Counter‐culture and consumer society

Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 4, Number 3, 207-343 i

Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 4, Number 3, 207-343 ii

Consumption, Markets & Culture

Editors in Chief A. Fuat Firat Alladi Venkatesh School of Management Graduate School of Management Arizona State University West University of California, Irvine 4701 W. Thunderbird Road Irvine, California 92697-3125 Phoenix, AZ 85069, USA USA Tel: +1 602 543 6224 Tel: +1 949 824 1134 Fax: +1 602 543 6221 Fax: +1 949 824 8091 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Editors: Paul du Gay, Sociology, Department of Sociology, The Open University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK76AA, UK; Nikhilesh Dholakia, Marketing, Department of Marketing, Ballentine Hall, University of Rhode Island, Kigston RI 02881-0804, USA; James Winders, History, Department of History, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608 USA Editorial Advisory Board Hacer Ansal, Economics, Istanbul Teknik Univeristesi, Isletme Fakultesi, Ikisat Anabilim Dal 1, Macka, Istanbul, Eric J. Amould, Anthropology-Consumption, Department of Marketing, College of Business Administration, CBA 320, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0492, Soren Askegaard, Marketing, Department of Marketing, Southern Denmark University, Campusvej, DK 5230-Odense M, Denmark, Richard P. Bagozzi, Behavioral Sciences, Department of Marketing, School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA, Russell W. Belk, Consumer Behavior, Department of Marketing, David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA, Dominique Bouchet, Sociology/Communications, Department of Marketing, Southern Denmark U niversity, Campusvej, DK 5230 - Odense M, Denmark, Lars Thoger Christensen, Marketing Communications, Department of Communications, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, Janeen A. Costa, Anthropology-Consumption, Department of Marketing, David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA, Richard Elliott, Marketing, School of Business and Economics, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4PU, UK, Mike Featherstone, Social Theory, The TCS Centre, Room 175, Faculty of Humanities, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK, Guliz Ger, Consumer Research, Department of Marketing, Bilkent University, 06533 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey, Mark Gottdiener, Sociology, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, 430 Paek Hall, Box 604140, State University of New York, Buffalo NY 14260-4140, USA, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Philosophy and Management, School of Business and Economics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Elizabeth C. Hirschman, Consumer Research, Rutgers State University, 218 Gallup Road, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA, Morris B. Holbrook, Consumer Research, Department of Marketing, School of Business, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA, Annamma Joy, Anthropology-Consumption, Department of Marketing, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., Montreal, Quebec H3G 1 M8, Romain Laufer, Philosophy and Marketing, Groupe HEC,1 rue de la Liberation, 78350 Jouy en Josas, France, Daniel Miller, Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University College of London, London, England, Lisa N. Penaloza, Marketing, Associate Professor, College of Business, CB 419, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO-80309-0419, USA, Richard W. Pollay, Advertising, Curator, History of Advertising Archives, 2053 Main Hall, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6t 122, Canada, Mark Poster, Intellectual History, Department of History, University of California, Irvine, Irvine CA 92697, USA, Paul M. Rabinow, Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, Kroeber Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA, Jonathan Schroeder, Consumption Aesthetics, Department of Industrial Economics and Design, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, John F. Sherry, Anthropology-Consumption, Department of Marketing, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestem University, Evanston 1160201, USA, Barbara B. Stem, Rutgers State University, 160 East 84th Street, Apt 16C, New York, NY 10028, USA, Craig Thompson, Department of Marketing, School of Business, University of Wisconsin, Madison WI 53706, USA

