Annotation:
Foster explores the social life of Coca-Cola in a number of settings, focusing primarily on
Introduction:
Quotes & Reflections
"This second wave [of globalization] formed in the mid-1990s; it followed a wave of consolidation, centralization, and standardization in which The Coca-Cola Company, under the leadership of Roberto Goizueta from 1981-1997, aggressively promoted its flagship product as a universal beverage" (ix).
"According to Daft, 'The very forces making the world more connected and more homogenous are simultaneously triggering a desire to withdraw, pull the shades and safeguard whatever is uniquely local.' The necessary response to this backlash, Daft pronounced, is to think locally and to act locally - to develop new regional brands customized to local tastes and to push marketing decisions and managerial accountability down to the local level" (ix).
"According to Daft, 'The very forces making the world more connected and more homogenous are simultaneously triggering a desire to withdraw, pull the shades and safeguard whatever is uniquely local.' The necessary response to this backlash, Daft pronounced, is to think locally and to act locally - to develop new regional brands customized to local tastes and to push marketing decisions and managerial accountability down to the local level" (ix).
"Objectively, complex connectivity refers to the empirical linkages being established among diverse and physically separated people through movements of capital, media, and, of course, people themselves... Subjectively, complex connectivity refers to the ways in which these linkages are imagined by the people involved, the way in which an individual person's phenomenal world is extended - or foreshortened" (xiii).
"On the other hand, consumers use the commercial value of their brand loyalty to lobby corporations for a variety of goods and services, the delivery of which was once presumed to be the obligation and function of elected governments in promoting social welfare. The result is a distinctively non-democratic though not always negative form of contested governance in which consumers use their market role to act as citizens while corporations use their resources to act like states." (xix)
"I propose to use Coca-Cola soft drinks as symbols of an uncertain process of global connection in which people everywhere, including Papua New Guinea, give meaning to ordinary consumer commodities - though rarely under circumstances of their own devising" (xix).
"Commodities are thus mutable, and this mutability has been most clearly recognized by anthropologists who regard consumers as agents capable of appropriating commodities for ends not imagined by producers. But this mutability is not infinite, a limitation on consumption most clearly recognized by political economists who highlight the structural inequalities of complex connectivity, including basic inequality of access to consumer commodities" (xix).
"For instance, it is by aligning the perspectives of consumers with those of their own that agents on the supply side of worldly things capture the value of consumers' appropriation and use of a product - a complicated way, perhaps, to unpack the notion of "brand loyalty" (xx).
"After the war [WWII], the company explicitly attempted to fashion itself as a local business wherever it operated, such that all consumers everywhere would recognize Coca-Cola as an artifact of their home, however worldly a thing it might be. This attempt involved not only adjusting advertisements to various local sensibilities, but also using the franchaise system of independent bottlers to reembed the product in local social relations (as well as local supply chains). But the attempt gave way in the 1980s to a new globalizing impulse, one that involved the consolidation of bottlers and the emergence of global advertising" (xx).
Personal Reflections
1.) CSR campaigns are situated within the context of the second wave of globalization; the trend is to incorporate and internalize diversity in order to universalize a particular product. The Coca-Cola Company has attempted to digest some external criticisms, the byproducts are highly corporatized social responsibility campaigns.
2.) Important to make the distinction between corporate governance and democratic governance. Public relations and consumer driven campaigns might give the illusion of a democratic structure or that corporations are set up to allow feedback and dialogue, but they are ultimately beholden to their shareholders. This distinction becomes particularly important when corporations start taking on responsibilities that were traditionally carried out by governments. For instance, if a corporation is responsible for a shore cleanup project, there could potentially be less avenues for public input and oversight in the project since the work is not being implemented by public officials (who might be required by law to make the details of the project accessible and transparent).
3.) The rise of corporate power has signaled a shift in global governance, one that has transferred a lot of power and legitimacy into the private market. Yet, democracy cannot be translated into market terms. Characteristics of corporate governance include a kind of corporate citizenship and brand loyalty that is part of an interconnected imagined community of consumers. CSR campaigns attempt to embody the public service aspect of corporate governance- so that corporations can be viewed as state-like, but the big difference is that they do not have the democratic framework or channels that constitute a real democracy.
Chapter 1: The Social Life of Worldly Things
Quotes & Reflections
Chapter 1: The Social Life of Worldly Things
Quotes & Reflections
"The concept... shows that it consists of a sequence of actions, a series of operations that transform it, move it and cause it to change hands, to cross a series of metamorphoses that end up putting it into a form judged useful by an economic agent who pays for it" (7).
