A Arvidsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 13994 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Arvidsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Arvidsson |
| SIGNATURE | ARVIDSSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0990-8579 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 318 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Industrious Tiktok: A Chinese digital form
The global rise of Tiktok has met with responses that have emphasised the platform’s Chinese origins. In this paper we contribute to the debate by articulating the contours of an ideal-typical Chinese digital form, as we call it. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism and his concept of cultural form along with the growing secondary literature on Tiktok and the Chinese digital economy, we will suggest that the distinctive nature of Tik…
Slop
According to DeepSeek, the latest Chinese AI slop generator, the meaning of the term “slop” in the English language changed during the eighteenth century. From having simply signified something mud
Sohn-Rethel in Naples. On plebeian creativity
This article explores German philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s little-known reflections on Naples, to begin developing the notion of a plebeian creativity. Unlike capitalist notions of innovation that reinforce the division between intellectual and manual labour, Sohn-Rethel suggested that the Neapolitan approach to technology consisted in reclaiming mostly broken technological artefacts within the context of an lived economy of use values. We sug…
Les marques sont des reliques modernes
Climate perplexity: Rural changemakers facing the anthropocene
Names doing rounds”: On brands in the bazaar economy
This article draws on fieldwork form Delhi’s garment and electronics bazaars to articulate an alternative perspective on the role of brands in the global bazaar economy. Knockoffs and counterfeit brands have mostly been viewed as problematic manifestations of counterfeiting and piracy, or framed in terms of authenticity or marginal practices of imitation. In this article, we suggest that bazaar brands also function as central to a growing popular…
Capitalism and the Commons
This article investigates the potential role of the commons in the future transformation of digital capitalism by comparing it to the role of the commons in the transition to capitalism. In medieval and early modern Europe the commons supported gradual social and technological innovation as well as a new civil society organized around the combination of commons-based petty production and new ideals of freedom and equality. Today the new commons g…
Introduction to Digital Media
Value and virtue in the sharing economy
Critical accounts suggest that the 'sharing economy' is mainly an ideological entity, bringing together a wide range of diverse empirical phenomena that have little in common, apart from their common adherence to an ideology of 'sharing'. This article suggests that the sharing economy can be empirically understood as instances of peer production attempting to 'come to market' via the use of a common 'sharing fiction'. Analysing the origins and pr…
Crowds and value. Italian Directioners on Twitter
This paper addresses crowd-based dynamics of value creation in participatory culture. Based on a corpus of 114,931 tweets associated with One Direction and similar boy bands, we draw on recent theories of crowd-based organization in digital media as well as classical crowd theory to build a theoretical model of collective value creation. In our model, the achievement of value in the form of trending and individual microcelebrity is based on affec…
Facebook and Finance: On the Social Logic of the Derivative
This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the 'social logic of the derivative'. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of deriva…
Brand Public
The concept of brand community has been used to understand how consumers create value around brands online. Recently consumer researchers have begun to debate the relevance of this concept for understanding brand-related communication on social media. Based on a data set of 8949 tweets about Louis Vuitton gathered on Italian Twitter in 2013, this article addresses these discussions by developing the alternative concept of brand publics that diffe…
Ad agencies
This article highlights advertising agencies as marketplace icons. The role of ad agencies in creating iconic brands can sometimes be obscured, yet ad agencies are central to how the contemporary marketplace works. While ad agencies are no longer the hegemonic instance of consumer culture that they were from the 1950s to the 1990s, they have adapted to today's democratic advertisingscape by shepherding cultural content produced elsewhere to marke…
K-pop: Popular music, cultural amnesia, and economic innovation in South Korea
John Lie is an accomplished sociologist and a renowned expert on Korean national identity and the Korean Diaspora. He is also a prolific writer on social theory. His book on K-pop, is an exhaustive
Creative mass. Consumption, creativity and innovation on Bangkok's fashion markets
The becoming productive of consumer culture has been an important theme for social research. Within neoliberal discourse, the link between consumer culture and new forms of immaterial production has been conceptualized as “creativity.” This paper uses the experience of Bangkok's fashion markets to begin to articulate an alternative understanding of the relation between consumer culture and immaterial production, a different kind of “creativity.” …
