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THE WORK OF THE NEW ECONOMY: Consumers,

Brands, and Value Creation

ROBERT J. FOSTER
University of Rochester

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND KNOWING CONSUMERS

Several years ago, as part of an internship with the New York office of a
transnational advertising agency, I was dispatched to do laundry. My destination:
Astoria, Queens, where I visited the home of Lois, a white, married, 40 something,
college-educated, middle-income mother of two school-age girls. Lois had been
previously identified by the agency as a brand loyalist—someone whose last six
purchases of laundry detergent were of a brand that I shall call “Wave.”
During a previous one-on-one interview at the agency, a Wave account planner
asked Lois to make two collages by cutting and pasting pictures from dozens of glossy
magazines spread out across a conference table. One collage expressed how Lois
felt when her dirty laundry had piled up or when a favorite piece of clothing had
become irremediably stained; the other collage expressed how Lois felt after she
had finished washing and drying her clean laundry. My field trip, during which Lois
and I did a load of whites together, was intended to follow up the office visit both by
comparing word and deed and by gleaning bits of the laundry process that had not
been gathered in the interview. The goal of my qualitative research was, in effect,
to ascertain the unspoken emotional and symbolic implications of doing laundry by
determining the social contexts and relations that Lois constructed through her use
of Wave detergent.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 22, Issue 4, pp. 707–731. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360.  C 2007 by
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reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.4.707.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4

What exactly was at stake for this advertising agency in knowing Lois’s laundry
habits? The agency’s explicit concern with the affective dimensions of the person–
product relationship has now become a central preoccupation of brand managers,
especially within the fast-moving consumer goods industry (see O’Shauaghnessy
and O’Shaughnessy 2003). This preoccupation is succinctly formulated in the idea
of Lovemarks. Lovemarks, according to Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi
& Saatchi Advertising, are what represent the next step in the evolution of brands.
Lovemarks are brands that are not simply respected and trusted, but loved. Love-
marks possess a “special emotional resonance” (Roberts 2004:74; see also Love-
marks.com n.d.). They signal an emotional connection and attachment to a brand
that goes beyond reason—and for which a premium price can be charged. At stake,
then, in Lois’s laundry habits was the particular love for her family that she per-
formed in washing their clothes with Wave. At stake was the possibility of tapping
into this love and rendering it a quality of a particular laundry detergent—of rep-
resenting the Wave brand as the sign and instrument of the close kin relationships
made and remade in the act of doing laundry.
Kevin Roberts’s discourse on the relationships between persons and products
and thus the relationships among consumers, companies, and brands is not merely
the breathless hyperbole of a high-octane salesman. Over the last few years, one
could hear similar talk in the sober corporate reports of heavily branded consumer
goods. For example, The Coca-Cola Company 2002 annual report, pertinently
entitled “Creating New Value,” asserts “The creation of new value begins with a
commitment to innovation—the kind of insight, creativity and determination that
brings to life new ideas, new products and new consumer experiences.” Value cre-
ation so defined hinges on managing relations between consumers and the brand.
Douglas Daft, then-CEO of the company, explained to “shareowners” that: “Re-
sponsibility for the world’s most beloved and valuable brand requires extreme care
in how, when and why we extend it. We don’t risk consumer loyalty to the brand
or seek an artificial bump in volume by spinning out product after product to chase
the latest fad. But we do ask ourselves continually how we can bring more people
to Coca-Cola.”
Not only must brand extensions in the form of Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, and
so forth be made judiciously but the brand must also be associated with people’s
emotional experiences; or as the report proclaims, “Value is: connecting with the
world’s passions.” On a global scale, this requirement motivates the company’s
sponsorship of both the Olympic Games and soccer’s International Federation of
Football Association (FIFA) World Cup tournament—“the world’s only truly global
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sporting events.” It also underwrites the efforts of The Coca-Cola Company to

reproduce demand for its beverages; or as the report proclaims, “Value is: refreshing
a new generation of consumers.” From its television sponsorship of American Idol
to its nightclub marketing in Europe, the company pursues unconventional ways
to forge “deep connections” with teens and young adults, ways “to speak to them
on their terms—and on their turf.” Underlying these various initiatives is a single
goal: “to create experiences for young consumers that are rewarding, unexpected
and true to The Coca-Cola brand.” Like Kevin Roberts, then, Daft clearly identifies
the dynamic relationships between consumers and companies—relationships that
are mediated by brands—as integral to the process of creating (new) value. Value
creation so defined thus involves both providing products that meet the needs of
consumers and providing shareholders with attractive returns on their investments.
My goal in this article is to apprehend claims about person–product rela-
tionships circulating in the world of business by means of cognate ideas born of a
merger between science studies (see Latour 2005a) and economic sociology (see
Granovetter and Swedberg 2001). These ideas presuppose the embeddedness of
economic action in shifting networks or assemblages of people and things (human
and nonhuman actors), and they call attention to the agency distributed within such
networks. I refer specifically to the work of Michel Callon and his colleagues and
to their notion of “the economy of qualities” (Callon et al. 2002). I pose two sets
of related questions. First, can we translate the marketing claim that relationships
between consumers and corporate brands define a locus of value creation into the
terms of Marx’s theory of value; and how might this translation revise not only the
marketing claim but also Marx’s understanding of surplus value creation?
For Karl Marx, the labor process under capitalism produces a commodity or
use-value that has value in exchange—an exchange value that is, moreover, greater
than the sum of the values of the commodities consumed in its production. This
surplus value creation occurs outside the sphere of circulation, in the hidden abode
of production, in which that peculiar commodity, labor power, is consumed. Such
“productive consumption,” according to Marx, differs from “individual consump-
tion”; the latter “uses up products, as means of subsistence for the living individual”
(1967:183). For Marx, “the product, therefore of individual consumption, is the
consumer himself; the result of productive consumption, is a product distinct from
the individual” (1967:183). Is there a way to understand business claims about
person–product relationships by locating surplus value creation in practices of what
Marx called “individual consumption,” that is, in the production of consumers them-
selves or in the consumption of commodities other than labor power? Is there a
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way, in other words, to recover the place of use-value—the useful qualities of

