwhat is possible when a free software tool is placed inthe right hands… it’s a slick, atmospheric short film whichcombines beautiful visuals with terrific sound mixing’(Roostertooth.com). Such comments highlight the ambigu-ous nature in the ownership in this context: First, many tools(e.g. recording and editing tools) are incorporated withingames, some through consumer demand, that are notdirectly useful for gameplay. As such, they are viewed bymachinimators as enabling creative endeavour, that is, themaking of films, through their presence. Second, contentcreated by machinimators is showcased on a websitecontrolled by the developer. In effect, these processes havethe potential to legitimise ownership of creative outputsalbeit ambiguous in terms of who owns what.

At a macro level, the Machinima community functions asa complex fuzzy and fluid organic system insofar as it isdefined by the cooperative and coevolving relationships thatindividuals enact with other individuals. There is a lack ofany formalised structure, mechanisms or control. Essentially,the community behaves like a complex adaptive system,creatively evolving and self-organising to renew itself andto maintain internal coherence. Through a spiralling processof interactions between market actors, explicit and tacitknowledge transfer is achieved enabling the evolution oforiginal games platforms. As one respondent comments,‘It’s our relationship with the Machinima community thathelps [our product] to evolve… it’s not fragmented intoindividuals… they collaborate, they group and worktogether, they support one another – we love that from a toolsand customer support perspective’ (Games developer B).Clearly, the community evolves beyond the control of theorganisation (its role is to identify and to legitimise thecontributions made by participants), potentially so that valueis derived from the widest possible engagement. Forexample, one community member comments, ‘When yougo into a virtual world or game, the characters are alreadybuilt but you can use it rather like a creative studio, youcan direct the avatars, which can be humanoid, animals, othercreatures… the framework has been built by thousands ofdedicated people and you can just customise it to your ownliking… you are basically cutting out the middleman, thetechnician who has to put all those figures together using avery complicated and expensive piece of software. So nowwe have a whole world of creative people and artists whocan create inexpensively and within their grasp’ (keyinformant E). Such a comment further illustrates anawareness that participants have of the intertwining natureof cocreation, wherein the games developer and a vastcommunity implicitly collaborate to generate and todistribute content. Whilst unintentional, in such a way, itmay be possible to avoid issues of specific ownership arisingbecause the resultant content sits between private and publicdomains (Cabrera, 2012).

From the developer’s perspective, a key issue becomesthe avoidance of autonomous knowledge production. There

is recognition that the primary value of a piece of softwarethey release is its subsequent manipulation by communitymembers and its potentially rapid development if othercommunity members participate in modifying and manipu-lating it. It is also recognised to have the potential to generatenew audiences, increasing the reach of the game well beyondwhat the developer may achieve without the input of thecommunity of machinimators, effectively using word-of-mouth marketing techniques. Hence, firms may proactivelyencourage consumers to ‘showcase what can be done in[game]… we’d love to see your experiment’ (Gamesdeveloper A). Such actions ensure the continued develop-ment and evolution of value-in-use experiences thuspromotes novelty and currency of games content. As onedeveloper comments, ‘our users really know what the marketneeds better than we do so they will often create stuff aheadof what we can do’ (games developer A). Nonetheless, thereis little control over what machinimators may create, and thishas potential to undermine developer brand values. There area number of processes and techniques that developers haveadopted in an attempt to manage these issues. Developerscontinually ‘listen in’ on the community to identify potentialdevelopment opportunities. Some developers activelymaintain and encourage direct dialogue with the community.As one respondent states, ‘I knew I could email one of thefounders [of the community] and I knew I’d get a reply’(games developer A). Another tactic is to optimise the skillsof opinion leaders within the community. In the initial stagesof games development, game content is released as a betaprototype version, and comments are invited back from‘core’ members identified. However, such cocreation isaccompanied by differing interpretations as to the ownershipof the outputs of such labour. As such, the Machinimacontext is perceived as a ‘hazy area of artistic expressionnot quite covered by copyright law but not quite insignificantgiven how many people have jumped on the bandwagon’(Glasser, blog, 24 February 2009).

