Detlev Zwick
Biographic Data
| ID | 3600548 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Detlev Zwick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Detlev |
| FAMILY NAME | Zwick |
| SIGNATURE | ZWICK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 291 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Manipulate to empower: Hyper-relevance and the contradictions of marketing in the age of surveillance capitalism
In this article, we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses, and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this co…
No longer violent enough?: Creative destruction, innovation and the ossification of neoliberal capitalism
My goal is to suggest that it is useful to distinguish analytically between capital’s primal, often direct violence against bodies and a systemic form of violence that is at the same time reproductive of the capitalist system and directed against its own creations. I suggest that this analytical separation allows us to see that on the one hand capitalist violence is intensifying and with it processes of exploitation, class bifurcation, downward m…
Creating Worlds that Create Audiences: Theorising Personal Data Markets in the Age of Communicative Capitalism
In this article, we draw on theories of biopolitical marketing to explore claims that personal data markets are contextualised by what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” and Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism”. Surveillance and communicative capitalism are characterised by a logic of accumulation based on networked captures of life that enable complex and incomprehensive processes of extraction, commodification, and control. E…
Biopolitical Marketing and Social Media Brand Communities
This article offers an analysis of marketing as an ideological set of practices that makes cultural interventions designed to infuse social relations with biopolitical injunctions. We examine a contemporary site of heightened attention within marketing: the rise of online communities and the attendant profession of social media marketing managers. We argue that social media marketers disavow a core problem; namely, that the object at stake, the c…
Defending the Right Lines of Division: Ritzer's Prosumer Capitalism in the Age of Commercial Customer Surveillance and Big Data
In a set of recent essays, including the one in this special section, George Ritzer (see also, e.g., Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; Ritzer forthcoming) has been advancing a new grand narrative for capi
Capitalism - A companion to Marx's economy critique
In this companion to Marx's three volumes of Capital the author Johan Fornas traces closely the original text thereby producing an “easy to follow” and accessible discussion of what is arguably sti
My Iranian Road Trip – Comments and Reflections on Videographic Interpretations of Iran’s Political Economy and Marketing System
Iran is an enigmatic political economy and marketing system. Access to it for purposes of rigorous and thorough research is not easy. Scholars therefore must be creative when studying such systems, and may be limited to interpreting extant findings by others. In this article, the authors share comments and reflections on My Iranian Road Trip, a short film documenting Nicholas Kristof’s 2012 tour through Iran, and an ensuing panel that analyzed an…
Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay: Reproduction of Desire and the Challenge of Slow Re-McDonaldization
Ritzer suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a prosumer society where early forms of prosumption (the gas station, the automatic teller machine, McDonalds, etc.) are now being universalized across industries, product and service categories, and geographies. This essay presents the results of a qualitative study of the lived experience of "doing prosumption," in particular, how prosumption work in user-generated media environments is ex…
Inside Marketing
Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices
In comparison to the impressive amount of resources, time, and energy going into researching the inner life of consumers, a rather minor effort has been made to study the growing army of economic actors whose work it is to define markets and give shape to the consumer culture as we know it. Furthermore, the results of the work that marketers do are, by definition, highly visible. Indeed, we would suggest that making things visible (in the sense o…
Manufacturing Customers: The database as new means of production
The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life.We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a r…
Putting Consumers to Work: `Co-creation` and new marketing govern-mentality
Co-creation is a new paradigm that has captured the imagination of marketing and management professionals and scholars. Drawing on Foucault's notion of government and neo-Marxist theories of labor and value, we critically interrogate the cultural, social, and economic politics of this new management technique. We suggest that co-creation represents a political form of power aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and co…
The Epistemic Consumption Object and Postsocial Consumption: Expanding Consumer-Object Theory in Consumer Research
We introduce the concept of the epistemic consumption object. Such consumption objects are characterized by two interrelated features. First, epistemic consumption objects reveal themselves progressively through interaction, observation, use, examination, and evaluation. Such layered revelation is accompanied by an increasing rather than a decline of the object's complexity. Second, such objects demonstrate a propensity to change their "face-in-a…
