Positioning and ‘doing’ geographies of dissociation

Positioning

All of the commentators acknowledge that the geography of dissociation is well embedded in a wide range of literatures. Still, they also express some concerns about misrepresentations and omissions: ‘Despite, or perhaps because of its synoptic gathering of concepts largely from British cultural economic geography and related fields in order to unpack dissociations, the article engages only lightly, or not at all, with large areas of economic geography that have addressed the consequences of commodity production, outsourcing of manufacturing, sweating of labour, corporate culture, and branding’ (Havice and Pickles, 2019: 74). This may be even more the case when acknowledging that nowadays relevant knowledge is no longer to be found in academic journals alone, but increasingly resides in online resources and other alternative and more open formats of publication as well (Cook et al., 2019).

To assess the validity of this critique, it is important to restate the contribution we wanted to make. Our article starts with the observation that the logic of status markets increasingly pervades the entire economy and even partly replaces traditional standard markets. On status markets, the use value of goods is mainly assessed in terms of their symbolic meaning rather than their functional properties or factual scarcity. Moreover, consumers are willing to pay a premium for commodities that they perceive as unique and associate with positive attributes. We witness, in other words, a reciprocal process of ‘translation’ (Aspers and Beckert, 2011) between symbolic meaning of commodities, on the one hand, and their exchange value or market price, on the other.

Within economic geography, this topic has been taken up by a growing number of researchers, most of whom are rooted within cultural economic geography and with an interest in analysing processes associated with the social construction of symbolic value. They provide a number of fascinating and, in our view, timely and relevant empirical analyses of how commodities are charged with symbolic value, how brands are established as means to transfer the logic of status markets from luxury goods to more mundane markets and how spatial categories are mobilized in these processes through processes of association (see, for instance, Beckert and Aspers, 2011; Pike, 2011). Reading this literature, however, we became increasingly concerned with a bias on exclusively positive associations between commodities, brands and other entities (including places and territories) representing some form of extra-economic value. The puzzle that initiated our engagement with dissociations was thus that strategies of charging (branded) commodities with symbolic value are successful even though we know so much about the problematic consequences and the morally dubious aspects in the production process. If reputation is the ‘Achilles’ heel of branding’ (Bair, 2019: 70), then why do widely known problematic practices – not least due to efforts undertaken by critical economic geographers following political economic approaches – not have a much stronger negative impact on the consumers’ willingness to pay a premium on these commodities?

So, our intention was not to accuse economic geography at large, or cultural economic geography specifically, of being too uncritical (Pike, 2019). Neither did we claim to unveil the ‘consequences of commodity production, outsourcing of manufacturing, sweating of labor, corporate culture, and branding’ (Havice and Pickles, 2019: 74) with our approach. Rather, our analysis and use of literature was guided by the much more focused and modest interest in improving understanding of the social construction of symbolic value by incorporating the dissociative strategies of producers and providers into the analysis and by enhancing the awareness of the ‘dialectics’ (Bair, 2019) of and interdependencies between associations and dissociations from a spatial perspective. We could not have asked such questions without awareness of the extant critical analyses conducted in a political economic spirit within economic geography and beyond. Therefore, we regard ‘geographies of dissociation’ as an inclusive and ‘pluralistic’ (Pike, 2019), and explicitly not as a ‘dissociative’ (Havice and Pickles, 2019), approach.

Pluralism

Engaging with conceptual pluralism, however, entails new challenges. Pike argues that in our anchor article, ‘it is not sufficiently made clear how such “multiple perspectives” can be somehow resolved or integrated in coherent and meaningful ways’ (2019: 65). Indeed, as a team of researchers versed in different economic geographic traditions, we spent much time discussing exactly these challenges. Our tentative conclusion is that we cannot (yet) provide a ‘coherent’ account that fully integrates both cultural and political economic perspectives. However, again we do not think that we did claim to fulfil such ambitious expectations in our article. As pointed out above, we see our contribution as a much more modest one, related to a particular strand of cultural economic geography that has become increasingly interested in the social construction of symbolic value but that still lacks a conceptual vocabulary for addressing the loopholes and missing links in these relational webs and their related geographies.