products—in the creation and extraction of surplus value?
Second, can we translate the claim that value creation hinges on a dynamic rela-
tionship between corporations and consumers into terms of a theory of participatory
democracy? That is, what sort of political potential might inhere in this relationship?
In particular, how might this relationship endow consumers with agency not only in
value creation but also, to borrow Bruno Latour’s (2005b) phrase, in making things
public? I suggest that the sociotechnical networks that form around the movement
of commodities variously enable consumers to address matters of concern and per-
force to constitute themselves as publics—as affiliations performed by attempts to
hear themselves and make themselves heard on a particular subject (cf. Warner
2002)? I here follow some recent attempts to recover from Walter Lippman (1925)
and John Dewey (1946) the notion of a public as a group of people that emerges
with reference to a matter of concern, that is, a matter identified and evinced as
negatively affecting people uninvolved in producing the matter in the first place (see
Callon 2005; Latour 2005b; Marres 2005). “For,” as Dewey put it, “the essence of
the consequences which call a public into being is the fact that they expand beyond
those directly engaged in producing them” (1946:27; see Marres 2005:214).
Such publics emerge, most notably, around “corporate externalities,” the costs
of a corporation’s doing business passed on to other people by its managers and
shareholders; and these publics emerge on an expanded spatial scale as the com-
modity networks connecting diverse economic actors extend across vast distances.
Thus, for example, “fair trade” publics have emerged in the United States and
Europe around concerns over the conditions under which farmers grow and sell
tropical food commodities—coffee, bananas, and cocoa—in Peru, Jamaica, and
Ghana. How, then, might such publics shape or disrupt processes of value creation
in the economy of qualities—especially when the value of brands is understood by
their owners to depend not merely on the trust of consumers but on nothing less
than the active love of consumers?
I approach the issue of value creation through a brief explication of Callon’s
notion of “the economy of qualities” and its resonance with the claims of current
business rhetoric, and I subsequently take up the question of surplus value that
neither Callon nor the business literature engages. I address the question of com-
modity networks and consumer agency through a discussion of two types of images
drawn from my research into the sociotechnical lives of an iconic global commodity:
branded soft drinks. (Soft drinks, like laundry detergents, are consumer items that
rely heavily on brand identity to distinguish themselves from their competitors.)
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FIGURE 1. Dancers pose at the 2006 Goroka Show, an annual cultural festival held in the
Highlands of Papua New Guinea. (Photograph by Jan Hoeksema.)

The first type of image engages a common ironic and playful qualification of soft
drinks as modern complements to traditional ways of life. This example was taken
at a popular cultural festival in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (see Figure 1).
The second type of image suggests a serious and critical qualification of soft drinks
as signs of corporate globalization, as threats to all ways of life. This particular
example was taken during a student protest against The Coca-Cola Company at
Yale University (see Figure 2). Both types of images raise questions about the limits
and possibilities of consumer agency in the economy of qualities for assembling a
public around matters of concern.

THE ECONOMY OF QUALITIES

The significance of the deep emotional connections that marketing executives
so purposively seek can be appreciated as a function of the way that Callon defines
a product as mutable or never quite finished:
A product . . . is an economic good seen from the point of view of its produc-
tion, circulation and consumption. The concept (producere: to bring forward)
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 meta-
morphoses that end up putting it into a form judged useful by an economic
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FIGURE 2. Yale University, March 31 2004. Then-CEO of The Coca-Cola Company Douglas
Daft lectures on ethics while surrounded by a “die in” of students protesting the company’s
alleged complicity in antiunion violence in Colombia. Yale Daily News, 1 April 2004.
(Photograph by Stephanie Dziczek. Reproduced with permission.)

