The economy of qualities

To consider the qualification of goods as one of the central issues in the dynamic organization of markets makes the situations in which this qualification-requali- fication constitutes an explicit challenge for all the agents involved particularly interesting.

The singularization of goods

The economy of qualities is based above all on the singularity of the goods offered to consumers. In other words, what is sought after is a very close relationship between what the consumer wants and expects, on the one hand, and what is offered, on the other. Many authors have emphasized these interactions between supply and demand, as well as the personalization of products they allow and the progressive adjustments to which they give rise.¹⁸ But the perspective adopted here, that of the qualification of goods, allows us to enrich and complete existing analyses.

Let us consider the question from the demand side first: how do consumers perceive differences between products and how do they evaluate them? In other words, how do they qualify products and classify them by giving them an order of preference?

The answer to this question should avoid the explanation that immediately comes to mind which accepts the idea of a radical separation between supply and demand, with the product serving simply as an intermediary between the two.

group or social class that tries to distinguish itself or form an identity by adopting a position in relation to the preferences of other groups.¹⁹ From our point of view, this is impossible. The qualities of a product depend on the joint work of a host of actors and there is no reason to believe that consumers do not participate, like the other actors concerned, in the objectification of those qualities.²⁰

How, in these conditions, can we explain consumers’ participation in the qualification of the goods for which they (finally) express a demand? The best way of avoiding difficulties associated with the traditional concept of preference is to introduce the more realistic and now well-documented concept of distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995; Mallard 1996). The perception of differences and their evaluation, a dual operation that constitutes the exercise of judgement, implies a consumer immersed in a socio-technical system of which the different elements will each, in its own way, participate in the implementation of that dual operation. F Cochoy’s ethnography of supermarket customers is very instructive from this point of view (Cochoy 2002).

Cochoy is interested in the particularly disturbing case in which the consumer has to choose between two almost identical products.²¹ As he shows, this situation is very common. Moreover, advertisements often influence the paradox by adding a strange injunction: between these two identical products choose ours! Chamberlin was right.

How do consumers manage to grasp differences when products are so similar? How can I explain why I choose a Philips VCR rather than a Sony or, even more ordinarily, fruit yoghurts made by Danone rather than Nestle? To explain why and how consumers end up opting for one or the other, F. Cochoy points to the part played by two decisive mechanisms.

The first of these is the establishment of a socio-cognitive arrangement that situates the different products in relation to one another: a particular point on a shelf; packaging, the semiotic analysis of which shows that it helps simultaneously to characterize the product and to compare it with other seemingly similar products; and references added by the distributor. Advertising, studied so well by Chamberlin, is another element in this apparatus. Consumers are not alone, facing a product, left to determine its qualities. They are guided, assisted by material devices which act as points of reference, supports, affordances in which information is distributed.

But consumers also have a life outside the supermarket. For example, they have a family. The products they buy are tested in their home; collective evaluations are made; learning takes place, which gives rise to evaluations. More broadly, our consumers are caught in social networks in which tastes are formed, discussed and imitated. Moreover, these networks are not purely social. Tests and evaluations are always based on material devices in which bodies are involved (Teil 1998; Thevenot 1993). The lessons learned from them are sometimes synthesized in lists that consumers draw up with the people they live with before going shopping.

The economy of qualities 37 faced with a shelf offering a profusion of similar products, the list will enable them to rely on elements external to the situation. For some products and markets our consumers can also consult magazines or guides produced by specialists or consumer associations (Mallard 2000). In the case of high-tech goods or, more generally, products that are difficult to qualify (because objective tests are more difficult to carry out), these intermediaries play a crucial part, in some cases going so far as to organize what Hatchuel calls a prescriber’s market (Hatchuel 1995). We thus see the complexity of the process of judgement through which properties are attributed to products and evaluations are made. It is always, as Chamberlin so clearly saw, through the comparison and explanation of differences that these judgements are made. Such comparisons and explanations suppose the existence of a complex socio-technical device that supports the consumer in her evaluation work.

Let us now turn to the supply side. It has in common with demand the obsession with positioning products. How is it possible to ensure that consumers identify properties that they then evaluate positively? This question is crucial, as the consumers’ attachment and consequent profits depend on the answer! This clearly explains why all the firm’s activities and those of everyone involved in it turn around the positioning and qualification of the product. And the only way to go about it is by trial and error and the progressive learning it allows: trying some positions, observing consumers’ evaluations, trying to clarify their judgements, taking them into account when repositioning the product etc.²² As we have seen, and Chamberlin stressed this point, this work of requalification can concern either what common sense would tend to consider to be the materiality of the product (orange juice, its acidity, the origin of the pulp) or its presentation (its wrapping, its position on the shelf, or advertisements for it).

