Abstract
Marketing has long been considered part of cultural intermediary activity, but still sits a little oddly alongside the ‘cultural’ TV producers and ‘quality’ journalists and critics originally used to typify the category. This article argues that such a tension is productive, and uses an underexplored aspect of marketing – social marketing – to pursue some more conceptual questions about the nature and usefulness of the term ‘cultural intermediaries’. It employs a framework loosely derived from actor-network theory to describe the emergence of social marketing in Britain, paying particular attention to the efforts to construct a market for such services, the need to consider material and non-human forms of agency in cultural intermediary activity, and the value of understanding cultural intermediary work in terms of ‘culturalisation’ – that is, as a process by which some areas of life are designated as belonging to the problem of culture, and others not.
Introduction
Marketing and related areas have long been considered part of cultural intermediary activity: although only mentioned explicitly by Bourdieu within the general category of ‘new petit bourgeois’ occupations, the two categories share a concern with ‘cultural production and organization’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 325) and its practitioners share the characteristic of having a complicated or interrupted relationship to ‘legitimate’ culture (1984: 357). The work of both groupings involves the provision of ‘symbolic goods and services’, but in the case of cultural intermediaries, in a form ‘half-way between legitimate culture and mass production’ (1984: 326) that reflects the fact that their authority, such as it is, comes from control over the media rather than the ‘legitimate’ authority of established ‘producers, auctores, and … reproducers, lectores’ (1984: 323). It is largely on this basis that subsequent writers have included ‘practitioners in design, packaging, sales promotion, PR, marketing and advertising’ (Nixon and Du Gay, 2002: 496) within the category of cultural intermediaries.
Yet although marketers appear to typify in many ways the category of cultural intermediaries – after all, they do produce thoroughly ‘hybrid’ cultural forms and circulate them through the mass media (Moor, 2008) – these roles still sit a little oddly alongside those of ‘cultural’ TV producers and ‘quality’ journalists and critics. This is partly because the cultural forms that they produce are so much more obviously instrumental (i.e. commercial) than those of other occupations within the category; the difficulty of treating marketers and related professions as fully cultural intermediaries reminds us once again of the persistent belief in culture as something separate (or in principle, separable) from formal rationality or material motives and constraints (Slater, 2011).
However, the difficulty of treating marketers as cultural intermediaries also reflects something about how the category itself has developed. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Bourdieu is more interested in culture in its classical than its anthropological sense. His emphasis on ‘cultural’ programmes when discussing cultural intermediaries, and his use of examples from art and music, are linked directly to his focus on different relationships to ‘legitimate’ culture and their role in reproducing class identities. By contrast, contemporary interest in cultural intermediaries often lies less in their role in reproducing or disrupting class formations, and more in their perceived role in promoting particular values, norms and lifestyles, especially insofar as these serve commercial interests. In this respect, the difficulty of fitting many plausibly ‘intermediary’ occupations into the categories offered by Bourdieu – and the debates about the appropriate scope of the term to which this gives rise (e.g. Hesmondhalgh, 2002) – merely exemplify these differences in intellectual priorities. However, in the context of a special issue on cultural intermediaries, it does raise important questions about the continued usefulness of the term: specifically, whether its particular conception of culture is appropriate to an age in which governance in general, and the governance of consumption in particular, seem to work at least as much through culture in its expanded anthropological sense (e.g. Yúdice, 2003).
In the rest of this article I use an underexplored area of marketing activity as a means to revisit these and other key questions in the study of cultural intermediaries. The area in question is social marketing: the systematic use of marketing concepts and techniques ‘to achieve specific behavioural goals, for a social or public good’ (National Social Marketing Centre, NSMC, 2006: 4). Within the UK, where the present study is based, 1 social communication in its broad sense, of which social marketing is a part, represents a substantial proportion of marketing activity. In 2010, for example, the UK government was the fifth largest spending advertiser in the country, with only Unilever, Procter & Gamble, the supermarket Tesco and the cable channel Sky spending more (The Telegraph, 2010). Social marketing shares the explicit aim of influencing behaviour with conventional marketing, but what is promoted is not so much a product, (although many of its practitioners do conceive of it this way); rather, it is a set of norms, values and practices: a ‘culture’ in the expanded, anthropological sense. It is an area that, at first glance, seems to share little with existing understandings of cultural intermediary activity. However, by using a case that deliberately pushes definitions of cultural intermediary work to its limits, one of my aims is to trace some of the newer ways in which the term ‘culture’ is deployed by those thought of as cultural intermediaries, and to explore whether existing understandings of the term are adequate to the empirical questions faced by scholars.