Echo Chamber or Public Sphere? Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data: Political Homophily on Twitter
This paper investigates political homophily on Twitter. Using a combination of machine learning and social network analysis we classify users as Democrats or as Republicans based on the political content shared. We then investigate political homophily both in the network of reciprocated and nonreciprocated ties. We find that structures of political homophily differ strongly between Democrats and Republicans. In general, Democrats exhibit higher l…
Valuing audience passions: From Smythe to Tarde
Audience research is undergoing substantial transformation. The old 'eyeballs' paradigm has been losing adequacy since, at least, the 1980s. At the same time, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide data that allow a far deeper and more intrusive view into the everyday life of media consumers. As a result, many companies are now developing systems based on social media data in order to represent, measure and value audience dynami…
Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet
We engage with recent applications of the Marxist “labor theory of value” to online prosumer practices, and offer an alternative framework for theorizing value creation in such practices. We argue that the labor theory of value is difficult to apply to online prosumer practices for two reasons. One, value creation in such practices is poorly related to time. Two, the realization of the value accumulated by social media companies generally occurs …
Toward a Branded Audience: On the Dialectic Between Marketing and Consumer Agency
This chapter contains sections titled: Mediatization and Consumer Agency The Development of Marketing Knowledge Capturing Creativity Putting Consumer Agency to Work: The Brand Conclusion References
Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter
General Sentiment - How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy
General Sentiment: How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy
The Fordist economy was marked by what David Stark calls a Parsonian Compromise in which economic value and other values were clearly separated, in theory as well as in practice. Today this is changing. Trends such as Ethical Consumerism and Corporate Social Responsibility are on the rise. More fundamentally, the economic importance of intangible assets like brands has increased. Together these developments testify to a new role for a wider range…
Speaking out: The ethical economy: new forms of value in the information society
Passionate Work? Labour Conditions in the Milan Fashion Industry
This article analyses labour conditions among creative workers in the Milan fashion industry. Employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, the article shows how workers in the Milan fashion industry are generally underpaid and overworked. Despite such dire conditions, fashion work is generally considered gratifying and workers express high levels of satisfaction. The second part of the article attempts to unravel this paradox, departing f…
The ethical economy: Towards a post-capitalist theory of value
Social production has risen on the agenda of the social sciences. Ye t most observers have been reluctant to confront the question of the value of these practices. Instead they have mostly been characterised as 'free', 'common' or beyond value. This article argues that far from being free, social production abides to a particular value logic, an 'ethical economy' where value is related not to the input of labour time, but to the ability to give p…
Brands: A critical perspective
This article proposes a critical perspectives on brands based on recent developments within Marxist thought. It argues that brands build on the immaterial labour of consumers: their ability to create an ethical surplus (a social bond, a shared experience, a common identity) through productive communication. This labour is generally free in the sense that it is both un-paid and more or less autonomous. Contemporary brand management consists in a s…
Brand Public
The concept of brand community has been used to understand how consumers create value around brands online. Recently consumer researchers have begun to debate the relevance of this concept for understanding brand-related communication on social media. Based on a data set of 8949 tweets about Louis Vuitton gathered on Italian Twitter in 2013, this article addresses these discussions by developing the alternative concept of brand publics that diffe…
Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet
We engage with recent applications of the Marxist “labor theory of value” to online prosumer practices, and offer an alternative framework for theorizing value creation in such practices. We argue that the labor theory of value is difficult to apply to online prosumer practices for two reasons. One, value creation in such practices is poorly related to time. Two, the realization of the value accumulated by social media companies generally occurs …
Facebook and Finance: On the Social Logic of the Derivative
This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the 'social logic of the derivative'. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of deriva…
Quality singles: Internet Dating and the Work of Fantasy