Characteristics of ownershipCommercial applications of Machinima based on gamesproduced tend to be explicitly protected through copyrightlaw and the content (and its distribution and use) controlledthrough EULAs. However, many producers are increasinglysupporting individual or ‘low key’ consumer-basedmachinimating. Indeed, many game developers areincreasingly accepting the loss of ‘authorial’ ownership ofproduction processes to the community once a game isreleased. At this point, it is the community of participantsthat further develop the game through their creativeendeavours by adding content and storylines, contributingthese directly back to the organisation or to fora that maybe firm managed. Whilst in principle, intellectual propertyrights reside with the firm, the opportunity for an ‘agnosticrelationship’ between firm and consumer resides in the factthat the system can be challenged from within thecommunity. A case in point is Microsoft and Blizzard’srecent decision to publish Game Content Usage Rulesrelaxing exclusive authorial rights of adaptation and distribu-tion after consultation with the community. One community



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member suggests, ‘these rules… provide a nascent legalenvironment in which remix culture and Web 2.0 canflourish’ (Kraus, 2011). Developers are effectively placingvaluable intellectual property in the hands of communitymembers who distribute content through social networksand fora to engage in dialogic exchange with othersthereby stimulating interest further in both the originalMachinima work and the game itself. As one communitymember comments, ‘Storytellers (née machinimators)…will further our understanding and demand for new narra-tive experiences. Advances in Machinima, and real-timeanimation in general, will assist with other disciplinessuch as game development (e.g. rapid prototyping) andspatial/temporal pre-visualization, providing quickeriteration in development cycles, which in turn will fuelfurther experimentation in their fields’ (key informant F).This highlights the sense of ownership felt by participantsin the organisation’s on-going developmental processes.However, there is an appreciation that the only way toprotect such knowledge is for it to remain recondite. Whilstthis creates equivocalness, one observer comments,‘Machinimists are accustomed to creating under the spectreof legal uncertainty’ (Hayes, 2008). Artistic creativitywithin such a context relies on the tightness of relation-ships between individuals within the community andproducers in terms of trust, reciprocity and an absence ofopportunistic behaviours. As the same communitysubsequently comments, ‘We need to understand the legalimplications of using a publisher’s technology [which]…could have consequences if it doesn’t align with thepublisher’s end-user license agreement. It’s highlyunlikely but it could be considered a potential issue incertain situations. A way to avoid these issues would beto use a non-game based Machinima application althoughthat may not be a [creative] option in some situations…’(key informant F), intimating that the role ambiguity ofownership plays between organisation and community isone that actually stabilises and supports an on-goingbeneficial relationship. That said, any commercial gainfrom the proceeds of such creativity without the consentof the producers is still a contentious issue as one commu-nity member comments:

‘One of the things worth noting, is that even if you get aMachinima to be profitable, it will most likely palemiserably to the profit of the company. If they are sostingy as to grab a few cents from these artists who arepromoting their games, they are just wasting their time.It’d be more profitable to just let them be and useresources they would for suing to do something else like,I dunno, marketing’ (B1).

Implications of ambiguous ownershipRecognising the financial value that such communitycentric production may generate, some producers haveendeavoured to incentivise engagement by returning atleast part of the economic market value of consumers’labours. One games developer explains how they facilitatethis process:

‘[We] help them earn back some of the resources thatthey have invested in our products. We have developeda content marketplace where [users] sell to other users inthe community and then they have a revenue sharethat they are able to generate some income from’ (Gamesdeveloper B).

This demonstrates formalised recognition of consumerparticipation in the creative process, in effect expanding theboundaries of the organisation to include the communitythrough the reward process. Ultimately, the approachattempts to shift ownership from an ambiguous status toone controlled by the organisation. Conversely, for many,such actions as the ‘insertion’ by firms of the consumer intothe productive process and subsequent financial rewardmerely adds to ‘the gray areas in this emerging art form’(B1). As such, issues of ownership of the proceeds of bothpaid and immaterial labour remain largely unresolved and amatter of interpretation

‘Being very cynical and logical then yes we are trying toexploit [users], but we are also trying to find people whowant to try [our product], if they do and they like it andthen they write about it and tell their friends then that’show we reach our market, either directly or indirectlyby referral… it’s all about recognizing the value of theconsumer and letting them control the relationship’(games developer C).