This article uses a framework that is loosely derived from actor-network theory and its antecedents and descendents. It does so in three ways. First of all, by describing the development of social marketing in ways that emphasise the need to ‘enrol’ actors into a project or network, to forge ties and attachments between them and to stabilise these ties through durable materials. Secondly, by arguing that non-human and/or material forms of agency can be just as significant contributors to ‘intermediary’ or mediating activities as human ones, and that they should be acknowledged as such. Thirdly, by proposing that cultural intermediary work be reconceived as the work of ‘culturalisation’: that is, as practices that designate certain areas as ‘cultural’, giving them content and circumscribing their relationship to the economic (cf. Çaliskan and Callon, 2009). The argument is structured around three sets of questions: the first is a general one about how any individual, collective or institutional agent comes to acquire power or influence. This part of the article explores the rise of social marketing in the UK and focuses in particular on the questions of context raised by the editors. The second question concerns the term ‘intermediary’. Here I suggest that actor-network theory and related perspectives offer a more nuanced framework for conceptualising intermediary activity, although they alter it in significant ways. The final question concerns the term ‘culture’. I suggest that if we are to take the preceding idea of intermediaries seriously, then we should be open to using culture in its expanded anthropological sense and, more specifically, that we should be able to see different understandings of culture not only as the stuff with which cultural intermediaries work, but also as the outcome of their actions.
Shifting contexts: from marketing to social marketing
The discipline of social marketing has its roots in America in the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged from marketing departments and business schools, and is associated principally with the work of Philip Kotler (e.g. Kotler and Levy, 1969; Kotler and Zaltman, 1971). Specifically, it emerged from Kotler’s efforts to refine and expand the ‘marketing concept’ and to posit marketing as something close to a generic ‘category of human action’ (cited in Morgan, 2003: 14). Although early proponents of social marketing alluded to its benefits for society as a whole, there was an effort to extend the influence of marketing as a discipline by proposing that it take on responsibilities that otherwise might be taken up by the state. In an early review of the literature, Lazer and Kelley suggested that if the discipline of marketing was not able to make a visible social contribution, ‘government will be forced to do that which marketing has not been willing to do voluntarily, thereby circumscribing the boundaries of marketing management’ (1973: 11). Even in its early days, social marketing was territorially ambitious and aware of potential brakes or limits on that influence.
The extension of marketing concepts and techniques into the social realm was marked by controversy and dispute. Early critics, often from inside commercial marketing, argued that the kinds of social interventions proposed by marketers could not be accurately described as ‘marketing’ since they did not result in a market transaction (Luck, 1969). Others worried that the ‘marketing concept’ was being extended too far, and argued that marketing’s social role should be confined to its contribution to gross national product. In some cases, commentators expressed unease about the asymmetries of power involved in the governmental use of marketing techniques to influence a population (see Laczniak et al., 1979). In fields such as health promotion, commentators expressed similar concerns that, on the one hand, the language of commercial marketing (including notions of ‘exchange’, ‘products’, ‘price’ and ‘competition’) did not accurately describe the realities of work in those areas; and on the other, that the adoption of that language and its associated techniques could affect that reality by corrupting the relationship between health workers and clients, altering the rationale for social interventions and potentially leading to unethical forms of incentivisation, as marketers tried to manipulate the behaviour of populations (see Buchanan et al., 1994; Moor, 2011).
Despite these concerns, social marketing has been adopted in a range of national contexts since the 1970s and, 1980s. How and why has it been able to do so? One answer is to look at the discipline’s ability to institutionalise itself in the form of journals, conferences and academic qualifications, and to organise its agenda and interests so that they are consonant with those of a more mainstream and established marketing discipline. We might also note (as I have done at greater length elsewhere, see Moor, 2011) its convergence with prevailing political conditions: undoubtedly the ascent of social marketing has paralleled the spread of neoliberal philosophies of government, in which welfare responsibility is increasingly outsourced to private organisations and market dynamics and techniques are seen as the model for society as a whole (Shamir, 2008). In this respect it is telling that the American model of social marketing, which proposes strict adherence to the ‘4Ps’ (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) of commercial marketing – for example by conceiving of social goods such as health as ‘products’ to be promoted – has been most widely adopted in countries that closely fit the neoliberal model.
