A Sociological Critique and Reformulation of Brands

In just under 150 years, societies have changed from having very few brands to having almost everything branded or brandable. How, and why don’t we know more about it? This chapter provides a much-deserved critique of extant brand thought and highlights the considerable need for a sociological conception of brands. Analyzing brands as vessels of popular meaning used for promoting things, places, people, and ideas, the chapter also questions how existing research traditions restrict and retard the development of a meaningful social science of brands. Too much attention to social psychology and to consumer culture theory, and too little to traditional sociology, has meant that the general social and political processes that generate, animate, and transform brands have been sacrificed to the priorities of these dominant research traditions in marketing departments. We offer this critique in order to identify opportunities for generating empirical research tying together society, politics, and markets.

A Commentary on Aguirre: Taking Narrative Seriously

I explore the incorporation of the narrative approach in sociology, the role of sociologist as narrator, and why this approach is unsettling to traditional sociology, where tension exists between the postmodern implications of a narrative approach and our empiricist assumptions. A narrative approach represents an epistemological shift and should force us to interrogate the crucial role played by narrative in the construction of reality. Affirmative action provides a perfect example, as sociologists actively define and construct what constitutes affirmative action through narrative. I argue that taking narratives seriously is key to confronting anti—affirmative action narratives and denaturalizing white privilege.

Wyzwanie etnometodologii i nauka o normach

By levelling its criticism it traditional sociology ethnomethodology focuses directly or indirectly on the role of norms in description and explanation of human behaviour. Although sociologists respond to this criticism the way in which they accommodate it is rather superficial. That is why this article is written in the form of a dialogue. One protagonist quotes selected tenets of ethnomethodology, phrasing them as he would be apt to in the programmatic phase of the development of that discipline, while the other offers corrections and undertakes to analyse and evaluate the views that he hears. In the course of their discussion it becomes clear that, according to ethnomethodology, norms out of context have no bearing on behaviour which is always occasioned by particular circumstances hic et nunc. Yet, it would not be true to say that remembrance of norms never affects decisions responsible for individual behaviour, any more than it would be to say that ethnomethodology can dispense with objective language as allegedly incompatible with the very nature of social life. Additionally, the dichotomy ‘indexical versus objective language’ distorts the continuum of the contextuality of expressions beyond recognition. Thus we are left with the old problem, familiar to both practitioners and theorists of normative disciplines, the problem of interpretation, its ramifications are neglected by ethnometodologists. Application of a concrete norm to a concrete situation presupposes an interpretation of the situation, and in this sense, it is true that knowledge of norms is not sufficient for a description of the behaviour by a man who follows them. But a norm can play a role in the interpretation of a situation too. Besides, in their attempt to get rid of surface norms, ethnomethodologists create latent or interpretative norms whose ontological status is rather doubtful. Though they are reconstructed they need not be Identified with deep-structure norms which in fact have influence on human behaviour. In case when the two might conflict the ethnometodologists would be hard put to know what to say. But without precluding any answer to this query, it must be stressed that the interpretative procedures, as they have been reconstructed from ethnomethodological analyses, are vague and underdeveloped which is probably due to this vagueness of criteria with which ethnomethodology defines the object of its interests.