Negotiating Cohesion, Inequality and Change: Uncomfortable Positions in Local Government by Hannah Jones

Author:Hannah Jones [Jones, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447320623
Google: -PCczgEACAAJ
Amazon: B00N2XRX02
Goodreads: 38752186
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2013-01-15T11:25:36+00:00

Brand and cultural capital

Throughout these empirical encounters I encountered the language of branding as a way of thinking about how place and narrative are mobilised by different groups. While many of the participants I encountered might have used this language casually, theories of branding are apt for understanding the dynamics of Hackney’s meanings, and particularly for understanding them as a source of cultural capital, and therefore as a site of power and struggle.

The marketing literature distinguishes branding as a distinct approach to selling a ‘product’ that is not about a fundamental change in the product or an association with a simple abstract emotion, but attachment to a narrative (Holt and Cameron, 2010). Lury suggests that not only have brands become used as a way of organising the role of emotion in brand relations (between consumer and product), but that the use of brands relies on a shift in which ‘[i]nstead of a desire to keep up with the Joneses, consumers are believed to be more concerned with finding meaning in their lives’ (Lury, 2004, p 38). Authors vary in the extent to which they acknowledge that such narratives rely on the reincorporation of existing mythologies. Aronczyk, for example, suggests that rebranding nations (as business products for tourism and investment) relies on creative destruction, ‘in which old myths and memories are swept away and new ones instituted in their place’ (2007, p 118). However, evidence from more traditional corporate branding exercises, such as those of the Starbucks coffee store chain or Nike sportswear, suggest that myth and counter-myth depend on and play against one another for effective communication, notoriety and relevance (Lury, 2004; Thompson et al, 2006; Holt and Cameron, 2010).

The reappropriation of brand myths can be thought of as a form of trading in cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986), where identities or meanings that are otherwise seen as abject become a source of cultural capital for those people who are able to adopt appealing aspects of the identity, while avoiding abject connotations (Skeggs, 2005b). Skeggs suggests that the logics and techniques of branding are used in popular culture to commodify the culture and experiences of working-class British people, making identification with these ‘products’ an asset for middle-class people, which they can trade on as cultural capital (see also Skeggs, 2004). In the case of Hackney (and other places like it), the power of ‘edgy’ branding allows a place that is seen as dangerous and uncomfortable to be appropriated by those whose existing economic, cultural and social capital enables them to escape any actual danger, while profiting from association with local myths.

Throughout this chapter, such reappropriation happens at various levels, in an iterative way. The presentation of Hackney as an exemplar of successful multiculture under the slogan ‘I Love Hackney’ was powerful because of Hackney’s prior negative connotations (its “dramatic, burning past”), and the campaign was reinvigorated in response to being dubbed Britain’s ‘worst place to live’ on national television. Here, the first-order claims to ‘Love Hackney’ were being made in defiance,

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