In addition to these general answers, I want to offer a more conceptual account from Callon and Latour (1981). For them, all differences between actors in terms of ‘level, size and scope’ are ‘the result of a battle or a negotiation’; the difference between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ actors is not due to any a priori distinction, but only to ‘the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act’ (1981: 279). Thus, rather than starting from a conception of different actors (e.g. individuals and institutions) as having different sizes or different amounts of power, and this being used to account for their success, instead they suggest thinking in terms of the construction of networks (‘actors as networks’) into which other actors can be enlisted. These actors may include materials as well as ‘bodies’, and indeed it is by enlisting the greatest number of durable materials that an actor-network can create ‘lasting asymmetries’ (1981: 285).
In offering this account, I want to make it clear that my aim is not to dispute the significance of underlying political agendas that aim to slim down the state, institute a market model of governance and promote individual responsibility (e.g. Miller and Rose, 2008; Shamir, 2008). Rather, it is to show how different types of intervention, which in fact share key assumptions about the need for individual behavioural change, compete with one another, and how one such model of intervention – social marketing – gains and loses influence over time. Such an account is mobilised here in the context of the study of cultural intermediaries to draw attention to the ways in which new spheres of intermediary activity, and the new markets that accompany them, are assembled in practice. This emphasis on the technical and infrastructural development of social marketing will be used in subsequent sections to argue for the need to take material and non-human agency more seriously in understanding intermediary activity. However, first I want to pursue this model further by turning to a second phase in the development of social marketing: namely, its adoption in the UK.
Social marketing in Britain
One way of describing the story of social marketing in Britain is in terms of a series of shifts in context: from one social context to another, from one national context to another and in terms of a political context in which its adoption became possible. However, the notion of ‘context’ is not straightforward; rather than thinking of it as a backdrop or condition for action, it may be more useful to think in terms of networks of relationships and attachments out of which some contexts are remade and others constructed anew. In addition, we can approach these shifting contexts of social marketing through the idea of location. Within existing studies of cultural intermediaries, ‘location’ is typically understood in cultural or class terms: where one comes from, where one fits into a class or occupational hierarchy, and so on. It is through this conception of location, as habitus and disposition and the ability to consolidate or reproduce it, that the power of cultural intermediaries has been typically theorised. 2 The value of this approach in the case of social marketing is not to be overlooked, since the targets of marketing interventions are very often what Nikolas Rose calls the ‘anti-communities of the depraved or the poor’ (Rose, 1999: 189), while its agents almost never are. I want to add another to this understanding of location from Marilyn Strathern, which is connected more explicitly to the idea of place within a network, and refers to ‘those locations where persons act, and act to make the world work … the point where they mobilise their resources, seek influence, labour, reproduce, spend energy, talk’ (1995: 179). This approach may be especially valuable in understanding how cultural intermediaries are able to produce durable knowledge and extend their authority into new sites – or in Callon and Latour’s terms, ‘how it is that some actors eventually end up as macro-actors and others become ‘individuals’… how actors wax and wane and how… we can follow them through their variations in size’ (1981: 281).
With this in mind, it is notable that the early days of social marketing in Britain were characterised by the deliberate establishment of new sites of agency and the linking together of previously separate institutional spaces. To take one example, the creation of the National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC) in 2006 was a Department of Health project which, through various reports, white papers and a large grant, endowed the new centre with the authority and resources to draw other institutions and agencies into its orbit: for example, by establishing links with university departments, providing training for health professionals, and establishing the benchmark criteria by which ‘social marketing’ was to be defined and judged (see NSMC, nd). With this authority, NSMC developed over a period of approximately five years, producing definitions and guidelines for social marketing interventions, case studies to exemplify good practice, publications, training manuals and ‘how-to’ guides, and establishing a network of affiliated agencies and researchers, as well as contacts in government (National Consumer Council, 2006; NSMC, nd). Perhaps most significantly, NSMC has provided training, sometimes in partnership with smaller agencies, for several thousand people, including staff at primary care trusts (PCTs), local government officers, public health strategists and others. 3
Also among those receiving training were commercial marketing and communications agencies’ employees for whom the expansion of government spending on social marketing during this period represented a significant market opportunity. Indeed, the development of social marketing as a market was crucial: a former director of the NSMC describes its role as precisely that of ‘market maker’, working on both supply and demand. In addition to persuading government departments, local councils, PCTs and others for whom social marketing could help to achieve objectives, NSMC was heavily involved in growing the supply of social marketing services through these kinds of training activities. This allowed many smaller independent agencies to flourish, but also created the opportunity for large international marketing agencies to develop new clients and areas of expertise. As a result, these larger agencies were then very well placed to win contracts for large-scale, national-level health interventions based on social marketing techniques and insights. 4