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agent who pays for it. During these transformations its characteristics change.
[Callon et al. 2002:197]

In other words, the product is a variable, a contingent outcome of negotiations—

even conflict—around the qualification of goods (see Ponte and Gibbon 2005).
This process of “evaluation,” of qualifying and requalifying products, unfolds at all
moments in the biography or career of a product—design, manufacture, marketing,
use, recycling, and so forth. But at certain moments, the qualities of a product
are stabilized; the product becomes a “good,” its list of qualities closed at least
temporarily.
Callon echoes contemporary marketing rhetoric in asserting that consumers
are just as active as any other economic agent—designers or advertisers, for
example—in qualifying products: “There is no reason to believe that agents on
the supply side are capable of imposing on consumers both their perception of qual-
ities and the way they grade those qualities” (Callon et al. 2002:201). Accordingly,
the product, understood as a sequence of transformations or as a process of qualifi-
cation and requalification, links consumers into the different networks coordinating
all the agents involved in production, design, and so forth—agents who most likely
never encounter each other face to face or even know of each other’s existence
in precise terms: “The product singles out the agents and binds them together
and, reciprocally, it is the agents that, by adjustment, iteration and transformation,
define its characteristics” (Callon et al. 2002:198). Hence, the product implies a
dynamic “economy of qualities,” an economy in which tradable goods in the market
are defined by the characteristics attributed to them in successive qualifications and
requalifications, including those enacted by consumers.
I should be careful here not to imply that the economy of qualities refers to some
version of a “new economy” thought to be less material than the “old economy”—
concerned more, for example, with signs and meanings than with physical or
material objects, or more with services than with goods. Instead, I emphasize that
the notion of an economy of qualities helps to apprehend a change in the conditions
of stability and instability of products. As the sociologist Don Slater insists: “it is not
that commercial objects have become more like signs, but that things in general have
become sites of intense social and economic contestation such that they have become
increasingly provisional and incipiently unstable as materialities” (2002:96). That
is, instability is always a property of products and, thus, always a potential resource
to be mobilized by the various actors (including nonhuman actors) networked
by products (Slater 2002:98). In this sense, the economy of qualities describes
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nothing historically new or exclusive to market transactions; it is a concept that,

for example, makes visible aspects of economic activity in “gift societies” as well as
in “commodity societies.” Indeed, Callon’s observation about the mutual definition
of agents and products directly recalls Nancy Munn’s trenchant remarks about
kula shells: “Although men appear to be the agents in defining shell value, in fact,
without shells, men cannot define their own value; in this respect, shells and men are
reciprocally agents of each other’s value definition” (1983:283). However, as Slater
notes, the extent to which specific practices (marketing, brand consultancy, and
design) reflexively alter the qualities of products to secure competitive advantage
has now brought the dynamics of stabilization and destabilization into the very
center of capitalist markets for consumer goods. What do these dynamics look like
to Callon?
For Callon (2001), one symptom of the current economy of qualities is what he
calls “voicy consumers.” The voicy consumer is an active consumer—but not merely
the now-familiar figure who far from being a passive dupe is, in certain instances,
an efficacious agent of subversion and resistance. Callon’s voicy consumers are as
much the precondition of the economy of qualities as they are its undoing. That
is, designers, manufacturers, and marketers welcome and invite voicy consumers
to involve themselves in the qualification of products—to criticize, to share their
feelings, and to interact with other consumers. In its ideal form, then, the economy
of qualities entails a fit between qualifications on the supply side and qualifications
on the demand side—a fit that needs constant monitoring and adjustment, but
nonetheless a more or less stable fit. Such stable fits allow consumers, much like
Marx’s figure of homo faber, to contemplate themselves in a product that reflects
their own singular qualities. At least for a while.
Voicy consumers, however, are also potential sources of destabilization, sources
for the production of new identities and new groups that exceed the capacity of
any firm to anticipate and guide the movements and transformations of a product.
The result is a tension integral to the economy of qualities: “In the economy of
qualities consumers are thus a constant source of overflowing. And it would be
counter-productive to simply suppress these overflowings, because in order to
function, markets of the economy of qualities need them” (Callon 2001; see Callon
1998). Consumer overflowings, then, are sources of innovation and competitive
advantage for a firm as well as sources of uncertainty and challenges to expertise and
authority.
The tension that Callon diagnoses in contemporary economic processes ap-
pears as a practical challenge in contemporary business literature. The threat of
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the voicy consumer—“better informed, more critical, less loyal, and harder to
read” (Roberts 2004:35)—haunts this literature. How to reckon with this tough
character? The consensus seems to be, as the notion of Lovemarks demonstrates,
by attempting to incorporate and manage the requalification or destabilization of
products as part of normal business. Even if this sort of management has been going
on since Josiah Wedgwood invented product placement in the 18th century, my
point again is that such reflexive intervention on the part of firms into the processes
whereby products are qualified and materialized has become central to commercial
practice (see Slater 2002). Methodologically, such management exercises require
microsociology and detailed ethnography—including field trips to Queens to do a
load of whites—methods that market researchers share with proponents of science
and technology studies. Theoretically, the reflexive management of qualifications
requires of businesses new ways of thinking about value creation, to which I now
turn.