The distinction between supply and demand is useful for emphasizing the symmetry and similitude of behaviours of the different economic agents engaged in qualification. Yet it does have a major drawback: it makes the anonymous and collective work of market professionals invisible, despite the key role they play in the qualification-requalification of products. In the mass market these professionals working behind the scenes are legion and far more numerous than omnipresent, designers, packagers or merchandisers. Cecile Meadel and Vololona Rabeharisoa followed the career of orange juice from the orange groves of southern Spain to the display of the juice in a bottle in a range on a shelf (Meadel and Rabeharisoa, 1999). Different actors come onto the scene at different stages in the orange juice’s career: the taster who, in close collaboration with the buyer, stabilizes the properties of the juice when production first begins; the sales manager who displays the plastic from which the bottles are made; the advertising agency and its brief; the marketing services and the market surveys that prompt it to segment supply and demand so as to take into account profound changes; the tasting sessions organized with

different panels of uninformed consumers or informed professionals who are put into a position to reveal their tastes and judgements (Meadel and Rabeharisoa 2001). All these people working on qualification share a product which they shape and transform: the orange and itsjuice constitute their world. But they are simultaneously in a distant relationship.

This profiling which, when successful, results in the qualities of products corres­ponding exactly to those that consumers want, is concluded with consumers’ attachment to the goods they buy and consume: it is that particular bottle, that orange juice, that the customer in the supermarket prefers. This attachment to a singularized product cannot be disassociated from the configuration - through supply and demand - of an apparatus of distributed cognition in which information and references are spread out between many elements. The consumer’s preferences are tied into this apparatus. This is why they can be both stable and reconfigurable.

Detachment and different attachment

All attachment is constantly threatened. This mechanism is central in the question under consideration here. Competition between firms occurs precisely around this dialectic of attachment and detachment. Capturing or “attaching” consumers by “detaching” them from the networks built by rivals is the mainspring of competition.

How does this form of detachment occur? Answer: by getting consumers to requalify the different products offered to them, that is, by repositioning products in such a way that it becomes visible to consumers, so that they are prompted to embark on a new effort at evaluation.²⁴ One can speak of a calculative supply. But calculations do not simply concern prices and profits. They are mainly about products and their qualities.

A fairly simple way of understanding how this requalification operates is by turning once again to the demand side and adapting March’s distinction between decision-making based on consequences (logics of consequences) and routine decision-making (logics of appropriateness) (March 1994). It would be a mistake to have to choose between two opposite conceptions of the economic agent in general and the consumer in particular. Agents who follow routines and those who calculate and decide on the basis of the consequences of their choices, both exist. Moreover, those same agents, for example supermarket customers, generally swing from one position to the next, rapidly and sequentially.

Attached consumers are ones who are caught up in routines. They are driven by the distributed apparatus of qualification. The differences they perceive and the evaluations they make are stabilized, objectified. They buy goods, the qualities

The economy of qualities 39 of which are familiar. They grade them and then use those scales. In the case of the supermarket, consumers functioning according to routines push their trolleys around, always use the same list, when they use one at all, and go from shelf to shelf, never hesitating on the choice of the products they buy. It is always the same information that is mobilized and treated by the collective to which they belong.

Consumers engaged in the requalification process hesitate. They wonder what they should buy, are puzzled when faced with an impressive range of orange juices or when they notice a new product standing out among the others.

How does this switch operate? How is the same consumer, caught until then in routines, turned into a decision-maker? This is where one needs to turn to the supply side and towards professionals of qualification. They constantly try to destabilize consumers, to extract them from routines and prompt them to re-evaluate the qualities of products, hoping that that requalification might be favourable to them.