However, the story of social marketing in Britain is not one of ever-expanding influence. Even during the third term of the Labour government, when social marketing was arguably at its most influential, there were competing institutional sites proposing alternative models of intervention into public behaviour. These included, most notably, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which had developed its own model of intervention (the ‘Four Es’: Enable, Encourage, Engage, Exemplify) based on the language of behaviour change, but which made no mention of marketing at all. Similarly, groupings at the supra-departmental level, such as the Cabinet Office, had instigated their own research into ‘culture change’ (Cabinet Office, 2008) or commissioned others to explore the potential for incorporating behavioural theories into policy (Cabinet Office and Institute for Government, 2010). These publications sometimes made reference to social marketing, but tended to position it as simply a communications technique rather than a more rounded behavioural intervention: 5 a characterisation that was strongly contested by those within social marketing, and which they feared would marginalise them in future policy. Perhaps most significantly, the language of behaviour change and ideas from behavioural economics reportedly were preferred by key figures in the Conservative Party. When the Conservatives entered into a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in 2010 there was concern among social marketers that their own influence would diminish and that the new public health policy would be dominated by behavioural theory. As it turned out, the White Paper, Healthy Lives, Healthy People (Department of Health, 2010), did include social marketing as part of its public health strategy and promised to publish a review in early 2011, but its future remains uncertain. Even before the general election, social marketing agencies were anticipating a change in approach and repositioning themselves as specialists in behaviour change as well as social marketing. There is no evidence to suggest that the language of social marketing will ever extend beyond the field of health, and it is perfectly possible that it will disappear altogether.
What does this story of the spread of social marketing into new contexts tell us about how cultural intermediaries’ influence is accrued and lost? First, it suggests that when the market for a particular activity is new or underdeveloped – as Callon and Latour indicate – its success may depend on establishing new networks, attachments and ties, and encouraging or enforcing a convergence of aims between actors. In particular, the creation of repositories of knowledge, the legitimation of that knowledge and its extension into new sites (either through technologies for knowledge sharing or through teaching and training activities) may prove especially important. Second, it suggests that we look more closely at the way that cultural intermediaries activities are formed as a market. In the case of social marketing, the provision of training courses and other materials (guidelines, benchmark criteria, handbooks) was not just aimed at providers, but also taught potential commissioners of social marketing, including PCTs, how to become customers, thereby developing the demand side of the market. It also provided existing cultural intermediaries, including domestic and international marketing agencies, with the skills that they needed in order to become suppliers. It should be noted that both activities were undertaken with direct government support.
Conversely, knowledge and training alone are not enough to develop a market or ensure continuing influence. As Callon et al. (1997) note, the need for successful demonstration is paramount also, particularly when collaborations between private companies and public institutions and funds are at stake. The requirement to demonstrate and measure effectiveness exists in other cultural intermediary contexts (Julier and Moor, 2009), but it may be particularly acute in the case of activities in which there is uncertainty about levels of influence, and competition between different suppliers. The way in which questions of measurement and evaluation are becoming central to the development of both social marketing and other behavioural interventions is explored in more depth in the next section, on the nature of intermediary actors.
What is an intermediary? Mediators, intermediaries and devices
As noted previously, in Callon and Latour’s (1981) work, one of the ways in which a network grows and creates ‘lasting asymmetries’ between itself and other networks is through enlisting ‘solid and durable materials’. In later work, Latour (1999, 2005) elaborates on precisely how these materials might affect ‘programs of action’. Two sets of concepts are particularly useful. The first, technical mediation, refers to the ways in which action is not simply a property of humans, but rather of an association of actants who offer new possibilities, goals and functions, and whose involvement may modify a programme of action. As Latour notes, whether or not something can be described as a mediating technology depends in part on how one defines mediation: in some cases, technology mediates by ‘translating’ a programme of action; in others, the mediator actively contributes to the way in which a goal is realised (Verbeek, 2005), perhaps making possible a form of action at a distance (see also Miller and Rose, 2008). In subsequent work, Latour (2005) draws a distinction that is especially interesting for the study of cultural intermediaries, between what he calls ‘intermediaries’ and ‘mediators’. An intermediary is defined as that which ‘transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs’ (2005: 37; emphasis added). Mediators, by contrast, ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’, and ‘may lead in multiple directions which will modify all the contradictory accounts attributed to its role’ (2005: 39).