Where the Action Is: Internet Stock Trading as Edgework
This article puts forth the argument that with the transfer of stock trading from what could be called an analog world of phone calls, faxes, and trips to the local bank, to the computer-mediated environment of the computer screen, the market becomes the site for new types of individual experiences and practices that cannot be predicted, captured, or understood with existing economic and finance theories. Specifically, by giving the stock market …
Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images
Through explication of a visual research method, this paper theorizes how masculine identity interacts with consumption—of imagery, products, desires, and passions in advertising and consumer culture. We analyze the male body as a discursive “effect” created at the intersection of consumption and several marketing discourses such as advertising, market segmentation, and visual communication, balancing between brand strategy—what the marketer inte…
Putting Consumers to Work: `Co-creation` and new marketing govern-mentality
Co-creation is a new paradigm that has captured the imagination of marketing and management professionals and scholars. Drawing on Foucault's notion of government and neo-Marxist theories of labor and value, we critically interrogate the cultural, social, and economic politics of this new management technique. We suggest that co-creation represents a political form of power aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and co…
Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images
Through explication of a visual research method, this paper theorizes how masculine identity interacts with consumption—of imagery, products, desires, and passions in advertising and consumer culture. We analyze the male body as a discursive “effect” created at the intersection of consumption and several marketing discourses such as advertising, market segmentation, and visual communication, balancing between brand strategy—what the marketer inte…
Manufacturing Customers: The database as new means of production
The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life.We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a r…
The Epistemic Consumption Object and Postsocial Consumption: Expanding Consumer-Object Theory in Consumer Research
We introduce the concept of the epistemic consumption object. Such consumption objects are characterized by two interrelated features. First, epistemic consumption objects reveal themselves progressively through interaction, observation, use, examination, and evaluation. Such layered revelation is accompanied by an increasing rather than a decline of the object's complexity. Second, such objects demonstrate a propensity to change their "face-in-a…
Biopolitical Marketing and Social Media Brand Communities
This article offers an analysis of marketing as an ideological set of practices that makes cultural interventions designed to infuse social relations with biopolitical injunctions. We examine a contemporary site of heightened attention within marketing: the rise of online communities and the attendant profession of social media marketing managers. We argue that social media marketers disavow a core problem; namely, that the object at stake, the c…
Manipulate to empower: Hyper-relevance and the contradictions of marketing in the age of surveillance capitalism
In this article, we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses, and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this co…
Where the Action Is: Internet Stock Trading as Edgework
This article puts forth the argument that with the transfer of stock trading from what could be called an analog world of phone calls, faxes, and trips to the local bank, to the computer-mediated environment of the computer screen, the market becomes the site for new types of individual experiences and practices that cannot be predicted, captured, or understood with existing economic and finance theories. Specifically, by giving the stock market …
Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay: Reproduction of Desire and the Challenge of Slow Re-McDonaldization
Ritzer suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a prosumer society where early forms of prosumption (the gas station, the automatic teller machine, McDonalds, etc.) are now being universalized across industries, product and service categories, and geographies. This essay presents the results of a qualitative study of the lived experience of "doing prosumption," in particular, how prosumption work in user-generated media environments is ex…
Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images
Through explication of a visual research method, this paper theorizes how masculine identity interacts with consumption—of imagery, products, desires, and passions in advertising and consumer culture. We analyze the male body as a discursive “effect” created at the intersection of consumption and several marketing discourses such as advertising, market segmentation, and visual communication, balancing between brand strategy—what the marketer inte…
Where the Action Is: Internet Stock Trading as Edgework
This article puts forth the argument that with the transfer of stock trading from what could be called an analog world of phone calls, faxes, and trips to the local bank, to the computer-mediated environment of the computer screen, the market becomes the site for new types of individual experiences and practices that cannot be predicted, captured, or understood with existing economic and finance theories. Specifically, by giving the stock market …