VALUE (CO-)CREATION
Callon’s notion of the economy of qualities complements the claims of contem-
porary business literature that value creation is a process of cooperation between
producers and consumers. The business literature, as already indicated, represents
this process as essentially cooperative, a long-term relationship of intimacy and re-
spect, an enduring yet evolving love affair between equal partners. C. K. Prahalad
and Venkat Ramaswamy, both professors of business, have recently theorized how
the “interaction between the firm and the consumer is becoming the locus of value
creation” (2004a:5; see also 2004b). More precisely, this interaction is the locus
of “cocreating” value. That is, consumers now no longer merely purchase offerings
autonomously created by the firm, but instead engage in personalized interactions
with the firm with the aim of cocreating products and services that realize desired
outcomes. This engagement has been identified as a trend, dubbed “Customer-
Made” and defined as “The phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services
and experiences in close cooperation with experienced and creative consumers,
tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in
(and rewarding them for) what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed,
designed, serviced, or processed” (Trendwatching.com n.d.).
More radically, Prahalad and Ramaswamy see the roles of production and con-
sumption, producer and consumer converging in the cocreation of experiences that
deliver “unique” value to consumers. That is, these experiences and the interac-
tions that facilitate them necessarily vary from individual consumer to individual
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consumer. They vary because firms can never fully control or manage how individual
consumers will go about the cocreation of their experiences. Firms that pay attention
to such variable cocreation experiences, Prahalad and Ramaswamy argue, enable
consumers to cocreate value that these same consumers are “by design, ‘willing
to pay for’ ” (2004a:13). Such firms therefore put themselves in a position to
defend against the “commoditization” of their products and services. By commodi-
tization, Prahalad and Ramaswamy mean a process by which competition renders
price the only quality relevant to consumers; that is, commoditization results in
consumers seeking the lowest price possible for products regarded as generic and
interchangeable.
To be fair, Prahalad and Ramaswamy also recognize that firms and consumers
are not only cooperators but also competitors. (Indeed, one of Prahalad and Ra-
maswamy’s [2000] earlier articles was bluntly entitled “Co-Opting Consumer Com-
petence.”) Firms and consumers compete in the extraction of value from cocreation
experiences; firms and consumers coextract as well as cocreate value This agonistic
aspect of the joint labor in value creation is slightly more pronounced in Callon’s
representation of the economy of qualities. Callon talks of “conflict and negotia-
tion around the qualification of goods” (Callon et al. 2002:197). He locates the
qualification of goods at “the heart of economic competition and the organization
of markets,” a process that “different economic agents can manipulate to suit their
strategic goals” (Callon et al. 2002:200). And these economic agents include not
only competing firms but also consumers whose attachment to particular goods is
always contingent, a function of qualifications or evaluations that are never final.
The danger of inattention to cocreation against which Prahalad and Ramaswamy
warn thus signals a basic paradox that Callon’s current economy of qualities presents
to firms:
In the economy of qualities it is preferable for the service provider to co-
operate 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. [Callon et al.
2002:211–212]

In other words, because of the constant need for a firm to stay in touch with the
consumer’s qualifications, the reflexive destabilization of products moves to the
center of marketing practice.
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Both versions of value creation—Callon’s competitive game and Prahalad

and Ramaswamy’s cooperative interaction—sidestep Marx’s question of surplus
value. What are the implications of “cooperation” or joint labor in the process of
value creation for our understanding of the appropriation of surplus value and the
generation of profits? In what ways, in particular, is the labor of the active or voicy
consumer a source of surplus value in the economy of qualities? These questions
require further consideration of the nature of use-value.