Editorial Review Board Mandakini Arora, Gender Studies, INSEAD, 37 Nassim Road, 03-01 Nassim Regency, Singapore 258423, George Cheney, Communications, Department of Communication Studies, The University of Montana-Missoula, Missoula, MT 59812, USA, Dan Cook, Sociology/ Consumption, University of Illinois, 104 Huff Hall, 1206 South Fourth Street, Champaign, 1161820, Roman de la Campa, Humanities, Department of Languages and, Literature, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3371, USA, Eileen Fischer, Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario M3J 1 P3, Canada, Kam-Hon Lee, Marketing, Department of Marketing, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, Laurie A. Meamber, Marketing, School of Management, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA, Reshmi Mitra, Economics, Xavier Labor Relations Institute, Post Box 222, Circuit House Area (East) Jamshedpur 831001, Bihar, India, Jeff B. Murray, Marketing, Marketing and Transportation, University of Arkansas, BADM-302, Fayetville, AR 72201, Steven Miles, Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AA, UK, Majia H. Nadesan, Communications, Department of Communications, Arizona State University West, PO Box 37100, Phoenix, AZ 850697100, USA, Thomas O'Guinn, Advertising /Communications, Department of Communications and Advertising, 119 Gregory Hall, 810 South Wright Street, Urbana, 1161801, USA, Julie Ozanne, Marketing, Department of Marketing, School of Business, Virginia Polytechnic University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA, Shay Sayre, Communications, Department of Communications, California State University, PO Box 6846, Fullerton, CA 92834-6846, USA, Clifford J. Shultz Jr., Marketing, Arizona State University, Agribusiness and Resource Management, 7001 East Williams Field Road, Mesa, AZ 85212-0180, USA

Aims and Scope

Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 4, Number 3, 207-343 iii

CMC: Consumption, Markets and Culture focuses on consumerism and the markets as the site of social behavior and discourse. It encourages discussion of the role of management and organizations in society, especially in terms of production, consumption, colonialism, globalization, business performance and labor conditions. Combining theories of culture, media, gender anthropology, literary criticism and semiology with analyses of business and management, the practice of postmodernity, blending art and commerce and requiring the constant renewal of styles, forms and images Educating readers about the conscious and planned practice of signification and representation is, thus, the journal mary aim; its second is to take part in inquiring in and construction the material conditions and meanings of consumption and production. Notes for Contributors can be found at the back of the journal. © 2001 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Pub], imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under national laws or under the photocopy license described below, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, or S in a retrieval system of any nature, without the advance written permission of the Publisher.

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Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 4, Number 3, 207-343 v

Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 4, Number 3 (2000)

CONTENTS

Santa Claus Does More Than Deliver Toys: Advertising’s Commercialization of the Collective Memories of Americans

Cara Okleshen, Stacey Menzel Baker and Robert Mittelstaedt 207

Counter-Culture and Consumer-Society John Desmond, Pierre McDonagh and Stephanie O’Donohoe 241

Gay Men on Film: A Typology of the Scopophilic Consumption Pleasures of Cultural Text

Steven Kates 281 Culture and Corruption in International Markets: Implications for Policy Makers and Managers

H. Rika Houston and John L. Graham 315

Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 4, Number 3, 207-343 207

Santa Claus Does More than Deliver Toys: Advertising's Commercialization of the Collective Memory of Americans Cara Okleshen*, Stacey Menzel Baker** and Robert Mittelstaedt***

This paper explores the role that advertising plays in shaping the collective memory of Americans by investigating the sources of the image of Santa Claus. Specifically, Coca-Cola's claim to the modern-day image of Santa Claus is juxtaposed with other sources of the image t(discuss the viability of attributing the image to just one source. The paper also discusses how marketing processes, specifically advertising, reflect, create, and shape the collective memory and cultural meaning of images. The paper concludes by examining the consequences of the commercialization of collective memory.

From 1931 through 1966, The Coca-Cola Company commissioned artist Haddon H. Sundblom to create Santa Claus illustrations for its Christmas advertising. Since then, people everywhere have defined their image of Santa Claus through Sundblom's paintings. This creation [picture on the can], entitled "Refreshing Surprise," was rendered in 1959. Surprise your guests with real holiday refreshment. Serve them ice-cold Coca-Cola.

* Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing and Distribution, University of Georgia, 148 Brooks Hall, Terry College of Business, Athens, GA 30602-6258. Tel.: 706-542-3767; Fax: 706-542-3738. ** Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, Bowling Green State University, 249 College of Business Administration, Bowling Green, OH 43403. Tel.: 419-372-7269; Fax: 419-372-8062; E-mail: [email protected] *** Nathan Gold Professor of Marketing, University of Nebraska 310 CBA, P.O. Box 880492, Lincoln, NE 68588-0492. Tel.: 402-472-2316; Fax: 402-472-9777; E-mail: [email protected]


The above quote, taken from the 1995 Coca-Cola Christmas can, illustrates the Coca-Cola Company's willingness to share its belief that it has created the collective image of Santa Claus. This advertising message is not just something that the company says; it actually believes it. This lesson is so deeply ingrained in the corporate consciousness of Coca-Cola that its employees swear the modern image of Santa Claus was created by the company in the 1930s, as demonstrated in the following quotes by Phillip F. Mooney, the Archivist for Coca-Cola Company.

Worldwide the public embraced what they saw and Haddon Sundblom s vision became everybody's vision.... What started out as an advertising campaign soon became a tradition... For over three decades, Sundblom's interpretation became etched in the American mind as the definitive characterization of Santa Claus (Charles and Taylor 1992, p. 5). The Sundblom Santa is remarkable for several reasons, most notably because of the way Haddon Sundblom captured the essence of St. Nicholas. Sundblom created an enduring symbol which Coca-Cola shares with the world each holiday season (http://Www.coca-cola.co.jplnldecl297/santa-e.htm1999).

In addition, in a book describing the unauthorized history of CocaCola, Pendergrast (1993), a former employee, suggests that this advertising campaign, which used Sundblom's bright red, eternally jolly Santa to target school-age children, shaped the way Americans think of Santa and reshaped American folk culture. Certain evidence seems to suggest the company may be correct in its assumption. For example, Coca-Cola is also given credit for the image by numerous authors in the popular press, as illustrated in the following:

The company's Santa campaign was one of its most remarkable, for it shaped and finally fixed the nation's perception of Santa out of an otherwise vague legend of Saint Nicholas (Louis and Yazijian 1980, p. 97). For two generations of Americans, and for millions upon millions all over the world, it is Sundblom s Santa who is the real Santa Claus, whose face, despite changing tastes and electronic times, radiates the true spirit of Christmas (Jones 1976, p.110). Our collective national picture of Santa Claus, for instance, is the creation of a commercial artist named Haddon Sundblom. Starting in 1931, he gave us each Christmas for almost forty years-on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company-a different version of what is now the standardized image of St. Nick (von Hoffinan 1998).


Further, many of the cartoon renditions and object representations of Santa Claus mirror Coca-Cola's Santa (Spethmann 1988). Edmund Gwenn, who won an Oscar for his role as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street in 1947 (Richard Attenborough in the 1994 version), bears a striking resemblance to Sundblom's Santa. Pepsi-Cola has even conceded the impact of the images when it considered poking fun at Coke by creating its own blue Santa Claus for its Christmas advertising (Anonymous 1996). However, Coca-Cola is not the only one that has been given, or taken, credit for the modern image of Santa Claus. Until the 1800s, Santa Claus was a thin man who dressed in bishop's robes and rode a white horse (Barnett 1954; Restad 1995; Snyder 1985). Since then, artists such as Maxfield Parrish, Thomas Nast, Norman Rockwell, N. C. Wyeth and several others have illustrated this famous folk hero. In fact, Clement Moore and/or Thomas Nast, and not Haddon Sundblom, are often viewed as responsible for our modern-day image of Santa Claus (Belk 1987; Curtis 1995; Gopnik 1997) and the attribution of the image to Coca-Cola has even been debunked as an urban legend. The above examples illustrate how a variety of sources hold claim to, or are given credit for, the modern-day, collective image of Santa Claus. This paper examines these competing versions of reality and questions the validity of Coca-Cola's advertising message, or any other message, which attributes the image to just one source. As Lipsitz (1990, p. 5) states, "Rarely do we ask about the origins and intentions of the messages we encounter . . . sometimes we forget the artists have origins or intentions." Thus, we ask, is it possible to attribute the image to just one source? Or is an attribution to an amalgam of sources more appropriate? How has the modern image of Santa Claus formed? Did Coca-Cola shape this image? What is the cultural meaning of these images? To answer these questions, this paper investigates the sources of the image of Santa Claus by exploring the role that advertising and other elements of popular culture play in shaping collective memory. The shaping of collective memories and images has been a subject of interest for several decades in the sociology literature. This literature describes the role of media in shaping collective memory (e.g., Beamish et al. 1995), yet to date, lacks the proposition that marketing, principally advertising, influences collective memory. The literature in marketing and consumer behavior has begun to address this issue within the context of how marketing processes help to create cultural


