Best Paper Award, ATMC 2009

Peter Lugosi and I had just presented our paper, “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest” [PDF], at the Advances in Tourism Marketing Conference in Bournemouth yesterday morning, so it was a very pleasant surprise to find out at the end of the day that we won the Best Paper Award! And yes, the picture on the cover of the book is of lovely Bournemouth beach…

Update: In the meantime I also managed to dig out our original abstract for this paper, here it is:

In this paper we turn our attention to the classical marketing problems of product/service launch and development, by examining the emergence of the so-called ‘ruin bars’ in Budapest between 1999 and 2009. Traditionally the marketing discipline has been content with adopting the abstract notion of the market from neoclassical economics and restricting itself to operations that concern the marketing of products into that abstract space, such as segmentation, positioning and targeting. Heeding recent calls for a practice turn in marketing theory, we abandon the abstract notion of the market in favour of an empirical description that does not make an a priori distinction between marketing practices and market-making practices. Drawing on the social studies of markets in economic sociology, we deploy actor-network theory as a methodology for re-describing the emergence of Budapest’s ruin bars. The marketplace that emerges out of this description is a fragile arrangement of heterogeneous actors that is painstakingly assembled and maintained to allow for the development and survival of this new service. The ruin bar format itself defies prior categorisations of a hospitality service, as it evolves into a hybrid marketplace that combines a pub with a cultural institute in which the seemingly worthless is transformed into something worthy.

From Marketing to Market Practices

Our paper with Peter Lugosi, “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest”, has now been published as Chapter 24 in Marketing Innovations for Sustainable Destinations. The individual chapter is also available directly from the publisher’s website (PDF). Here is an extract, by way of an abstract:

In a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, Araujo et al. (2008) call on the marketing discipline to embrace the insights of the social study of markets in economic sociology as a promising avenue for revitalising the classical concepts of marketing. Drawing on the research programme launched by Michel Callon’s 1998 volume, The Laws of the Markets, they suggest that one traditional disciplinary distinction be abandoned in particular: “Although convenient, a distinction between market-making practices – defined as activities that shape the overall market structure – and marketing practices – defined as firm-based activities aimed at developing an actor’s position within a structure – is misleading” (Araujo et al., 2008: 8).

In this paper, we take up Araujo et al.’s (2008) call to deploy such a constructivist economic sociology perspective in the study of an empirical case. The case study concerns the emergence of the so-called romkert (meaning ‘ruin garden’) or romkocsma (‘ruin pub’) phenomenon in Budapest between 1999 and 2008 (see Lugosi and Lugosi, 2008). A ruin or rom bar, terms we use interchangeably in this paper, is a hospitality venue that incorporates its ruinous surroundings (such as dilapidated courtyards and other distressed material goods) as part of its service concept and the consumer experience. We re-describe this case using the actor-network theory (ANT) perspective of Callon and colleagues.

Entrepreneurial learning and qualification

On Wednesday 3rd June 2009 I will be presenting a paper summarising my research on e-commerce entrepreneurship at the Quadrangular Conference at the University of Cambridge. The paper is entitled “The Qualification of E-Commerce Services: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Learning in the Technological Economy.” As I’m approaching the end of the field work phase, this is an attempt at articulating some emerging findings and situating them in relation to relevant debates.

Forthcoming presentation at LSE

On Wednesday 22 April 2009, I will be speaking at the 5th Social Study of ICT Open Research Forum (SSIT-ORF), in Panel 2: “ICT Innovations and Organisations.” In my talk I will be reflecting on the relationship between ICT innovation and organising, by drawing on the case study of my doctoral research on the organising practices of small online retailers in the South of England. Using an actor-network theory approach, I will focus on describing how e-commerce enterprises are assembled out of e-commerce services, and how this process of assembly (and innovation) is inseparable from the market process of qualifying (Callon et al. 2002) these services. I will reflect on the role of ICT artefacts in these organising and qualifying processes, and on the basis of my preliminary findings (somewhat provocatively) I will argue against making a conceptual distinction between ICT innovation, organising practices, and market practices.

Reference:

Callon, M., C. Méadel, et al. (2002). “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy & Society 31(2): 194.

Talks at LSE, Bournemouth, and Cambridge

Just a quick announcement of my forthcoming talks in the next few weeks. On 10 February 2009 I’ll be giving my annual presentation at the IS554 research seminar at ISIG, Department of Management, LSE. The talk, entitled “Framing, Qualification, and Reflexivity: Reporting from the Field,” is an interim report about my field research. I will be drawing on economic sociology to describe the data I have so far collected on entrepreneurial learning in the online retail industry. Specifically I will be reflecting on the curious ‘double hermeneutic’ at work in my interpretation: Michel Callon et al.’s notions of framing and qualification and Daniel Beunza and David Stark’s notion of entrepreneurial reflexivity emerge as operative concepts that are apt not only for the characterisation of the empirical situation but also for the very nature of the research process itself.

Entrepreneurship and economic sociology at Goldsmiths

My head is still spinning thanks to a superb workshop/conference I attended last week: the Goldsmiths Winter Workshop in Economic Sociology that took place between 13-15 January 2009.  It was organised by David Stark and Daniel Beunza from Columbia, and Will Davis, Allan Day and Joe Deville from Goldsmiths. The organisers struck a unique balance between a variety of tensions that characterise the research world and set the stage for some highly stimulating contributions and discussions. (See photos of the event here.)

AC/DC and global innovation

On Wednesday 29 October I was listening to AC/DC and thinking about innovation. No, I’m not talking about the new album just released last week by the legendary Australian rock band. I was at the launch of the AC/DC model of innovation at NESTA in London. AC/DC stands for “Absorptive Capacity/Development Capacity,” and it forms the heart of a new innovation system model that is aimed at capturing the simultaneously local and global aspects of innovation. It is an interesting and sophisticated model that is decidedly geographic, in the sense that it measures various types of connectedness that are geographically specific. I haven’t had a chance to read and ‘absorb’ the whole report yet, but it certainly looks intriguing.

Wal-Mart: making things explicit

Last week I touched upon the notion of explicitation in relation to the current financial crisis. Wal-Mart’s announcement yesterday of its intention to make it more explicit how the products on its shelves originating from China have been produced appears to be yet another example of such explicitation. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott admitted that in the past the retailer was approaching the sourcing of its products in China with some detachment: “We have traditionally purchased in a very transactional manner” (22 October 2008, FT.com). The priority was not the conditions under which a given product had been produced but the price of that product.

The end of supermarket supremacy?

Procter & Gamble’s tentative steps towards selling its products directly to consumers over the internet suggest the unfolding of an interesting new dynamic in the retail industry. While we have got accustomed to powerful retailers expanding into the e-commerce arena (such as Tesco), or the emergence of new online retailers altogether (think Amazon), the increasing number of FMCG and other manufacturers going direct may give these retailers something to think about. Apparently Wal-Mart is already busy hiring a strategy executive just to focus on this phenomenon. What are the implications of all this for supermarkets and consumers?

The Way of the Garbage Warrior

While flipping through the channels last night I accidentally stumbled upon Oliver Hodge’s documentary Garbage Warrior on More4 and I couldn’t help but watch the whole thing. It is an interesting film for a number of reasons but to me it was most of all a fascinating case study of innovation, in both the narrowest and broadest sense of the word. The film tells the story of architect Michael Reynolds and the experimental sustainable community he built over the last 30 years in Taos, New Mexico, mostly out of garbage. (Watch the trailer below for a summary of the storyline.)