BRAND VALUE AND SURPLUS VALUE

Consider brands. The economic value of brands is now measured by such
devices as the annual Interbrand–BusinessWeek survey, according to which the
brand Coca-Cola was worth $67.5 billion in 2005, about 64 percent of the company’s
market capitalization (Interbrand n.d.). No doubt brands are built through the
various strategies deployed by brand owners with regard to marketing; but brands
held as corporate assets are also produced by consumers, through the everyday
practices in which consumers use branded goods to create social relations and
shared meanings and affect. This sort of consumer productivity unfolds beyond the
reach of the firm; it is an external productivity that firms increasingly seek to tap if
not appropriate. Brands thus translate the particular use-values created by the labor
of consumers (through and outside interactions with firms) into a more general and
comparable value form.
Kevin Roberts recognizes this translation in his claim that “Brands aspiring to
be Lovemarks must develop intuitive listening skills and ways to harvest stories of
their consumer experiences” (2004:90). Recall how Lois’s orientation and devotion
to her family was performed in the laundry process. There was only one hamper in
the tidy three-bedroom two-level row house. It was a white wicker basket located
next to the washing machine and dryer, which were located on the ground floor
in a converted closet space adjacent to the family room. Each family member was
responsible for depositing his or her dirty clothes in this hamper. Similarly, family
members would deposit dirty towels in the hamper after showering in the house’s
only bathroom, which was also located on the ground floor. Lois was the sole person
responsible for sorting through the hamper, separating the clothes into whites and
colors, and washing and drying the clothes. Occasionally her daughters would help
Lois sort and fold the dried clothes and bring them to their rooms; Lois’s husband,
however, never participated in the laundry process and she put his clothes away
for him. She was the person responsible for accomplishing the orderly and regular
transformation of the dirty clothes collected in the family hamper and supervising
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the return of clean clothes to each separate family member’s closet or dresser. Lois’s
laundry routine thus constructed a set of kin relations that defined her as the person
responsible for caring for the household’s clothing. These kin relations, and the force
of moral personhood implicated therein, stretched beyond the bounds of Lois’s own
household. It is hardly irrelevant—and completely consistent with the agency’s
profile of brand loyalists—that Lois began using Wave on the recommendation of
her mother, who also used the brand.
Stories such as Lois’s alert brand owners to the ways in which consumers
use products in myriad personal projects of self-fabrication and, especially, infuse
certain products with emotion; for, as Kevin Roberts notes, “best of all, emotion
is an unlimited resource” (2004:43). Getting in touch or emotionally connecting
with consumers is thus a precondition for translating consumption work—the use
of products—into surplus value. (By consumption work, I refer to the social prac-
tices by which persons transform products into artifacts “invested with particular
inseparable connotations” [Miller 1987:190]). This translation involves treating the
production of consumers themselves, to recall Marx’s terms—the production of
their subjectivity—as a source of value creation from which surplus value can be
extracted. How is this translation accomplished?
I submit that consumption is a form of labor open to exploitation analogous to
wage labor (see Foster 2005). Adam Arvidsson (2005:237) similarly suggests that
consumers, active and creative, produce an “ethical surplus”—“a social relation, a
shared meaning, an emotional involvement that was not there before”—in their use
of branded goods. That is, consumers use goods to produce a “common”—a com-
municative context within which goods can acquire use-values. Brand management,
then, is all about guiding and anticipating this productive process without suppress-
ing the creativity and autonomy of consumers. For Arvidsson, brand management
exploits consumers in two ways: quantitatively, by absorbing the time consumers
put into creating a common, and qualitatively by establishing the production of a
common through communicative interaction on the premise of brands as necessary
means of production.
Put otherwise, brands represent the appropriation of the appropriations of
branded goods by consumers. This way of putting things emphasizes the “marks”
in Lovemarks, for despite rhetorical claims to the contrary, brands that qualify as
Lovemarks are the legally protected intellectual property of brand owners. Ac-
cordingly, the premium price that consumers pay for brands represents a charge
levied for access to the meanings, social relations, and affect that consumers
themselves have produced (see Coombe 1998). Jones Soda Company (n.d.), a
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Seattle based soft-drink firm and a clear example of the phenomenon of “Customer-
Made,” regularly changes the labels on its glass bottles. These labels feature
black and white photographs—of landscapes, children, or cars—submitted by
consumers of Jones Soda. According to a New York Times business report, “To
Charge Up Customers, Put Customers in Charge” (Taylor 2006), Jones cus-
tomers can order for $34.95 a 12-pack that features their own photographs—
“a form of Internet-enabled personalization that is the company’s highest-margin
business.”
Given that the creativity and agency of consumers is always productive of
new meanings, relations and affect, brands thus function for their owners as stable
platforms for the perpetual destabilization or requalification of products. Herein
perhaps lies the significance of the distinction between goods and services in defining
a “new economy”: goods that consumers once owned are now effectively services
that consumers lease on a continuing basis. It is as if the new economy is a version
of the (really old) kula economy, in which what Malinowski called “cumulative
possession” is the norm: shell valuables must always, sooner or later, be passed on to
one’s partners. That is, what the new economy reflects is not the dematerialization
of things into events, but a shift from the permanent transfer of ownership of
things to the ongoing rental of things. In buying branded goods, consumers pay
again and again to recover the outcomes and means of their own productivity and
subjectivity.
Brand management, then, is ideally a solution to the paradoxical problem
identified by Callon, on the one hand, and by business writers like Prahalad and
Ramaswamy, on the other hand. Voicy consumers need to be actively engaged, their
creativity and innovation encouraged as part of the never-ending quest to requalify
products for purposes of competitive advantage. At the same time, this agency and
innovation needs to be anticipated and guided, contained within the parameters
of a brand’s identity. Consumer overflowings are welcome to the extent that they
develop the brand in certain directions, but unwelcome to the extent that they
exceed the frames of permissible or manageable use. What sort of possibilities for
a politics of value (creation) does this delicate task of managing the economy of
qualities open up and shut down? For if the reflexive destabilization of products
preoccupies marketing executives, then it is fair to say that it also preoccupies many
consumers. What sort of possibilities for alternative forms of joint action—for
making new publics—emerge as the commodity networks enrolling consumers
lengthen to include “actors and interests operating at different spatial scales” (Slater
2002:106)?
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FIGURE 3. Alphonse Hega’s second entry for the 1998 Coca-Cola PNG national calendar
competition. (Photograph by Alphonse Hega [see Hirsch 2004].)

MAKING THINGS PUBLIC IN THE ECONOMY OF QUALITIES

These questions can be taken up through two separate cases of the dynamics of
(de)stabilizing products. Although quite different, both cases hinge on the evaluation
of commodities stamped with the same iconic global brand.
Case One. In 1997, the Coca-Cola bottler in Papua New Guinea (PNG) spon-
sored a competition in which people were invited to send photographs for inclusion
in the annual company calendar. Contestants were advised to take “everyday pho-
tos” of people drinking and enjoying Coca-Cola (Hirsch 2004, n. 5). Figures 3
and 4 are photographs taken and submitted by Alphonse Hega; Figure 4 was one
of the 12 winners. Hega told anthropologist Eric Hirsch, whose account I draw
on here, that the photos were part of a more general strategy to represent the
people in Hega’s home area in a positive manner and to record their “culture”
(Hega’s term). The people in Hega’s home area, the mountainous Goilala District,
have acquired a reputation for criminal activity in nearby urban Port Moresby.
Goilala people are also acutely aware of their exclusion from the economic devel-
opment that Port Moresby symbolizes to them. In this regard, Hega’s photographs
extended his previous involvement in Christian evangelism and youth education
as vehicles for changing the “the bad name of the Goilala” and for asserting be-
longing in a larger translocal community (Hirsch 2004:22; see also Hirsch 1994,
1995).
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FIGURE 4. Alphonse Hega’s winning entry for the 1998 Coca-Cola PNG national calendar
competition. (Photograph by Alphonse Hega [see Hirsch 2004].)