** Daniel Miller "key innovation has been to regard consumption as a form of labor or work: practical activity in which people meet an object world that confronts them as external and foreign and through which they fashion objectifications of themselves as social beings recognizable to themselves and to others. Miller thus resolves the existential dilemma of Marx's alienated worker, but in the realm of consumption rather than production" (11).
"It is through consumption work that people - often denied the opportunity to do so in their employment - project and contemplate themselves in an object world of , at least in part, their own making" (11).
"[Coca-Cola is] a master symbol of the consumerist ethic, a pause for self-indulgence" (14).
"Thomas's strategy reminds us that cross-cultural consumption is a multi-directional process or, to anticipate, that meanings and qualifications are being generated by all the agents assembled in a network of production, distribution, and exchange, a commodity or product network" (17).
"there is no guarantee that the intention of the producer will be recognized, much less respected, by the consumer from another culture" (17, quoting David Howes).
"The more completely commodities of exogenous origin are assimilated to a new social setting - perhaps they do not even strike anyone as foreign or out-of-place - the more such settings conceal social relations acting at a distance, much as Marx argued that all commodities conceal the social relations of their production" (18).
"these creative acts of reembedding unfold within a definite set of power relations that link local cola consumption to diverse national and transnational networks" (20, referencing Moffett).
"Consumption is under these circumstances a potential site of conflict since consumers must work with or against the localization or domestication strategies of corporations and their advertising agents" (24).
"Market research, including commercial ethnography, now plays a significant role in this process of capture or reappropriation - a process which can be seen as an organized attempt to short circuit the possibility of using commodities in ways for which they were neither designed nor advertised, to regulate the possibilities of qualification. Consumption work, the realization of specific use values in specific contexts, thereby becomes a potential source of value for brand owners" (29).
Personal Reflections:
1.) The world of objects obscures the processes of internalization, in which outside, external objects are immediately digested by individuals, between individuals and through fluid dialectical relationships between people and objects.
Chapter 2: Globalization, Citizenship, and the Politics of Consumption
Quotes & Reflections
"With the appointment of Douglas Daft as CEO in 2000, the company announced a renewed concern with the local, a withdrawal from an aggressively singular global strategy of marketing and a heightened sensitivity to multiple local differences in taste and preferences. This new or revived concern for the local also implied a significant reorganization of corporate structure, a decentralization of decision-making intended to make operations more responsive to fast changing local situations" (35).
"This joint venture between state and market actors reproduced an alliance that helped to expand consumption and to subsidize production of sugar in the eighteenth century" (38).
"The global high-sign campaign campaign thus signaled a transitional moment in the history of The Coca-Cola Company, a transition from being a national company to a multinational or global company - a transition not only in business operations, but also in self-perseption. It also signaled how globality was to be conceived, namely, as multilocality: a diversity of local places and customs organized within a common framework of agreed upon values" (43).
"The encounter with global modernity is here envisaged in elite cultural nationalist terms, even if articulated by a transnational corporation; the result is not Western monoculture but a distinctive national culture made out of the best features of diverse local traditions and global commodities" (46). (What does Foster mean by "best features"?)
Personal Reflections:
1.) Resistance to Coca-Cola, as a product and as a brand, has taken on a variety of forms, occurring primarily on the local level (although some local struggles have been internationalized). As Foster mentions, the Coca-Cola Company, under Daft's leadership, re-oriented their marketing strategy towards a more local approach. Part of this marketing project has included attempts to contain localized interpretations and reimaginations of the product and the brand. A localized marketing strategy helps the company to anticipate consumer demands and to control the dialogue and social organizations around the product. One way to address and process localizations is through Corporate Social Responsibility campaigns.
Personal Reflections:
1.) Resistance to Coca-Cola, as a product and as a brand, has taken on a variety of forms, occurring primarily on the local level (although some local struggles have been internationalized). As Foster mentions, the Coca-Cola Company, under Daft's leadership, re-oriented their marketing strategy towards a more local approach. Part of this marketing project has included attempts to contain localized interpretations and reimaginations of the product and the brand. A localized marketing strategy helps the company to anticipate consumer demands and to control the dialogue and social organizations around the product. One way to address and process localizations is through Corporate Social Responsibility campaigns.
2.) Alliances with the state have proved profitable for Coca-Cola in the past. Foster mentions how Coca-Cola was able to arrange a contract with the U.S. government to supply Coke products to U.S. soldiers abroad, which increased production and consumption significantly (and was how Coca-Cola was initially introduced to New Guinea).
3.) Although Coca-Cola attempts to be viewed as a part of local culture, and not as an imperial force, some of Coke's initial bottling plants in Latin and South America were established in concert with other U.S. multinationals (eg United Fruit Company in Guatemala) or as a result of U.S. military operations (eg New Guinea).
