Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post-postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339922

Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market-oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post-1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market-oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways

Mobilizing policy: Models, methods, and mutations

This article calls for a re-conceptualization of the social sciences by asking for a cosmopolitan turn. The intellectual undertaking of redefining cosmopolitanism is a trans-disciplinary one, which includes geography, anthropology, ethnology, international relations, international law, political philosophy and political theory, and now sociology and social theory. Methodological nationalism, which subsumes society under the nation-state, has until now made this task almost impossible. The alternative, a 'cosmopolitan outlook', is a contested term and project. Cosmopolitanism must not be equalized with the global (or globalization), with 'world system theory' (Wallerstein), with 'world polity' (Meyer and others), or with 'world-society' (Luhmann). All of those concepts presuppose basic dualisms, such as domestic/foreign or national/international, which in reality have become ambiguous. Methodological cosmopolitanism opens up new horizons by demonstrating how we can make the empirical investigation of border crossings and other transnational phenomena possible.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01250.x

Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences : a research agenda

To better address differences and complexities of social life articulated through the postmodern turn, grounded theory is being regenerated and updated. Based on Strauss's ecological frameworks in his social worlds and arenas theory, I offer situational maps and analyses as innovative supplements to the basic social process analyses characteristic of traditional grounded theory. There are three kinds of analytic maps: maps of situations including all the key human and nonhuman elements, maps of social worlds and arenas, and maps of positionality along salient analytic axes. This article introduces all three kinds of maps and explicates one—situational maps—as a means of coherently elucidating and analyzing some of the complexities and instabilities of social life.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/si.2003.26.4.553.pdf

Situational Analyses: Grounded Theory Mapping After the Postmodern Turn

In this follow-up to the highly successful "Ethnography Unbound", Michael Burawoy and nine colleagues break the bounds of conventional sociology, to explore the mutual shaping of local struggles and global forces. In contrast to the lofty debates between radical theorists, these nine studies excavate the dynamics and histories of globalization by extending out from the concrete, everyday world. The authors were participant observers in diverse struggles over extending citizenship, medicalizing breast cancer, dumping toxic waste, privatizing nursing homes, the degradation of work, the withdrawal of welfare rights, and the elaboration of body politics. From their insider vantage points, they show how groups negotiate, circumvent, challenge, and even re-create the complex global web that entangles them. Traversing continents and extending over three years, this collaborative research developed its own distinctive method of 'grounded globalization' to grasp the evaporation of traditional workplaces, the dissolution of enclaved communities, and the fluidity of identities. Forged between the local and global, these compelling essays make a powerful case for ethnography's insight into global dynamics.

Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World

1. Introduction: Re-Reading Globalization from Northeast Brazil 2. Traveling Feminisms: From Embodied Women to Gendered Citizenship 3. The Leverage of the Local: Political Negotiations in a Global Sphere 4. Feminists and Funding: Plays of Power in a Social Movement Market 5. Conclusion: Defending the Endangered Public. Methodological Appendix: Transnational Feminism as Field - Power, Solidarity and the Researcher

Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil

Translocalities/Translocalidades is a path-breaking collection of essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and United States–based Latina feminisms and their multiple translations and cross-pollinations. The contributors come from countries throughout the Americas and are based in diverse disciplines, including media studies, literature, Chicana/o studies, and political science. Together, they advocate a hemispheric politics based on the knowledge that today, many sorts of Latin/o-americanidades—Afro, queer, indigenous, feminist, and so on—are constructed through processes of translocation. Latinidad in the South, North and Caribbean "middle" of the Americas, is constituted out of the intersections of the intensified cross-border, transcultural, and translocal flows that characterize contemporary transmigration throughout the hemisphere, from La Paz to Buenos Aires to Chicago and back again. Rather than immigrating and assimilating, many people in the Latin/a Americas increasingly move back and forth between localities, between historically situated and culturally specific, though increasingly porous, places, across multiple borders, and not just between nations. The contributors deem these multidirectional crossings and movements, and the positionalities engendered, translocalities/ translocalidades .

Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Kiran Asher, Victoria (Vicky) M. Banales, Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius, Maylei Blackwell, Cruz C. Bueno, Pascha Bueno-Hansen, Mirangela Buggs, Teresa Carrillo, Claudia de Lima Costa, Isabel Espinal, Veronica Feliu, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, Agustin Lao-Montes, Suzana Maia, Margara Millan, Adriana Piscitelli, Ana Rebeca Prada, Ester R. Shapiro, Simone Pereira Schmidt, Millie Thayer

Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas

Through case studies of lesbian movements in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, this paper examines the phenomenon of identity-based movements, finding that it embraces significant differences in the content and forms of collective identities. New social movement theory calls attention to the role of identity in contemporary movements, but overlooks variation in the nature of identities. Resource mobilization and political process theories, on the other hand, offer tools for explaining differences, but have not generally been applied to cross-national comparisons of movements around identity. Drawing on interviews with lesbian activists in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, on participant observation, and on archival research, I argue that three factors account for the differences in the way movements in distinctive national contexts construct collective identities: 1) economic structure/model of development; 2) state-civil society relations; and 3) the broader field of social movements.

Identity, Revolution, and Democracy: Lesbian Movements in Central America

In the late 1970s, a group of young feminists, speculums in hand, gathered in each other's living rooms in the city of Recife, in northeast Brazil. Together they conducted gynecological self-exams, studied herbal remedies for common ailments, and talked about sexuality and relationships. In 1980, they founded an organization, SOS Corpo (SOS Body), and began to do outreach to women in the poor neighborhoods of the urban periferia (outskirts), hoping to spread the gospel of bodily knowledge to those with little access to it.

Translations and Refusals: Resignifying Meanings as Feminist Political Practice

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