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Hega clearly regarded the calendar competition as an opportunity to requalify

Goilala “culture”; his horizon encompassed a national field of diverse yet comparable
entities or “other cultures.” But Hega was also mindful that the Coca-Cola bottling
company regarded the competition as a means for qualifying its flagship product.
He therefore chose, Hirsch tells us, a “familiar and frequently used motif in order
to create the appropriate effect on the judges: the juxtaposition of ‘traditional’ and
‘modern’ ” (2004:28). In so doing, Hega produced a version of an image with which
many Papua New Guineans are long familiar from commercial advertising for soft
drinks (for one pertinent and striking example of a Coca-Cola television ad that ran
in PNG during the late 1990s, see K. and K. McGrath n.d.; see other examples in
Foster 2002 and discussion in Foster in press). In fact, the image of an exotically
dressed Native brandishing a soft drink is coeval with the coming of Coca-Cola to
PNG. Precisely this image graced the cover of the June 1967 issue of Coca-Cola
Overseas, The Coca-Cola Company’s in-house magazine for international bottlers,
which announced the arrival of a Coca-Cola bottler in the then-UN Trust Territory
of Papua and New Guinea. Hega thus made use of a recurrent visual trope—found in
travel photography, commercial advertising, and even anthropology textbooks—for
making both “culture” and “culture contact” perceptible and intelligible.
Hirsch notes in passing that during one seminar presentation of an account of
the calendar competition, participants criticized Alphonse Hega on the grounds that
he had allowed himself to be used by the Coca-Cola marketing apparatus and had
become complicit in projects of cultural imperialism and global capitalist exploita-
tion (2004: n.18). Yet Hega was explicitly and deeply concerned about cultural
imperialism: “Introducing [other] people’s culture in our place and not sticking
to our own—we will forget our own—our children will think it is ours but it is
introduced” (Hirsch 2004:35). Hega flatly rejected a marketing rhetoric that of-
ten deployed the native-with-soft drink image to conjure a happy convergence of
indigenous and foreign customs in the form of a new generation of Papua New
Guineans (see Foster 2002:52). Nevertheless, Hega knew what he needed to do to
win the contest and thus further the goal of making public “his culture” on favorable
terms. As Hirsch notes: “[Alphonse] can only make use of what he has at his disposal”
(2004:36).
Alphonse Hega’s photographs illustrate the dynamics of value creation in the
economy of qualities as outlined by Callon (and Prahalad and Ramaswamy). His
creativity and innovativeness were stimulated by an invitation from the Coca-Cola
bottler—an invitation to use a corporate-sponsored calendar contest as a sociotech-
nical device for making his culture public. Hega seized the opportunity as a chance
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to publicize the autonomy and value of “a culture”—his culture, orphaned by the

agents of economic development. But the opportunity was constrained by Hega’s
effort to articulate a vision of Goilala culture that conformed to his idea of what
the Coca-Cola bottling company anticipated. Hega sought to make Goilala culture
intelligible in terms that he was confident would be understood. His effort thus
clearly fell within the limits and lineage of a managed brand identity; indeed, it
stabilized that brand identity. No apparent overflow.
Whether Hega was successful in his project of requalifying Goilala culture by
piggybacking on the marketing scheme of a transnational soft drink company is an
open question. I have my doubts, however, about its efficacy in assembling the public
that Hega had in mind. Hega’s reproduction of a “familiar and frequent” image of
the modern primitive did not even mobilize Hirsch’s university seminar audience.
I am uncertain, then, about whom, if anyone besides people reading these words,
Hega’s picture brought together around his concern about the unjust and inaccurate
perception of Goilala culture. I am more confident, however, that the Coca-Cola
bottler was satisfied with its own efforts to qualify its products through the agency
and creativity of Alphonse Hega—and perforce harness that creativity and agency
as a source of surplus value, despite the fact that in this case Hega himself had
no emotional investment in branded Coca-Cola products other than a profoundly
negative one.
Case 2. Figure 5 stands in not only for an array of attempts to redefine the
terms of intelligibility for brand Coca-Cola, but also for a more successful political
outcome: the organization of a public around a particular matter of concern, a con-
cern more distributed—that is, impinging on more actors and interests, operating
at more and different spatial scales—than Alphonse Hega’s concern.
In July 2005, Internet news sites circulated stories about Sharad Haksar, a well-
known commercial photographer based in the city of Chennai (Haskar n.d.; see
also Chadha 2005). According to reports, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Private
Ltd., a subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Company for whom Haksar had done work
in the past, threatened Haksar with legal action on the grounds that he had caused
“ ‘incalculable’ damage to the goodwill and reputation of the brand Coca-Cola”
(Bhattacharya 2005). At issue was a large billboard that Haksar had placed in a busy
area of Chennai. The billboard displayed a photograph of Haksar’s that depicted a
dry water pump with four empty pots lined up next to it and waiting to be filled. In
the background, painted white on a red wall, appear the words “Drink Coca-Cola,”
the name of the soft drink written in its familiar, distinctive, and trademarked
script.
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4

FIGURE 5. Chennai, India, June 2005: Billboard with controversial picture by Sharad Haksar
on busy street. (Picture courtesy of Getty Images/AFP.)