meaning (e.g., Holt 1997; McCracken 1986; Pollay 1986; Sherry 1986; Tharp and Scott 1990; Thompson and Haytko 1997). Another related area developing in this body of literature concerns the use of nostalgic or retro images in advertising and consumer decision-making (e.g., Baker and Kennedy 1994; Baumgartner et al. 1992; Holak and Havlena 1992; Holbrook 1993; Stern 1992). Most of this work focuses on how individuals interpret the past, versus how cohorts, and at the broader level cultures, come to view the past. However, Baker and Kennedy (1994) do introduce the idea of "collective nostalgia" and O'Guinn and Shrum (1997) found television significantly impacts social perceptions of what others have and how others live (i.e., collective knowledge /memory is impacted by television). In addition, other consumer research studies have examined how consumer decision-making is impacted by collective memories. For example, Holbrook and Schindler (1989, 1996) found cohorts demonstrate differences in consumption preferences and nostalgia. Similarly, Belk et al. (1991) found that adult collectors of antique automobiles prefer models that were popular during their high school years, and that the collectible cars imbue meaning from the past into the present. This paper seeks to add to this growing body of literature by exploring how collective memories have been shaped by Santa folklore and advertising, and does so through a historic case analysis of the progression of Santa Claus' image and meaning in American culture. The paper begins by discussing the literature on collective memory and presenting several applications of collective memory. Next, we present a historical analysis of the progression of Santa folklore and image to demonstrate how collective memories develop over time. After a discussion of how collective memories are commercialized and how this process creates cultural meaning, the paper concludes with a discussion on the effects of the commercialization of collective memories. COLLECTIVE MEMORY The study of collective [or social] memory explores how members of a social group retain, alter, or reappropriate public knowledge of the past (e.g., Halbwachs 1950, 1980; Fentress and Wickham 1992). Through social means, people collectively remember the same event (albeit sometimes in a different way), and discussions of such memories often outlive their creators (Radley 1989). Because these memories


