Communication and Economic Life. Liz Moor

of symbolic interaction, it focuses on money, payments and price and shows that these have long functioned as ‘media’ for the communication of various feelings, affiliations and solidarities. This history is traced through strands of social scientific work, which help to explain why changes in these aspects of our economic lives are so consequential. In particular, monetary media hark back to the longstanding association between ‘communication’ and ‘communion’; the changes associated with the decline of cash, the rise of alternative currencies or the emergence of dynamic pricing all revive longstanding tensions between money’s power to generate collectivity (‘communion’) and its power to divide and exclude.

Part II shifts the focus of the book to explore how different types of discourse, and different communicative types, contribute to the structuring of economic life. In these chapters I adopt a broadly pragmatist approach to communication, focusing on the way that people or institutions attempt to ‘do things with words’ (Austin 1975). The forms of communication I consider – promotion, information, narrative and discussion – correspond loosely to different rhetorical modes or styles, although they are of course not exhaustive, and certainly not mutually exclusive.

      Chapter 3 considers the role of promotion in shaping economic life. Promotion is typically associated with consumer culture and the matching of supply and demand, but the chapter shows that its role in our economic lives is much more wide-ranging. ‘Promotional’ communication is now a required element of many occupations other than retail (extending even to academics), and can be found in political speeches about the economy, central bank communications, and even economic theory. The chapter explores this extended scope of promotion, and shows, in the second half of the chapter, that the media of promotion are also often not quite what we think: contemporary promotion does not just flow through ‘big’ media and media institutions, but also through materials such as buildings, retail sites, credit cards and the behaviours and bodies of shop assistants. The chapter also considers the consequences of the fact that much promotional communication is either deliberately hidden or intended to sink into the unnoticed background of everyday life.

      Chapter 4 addresses a quite different communicative practice: ‘informing’. As a mode of discourse, informing is supposed to be open and uncoercive (Peters 1999). Similarly, the free flow of information – and its equal availability to all – is supposed to be central to the efficient functioning of markets as well as democracies (Schudson 2015). In this chapter I focus on the consequences of information abundance for online economies, and show that communication-as-information in fact constructs economic life in highly variable ways. On the one hand, both consumers and small businesses are advantaged by new types and volumes of information: it is easier to find information about goods and competitors; there are more opportunities for consumer ‘voice’ as well as ‘exit’; private aspects of our economic lives can be discussed in ways that are often highly beneficial; and exchange can sometimes be ‘re-personalized’ (Hart 2001). In many ways, information in our economic lives is a force for value plurality. At the same time, information is increasingly central to practices of concentration and control. Information about consumers is collected behind their backs automatically or semi-automatically, and is then sold and/or used to classify them in unknown but often highly consequential ways. ‘Informing’, in other words, is increasingly hidden from view and data is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of intermediaries who know how to interpret and deploy it. The chapter traces these developments before focusing in particular on the use of consumer information in digital marketing and online pricing.

In chapter 5 I examine the role of narratives and storytelling in economic life. I do this in two main ways: first, I look at literary and filmic treatments of economic life, and show that, historically, creative writers have often seen their role as opposing the values of the market. I then explore how these ‘oppositional’ values play out, and how certain recurrent economic concerns have become fuel for literary or filmic exploration. This includes an assessment of some of the problems that film, in particular, has had in representing capitalism and economic life. The chapter then turns to look at the economy itself as a narrated phenomenon, showing that, historically, the distinction between fact and fiction in written accounts of economic life was less clear and pronounced than it is now. The chapter explores both economists’ and economic sociologists’ interest in the role of narrative in constructing economic actions, and also examines the growing commercial uses of narrative – as in the case of ‘brand storytelling’ – to imbue companies and brands with meaning in the eyes of consumers and other stakeholders. Finally, the chapter considers the challenges to narrative forms of economic communication.

In chapter 6 I consider practices of discussion and deliberation – forms of communication that are often held to be superior to the one-way messages of media and culture (even the ‘high culture’ of literary narrative). Beginning with an analysis of economic discussion on television news and current affairs programmes, the chapter shows that these are often very far from the Habermasian ideal of rational-critical discourse. The tendency to simply put two opposing political viewpoints together with little commentary or explanation seems especially appealing in economic coverage, since it is an area that broadcasters often assume viewers find dull. Their response to this may be to attempt to create lively and engaging content through staged confrontations between political opponents. The chapter then considers the examples of audience discussion shows and online discussion forums. These do not meet ideals of deliberative debate either, but they do involve a wider range of people, and often construct economic life and economic concerns in ways that are dramatically different to television news. They also show that ‘deliberation’ is often combined with many other kinds of discourse. In the final part of the chapter, I look at some instances of ‘everyday economics’ that emerge in the less mediated spaces of daily life. These show – as I noted at the start of this introduction – that even a concept so apparently obvious as ‘the economy’ differs wildly in the way that it is understood in everyday contexts than in the mass media. Deliberation or debate about economic issues, here as elsewhere, is not a discrete type of discourse but deeply interwoven with other forms of communication. ‘The economy’, if it is understood at all, is understood in Weberian or Polanyian terms as the process of making ends meet, or alternatively as a power relation in which certain actors occupy a more advantageous position than others.

In the final chapter I revisit the book’s main themes and propose some ways to develop the study of economic communication in the future. I re-evaluate the book’s pragmatic approach to communication, assess what it leaves out, and explore how it might be taken up in more empirical contexts. I also spell out in more detail what a new framework for the study of communication and economic life might look like, and give concrete examples of areas that are often ignored by media and communications scholars but that would be fruitful avenues of enquiry. At the heart of any future research agenda there would be a focus on economic action as meaningful, rather than ‘the economy’ as powerful actors have already defined it. This does not mean abandoning critical scrutiny of those actors or of large institutions, but rather, by starting from what is meaningful in everyday life, attempting to connect public and political questions about economic communication to what C. Wright Mills called ‘private troubles’. Doing this in turn allows us to think about the kinds of obligations that large and powerful institutions have to their audiences.

Notes

      1  1 In addition to studies that focus on the reporting of the macro economy, finance, and so on, some scholars have considered the representation of business and entrepreneurship, particularly in ‘reality’ television formats. See, e.g., Couldry and Littler (2011) and Kelly and Boyle (2011).

      2  2 Coyle is not the first economist to raise questions about the value of GDP, either as a measure of ‘the economy’, or for understanding economic