Although the language confuses established understandings of intermediaries, this way of thinking offers a number of possibilities to those working with the concept. First, the terms offer a more nuanced way of assessing the type and extent of cultural intermediaries’ influence. There have been exhortations towards greater precision in this area (e.g. Nixon and Du Gay, 2002), but there remains a tendency towards vague assertions of a ‘shaping’ role and reluctance to be more specific. By offering a precise characterisation of different forms of mediating activity, here Latour provides a framework for comparison that could strengthen much work in this area (see also Verbeek, 2005). Second, the terms foreground material and non-human agency. This is relatively absent from existing studies of cultural intermediaries, but has the potential to expand considerably the scope of empirical investigation. Of course, this notion of agency, distributed across multiple sites and taking a range of human and non-human forms, owes much to Foucault’s conception of the dispositif, whose elements are not only ‘material’ but also may include ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, [and] philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’ (Foucault, 1980: 194–195). More recent work on devices has included ‘organizational, ethical, and cultural’ (Karpik, 2010: 113) as well as technical elements, or even ‘anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings’ (Agamben, 2009: 14). The value of Latour’s work, and of subsequent work on market ‘devices’ (e.g. Muniesa et al., 2007), is to build on these ideas so that they do not simply list the kinds of things that might count as devices or as part of the dispositif, but also begin to distinguish between different modes of functioning, different contributions to programmes of action and different levels of influence.
One way of framing questions about the agency of social marketing, then, is in terms of the role of various non-human actors. How far are these to be understood as ‘mediators’ rather than (in Latour’s sense) ‘intermediaries’? Moreover, what are the implications of this for how we understand cultural intermediaries? As I have hinted previously, the development of social marketing has been highly supported by various material and technical features, including buildings, training centres and materials, policy documents, measurement techniques, event calendars, guidelines, project archives and various information and communication technologies for linking these together. This is in addition to actual social marketing interventions which, depending on the project, might include stickers, certificates and workbooks (in a project targeting young children’s health), temporary structures in public spaces (e.g. targeting binge drinking), devices for monitoring heart rate and lung capacity, and so forth. Some of these simply support the project – they may be essential to getting things done, but they do not substantially change them – while others decisively shape (and limit) the way that projects unfold, how they are understood and so forth. For reasons of space I am unable to explore all of them here (see Moor, 2011). Instead, I want to focus on just one: the use of various measurement and evaluation methods in social marketing, and the concepts that these embody.
Measurement techniques as mediators
Measurement and evaluation techniques may contribute to the ‘durability’ of a programme of action in a variety of ways, most notably by offering the possibility of demonstrating effectiveness (thereby legitimating certain types of intervention) and by producing data that can be deployed to this effect. Demonstrations of effectiveness were clearly important, and with greater competition from alternative approaches have become more so, to the credibility of social marketing as a discipline and the practical requirement of gaining access to clients and (public) funds. However, measurement techniques and devices are not simply put to work on behalf of social marketers; part of what makes them interesting also is that they can be examples of a more assertive or performative type of non-human agency, which alters the outcome of interventions and represents them in ways that make some qualities or values visible, while leaving others in the background (Didier, 2007).
So far, social marketing has adopted a variety of measurement, evaluation and demonstration techniques. These may include basic measures (e.g. elicited through surveys) of awareness of the programme’s existence or recognition of its name. These obviously mirror the routine measures of brand awareness conducted in commercial contexts, and indeed the need to give interventions or projects a recognisable name is partly due to a widely-held belief that health interventions themselves are comparable to brands of lifestyle choice that must compete in a marketplace of less healthy alternatives (Moor, 2011). In addition, almost all social marketing interventions involve setting behavioural goals and using behavioural indicators of various kinds. These may range from the very ambitious and macro types of indicators (e.g. reduction of the number of people drinking at harmful levels, reductions in alcohol-related hospital admissions) to, more commonly, self-reported behaviour as well as stated intention, both of which are quite low on credibility. Efforts to prove actual behavioural change can then make use of publically collected statistics (e.g. the total number of drink-driving accidents), but may find it hard to attribute causality. In addition, typically the choice of one indicator rather than another (or in addition to another) will reflect something of the context for the intervention. Measurement and evaluation processes may be omitted entirely by clients due to lack of time (typically, measures of behavioural change are supposed to take place between three and six months after completion of a project), and sometimes due to a reluctance to pre-test interventions in case they might prove ineffective.
The requirements of measurement also change according to context. Although some evidence of behavioural change is usually demanded, measurement techniques are being increasingly asked to compare interventions and make assessments of relative value for money, in which the point is to show how much and what kind of return on investment is created by the use of one technique rather than another. This requirement shapes both the choice of measurement technique and sometimes the interventions themselves. Thus another common measure of social marketing interventions is ‘cost per user’ or ‘cost per active response’. These metrics foreground economic calculability as a key component of (socially) valuable interventions. More significantly, they direct the choice of intervention towards those that are not only relatively cheap (for example, advertising and other communications campaigns rather than face-to-face work), but which also take a form (for example, websites, phone lines) where evidence of engagement and contact with a target group (e.g. page views of a website, calls to a phone line) is relatively easy to procure. In these cases, the requirements of calculability, efficiency and evidence of engagement means that measurement cannot simply capture an external reality but rather ‘acts back’ on the object it was designed to measure.