Yet we see the critical commentaries in this direction also as an invitation to think about possible additional impacts of the dissociation heuristic not anticipated in our initial article. Maybe political economic perspectives (Havice and Pickles, 2019) can be inspired by the cultural, socio-constructivist approaches even though, or perhaps better because, they are based on a different epistemology. A salient example is provided in the commentary by Bair, who suggests that our interpretation of outsourcing activities as being part of proactive dissociation strategies does provide ‘a different explanation for the “make or buy decision” than that offered by most accounts of global production’ (2019: 69). We certainly do not want to discount the immensely useful work on global commodity chains and global production networks (GPNs) that has explored ‘chain governance structures, ownership patterns, and the uneven power relations and forms of agency in networked production’ (Havice and Pickles, 2019: 75). As pointed out in the commentaries, there is indeed an extensive and exciting body of work on how value chain fragmentation serves to create dark places and obscures links. However, this body of work, we argue, can be enhanced by closer inspection of the actual practices at corporate level through the lens of dissociation. This is not to deny that the rationale for value chain fragmentation through outsourcing and offshoring is largely based on organizational strategies, including efforts to increase shareholder value (see, for instance, Milberg and Winkler, 2013). However, once such fragmented value chains have formed, the need to obscure the manifold links through proactive and reactive practices of dissociation becomes an important part of business strategy and reputational management, especially if these links are rendered visible by activist consumers.

Thinking further along these lines, the dissociation perspective has something to offer to scholarship on GPN 2.0 as well. In this framework, different types of risks – including economic, labour, regulatory, environmental and product-related risks – are conceived as challenges that impact on firms’ strategies of globalizing their production (Coe and Yeung, 2015). The rising importance of ‘reputational risks’, however, is not yet considered systematically in this framework.

While ‘inspiration’ (Bair, 2019) between socio-constructivist, cultural and political economic approaches can work without resolving their epistemological discrepancies, the overarching and long-term collective project of developing a more fully integrated cultural political economic geography (Hudson, 2008) cannot. Here, the ‘substantive differences in aims, approaches, goals, and political ambitions’ (Pike, 2019: 65) have to be negotiated and eventually resolved in order to come to an entirely ‘new vocabulary’ (Cook et al., 2019: 83). These are, of course, high expectations and ambitious agendas that our work on dissociation does not fulfil and did not set out to fulfil. Yet we hope that our work may contribute to advancing such an agenda. We would appreciate if our ideas on dissociations can become one term deserving inclusion in a ‘new dictionary for cultural economic geography’ as envisaged by Cook et al. (2019) in their commentary and are motivated to think further in this direction in the future.

Here, the concept of ‘value’ seems to be of key importance as it might serve as a boundary spanner to afford more substantive interaction across sub-disciplinary fields. Pike (2019) points in this direction when criticizing our lack of explicit engagement with political economic ideas around the distinction between exchange and use value. Marxist value theory puts labour at the core of value production and thus can provide a theoretical frame for judging what ought to be the value of a commodity. The Marxian value theory of labour is also commensurable with the concept of commodities having both exchange value and use value. Establishing these, however, involves not only the process of the production of commodities and commodification, but crucially also the process of consumption and de-commodification. As Bridge and Smith (2003: 258) note, ‘[t]hrough production, circulation and consumption, commodities shuttle back and forth between the poles of use value and exchange value’. While exchange value is assessed quantitatively, use value is assessed qualitatively, based on the presumed qualities and desirability of a commodity which therefore also assumes a symbolic value or sign value (Baudrillard, 2017). Capitalist producers’ pursuit of profit and maximizing exchange value, as well as the continued and successful process of commodity production, thus depend on successful de-commodification by the consumer (Sayer, 2003).