are collective, they are likely to change more slowly than those held by an individual (i.e., autobiographical memories; Belk 1991). That is, social memories are held together by a means of discourse, but they are allowed to change and develop as our needs for the memories change. The function of these memories of the past is to provide a society with continuity over time (Schwartz 1991 a). The majority of the literature on collective memory (sometimes also referred to as collective knowledge) has developed along two theoretical lines; one views the present as a frame of the past and the other views the past as a frame for the present. The former "sees the past as a social construction shaped by the concerns and needs of the present" (Schwartz 1991a, p. 221). This school of thought is based primarily upon the work of Mead (1929), who argues that the past is remembered in terms of the context of today. Halbwach (1950, 1980) similarly contends that collective memory reconstructs the past by adapting images of ancient facts to the needs of the present. That is, society remembers the past according to present concerns. Thus, collective memory is a continuous and fluid social construction. The second theory on collective memory views the past as that which "shapes our understanding of the present" (Schwartz 1991 a, p. 221), as society's past lingers to influence the interpretation of its present. This approach, which grew from Durkheim's (1893/1947; 1912/1995) writings, does not perceive current thoughts and expressions as isolated creations. Instead, followers of Durkheim would argue that society attempts to reproduce the past as it once was, unlike the social constructionist perspective which states that the past is reinterpreted to meet society's current needs (Schwartz 1991a). When the past is transported to the present, it is upheld through "guiding patterns" which maintain continuity from our collective memories (Shils 1981). That is, current thoughts are only credible when they resonate with and reinforce existing beliefs and interpretations about the past (Schudson 1989). This "draws attention to continuities in our perceptions of the past and to the way these perceptions are maintained in the face of social change" (Schwartz 1991a, p. 222). Thus, even when present society is undergoing change, it attempts to maintain an association with past traditions. Recent authors concur with the two primary approaches but disagree with either one in its original form. Thus, they advocate a single all-encompassing theory of collective memory. Schudson (1989), Schwartz (1991a,b), and Swidler and Arditi (1994) prescribe that people reconstruct the past to meet current needs, but do so within


the restrictions of "the experiences of their own traditions" (Schudson 1989, p. 108). Thus, these scholars embrace the two approaches by recognizing that (1) past conditions are constructed in terms of the present, and (2) memories are limited by societal influences that occurred in the past. In other words, society reinterprets the past so that it is consistent with the present and also remembers what it wants (and needs) to remember. Thus, collective memory depends upon maintaining a degree of continuity from the past to the present and, when new elements or new uses of collective memory are added, they must resonate with previous memories (Schwartz 1973; Schwartz 1991a). Put differently, as cultivation theory (Gerbner et al. 1977) also suggests, frame resonance has to occur. Frame resonance is the relevance of the frame to the life world of the participants (a.k.a. striking a responsive chord; Schwartz 1973; Snow and Benford 1988). When a new frame is added, it has to be believable, or "ring true," and it must take the viewer's past experiences and knowledge into consideration. Some research has found generational effects for collective memory. Specifically, some sociologists have established that memories of political events and social changes are structured by age (adolescence and early adulthood). In support of this contention, Holbrook and Schindler (1996) found that age is related to peak preferences in customer tastes and nostalgia, which can be explained with the analogy of imprinting. That is, preferences or attachments to objects (in this case images) form during a particularly critical or sensitive period of one's life. Other researchers are not as specific to delineate age related effects. When dealing with memorials, art, popular culture, and literature as objects of collective memory, age related effects may not be as prominent. Objects (and images) may be more enduring than political or social events, which occur at a given point in time. Many researchers argue that viewing memorials, art, popular culture, and literature brings forth recollections of the past according to national myths (Hasian and Frank 1999). Collective memories can be passed from generation to generation, which maintains the continuity to the past. However, each generation renegotiates the collective memory, given present conditions. Thus, for objects and images, which are more enduring in time than political or social events, there is a (re)production of generational social knowledge (Hasian and Frank 1999). The actual collective memory explains the perceptions of an era and also its linkages to past generations. Our case study is consistent with these points of view. Most likely, the collective memory of Santa Claus and its associated meanings are