Cecile Meadel and Vololona Rabeharisoa take the example of an orange juice producer whose sales declined. To remedy the situation it decided to launch a product requalification project with the aim of changing the position of its products in the market. The origin of the oranges, the taste of the juice and its packaging (among other things) were changed. But customers still had to be informed of these changes. The strategy chosen, both simple and common, clearly illustrates the nature of the mechanisms at play in this switch. To the questions: “How to break the consumers’ attachment to their favourite brands? How to extract them from the routines they follow with a certain delight, and get them to grasp the bottle without thinking?” the solution devised by (re)qualification professionals offered an exemplary answer. The strategy consisted of reactivating the network in which customers were immersed by focusing, for example, initially on those consumers who were accompanied by their children. The idea was to attract the children’s attention by means of a prominent feature, for example a bottle offering a free Pokemon. The child would predictably detach herself from her father, pull him by the arm, force him to leave the routine he automatically followed, and put him in front of a product which, strictly speaking, he had not seen. A discussion between father and child would follow, which was likely to end in a purchase and, eventually, in attachment to a new brand. If the children’s network was effective, the new attachment would spread well beyond that single family unit.

This scene, so ordinary and obvious, is instructive. By acting on the collective in which consumers are immersed, that is, by giving weight to children’s evaluation, the supplier is in a position to attach consumers after detaching them from another network in which they are caught. The orange juice proposed, one quality of which is perhaps the slightly sweeter taste, but which has, above all, a connection with the Pokemon network, has been differentiated and has attached a new consumer. This clearly illustrates the general mechanism we wish to describe. It is through a reconfiguration of the socio-cognitive apparatus (the new orange juice stands out on the shelf and modifies the circle of those with whom customers are to interact and deliberate in revising their preferences and finally ending up with new judgements and evaluations) that detachment and reattachment are effected.

In the economy of qualities, this struggle for attachment and detachment is at the heart of competition. It entails the collective (re)qualification of the products that become strategic variables. The positioning of products and the shaping of preferences are endogenous variables that agents manipulate and calculate.²⁵ What we propose to show now is that the modalities of the organization it implies resemble those of the service economy as described by Jean Gadrey.

Service activities as the basis of the economy of qualities

Until now the validity of the subject of this chapter has been general. At no point did we raise the question of the distinction between material goods and service provision. The process of (re)qualification, whether it concerns an insurance contract, home care for the aged, a transport service, a fruit juice, a motor car or an apartment, follows the same logic. Forms of competition that are set up and centre around the struggle for attachment and detachment of customers to the goods offered to them likewise follow the same logic. Is it useful and of any interest, in these conditions, to revive problematic distinctions? Why not stick to the good­product twosome, rather than adding confusion by introducing criteria that flirt with metaphysics, like those of materiality or non-materiality of products?

That could be a possible strategy But it would have the drawback of overlooking the concerns of actors who talk increasingly about services or service relations, stressing the importance of users and the quality of the services offered. The service economy exists in reality, in official classifications and in the categories used by agents. Ignoring that would run counter to our aim which enjoins us to consider those agents as competent colleagues who know what they are saying and doing. It would also amount to not seeing that the economy of qualities, as defined above, easily encompasses what actors call service provision. What we would like to suggest hereafter is precisely that what we mean by the term service or service activity increasingly corresponds to forms of organization of markets in which the qualification of products is a central and constant concern. Perhaps the service economy is just another name given to the economy of qualities by the agents concerned and certain economists.

To demonstrate this in rough terms, let us start with Jean Gadrey’s definition (Gadrey 2000). According to him, any purchase of services by an economic agent B (individual or organization) is a purchase from an organization A of the right to use, for a specified period, a technical or human capacity possessed by A to produce (on agent B or on the goods that agent possesses) useful effects that do not have the form of new economic entities. On the basis of this definition, Jean Gadrey suggests distinguishing three service logics: request for intervention, making available and show, the definitions of which can be summarized as follows:

• In the case of the logic of a request for intervention, B (for example the owner of a car) addresses a request for intervention to A who is the owner of a set of human and technical capacities (the garage or mechanics workshop) the mobilization of which will allow B’s demand to be satisfied.

• In the case of the logic of making available, B, based on a simple decision, uses a technico-human capacity which functions and which A makes available to B in mutually agreed conditions.²⁶ Examples of such logics are transport, telephone and electricity.

• In the case of a show (or spectacle), B decides to attend, in conditions proposed by organization A or negotiated with it, a human performance (a play, an amusement park, a show on a river cruise, etc.) generally supported by technical devices.