However, it may be argued that the ambiguous natureof the current legal status quo is beneficial for bothparties. Producers benefit in terms of publicity and on-going interest in their product through continual manipu-lation, modification and redistribution. Machinimatorsbenefit from being able to express and showcase theircreative talent without any desire to gain financiallydirectly from the game albeit they may acquiredeveloper-endorsed sponsorship or prizes for showcasingtheir creative works in formal settings such as exhibi-tions and digital arts festivals.

Notwithstanding this, there are future power relation-ships that may evolve from the awareness generatedthrough the community of followers in an iterativecycle of cocollaboration. For example, successfulmachinimators, that is, those that generate critical acclaimthrough their selected fora, may become ‘power users’ ofgames, and in turn, they are primary targets for gamesdevelopers seeking to reinforce the marketability of theirproducts. Subsequently, creators benefit through earlyaccess to beta products and may formally become partof games development teams, which simultaneously bene-fits games developers by enhancing their proposition.Such enhancements can be far reaching, as one commu-nity member states,

‘One only needs to look at the commercial success ofRooster Teeth’s Red vs Blue series to see first handhow successful Machinima can be at creating a sustain-able online series. [Machinima] can not only givecreators accessibility, but can also give accessibility todevelopers. [One Machinima creator] went from being



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a creator of some fantastic examples of Machinima todeveloping a Machinima application himself. This grewentirely out of his experiences as a Machinima artist’(key informant F).

This trajectory implies the potential for some separa-tion between the cocollaborators, with a resultant shift inpower and a new context within which ambiguity ofownership becomes further muddied by consumer appro-priation of firm appropriated content from consumers. Insuch a situation, not only it is difficult to unravel whomight own what but also by applying traditional legalprinciples, it may well be that the destruction of futurevalue resulting from the process could become contested(e.g. Dibbell, 2013).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This exploratory research contributes to a gap in ourunderstanding of value and its cocreation within virtualexperience environments by empirically investigating theconsequences of ambiguous ownership of resultant outputson the processes of cocreation themselves. Much of theextant literature on cocreation in general and virtualcommunities in particular suggests they may be interpretedas ‘market configurations’ whose aim is ‘creating harmony,consonance and fit between the configurative elements’(Storbacka and Nenonen, 2011:243). However, issues ofthe ownership of the fruits of cocreation are seldomexplicitly addressed in the cocreation literature or alterna-tively, assumed to be noncontentious with empoweredconsumers assuming ownership and optimising value-in-use through the application of their operant resources(e.g. Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Grönroos, 2008; Plouffe,2008). Such interpretations are increasingly beingperceived as ‘overly angelic’ (Cova and Dalli, 2009) asthe ‘the bad boys of capital’ (Terranova, 2000) feed ‘offthe reservoir of autonomous immaterial labour’ that hasevolved outside the domain of the firm’s boundaries(Arvidsson, 2005). However, as evidenced from thefindings of this research, the distinction betweenproduction and consumption, between work and culturalexpression and between property and ownership areincreasingly blurred necessitating delicate balancing actswhere cocreators exploit such ambiguities to their mutualbenefit. Within the context of this investigation, owner-ship ambiguity paradoxically may provide an on-goingenvironment in which value creation processes beneficialto both participant and developer flourish.

More specifically, this research has demonstrated howa set of characteristics may converge within a collectiveresulting in a consensus about what constitutes appropri-ation through a legitimising narrative within the commu-nity. Unchallenged by games developers, this results inbehavioural normalisation of such actions among com-munity members whilst ignoring the legally authorisedrights of content owners. Some producers accept this lossof control over the games on release as inevitable.