A focus on the measurement devices used by cultural intermediaries also directs attention to the ways in which such techniques may both precede and outlast their ostensible human authors. For example, the concept of Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) originates in the commercial field as a means to assess the relative contribution of different marketing strategies to revenue growth, and in some cases to aid decisions about resource allocation within an organisation. However, it now circulates within public contexts in the UK as a means to supplement evidence of behavioural change with data that allows comparisons of relative cost (Central Office of Information, 2009). In addition to shifting the basis on which interventions are evaluated, these techniques allow contexts that previously might have been thought of as distinct to be brought into a new kind of relation. Similarly, Andrew Barry (2002) has argued that measurement is increasingly central to government because it allows diverse objects and problems to be brought within the same frame of economic calculation. One of the outcomes of this, he suggests, is that measurement techniques often function as ‘relays’ between economic and political spheres, connecting them but also allowing them to retain an appearance of separateness. Of course, the application of models from the commercial sphere to the administration of public life is not only due to the extension of its measurement techniques, but nonetheless they represent an important way in which apparently separate worlds are made (or made to seem) commensurate. Moreover, the flow of influence is not necessarily one-way: the development of new concepts of value, such as ‘public value’ (e.g. Talbot, 2008) and the techniques for capturing or measuring it, may originate in one context but come over time to exert influence and challenge existing models in others. 6 Perhaps the point is that new techniques of demonstration and evaluation, which may encode certain principles and values already, can travel across contexts in ways that offer new forms of justification for action and new ways of framing and formatting interventions.
Discussion
How might these discussions of concepts and measurement devices help us to restate what is meant by cultural intermediaries and the nature of their influence? As suggested previously, the work of Callon, Latour and others suggests that mediators, intermediaries and devices may be conceived as combinations of human and non-human actors whose role in developing programmes of action may extend from merely transporting meaning to actively shaping outcomes, and in some cases modifying or even transforming them. A similar range of possibilities is evident in the case of social marketing, where forms of inscription (such as handbooks and guidelines) may perform a weaker role of assisting in the circulation and propagation of theories, where theories from one sphere (marketing) may come to dominate the lives of human professionals in another (health promotion and public welfare), and where technical systems of measurement and evaluation may reframe concepts (social change, public health) and reformat interventions to fit the requirement of economic calculability. Therefore, at minimum we must be prepared to consider in principle the possibility that cultural intermediaries or mediators might include non-human as well as human agents. This is implicit in recent studies that talk about cultural mediation in terms of activities, relationships and spaces (Molloy and Larner, 2010) and built environments (Zukin and Kosta, 2004), as well as earlier work that recognises the role of ‘devices’ as well as ‘dispositions’ (Du Gay, 2004), but it could be extended much further.
First of all, what would follow from this is a potentially more fine-grained analysis of influence, where the functions of intermediaries – at least as we commonly understand them – may take a range of forms, from the most minimal (simply transporting existing meaning) to the most maximal. Secondly, if we understand the full range of influence as being available in principle to both human and non-human actors, then studies of cultural mediation potentially could acknowledge that in some cases the most influential intermediaries (or mediators, in Latour’s terms) will be non-human. This may not be the case very often, and in many cases it may prove impossible to disentangle fully the nature of influence. There may be times when concepts of networks or agencements may prove more useful. Nonetheless, the point of being open to the possibility is that it would allow studies to acknowledge and account for the ways in which buildings, theories, technologies, concepts and so on may outrun their human ‘authors’, taking up new roles and functions in new contexts, and creating unintended consequences as well as multiple directions for further action. Neither does this focus on material and/or non-human actors mean disregarding a more explicitly political form of analysis: the point of the first section of this article has been to show that an account of material or non-human agency may be part of a broader investigation of the development of networks of influence, the (sometimes forced) emergence of markets for particular goods, services and activities, and the role of more formally political agencies (e.g. government departments) within this.