The result of these processes is the emergence of complex regimes of valuation that are geographically, culturally and historically specific. Levy et al. (2016: 369) develop the concept of:

‘value regimes’ as political arenas in which civil society and business interact…value regimes achieve a degree of stability when three inter-related dimensions are aligned: Economic models of value creation and distribution, including processes of production and exchange, mechanisms of valuation, and their associated market structures and business models; Normative and cultural values regarding the moral and social value of products, lifestyles, the natural environment, and labour conditions; and governance mechanisms, representing formal and informal rules, power relations, technical standards, and organizations with authority.

From agenda-setting to empirical research

We drew on empirical vignettes to flesh out some of the conceptual claims in our article. The commentators rightly express the concern that this provides only fragmented and anecdotal evidence. For instance, Pike (2019) acknowledges that examples are helpful to advance the central idea of dissociation in a more intelligible way yet also criticizes the non-systematic selection of examples and raises the question: ‘Do the central arguments still hold…in the cases of more mundane goods and services, where symbolic value is less important?’ (Pike, 2019: 66). We agree that more systematic and comparative research is required to specify the boundary conditions under which our central claims hold. We are working on an explorative single case study of geographies of dissociation in the global fur-fashion complex in order to substantiate our conceptual claims empirically.

In their commentaries, Bair (2019) and Richey (2019) took the opportunity to look through the lens of dissociation at two different empirical realms. These empirical explorations point at substantial possibilities to use geographies of dissociation as a fruitful heuristic in quite diverse empirical fields and beyond those envisaged by ourselves. For example, Richey (2019) shows that dissociations are crucial in value creation practices of ‘help brands’. Help brands create and exploit symbolic value as they associate the good feelings around humanitarian aid with the consumption experience. Examples in this case are the joint initiative of the Bank of America and the RED fashion label to stop the AIDS disease. This particular engagement with help brands unveils ‘a more diffuse set of practices that may result from mixed, unspecified, or even competing intentions. However, the effects of these practices can be seen as dissociating the brand, or its particular product, from negativity’ (Richey, 2019: 79). Thus, in this case, a geographies of dissociation perspective also helps better integrate the role of consumers and (political and ethical) consumption in GPNs and processes of value creation (cf. Bartley et al., 2015; Clarke et al., 2007), an issue not yet fully elaborated in our article.

Bair (2019), in contrast, applies parts of the dissociation terminology to one of her areas of expertise, which is supply chain corporate social responsibility (CSR; also, see Bair and Palpacuer, 2015). She shows that this field, too, is characterized by ongoing struggles between associations and dissociations. Yet, in her view, insights from supply chain CSR also help to explore the limits of the concept. Bair argues that corporate critics have already learned to counter dissociative practices opening up a wide field in which value propositions are confronted with counter-strategies of value contestation: ‘While in the past, the lack of an equity might have been sufficient to insulate a brand from problems at a supplier facility, this is less often the case today, at least for highly visible and reputation-sensitive brands’ (Bair, 2019: 70). In our internal discussions, we did consider these additional practices as counter-association (making salient negative associations of branded objects) and dis-associations (demobilizing existing or emerging negative associations). However, we refrained from introducing this additional terminology in our forum article to avoid terminological confusion. Yet we appreciate these suggestions as an invitation to further explore such issues of value contestation in the near future.

To conclude, academic writing always requires the use, coining and refining of concepts. The sustainable value of new conceptual ideas, however, is not their uniqueness in the sense of a brand value but their ability to open up new directions of thinking and theorizing, guide empirical investigations and reveal novel and relevant insights into social phenomena. Bair’s (2019) and Richey’s (2019) engagements with our work through their case studies provide fascinating examples of what shape this may take, and we look forward to seeing how colleagues might use, adapt, refine, critique or enhance the concept of dissociations in their own work. The value of ‘geographies of dissociation’, we believe, depends on whether these ideas resonate with other scholars and are able to make a meaningful contribution to future research.