Markets and the arts of attachment

McFall, Liz and Cochoy, Franck and Deville, Joe (2017) Markets and the arts of attachment. In: Markets and the Arts of Attachment. CRESC Culture, Economy and the Social . Routledge, pp. 1-21. ISBN 9781138904293

Abstract

One story sociologists and political economists tell about marketing is that it manufactures desire for things that people would not otherwise want. As Karl Marx (1980) famously explained, products get their finishing touches only in consumption. Marketing is an integral part of the distribution of action that defines production and consumption by orchestrating markets. As practiced in the wild, marketing also concerns the build, design, pricing and placing of the thing itself. This means that markets and marketing are in it together and that people are in their products from the start. In this Introduction we outline what we mean by the ‘arts of market attachment’ using the motif of the Apple Watch before introducing how our various contributors make sense of the arts and devices of markets.