The advantage of this definition, and of the resulting classification in three logics, is that it clearly demonstrates the link between service activities and the economy of qualities. The particular frame of the service relationship in which the service provision takes place has two consequences. First, it facilitates the setting up of the (reflexive) work through which the different agents engaged in the process pose and solve the problem of the singularization of products. Second, it facilitates the formulation and implementation of strategies aimed at managing consumers’ attachment to and detachment from the products offered to them.

In his definition,Jean Gadrey introduces the key concept of socio-technical capacity This socio-technical capacity consists in human competencies and material devices that have been designed and arranged in a way in which they can be mobilized in order to achieve desired results. In the request for intervention logic, it consists of a set of means for the purpose of investigation, control, maintenance and reparation, which combine instruments and machines but also specialized technicians who are mobilized in an organized way to produce the expected effects on B. In the making available logic, this technical capacity, often invisible to the user, may be considerable, as in the case of connection to an electricity, telecom­munication or the domestic water supply network. B, by lifting her telephone receiver, opening a tap or switching on her washing machine, sets in motion a complex arrangement of humans and non-humans whose actions have been adjusted in relation to one another and prepared for mobilization at any time and at any point of access to the network. The property of that socio-technical capacity is sometimes shared between different owners. A car rental network makes available its vehicles, its rental sales agents, its agencies and its maintenance and insurance services, but also takes advantage of the road infrastructure (a public good) that will enable its customers to travel about. In the logic of show, the manager of a theatre or amusement park and the organizer of a pleasure cruise on the Seine group together a series of participants, each of whom plays a part in a script or scenario prepared in advance and the realization of which would be impossible without the engagement of material mediums participating actively in the show (the Seine and the boat are needed, as are the theatre, its stage and comfortable seats, the projector: each of these non-human entities contributes, in its own unique way, to the show) (Akrich 1992).

In all these situations the beneficiary B acquires - and this is what the commercial transaction is about - a right to (specified) use of that socio-technical capacity. It is to repair B’s car that the garage is mobilized. It is to enable her to light her apartment that the turbines generate electricity year after year, that agencies carefully monitor her consumption and that high-tension lines criss-cross the countryside. It is for the audience’s pleasure that the actress repeats her monologue for the hundredth time, that the usherette leads people to the seats they have reserved on the Internet, etc. Service provision consists in the effects produced by the mobilization and reasoned use of this socio-technical capacity.

Thus defined, service provision is not radically different from other forms of goods placed on the market.²⁷ But owing to the key importance it gives to the relationship between the socio-technical capacity (in the seller’s hands) and the customer (who uses it), it allows greater reflexivity on activities of qualification and singularization. What we have suggested calling a socio-technical device, a device that enables us to think of qualification in terms of distributed cognition, is in fact very similar to what J. Gadrey calls socio-technical capacity. In the case of service provision, this socio-technical device occupies a central place, for the success of the service depends on it directly and quasi-perceptibly This can be expressed differently by emphasizing the fact that service provision, by allowing consumers to use this socio-technical capacity, organizes a system of action in which consumers participate personally in order to benefit from that use. In the course of the interaction thus constructed, they become elements in this system of action. They act, react and, most importantly, interact, thus gradually constructing and clarifying their preferences. Service provision is a machine (sometimes a machination) designed to reveal what customers want and progressively to construct the irreducible singularization of their demands along with their satisfaction.

It is with the use of new information and communication technologies that this logic of singularization reaches its peak. Take the pragmatic case of the Internet user. When she goes onto the Web through a portal, the Internet user is faced with a distributed cognition device that, in every sense, is comparable to the one described when we presented a supermarket customer hesitating in the choice between several orange juices. She first chooses between different providers and then between the different services proposed by the chosen provider. Most of her activity will consist of qualifying (i.e. classifying, evaluating and judging) the products offered to her, by comparing and relating them to others. This qualification, the generality of which we discussed above, is even more present, in a purer form, in the case of the Internet. With information renewed on the screen, with links and cross-references, and with scroll menus that multiply options from which users can and must choose, the Internet is a machinery that is entirely oriented towards the singularization of products. Whether the user is visiting the site of a supermarket or Club Internet, this qualification takes place within a distributed cognition device. But, in the latter case, it takes place through programs whose only function is to provide and link information so that consumers are in a position to make choices.

