In this paper, I extend the established concept of performativity by focusing on the origins and micro-level interactional strategies of marketing objects. In product markets wherein face-to-face ...interactions between buyers and sellers are impossible, profit-seeking firms depend upon marketing objects—and on their packaging stories—to interact with buyers. While much research focuses on the particular effects of performative marketing objects on consumers, I explore the conditions required for such effects to emerge. In this project, I employ a richly descriptive case study design by focusing on a transnational specialty food firm based in Indonesia and examining the complete collection of food product packages ( N = 81) that communicate with buyers on behalf of its products for sale. I understand marketing practices as helping to create the phenomena they allegedly describe, and thus contribute to object-oriented marketing theory through a dramaturgical analysis of packaging talk.
Whether the result of purposeful nation-branding projects or longstanding traditions, associations endure between specific nations and the particular goods they produce. Such associations can be ...harnessed on behalf of the symbolic and economic value recently recognized as national cultural wealth. Further, the cultivation of impression management strategies about geographical origins is requisite for specialty food firms: terroir is a foundational convention of the gourmet food industry, and its potential value is significant. For entrepreneurial firms in the specialty food market, the process of strategically connecting to cultural wealth would seem to depend upon their particular geographic location. But while some national origins add both symbolic and economic value to cultural products within the global marketplace, others potentially threaten that value. In this paper, I read closely the discursive data contained on a nearly complete collection of two case study firms’ food packages (N = 100) to illustrate the firms’ unexpectedly divergent perceptions of cultural wealth, despite their identical national location. I further analyze interview data to describe the vital (and potentially valuable) interaction between producer perception, imagination, and cultural production. By redirecting analytical attention toward profit-seeking producers, this paper aims to increase the analytical power of the concept of cultural wealth.
•Food packages are legible elements of consumer culture, designed to create cultural value.•Food packages can be understood as both material objects and vehicles for discourse.•Food producers manage ...their firm’s brand identity to create a powerful collective voice for their consumer goods.•Acting as cultural intermediaries, they strategically craft distinctive food packages by attending both to materiality and, simultaneously, to omnivorous culinary discourse.
This paper clarifies the role of objects in generating both cultural meanings and valuable forms of status by building upon previous research on cultural consumption and mediation, while simultaneously highlighting the intrinsic materiality of such practices. Beginning with the sociological notion that clues to high-status cultural consumption exist within journalistic writing about food, this project asks how profit-seeking firms make use of related discursive strategies to establish that their cultural products are not only delicious but also distinctive. To that end, this paper examines the packaging materials and packaging discourse of two case study firms whose food products are similar, in kind and country of origin, and whose food packages all meet the shared expectations of the US gourmet food market, in order to explore how their packages differentiate themselves from their competitors and frame their contents as valuable. In order to understand these firms as both commercial storytellers and amateur cultural intermediaries, the comparative case study methodology is employed with the goal of describing the process whereby profit-seeking firms make use of gourmet food writing and food packages to create distinction within an omnivorous, and economically valuable, marketplace. This paper draws attention to food packaging as a form of gourmet food writing which has a role to play in the dynamics of distinction within the contemporary gastronomic field.
For the producers of food products originating in the tropics, far from consumers and their local farmers’ markets, vital processes of interacting and storytelling necessarily take place in grocery ...store aisles and rely on food product packages as vehicles for valuable stories. As a result, specialty food entrepreneurs are dependent upon food packages—market devices—to communicate about the goods they contain in order to create symbolic value on behalf of those goods. Packaging stories thus contribute to the contextualization of products whose qualities are not inherent, but are, rather, the outcome of ongoing processes of strategic qualification. Without them and the valuable discursive details they provide, the market of singularities could not function. In this article, I read closely the textual data contained on a nearly complete collection of a case-study firm’s food packages (N=75) that represents the firm’s longitudinal attempts to tell selective, oriented stories about a variety of Indonesian food products. I find three primary types of productive labor represented in the sample of packaging stories. I further describe the emergence and disappearance of such stories and their discursive details, given the timing of the release or revision of their market devices. By redirecting analytical attention toward the origins and production of market devices—rather than on their impact on consumers—this article investigates the strategic and shifting storytelling work of specialty food entrepreneurs who gain access to cultural intermediation through their own branded market devices.
