Coda: sociology and the brand as a social fact

Describing the societies in which we live is a general Euro-American project, so Marilyn Strathern (this volume) says. She further notes that the interest of economists is that their descriptions are meant to help us act; even if their knowledge is not predictive, it is meant to stimulate future policy and/or market behaviour.

The normative guideline, the ethical principle, has already jumped from description to action; it pre-empts the connection. The anticipation of action is as much a condition of the description, we might say, as a consequence of it.... Action is already implied.

(Strathern, this volume)

I have argued here that abstraction, dynamism and indeterminacy are the characteristics of the social fact - or objectivity - of the contemporary artefact that is the brand. As a consequence while the brand may be totalising, it is not and cannot be a total fact (Mauss 1976). It is not a ‘bare fact’ but rather a ‘happening fact’ (Whitehead 1970). This is the source of its value as an object of contemporary capitalism, but it is also what makes it partial or open to other interests. I want to conclude by suggesting that sociologists need to be able to address this object - and others like it - not only in terms of the descriptive but also of the imperative. This would involve sociologists contributing to the implication of action in the object, and to the object in action, without becoming complicit in objectivity.

Notes

1 Although I will consistently speak about ‘the brand’ or ‘branding’, I hope I will not be taken too literally. There is no single thing at issue here, or even a single set of convergent processes. To understand my use of the phrase ‘the brand’ to imply a single, specific thing that is in all instances the same is to give what is at issue a kind of misplaced concreteness, to mislocate the abstract in the concrete, to present a complex artefact as an immediate matter of fact (Haraway 2000; Whitehead 1970). To put this another way, to assume that what I have called the brand is a single thing would be to mistake the layers of abstraction and processing that have gone into producing the brand. My aim is rather to see how the ‘thingyness’ or ‘objectivity’ of the brand is something that has gradually emerged slowly and unevenly over the last 150 years or so, and then more intensively but still not always coherently over the last 50 years. The method of working adopted has thus been working back from an object toward ‘the system of mutual implication, the system of regularities, and the coherent network of conditions of possibilities that give the object its body and its sense’ (Kwinter 2001: 215; Haraway 2000: 92-3, 95) and forward to the object as a possible set of relations and connections.

2 Of course the emergence of the brand is not the inevitable result of a single tendency (‘the rise of marketing’), there are multiple processes at issue, including developments in graphic and product design, media, accounting and law as well as retail management and marketing. The activities of the law in this regard are discussed in Lury, forthcoming.

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