constructed during the formative years. Adolescents, who are eager with anticipation about the Christmas holiday, may be imprinting images of Santa Claus. However, as people age, they may renegotiate the image of Santa Claus, given present conditions. Thus, the image that is imprinted is one that is intergenerational in that it maintains continuity to the past. Applications of Collective Memory Collective memory theories have been applied to explain individual and collective political behavior (e.g., Schuman and Scott 1989). In addition, collective memory is often discussed in the context of major social and political events (e.g., the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the Kennedy assassination). For example, Schwartz has analyzed how the image of Presidents George Washington (1991a) and Abraham Lincoln (1991b) differed over time. From 1800 to 1865 President Washington was fondly remembered as a person of "remoteness, gentility, and flawless virtue" (p. 221). After 1865, his popular image changed into one of a plain, ordinary, imperfect person. Schwartz attributes this alteration to the common peoples' desire to identify on a more personal and familial level with the past president. As another example, two statues of President Lincoln were created in the early 20th century. Augustus Saint-Gaudens' work interpreted Lincoln to be a "dignified, clean, and well-dressed" leader, while George Gray Barnard's portrayed Lincoln as "club-footed and inelegant" (p. 306). The two statues represent divergent views of the President as either the "strong dignified leader" or the "tender-hearted common man" (p. 301). The public was divided over which version of Lincoln to favor. Schwartz suggests that such indecision reflected the different views on the imagery of modern democracy and how to convey it to the world. As the work of Schwartz demonstrates, images are used to create and reflect the meaning of the person or event they represent. Although examining nostalgia and not collective memory per se, Rosaldo (1989) argues that films portray racial dominance and subordination with elegance, which constructs the collective memory of imperialism as innocent and pure. Other research extends beyond film to suggest that marketing and advertising has played a significant role in creating collective imagery. For example, sports marketing, through advertising and promotion, created the meaning behind Michael Jordan's brand image (Gates 1998). The meaning behind the celebrity brand image was manufactured, bought, and sold to make


the brand an icon; a process that may be essential as long as products that project a personality are desired (Sudjic 1989). Others have suggested that advertising and promotion constructed society's collective image of the Southwest (Howard and Pardue 1998; Weigle and Babcock 1996). In 1895, The Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway were looking for advertising and promotion to give life to their businesses. The Santa Fe Railway commissioned artists who created images of the Southwest used for advertising via paintings, brochures, postcards, calendars, and books. The Fred Harvey Company built hotels, which collected the arts and crafts of the natives in the Southwest, and were promoted accordingly. Weigle and Babcock (1996), argue that the intentional construction of the Southwest was a synthesis of art and commerce for corporate image making that produced discourse about the region and its indigenous habitants. Howard and Pardue (1996) similarly propose the Southwest's image was invented by The Fred Harvey Company and Santa Fe Railway. They attribute the growth of the tourist industry in the Southwest to the creation of an image by the sustained promotions, advertising, publications, guided tours, world's fair exhibits, and memorabilia distributed by The Fred Harvey Company. Society's image of the Southwest was developed, shaped, and brought forth by the symbiotic promotion of railway and tourism (Howard and Pardue 1998, p. 134). Other examples of commercial collective memories include Montgomery Ward's creation of Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer (Barnett 1954; Schmidt 1995; von Hoffman 1998), Disney's reconstruction of Pinocchio (Collodi 1969), and Disney's recreation of Mainstreet USA, based on a miniaturized, stylized, and very hyperreal representation of the Missouri village where Disney grew up (Bright 1987). The all-encompassing theory of collective memory (Schudson 1989; Schwartz 1991a,b; Swidler and Arditi 1994) would suggest that when advertisements, or other forms of discourse, fail to resonate in the consumer's mind, the new information will be rejected. For example, though television images differ from objective reality, they cannot differ markedly from that reality (Ong 1977). To demonstrate the effects of images that fail to resonate, an example of a Nissan Motors' campaign is provided. One Nissan campaign featured the company's founder, Yutaka Katayama, and related images of the past to Nissan with the slogan "Life is a journey; Enjoy the ride." In particular, one advertisement uses a young boy playing baseball who ends up admiring a 1972 Datsun in Yutaka Katayama's garage in an attempt to conjure