This article builds on a case study of the worldwide online dating site Match.com to develop a theoretical understanding of the place of communication and affect in the information economy. Drawing on theoretical debates, secondary sources, a qualitative survey of dating profiles and an analysis of the features and affordances of the Match.com site, the article argues that internet dating seeks to guide the technologically enhanced communicative …
General Sentiment: How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy
The Fordist economy was marked by what David Stark calls a Parsonian Compromise in which economic value and other values were clearly separated, in theory as well as in practice. Today this is changing. Trends such as Ethical Consumerism and Corporate Social Responsibility are on the rise. More fundamentally, the economic importance of intangible assets like brands has increased. Together these developments testify to a new role for a wider range…
The ethical economy: Towards a post-capitalist theory of value
Social production has risen on the agenda of the social sciences. Ye t most observers have been reluctant to confront the question of the value of these practices. Instead they have mostly been characterised as 'free', 'common' or beyond value. This article argues that far from being free, social production abides to a particular value logic, an 'ethical economy' where value is related not to the input of labour time, but to the ability to give p…
Capitalism and the Commons
This article investigates the potential role of the commons in the future transformation of digital capitalism by comparing it to the role of the commons in the transition to capitalism. In medieval and early modern Europe the commons supported gradual social and technological innovation as well as a new civil society organized around the combination of commons-based petty production and new ideals of freedom and equality. Today the new commons g…
Valuing audience passions: From Smythe to Tarde
Audience research is undergoing substantial transformation. The old 'eyeballs' paradigm has been losing adequacy since, at least, the 1980s. At the same time, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide data that allow a far deeper and more intrusive view into the everyday life of media consumers. As a result, many companies are now developing systems based on social media data in order to represent, measure and value audience dynami…
From Counterculture to Consumer Culture: Vespa and the Italian youth market, 1958–78
This article contributes to an analysis of the origins of contemporary post-modern consumer culture, centred on the notion of lifestyle choice. It presents a case study of Piaggio's marketing strategies for their motor scooters – the Vespa being the most famous one – during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Vespa had become an icon of the international youth culture already at the beginning of this period, it is argued that Piaggio's advertising …
Value and virtue in the sharing economy
Critical accounts suggest that the 'sharing economy' is mainly an ideological entity, bringing together a wide range of diverse empirical phenomena that have little in common, apart from their common adherence to an ideology of 'sharing'. This article suggests that the sharing economy can be empirically understood as instances of peer production attempting to 'come to market' via the use of a common 'sharing fiction'. Analysing the origins and pr…
Creative mass. Consumption, creativity and innovation on Bangkok's fashion markets
The becoming productive of consumer culture has been an important theme for social research. Within neoliberal discourse, the link between consumer culture and new forms of immaterial production has been conceptualized as “creativity.” This paper uses the experience of Bangkok's fashion markets to begin to articulate an alternative understanding of the relation between consumer culture and immaterial production, a different kind of “creativity.” …
On the 'Pre-History of The Panoptic Sort: Mobility in Market Research
This article reviews the history of market research to argue that that discipline has seen a paradigm shift during the second half of the 20th century. Originally market research developed as an integral element to the society-wide capitalist control revolution. Its aim was to contain the complexity of an increasingly mobile consumer demand in a number of pre-established categories. Since the 1950s however market researchers developed a series of…
The Therapy of Consumption Motivation Research and the New Italian Housewife, 1958-62
This article describes the transformation of the image of the housewife-consumer in Italian advertising during the 'economic miracle' of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing on market research, professional debates and advertising campaigns it argues that motivation research - an originally American market research technique with Freudian origins - was crucial in altering the ways in which advertisers and marketers related to women consumers. …
Climate perplexity: Rural changemakers facing the anthropocene
Names doing rounds”: On brands in the bazaar economy
This article draws on fieldwork form Delhi’s garment and electronics bazaars to articulate an alternative perspective on the role of brands in the global bazaar economy. Knockoffs and counterfeit brands have mostly been viewed as problematic manifestations of counterfeiting and piracy, or framed in terms of authenticity or marginal practices of imitation. In this article, we suggest that bazaar brands also function as central to a growing popular…