The ‘culture’ in cultural intermediaries
Writing 17 years ago about the changing status of anthropological knowledge, Marilyn Strathern (1995) noted the challenges to anthropological understandings posed by the increasing ‘appeal to culture’ in a range of social and institutional contexts. For her, the adoption of an anthropological sense of culture in new and unexpected locations – including, but not limited to, corporate and organisational literature – could no longer be ignored by anthropologists. What was striking, she observed, was that this specifically Euro-American understanding of the role of culture in human affairs was being adopted in a way that was ‘simultaneously normative and comparative’, and which pointed ‘to the differences between systems of value, to the link between practice and ethos, to the need to change habits if one is to change the way people think’ (1995: 2). At the same time, she noted, the concept of culture was being (re-)contextualised in many ways that anthropologists would find novel; while clearly the use of the term in new sites was intended to alter those sites, the effect also extended to the concept itself, which was being remade through the new contexts in which it was deployed.
I noted at the beginning of this article that the use of social marketing as an example of cultural intermediary activity would seem to push the latter concept to its limit. At the same time, I suggested that debates about precisely what kind of culture could be legitimately included in the study of cultural intermediaries have been ongoing, and that these highlight something of a disjunction between Bourdieu’s original project and the intellectual priorities of some recent scholars. The focus of these recent studies has tended to be on the ways in which production and consumption are linked together (or in some accounts, mutually constituting) – something that does not seem so far removed from Bourdieu’s own project – but also they have examined the way in which commercial interests are served by using culture to work on consumer demand. However, in both cases writers have found it difficult to keep the use of the term pure, and perhaps their definition of culture has spilled over unavoidably from the classical conception used by Bourdieu into either the state-sponsored sense of cultural industries or the more anthropological sense of values, practices, habits and norms. What this in turn suggests is that in using the term, recent writers have been guided as much by empirical observation (of how culture is deployed in concrete situations) as by theoretical convention or precedent. What is less common is an explicit acknowledgement that this is what is happening, or a discussion of its implications.
Although it has been in the background of this article so far, it should be clear that culture in its anthropological sense is one of the main targets of social marketing interventions, which seek to remake human practices, habits and lifestyles, and in some cases entire value systems, in line with government priorities in areas such as health, welfare and the environment. Indeed, ‘culture’ appears in various forms in the reports, policy documents, benchmark criteria and training guidelines associated with social marketing and competing forms of government intervention. In the UK there have been reports on cultural capital and how to improve and put it to work among the most socially disadvantaged groups (Cabinet Office, 2008). There are frequent references to the need to work with cultural norms in order to achieve social change, not to mention an ongoing but sometimes implicit concern with ethnological conceptions of culture: for example in the discussion of so-called hard-to-reach groups and the need for specialist agencies to deal with minority communities. 7 In other words, the concept of culture is clearly a key tool in these intermediaries’ efforts to shape reality. Yet it is not the culture of art critics and fashion buyers, but something else. What is its relevance to the study of cultural intermediaries?
In order to move this question forward, I want to return to an observation made by Liz McFall (2002) in an early commentary, that while the concept of intermediaries appears to depend on a separation between culture and economy, the whole idea of culture as a distinctive and bounded entity is itself historically and geographically specific. For McFall this renders suspect both the term and the associated project. The point is well taken: on the other hand, one does not need to believe that culture and economy really are separate spheres to recognise that they are often treated as such, that some actors have an interest in keeping them separate while others have an interest in bringing them closer, and that this can have a number of interesting practical effects. Another way of framing McFall’s point would be to say that since both culture and economy are endlessly produced and reproduced as more or less distinctive spheres of human life, in a variety of ways from the mundane to the highly purposive and deliberate, one way of understanding cultural intermediaries would be as those actors – human and non-human, individual, collective and institutional – charged explicitly with working on or with these terms, who give them definition and content and therefore are involved in performing them and their relationship.
A similar point has been made by David Oswell (2006). He suggests that if culture, just as much as economy, is understood as a problem rather than a concept or set of concepts, then one plausible agenda for research is to
look at the ways in which actors … themselves construct and perform the problem of culture and [at] the ways in which these actors draw on existing resources and definitions (regarding what culture means, how it might be put to work etc) to do so. (2006: 174)
Here, the concept of culture is seen as performative (or potentially so) in much the same way that economic concepts and models have been argued to perform, or at least affect, the ‘real’ economy (MacKenzie et al., 2007). This obviously shares some affinities with Strathern’s suggestion that concepts can create contexts; and just as Strathern argues that the concept of culture itself may be remade or reworked as it is taken up new ways, Oswell points out that new or enterprising uses of the term ‘culture’ (e.g. in business practice) also might be seen as ‘a new mobilisation or articulation of the problem’ (2006: 174).