A powerful cultural concept not easily translated into English, terroir both contains and communicates valuable associations about place. Because terroir is an important way to communicate with US ...consumers, food producers work to draw upon valuable associations between food products and their particular places of origin. In this paper, I put forward a notion of terroir as a conceptual terrain on which artisan food entrepreneurs negotiate with the potentially fraught relationship between the place where their food products originate and the associations that US consumers might have about those particular places. This in-depth case study analysis examines the complete collection of a transnational gourmet food company's commercial Facebook posts (N = 1485) in order to illustrate how a food-producing firm both creates and revises its virtual identity online through strategic attention to terroir. Because few studies have examined the virtual strategies of artisan food producers with regard to the emplacement of terroir, this project undertakes a richly descriptive case study design by focusing on a transnational specialty food firm based in Indonesia. Its analysis suggests that artisan entrepreneurs can strategically rescale terroir in order to create positive (and therefore, valuable) associations in the face of potentially negative ones.
ZFIN, the Zebrafish Model Organism Database (http://zfin.org), is the central resource for zebrafish genetic, genomic, phenotypic and developmental data. ZFIN curators manually curate and integrate ...comprehensive data involving zebrafish genes, mutants, transgenics, phenotypes, genotypes, gene expressions, morpholinos, antibodies, anatomical structures and publications. Integrated views of these data, as well as data gathered through collaborations and data exchanges, are provided through a wide selection of web-based search forms. Among the vertebrate model organisms, zebrafish are uniquely well suited for rapid and targeted generation of mutant lines. The recent rapid production of mutants and transgenic zebrafish is making management of data associated with these resources particularly important to the research community. Here, we describe recent enhancements to ZFIN aimed at improving our support for mutant and transgenic lines, including (i) enhanced mutant/transgenic search functionality; (ii) more expressive phenotype curation methods; (iii) new downloads files and archival data access; (iv) incorporation of new data loads from laboratories undertaking large-scale generation of mutant or transgenic lines and (v) new GBrowse tracks for transgenic insertions, genes with antibodies and morpholinos.
The Zebrafish Model Organism Database (ZFIN; http://zfin.org) is the central resource for zebrafish (Danio rerio) genetic, genomic, phenotypic and developmental data. ZFIN curators provide expert ...manual curation and integration of comprehensive data involving zebrafish genes, mutants, transgenic constructs and lines, phenotypes, genotypes, gene expressions, morpholinos, TALENs, CRISPRs, antibodies, anatomical structures, models of human disease and publications. We integrate curated, directly submitted, and collaboratively generated data, making these available to zebrafish research community. Among the vertebrate model organisms, zebrafish are superbly suited for rapid generation of sequence-targeted mutant lines, characterization of phenotypes including gene expression patterns, and generation of human disease models. The recent rapid adoption of zebrafish as human disease models is making management of these data particularly important to both the research and clinical communities. Here, we describe recent enhancements to ZFIN including use of the zebrafish experimental conditions ontology, 'Fish' records in the ZFIN database, support for gene expression phenotypes, models of human disease, mutation details at the DNA, RNA and protein levels, and updates to the ZFIN single box search.
Half of all vertebrate species are teleost fish. What accounts for this explosion of biodiversity? Recent evidence and advances in evolutionary theory suggest that genomic features could have played ...a significant role in the teleost radiation. This review examines evidence for an ancient whole-genome duplication (tetraploidization) event that probably occurred just before the teleost radiation. The partitioning of ancestral subfunctions between gene copies arising from this duplication could have contributed to the genetic isolation of populations, to lineage-specific diversification of developmental programs, and ultimately to phenotypic variation among teleost fish. Beyond its importance for understanding mechanisms that generate biodiversity, the partitioning of subfunctions between teleost co-orthologs of human genes can facilitate the identification of tissue-specific conserved noncoding regions and can simplify the analysis of ancestral gene functions obscured by pleiotropy or haploinsufficiency. Applying these principles on a genomic scale can accelerate the functional annotation of the human genome and understanding of the roles of human genes in health and disease.
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