The Epistemic Consumption Object and Postsocial Consumption: Expanding Consumer-Object Theory in Consumer Research
We introduce the concept of the epistemic consumption object. Such consumption objects are characterized by two interrelated features. First, epistemic consumption objects reveal themselves progressively through interaction, observation, use, examination, and evaluation. Such layered revelation is accompanied by an increasing rather than a decline of the object's complexity. Second, such objects demonstrate a propensity to change their "face-in-a…
Putting Consumers to Work: `Co-creation` and new marketing govern-mentality
Co-creation is a new paradigm that has captured the imagination of marketing and management professionals and scholars. Drawing on Foucault's notion of government and neo-Marxist theories of labor and value, we critically interrogate the cultural, social, and economic politics of this new management technique. We suggest that co-creation represents a political form of power aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and co…
Manufacturing Customers: The database as new means of production
The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life.We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a r…
Inside Marketing
Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices
In comparison to the impressive amount of resources, time, and energy going into researching the inner life of consumers, a rather minor effort has been made to study the growing army of economic actors whose work it is to define markets and give shape to the consumer culture as we know it. Furthermore, the results of the work that marketers do are, by definition, highly visible. Indeed, we would suggest that making things visible (in the sense o…
Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay: Reproduction of Desire and the Challenge of Slow Re-McDonaldization
Ritzer suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a prosumer society where early forms of prosumption (the gas station, the automatic teller machine, McDonalds, etc.) are now being universalized across industries, product and service categories, and geographies. This essay presents the results of a qualitative study of the lived experience of "doing prosumption," in particular, how prosumption work in user-generated media environments is ex…
My Iranian Road Trip – Comments and Reflections on Videographic Interpretations of Iran’s Political Economy and Marketing System
Iran is an enigmatic political economy and marketing system. Access to it for purposes of rigorous and thorough research is not easy. Scholars therefore must be creative when studying such systems, and may be limited to interpreting extant findings by others. In this article, the authors share comments and reflections on My Iranian Road Trip, a short film documenting Nicholas Kristof’s 2012 tour through Iran, and an ensuing panel that analyzed an…
Defending the Right Lines of Division: Ritzer's Prosumer Capitalism in the Age of Commercial Customer Surveillance and Big Data
In a set of recent essays, including the one in this special section, George Ritzer (see also, e.g., Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; Ritzer forthcoming) has been advancing a new grand narrative for capi
Capitalism - A companion to Marx's economy critique
In this companion to Marx's three volumes of Capital the author Johan Fornas traces closely the original text thereby producing an “easy to follow” and accessible discussion of what is arguably sti
Biopolitical Marketing and Social Media Brand Communities
This article offers an analysis of marketing as an ideological set of practices that makes cultural interventions designed to infuse social relations with biopolitical injunctions. We examine a contemporary site of heightened attention within marketing: the rise of online communities and the attendant profession of social media marketing managers. We argue that social media marketers disavow a core problem; namely, that the object at stake, the c…
No longer violent enough?: Creative destruction, innovation and the ossification of neoliberal capitalism
My goal is to suggest that it is useful to distinguish analytically between capital’s primal, often direct violence against bodies and a systemic form of violence that is at the same time reproductive of the capitalist system and directed against its own creations. I suggest that this analytical separation allows us to see that on the one hand capitalist violence is intensifying and with it processes of exploitation, class bifurcation, downward m…
Creating Worlds that Create Audiences: Theorising Personal Data Markets in the Age of Communicative Capitalism
In this article, we draw on theories of biopolitical marketing to explore claims that personal data markets are contextualised by what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” and Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism”. Surveillance and communicative capitalism are characterised by a logic of accumulation based on networked captures of life that enable complex and incomprehensive processes of extraction, commodification, and control. E…
Manipulate to empower: Hyper-relevance and the contradictions of marketing in the age of surveillance capitalism
In this article, we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses, and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this co…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Business (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Capitalism (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Advertising (4 works)