Not only do providers create and provide this system in which Internet users are immersed, they are also in a favourable position to monitor users, observe their preferences and, based on these observations, singularize the products offered to them. E-commerce companies hope to base their competitive lead on their ability constantly to observe customers making choices, linking products and

The economy of qualities 43 showing their preferences. Since they are able to record customers’ previous purchases and their reactions to new offers, suppliers end up knowing as much as customers themselves do about what they want and expect. This shared knowledge, which evolves as new experiences accumulate, is based on consumers’ engagement in a socio-technical device with which they interact and evolve.

In service provision, as defined by Gadrey, business is structured around this qualification process made possible by the establishment of the device and by the right granted to the customer to use it. From this point of view, new ICTs make an irreplaceable contribution. Between supermarket X and E-bay there is a difference not of nature but of degree. By mobilizing new ICTs, e-commerce makes the qualification and requalification of products the central concern in service provision.²⁸ The work of attachment is an obsession explicitly shared by all the actors, including the end user. Paraphrasing La Boetie, we could talk of consumers’ voluntary attachment to the products they qualify in close interaction with supply intermediaries, whether they are human or non-human. It is not by coincidence that, to describe these opportunities provided by e-commerce to qualify the user­consumer’s position, the two contradictory words “independence” and “depen­dence” are used: independence, because the Web multiplies openings, facilitates comparisons, etc.; dependence because it conversely promotes singularization and the attachments it allows.²⁹

We could multiply examples and consider the logics of show and intervention in order to demonstrate that service provisions are always part of the economy of qualities, because they focus on socio-technical capacities or devices, and promote their mobilization by customers prompted to participate in the process of qualifying the products intended for them. This is just one way of saying, in a more precise form, that what is important in the service business is the relationship or, rather, system of relationships which, on a material and collective basis, organizes the qualification of products. The emblematic nature of services is increasing even further with the development of information networks and computer technology

The second characteristic of service provision, as defined byJean Gadrey, is the character, both lasting and limited in time, of the consumer’s right to use the socio-technical device. This temporal framing facilitates the reasoned control and management of operations of attachment, detachment and re-attachment. It constitutes a sound base for the establishment of lasting relations, constantly re­evaluated, between service provider and customer.

Take the case of the car market. AsJean Gadrey points out, buying a car is fundamentally different from renting one.³⁰ Of what does this difference consist? Obviously, of the consumer’s lesser attachment to the product he consumes. As the owner of his car he will have to make greater investments to detach himself than if he were simply renting the car. A weaker attachment enables him, moreover, to participate more actively (because more frequently and on the basis of more recent experiences) in the singularization of the product he buys. Seen from the service provider’s point of view, rental enables him to concentrate on qualification of the product and on its renegotiation to answer questions such as: what are observable uses? how do they evolve? in what kind of business is such or such a type of customer?

This example, which has a general value, shows that the joint advantage for consumer and supplier in establishing a lasting use of the socio-technical capacity, while setting a limit in time to the relationship, is that it allows the increasingly intense and profound qualification of products and the singularization they afford. This relationship simultaneously encourages agents to focus on the returns from ongoing experience and to take them into consideration when renewing the contract and the service.

This collective work on the qualification of products and, consequently, on users’ attachment, implies consumers who are calculating rather than set in routines. This in itself implies a risk, for consumers with routines are unquestionably an advantage in the short term for the service provider: they remain attached, loyal, reliable. On the other hand, any attempt to experiment with what they want and hence to model their preferences is more difficult, if not impossible. In an economy where competition concerns the qualification of products (for the purpose of their singularization and the consumers’ attachment), a “routinized” consumer³¹ is a constant threat since interaction that has been interrupted can be taken up and re­established by a rival, who will thus adopt a position to detach the consumer by giving him back his ability to calculate, in order to swing him, with his active and calculated participation, towards new attachments.

The paradox is clear. In the economy of qualities it is preferable for the service provider to cooperate with the consumer and therefore to deal with a calculating consumer, at least on a regular basis without long intervals in-between. This is possible only by limiting the periods of routine attachment and by constantly calling into question the singularization of products proposed in order to launch new negotiations and adjustments of their (re)qualification. Service provision, as defined by Jean Gadrey, facilitates the detailed and regular management of this delicate balance between attachment and detachment. The right to use socio-technical capacities belonging to the service provider, for a limited period of time: this definition describes a frame that allows compatibility and complementarity between the entanglement of personal relations (and the collective deliberations they allow), on the one hand, and the possibility for agents to get out of these relations, to detach themselves in order to evaluate the advantages of new attachments, on the other.