A Coca-Cola spokesperson referred to Haksar’s 20 foot by 30 foot billboard as

an “infringement of our trademark” (Bhattacharya 2005). The letter sent to Haksar
by the law firm representing Hindustan Coca-Cola characterized the billboard as
“a deliberate attempt to bring disrepute to my client’s global reputation built up by
spending millions and millions of rupees and by its quality of product and service”
(Bhattacharya 2005). Reputation—the public significance of the Coca-Cola brand—
was thus unambiguously claimed as the exclusive creation and property of The
Coca-Cola Company, regardless of the logical and material condition of reputation
as an interactive or social process, a qualification generated by the ongoing use by
consumers of a branded good (see Coombe 1998). From this perspective, Haksar’s
image was both an attack on and illegal appropriation of the company’s capacity to
qualify its products. So much for cocreating value.
Haksar defended his billboard as a social message, one in a series of such
messages that he had communicated over the previous three years on billboards that
occasionally and similarly used trademarked logos (such as the famous Nike swoosh).
The social message in this case referred to the scarcity of drinking water in urban
Chennai: “I wanted to show the irony of the situation—when there is such acute
water shortage, aerated drinks are freely available” (Bhattacharya 2005). Haksar,
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moreover, claimed that the billboard was an expression of his artistic freedom and
not an attempt on his part to reap commercial gains: “If MNCs [multinational
corporations] do not want their trademark image used in art, they should have a
disclaimer on every one of their products! By that yardstick, if I take a photograph
of a street, house-owners can object to their house being in the image. Where does
it stop?” (Rajagopalan 2005). From this perspective, the legal action threatened
against Haksar was an attack on his right and capacity to produce semiotic rather
than commercial value, that is, to make meaning or to communicate in the public
domain. The question asked by one Mumbai-based blogger commenting on the case
is entirely appropriate: “The question is, when a brand and it’s [sic] slogan becomes
part of the popular culture, how far can it—or should it—be ‘protected’ ” (Bansal
2005).
The disjunction between Haksar and the attorneys’ perspectives recalls the
extent to which such misalignments in a commodity network are capable of pro-
ducing unanticipated results. Haksar’s own billboard cannot escape this condition.
Despite his claim that the point of the billboard was “to highlight the problem of
water shortages in my city, and not to bring Coca-Cola down,” Haksar’s image was
perceived differently by activists accusing Coca-Cola bottling plants across India
of depleting (or “mining”) groundwater, accusations strenuously denied by The
Coca-Cola Company (n.d.a). In fact, it was on the website of the India Resource
Center (IRC), a cyberspace clearinghouse largely devoted to campaigning against
the company’s operations in India, that I initially learned of the Chennai billboard
controversy. According to an IRC news release that appeared the day after Haksar
was served legal notice: “Mr. Haksar’s billboard highlights the severe water shortages
being experienced by communities that live around Coca-Cola bottling plants across
India” (IRC 2005). Amit Srivastava, Coordinator of the IRC, thanked Haksar for
the photographer’s apparently unintended efforts. That is, Haksar’s self-professed
gesture of irony had been taken up as a public protest of transnational corporate
practice. It was perhaps exactly this interpretation of the Chennai billboard that
prompted Hindustan Coca-Cola’s legal action in the first place.
Haksar’s image and Amit Srivastava’s use of it are both unruly overflowings,
instances of consumer agency that escaped the bounds of brand management and
therefore prompted a call to the trademark—or perhaps Lovemark—police. These
overflowings, unlike Alphonse Hega’s efforts, both indicate and accomplish the
proliferation of concerned groups, that is, the organization of a public around a
matter of concern. This public is not coterminous with an already existing social
community; it is instead an affiliation of strangers organized by and around the
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4

consequences of a global corporation’s business operations. It is a Deweyan public,

consisting of “actors who are jointly implicated in an issue but who do not belong to
the same social world; this is why they must get organized into a political community
if they are to address the issue in question” (Marres 2005:214). The concerns of
the IRC about water tables in India have been linked to the concerns of many trade
unionists and student antisweatshop activists over allegations of The Coca-Cola
Company’s complicity, through its bottlers, in labor violence in Colombia (see
Figure 2). These concerns have called into being a public distributed across the
planet, a public assembled out of individuals and groups—some of whom might
well seem alien to each other—affected in different ways by the externalities of
corporate practice. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) and some
of its sections have advanced the proliferation of concerned groups by joining this
public (AAA 2006).
***
The notion of the economy of qualities implies that consumer agency operates,
if at all, embedded and distributed within commodity or product networks. What
then is the potential for making things public (or making publics around things) to
which consumer agency can lay claim, especially given the prevailing views among
business consultants and corporate actors that value creation unfolds as joint activity
between producers and consumers? And how might making things public redirect or
even undo the attempts of firms to define and control this process of value creation?
Both economic sociologists and marketing executives agree that the commod-
ity or product networks characteristic of the current economy of qualities endow
consumer agency with an enhanced capacity for value creation. It is this capac-
ity that renders consumer agency of special interest to some firms. On the one
hand, consumer agency—in the form, for example, of unique product experiences
(cocreated or not)—is a source of the surplus value that firms extract as rent by
charging premium prices for the use of their brands. On the other hand, consumer
agency is a source of disruption, of unruly overflowings that escape capture and
can even destroy value—notably, the value of brands, favorite targets of no logo–
style corporate “anti-globalization” activists. This disruption stems from consumer
agency’s capacity—admittedly uneven and never guaranteed, but surely ampli-
fied by new communication technologies—to assemble publics around matters of
concern. When these matters of concern originate in the business operations of
corporations vending iconic global commodities such as Coca-Cola soft drinks, the
proliferation of concerned individuals and groups assembled as a public can seem
almost endless.
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Not all attempts to assemble a public will, of course, be successful. Alphonse

