‘Can brands save the world?’ On the ethical projects of commercial communications
| Dates: | 10 February 2016 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Dr Dan Welch |
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Corporations increasingly draw upon notions of sustainable consumption to address consumers, employees and other stakeholders. The paper draws upon primary research into the commercial field of sustainability communications in the UK, and secondary sources on the history of advertising, marketing and public relations. The presentation first addresses an increasingly prominent business discourse concerning the relation between brands, consumerism and sustainability: what I call brand-mediated sustainable consumption. Sustainable consumption is deployed as an ethical project by commercial communications and increasingly as a legitimation discourse for corporate capitalism, in the context of the twin crises of sustainability and neoliberalism. Secondly, I suggest we can discern two previous such ethical projects in the history of commercial communications, both of which similarly came to serve as capitalist legitimation discourses. The first we find in Edward Bernays (1929) conception of the role of Public Relations in democratic society and the self-understanding of Scientific Advertising as the medium of representation for consumer sovereignty. The second is found in the ‘creative revolution’ of advertising in the 1960s, and its self-understanding as the avant garde of the new, emancipatory consumerism. The historical and contemporary examples each emerge in the context of cultural and economic transformation or crisis, and accompany transformations in the everyday practices and institutional arrangements of the commercial communications industry. Finally, the paper relates brand-mediated sustainable consumption to Boltanski and Chiapello’s “new spirit of capitalism” (2005) and suggests that it frames corporations’ purposive interventions into the field of sustainable consumption; addressing employees, as much as consumers, as consuming subjects.
All welcome.
Speaker
Dr Dan Welch
Role: Research Associate
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Board Room
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