What follows from this is that rather than arguing about what kinds of areas of activity can and cannot be called cultural intermediary work, we might focus instead on what we might term the work of culturalisation (c.f. Çaliskan and Callon, 2009): on what kinds of conceptions of culture are produced through various forms of work, including so-called intermediary work. From this point of view, while some intermediaries directly reproduce classical conceptions of culture, others use a more anthropological sense of the term, and some replicate the policy language of ‘cultural and creative industries’. Many draw on multiple conceptions at the same time, producing hybrid forms and new articulations. And while they connect culture to economy in numerous ways, they also connect it to other concepts and practices. In the case of social marketing, for example, the culture to be worked on is understood in large part in psychological and specifically behavioural terms, but it is very closely allied also to the economic realm, most concretely through the use of various measurement devices. Moreover, some articulations of culture are more influential than others, and the framework of networks and programmes of action outlined briefly earlier provide one way of thinking about this. The broader point is that if we can talk of various practices of economisation, by which some areas of life are produced as economic and others not (Çaliskan and Callon, 2009), we can surely also speak of culturalisation as those processes by which certain areas of life are deemed to belong to the problem of culture (or particular definitions of it), and others somewhere else. It goes without saying that the actors involved in these processes may not be limited to those we currently think of as intermediaries, and that they may include concepts, techniques and devices as much as human agents.
Conclusion
In the first part of this article I used the example of social marketing to explore the ways in which a particular set of intermediaries – social marketers – initially emerged and then began to gain, but also (in one national context) lose influence. Following the ideas set out by Callon and Latour (1981), I suggested that the development of social marketing could be conceived not only in terms of institutions, but also in terms of networks and markets, both of which were enabled by considerable government support. I also showed how the success of social marketing has been challenged by competing frameworks for intervention in the social, which draw on alternative concepts and circulate through networks developed elsewhere. Recognizing a potential shift in direction or emphasis within government, many providers of marketing-based social interventions repositioned themselves as experts in the new language of behaviour change: their survival depending on their ability to articulate, deploy and perform key concepts and ideas, and thereby to attach themselves to that programme of action.
In the second part of the article I used Latour’s (1999, 2005) framework of mediators, intermediaries and technical mediation to explore the ways in which the activities of intermediaries such as social marketers can be understood as depending on material and/or non-human elements in various ways. Through the examples of social marketing’s measurement techniques and the concepts that they embody, I showed how these non-human elements became inscribed in various ways and circulated within and across networks. I also argued that while challenging the typical understanding of intermediaries, Latour’s language of intermediaries and mediators allows us to specify the nature and extent of cultural intermediaries’ influence with greater precision. This influence may include simply transporting (or reproducing) meaning, but also may include a more active contribution to shaping outcomes and, in some cases, their distortion or even transformation. In any case, the point is that ‘whether they might just help (in a minimalist, instrumental version) or force (in a maximalist, determinist version), devices do things … [they] articulate actions; they act or make others act’ (Muniesa et al., 2007: 2).
It has not been my aim in this article to make a strong claim that social marketers are cultural intermediaries, or to argue for their inclusion in the category. Rather, the point has been to show that what cultural intermediaries (in this case, marketers) do is not only a function of their dispositions, cultural capital or occupational formulae, but also depends upon the existence of markets for their services: markets which, in this case, were established almost from nothing by government departments with their own agendas and visions of how to govern social and cultural life. Similarly, how intermediaries perform these functions depends not only on their own dispositions and competences, but also on concepts, tools and techniques, some of which they may have developed themselves, but also which may have been devised elsewhere and which they must be able to recognise, adopt and perform if they are able to function as market actors at all. In this respect I have claimed that in some cases it may in fact be the devices – concepts, metrics, guideline criteria and so forth – that are the most influential intermediaries, at least in the sense that it is they, not human agents, that decisively shape outcomes.
I have suggested throughout this article that if there is a culture in the work of social marketers, it is the more anthropological conception of habits, practices, norms and values – indeed, culture as a whole way of life. This version of culture is both what social marketers believe they are working on, and the intended outcome of their efforts. Again, it has not been my intention to claim that this is the definition of culture that scholars of cultural mediation should now use. Marketing may be a particularly ‘monstrous’ entity because of the way it offends the purity of both culture (in its classical sense) and the market (Slater, 2011), but all of the roles we typically think of as cultural intermediaries involve the production of one definition of culture rather than another and, on occasion, the production of more novel articulations of the term. It is this, above all, that provides the basis for their continuing interest as an area of study.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the guest editors and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
Biographical note
Liz Moor is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research looks at the role of communication in economic life. She is the author of The Rise of Brands (Berg, 2007) and the co-editor of Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice (Berg, 2009).