Hega’s efforts to publicize his concerns might well amount to a minor chapter in
the conquest of cool (Frank 1997), whereby his creativity was recuperated for the
purpose of qualifying a soft drink that he regards as Other rather than as an extension
of Self. But there is no reason to accept a grim view of the current economy of
qualities as one in which people’s labor is inevitably exploited doubly, that is, in both
production and consumption. Some attempts at assembling a public will succeed
in addressing the matter of concern that brings the public into being. Chances of
success increase when economic agents—including consumers—“have the required
autonomy to propose new courses of action” (Callon 2005:310). Put differently,
success is more likely when concerned individuals or groups threaten to requalify
a product in ways that destabilize the fit between a brand and its loyalists. Such has
been the outcome of the public—composed in large part of college students on
campuses across the United States—that formed around concerns about the less
than best practices of Coca-Cola bottlers in Colombia and India.
In 2006, for example, the public mobilized by and around the consequences
of The Coca-Cola Company doing business managed to elicit from the company an
announcement that the UN International Labor Organization has agreed to conduct
an “investigation and evaluation” in Colombia. Critics quickly cast reasonable doubt
on the significance of The Coca-Cola Company’s concession (see Campaign to Stop
Killer Coke n.d.; and Coca-Cola Company n.d.b for more details); and perhaps
there is no reason to exaggerate the efficacy of what Callon (2001) calls “hybrid
forums”—public spaces in which a wild assortment of differentially competent
actors debate the economic, political, legal, ethical, and scientific dimensions of
particular markets. Nonetheless, the recent campaign against Coca-Cola exemplifies
what Dewey (1946) regarded as the essence of community life; a public has come into
being and challenged arbitrary power, acquiring the resources to settle problems—
problems of corporate externalities—otherwise unaddressed by “public officials,”
whether in India, Colombia, or the United States. In other, modestly optimistic
words, the economy of qualities imbues consumer agency with a capacity to perform
what Warner (2002) calls “the active uptake” necessary for creating a public and
to accomplish thereby greater accountability—and not to consumers and investors
only—in the creation of value.

ABSTRACT
My goal in this article is to apprehend claims about person–product relationships now
circulating in the world of business. I take up approaches that presuppose the embeddedness
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of economic action in shifting networks or assemblages of people and things (human and
nonhuman actors), and that call attention to the agency distributed within such networks.
I discuss the work of Michel Callon and his colleagues and specifically their notion of “the
economy of qualities” (Callon et al. 2002). I pose two sets of related questions. First, can
we translate marketing claims that relationships between consumers and corporate brands
define a locus of value creation into the terms of Marx’s theory of value? And how might
this translation revise not only the marketing claim, but also Marx’s understanding of
surplus value creation? Second, can we translate the claim that value creation hinges
on a dynamic relationship between corporations and consumers into terms of a theory of
participatory democracy? That is, what sort of political potential might inhere in this
relationship? In particular, how might this relationship endow consumers with agency
not only in value creation but also in “making things public” (Bruno Latour 2005b)? I
address these questions of commodity networks and consumer agency with a set of visual
props drawn from my research into the sociotechnical lives of an iconic type of global
commodity: Coca-Cola brand soft drinks.

Keywords: consumption, value, brands, new economy, Michel Callon, Coca-

Cola

NOTES
Acknowledgments. This article began as a plenary talk for the 2006 biennial spring conference
of the Society for Cultural Anthropology in Milwaukee. I thank Judith Farquhar, with whom I
coorganized the conference and developed its theme of “Translations of Value,” for her encour-
agement and support. Three anonymous reviewers provided an unusually rich and provocative
set of comments, not all of which I have been able to address, for which I am grateful. Kim
Fortun, Dan Reichman, and, especially, Julia Elyachar offered stimulating and detailed responses
that have improved the article and given me much to think about besides. Eric Hirsch and Jan
Hoeksema generously granted me use of their images. Photographs provided by Yale Daily News
and Getty Images are used with permission.
Editor’s Note: The “New Economy” and globalization have been analyzed in many Cultural
Anthropology articles. See, for example Anna Tsing’s “The Global Situation” (2000). Branding
and value creation have also been important topics, as, for example in William Mazzarella’s
award-winning “ ‘Very Bombay’: Contending with the Global in an Indian Advertising Agency”
(2003), and the special issue devoted to value creation introduced by Paul K. Eiss and David
Pedersen’s, “Introduction: Values of Value” (2002).

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