This module looks at the rise of promotional culture (public relations, advertising, marketing and branding) and promotional intermediaries and their impact on society. The first part of the module will look at the history of promotional culture and will offer some conflicting theoretical approaches with which to view its development. These include: professional/industrial, economic, political economy, post-Fordist, audience, consumer society, risk society, and postmodern perspectives. The second part will look at specific case areas of promotional culture. These are in: fashion and taste, technological commodities, popular culture (film TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties, and financial markets. In each of these areas questions will be asked about the influence of promotional practices on the production, communication and consumption of ideas and products as well as larger discourses, fashions/genres and socio-economic trends.
It is required in this essay topic to base your work on most of the following sources. I will write down 25 sources, but if you decide there is some other, more relevant source for this topic, please go ahead and use it. But most of the given sources have to be used in the essay.
Topic: Week four focuses on ways of reading and analysing promotional texts semiotically, and competing interpretations of how such texts contribute to evolving social relations. Above all, it will discuss accounts of how promotional texts have played in the transition towards a post-industrial, post-Fordist, or postmodrn society. In so doing, promotion has been part of the rise of symbolic value over use value and exchange value; and a means by which the superstructural and cultural elements of society have come to dominate its structural and economic foundations. Several key concepts and transitions will be discussed, as will more recent critical responses.
key readings:
1) A Wernick (1991) Promotional Culture, Sage, London, Chapter one
2) Chapter four of A Davis (2013) Promotional Cultures
This lecture asks does promotional culture have a strong influence on fashion trends,individual and collective ‘tastes’ and ‘identities’ (subjectivities)? The week focuses particularly on the fashion industry. Is fashion imposed from above or does it come more from the activities and preferences of the mass of consumers? The concept of taste is discussed in relation to culture with reference to ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ cultural values. The lecture will then attempt to find a way through these discussions by discussing the work of Bourdieu.
Key readings:
3) P Braham (1997) ‘Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production’ in P du Gay ed. (1997) Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, Sage, London
4) Chapter five of A Davis (2013) Promotional Cultures