Indeed, such ‘tapping’ of ‘mass consumer intellectuality’by firms (Bonsu and Darmody, 2008) is a recognitionthat the consumption community may contain consumerswith equitable or even superior skill sets that are able toadd value to the ‘postproduct’ experience for othersegments of consumers within the community. Collabora-tive value generation frequently involves an iterativeprocess of coevolved value-in-use between firm andconsumer. Such firm–consumer interactions not only‘represent the most powerful and pervasive challenge totraditional business and marketing practices in modernhistory’ (Plouffe, 2008:1181) but may also have legalconsequences through a powerful and significant signal-ling effect.

Whilst intellectual property rights primarily lie with thegames developer, once released into the public arena, thisresearch highlights how consumers are able to take‘moral’ ownership of the product, as implied byTerranova (2000), by defining and creating their ownpostproduct consumption experience through the manipu-lation of the product in ways that the original developerswould not have anticipated. However, although somedevelopers seek legal recourse in an attempt to maintainexclusivity over products, others encourage such actionsboth implicitly and explicitly in EULAs and through arange of engagement activities with community members.Indeed, Dibbell (2013) argues that a EULA may now bebetter construed as a social rather than legal contract,thereby empowering players to transform the game addingfurther value for the both parties. Similarly, drawing onthe Lockean legal principle of property and specificallyownership ‘of the fruits of one’s labour’ (Locke, 1967),many game developers are increasingly accepting the lossof authorial ownership of production processes to thecommunity once a game is released into the experienceenvironment.

Drawing on previous legal precedence, such collectivepractices may drive a redefinition of mainstream normsthrough a bottom-up effect that focuses on interpretingrights rather than law (Jones, 2009). This in turn maydrive a reinterpretation of the law through the acceptanceof these contextually established normative values such assharing, reusing, modifying, ‘mashing’ and distributingcreative work with others. Indeed, such sentimentsalready manifest themselves in the creative commonswhose stated goal is to change the default rule createdby copyright law under the banner of ‘All RightsReserved to Some Rights to No Rights Reserved’.Furthermore, the issues raised here highlight that theconcepts of value creation, and value-in-use needs to befurther theorised and explored in the context of engage-ment communities for digital and virtual consumptionpractices and, more precisely, in terms of the ownershipof their outputs. Examining how precedence within suchnetworks evolve over time would enrich our understand-ing of the ‘tensions, desires and conflicts’ (Denegri-Knottet al., 2006) that firms and consumers need to reconcile insuch contemporary markets and would be an interestingdirection in which to take future research.



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Data Description Data collection period Analytical methods employed

Machinima Europefestival

Phase 1Researcher directed festival, UK.Data collated comprises

Festival preparation Participant observation;content analysis of documents,social media content and films;conceptual maps of communityand individual memberinvolvement

(January–October 2007)Extensive correspondence withcommunity leaders (Academy ofMachinima Arts and Sciences andMachinima Europe Board and includesemail and telephone call notes)

Post festival evaluationof impact,

Film-makers about film-making(83 festival entrant documentation)

(November 2007–December 2009)

Network collaborations and filmcontent (156 films – videos rangingbetween 30 s and 1 : 40min)Distribution (resources used) andtechnologies employed(software and hardware) and filmreview panel (35 individuals, includesemail and telephone call notes)Social networks, blogs and personalcommunications with community members

Key informantinterviews

Phase 2Preliminary semistructuredinterviews with 10 key informantslasting between 1 and 2 h

September–November 2008 Content analysis;conceptual maps

Subsequent interviews withcommunity participants – 34(interviews conducted by email and Skype),semistructured, questions related toemergent themes of creative engagement,learning, digital context, promotional activities,tagging, social networking and perceptionsof ownership, originality and authorship

January 2010–June 2011

Content analysis ofvirtual fora

Phase 3Virtual community fora:http://Machinimafordummies.com;http://Machinima.org; http://Machinima.com;http://mprem.com; http://moviestorm.co.uk;http://roosterteeth.com; YouTube/Vimeochannels related to film-makers;http://techdirt.com; http://kokatu.com

January 2007–December 2012 Content analysis;conceptual maps

Over 1000 A4 pages of content downloaded

Appendix A Data collection process



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Disordering things