Between Fascism and the American Dream: Advertising in Interwar Italy
Social Science History - Volume 25, Number 2, Summer 2001
Från hemmafru till autentisk människa: Kärlek och reklam i Vecko Revyn 1942-94
This article is based on a study of advertising and material covering ”existential issues”, such as love, sexuality and the body in a Swedish young women’s magazine ”Vecko Revyn”. The period studied runs from 1942-94.It’s main argument is that the representation of female identity has gone through three distinct phases: During the 1940-50’s, the subject of these discourses was represented as a ’type’ who was attributed needs for commodities as we…
The Therapy of Consumption Motivation Research and the New Italian Housewife, 1958-62
This article describes the transformation of the image of the housewife-consumer in Italian advertising during the 'economic miracle' of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing on market research, professional debates and advertising campaigns it argues that motivation research - an originally American market research technique with Freudian origins - was crucial in altering the ways in which advertisers and marketers related to women consumers. …
From Counterculture to Consumer Culture: Vespa and the Italian youth market, 1958–78
This article contributes to an analysis of the origins of contemporary post-modern consumer culture, centred on the notion of lifestyle choice. It presents a case study of Piaggio's marketing strategies for their motor scooters – the Vespa being the most famous one – during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Vespa had become an icon of the international youth culture already at the beginning of this period, it is argued that Piaggio's advertising …
Between Fascism and the American Dream: Advertising in Interwar Italy
Social Science History - Volume 25, Number 2, Summer 2001
Between Fascism and the American Dream: Advertising in Interwar Italy
Whoever arrives inNewYork and walks up “Old Broadway” will immediately find himself blinded by the royal splendour of an endless row of neon signs that silently speak of an infinity of products: from gramophones to silk stockings, from show polish to the latest theatre show. If later, before going to sleep, he decides to browse through an illustrated magazine, he will marvel at the beauty of its illustrations, at the influence that advertising ha…
On the 'Pre-History of The Panoptic Sort: Mobility in Market Research
This article reviews the history of market research to argue that that discipline has seen a paradigm shift during the second half of the 20th century. Originally market research developed as an integral element to the society-wide capitalist control revolution. Its aim was to contain the complexity of an increasingly mobile consumer demand in a number of pre-established categories. Since the 1950s however market researchers developed a series of…
Reality Branding
Artiklen tager ’reality branding’ som udgangspunkt for at diskutere markedsføringens kultur- og livsstilsproducerende potentialer på en mediearena, hvor den kommercielle og hverdagslige virkelighed smelter sammen i virksomheders og konsumenters ’joint effort’ i at skabe meningsfyldte historier. Tankegangen er, at forbrugere har gennemskuet reklamernes mere eller mindre fantasifulde tegnkon- struktioner og forholder sig blasert til budskaberne. So…
Brands: A critical perspective
This article proposes a critical perspectives on brands based on recent developments within Marxist thought. It argues that brands build on the immaterial labour of consumers: their ability to create an ethical surplus (a social bond, a shared experience, a common identity) through productive communication. This labour is generally free in the sense that it is both un-paid and more or less autonomous. Contemporary brand management consists in a s…
Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture
Drawing on rich empirical material, this revealing book builds up a critical theory, arguing that brands have become an important tool for transforming everyday life into economic value. When branding lifestyles or value complexes onto their products, companies assume that consumers desire products for their ability to give meaning to their lives. Yet, brands also have a key function within managerial strategy. Examining the history of audience a…
Quality singles: Internet Dating and the Work of Fantasy
This article builds on a case study of the worldwide online dating site Match.com to develop a theoretical understanding of the place of communication and affect in the information economy. Drawing on theoretical debates, secondary sources, a qualitative survey of dating profiles and an analysis of the features and affordances of the Match.com site, the article argues that internet dating seeks to guide the technologically enhanced communicative …
The ethical economy: Towards a post-capitalist theory of value
Social production has risen on the agenda of the social sciences. Ye t most observers have been reluctant to confront the question of the value of these practices. Instead they have mostly been characterised as 'free', 'common' or beyond value. This article argues that far from being free, social production abides to a particular value logic, an 'ethical economy' where value is related not to the input of labour time, but to the ability to give p…
Speaking out: The ethical economy: new forms of value in the information society
Passionate Work? Labour Conditions in the Milan Fashion Industry
This article analyses labour conditions among creative workers in the Milan fashion industry. Employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, the article shows how workers in the Milan fashion industry are generally underpaid and overworked. Despite such dire conditions, fashion work is generally considered gratifying and workers express high levels of satisfaction. The second part of the article attempts to unravel this paradox, departing f…
Toward a Branded Audience: On the Dialectic Between Marketing and Consumer Agency
This chapter contains sections titled: Mediatization and Consumer Agency The Development of Marketing Knowledge Capturing Creativity Putting Consumer Agency to Work: The Brand Conclusion References
Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter
General Sentiment - How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy
General Sentiment: How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy
The Fordist economy was marked by what David Stark calls a Parsonian Compromise in which economic value and other values were clearly separated, in theory as well as in practice. Today this is changing. Trends such as Ethical Consumerism and Corporate Social Responsibility are on the rise. More fundamentally, the economic importance of intangible assets like brands has increased. Together these developments testify to a new role for a wider range…
Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet
We engage with recent applications of the Marxist “labor theory of value” to online prosumer practices, and offer an alternative framework for theorizing value creation in such practices. We argue that the labor theory of value is difficult to apply to online prosumer practices for two reasons. One, value creation in such practices is poorly related to time. Two, the realization of the value accumulated by social media companies generally occurs …
Echo Chamber or Public Sphere? Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data: Political Homophily on Twitter
This paper investigates political homophily on Twitter. Using a combination of machine learning and social network analysis we classify users as Democrats or as Republicans based on the political content shared. We then investigate political homophily both in the network of reciprocated and nonreciprocated ties. We find that structures of political homophily differ strongly between Democrats and Republicans. In general, Democrats exhibit higher l…
Valuing audience passions: From Smythe to Tarde
Audience research is undergoing substantial transformation. The old 'eyeballs' paradigm has been losing adequacy since, at least, the 1980s. At the same time, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide data that allow a far deeper and more intrusive view into the everyday life of media consumers. As a result, many companies are now developing systems based on social media data in order to represent, measure and value audience dynami…
Creative mass. Consumption, creativity and innovation on Bangkok's fashion markets
The becoming productive of consumer culture has been an important theme for social research. Within neoliberal discourse, the link between consumer culture and new forms of immaterial production has been conceptualized as “creativity.” This paper uses the experience of Bangkok's fashion markets to begin to articulate an alternative understanding of the relation between consumer culture and immaterial production, a different kind of “creativity.” …
Crowds and value. Italian Directioners on Twitter
This paper addresses crowd-based dynamics of value creation in participatory culture. Based on a corpus of 114,931 tweets associated with One Direction and similar boy bands, we draw on recent theories of crowd-based organization in digital media as well as classical crowd theory to build a theoretical model of collective value creation. In our model, the achievement of value in the form of trending and individual microcelebrity is based on affec…
Facebook and Finance: On the Social Logic of the Derivative
This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the 'social logic of the derivative'. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of deriva…
Brand Public
The concept of brand community has been used to understand how consumers create value around brands online. Recently consumer researchers have begun to debate the relevance of this concept for understanding brand-related communication on social media. Based on a data set of 8949 tweets about Louis Vuitton gathered on Italian Twitter in 2013, this article addresses these discussions by developing the alternative concept of brand publics that diffe…
Ad agencies
This article highlights advertising agencies as marketplace icons. The role of ad agencies in creating iconic brands can sometimes be obscured, yet ad agencies are central to how the contemporary marketplace works. While ad agencies are no longer the hegemonic instance of consumer culture that they were from the 1950s to the 1990s, they have adapted to today's democratic advertisingscape by shepherding cultural content produced elsewhere to marke…
Sociology (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (17 works) · Business (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Advertising (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works)