up a memorable image of Nissan (originally Datsun). Nissan's campaign was viewed as "an ambitious attempt to begin cultivating a memorable brand personality, brand heritage, and brand meaning for a brand that hasn't been one since it was called Datsun" (Garfield 1996, p. 56). That is, as the critics contend, collective memory does not resonate for every advertiser. Nissan's attempt to shape the collective memory of its automobile tradition as a means of generating favorable nostalgia is not an effective tactic given that it has a limited base of consumer familiarity upon which to build. This lack of frame resonance demonstrates that the manipulation of collective memory is a delicate task that depends on an accurate assessment of perceptions about the past before attempting to reconstruct it. THE PROGRESSION OF SANTA FOLKLORE AND IMAGE Count (1953) begins his book entitled 4000 Years of Christmas by suggesting that the complete story on how "a bishop-saint of Asia Minor and a pagan god of the Germans merged to become [the American] Santa Claus remains largely unknown" (p. 11). In the fifty years since this book was written, scholars in a variety of disciplines have written extensively on the historic origins of Santa. This search "constitutes a genuine detective story, leading back to prehistoric times and man's earliest concepts of religion" (van Renterghem 1995, p. 53) and reveals that Santa existed long before Clement Moore, Thomas Nast and Coca-Cola. In this section, we provide a chronological account of how the modern-day American Santa Claus formed. Particular emphasis is placed upon the collective image, or physical description of Santa. Santa Claus: The Patron Saint The mythical concept of Santa Claus evolved from the persona of a "real" individual. Nicholas, was born in the town of Patara, once a port in southern Turkey, and later became a bishop and saint (Count 1953; Jones 1978; Restad 1995; Snyder 1985). Many legends exalt his good deeds; one tells that Nicholas aided a poor man by providing a dowry for each of his three daughters, thus enabling them to marry. Another recounts that three schoolboys, returning home for a holiday, were saved by Nicholas when he waved his scepter over their butchered bodies, giving them life (Jones 1976). Other stories relay how he saved a ship and its sailors during a ferocious storm and provided


grain during a famine (Count 1953; Jones 1976). These and other legends illustrate Nicholas' tremendous energy and exemplify him as a protector of humble folk, a guardian of unmarried girls, a giver to the needy, and a protector of children (Count 1953). Nicholas "'death" around 343 A.D., and his history of great deeds combined to fashion a legend from a "mortal" (Jones 1976). Paintings of Saint Nicholas performing his miraculous feats first appeared during the Renaissance period. Artwork portrayed Saint Nicholas in various stages of his life: as a young boy or a middle-aged man, as a tall, thin individual and as an adorned bishop (Jones 1976). His short beard, appearing in some paintings, is generally portrayed as dark brown (Figure 1). Santa Claus: The Gift Bearer Many countries adopted their own versions of Nicholas, the patron saint, who is known by many names including St. Nicholas, Samiklaus, Sinterklaes, der Niklas, and Father Christmas (Curtis 1995; Jones 1978; Snyder 1985). Saint Nicholas' role as a gift bearer developed in France sometime during the twelfth century, and soon spread throughout Europe (Jones 1976). Covenant nuns placed gifts secretly at the houses of poor families on St. Nicholas Eve, December fifth. The gifts, packages, and stockings consisted of luxurious foods unavailable to most common families. Young children also gratefully enjoyed a holiday from school on December sixth in 14th century Paris (Jones 1978). This tradition of giving and celebration became contagious among the poor and rich alike, as it gained a following in the rest of Europe. Until 1300, Saint Nicholas was depicted with a short, brown beard; its transformation to white is also a legend. As Christianity spread, many people began to associate Saint Nicholas with Odin, the pagan god of Northern Europe. On the Winter Solstice, December 21, Odin could be seen riding his white horse (or donkey or goat), his long white beard flapping in the wind, as he led the year's dead souls away to their resting place (Figure 2). This dual interpretation combined to lend Saint Nicholas a more distinguished appearance (Jones 1976). Santa Claus: Coming to America From the 1500s to the 1800s, Saint Nicholas was adopted by many Western European cultures. His acceptance reached the New World


Figure 1: St. Nicholas as Bishop (1425). See also Color Plate 1. Source: Jones (1976).


Figure 2: Britain's Father Christmas (1836) Source: Jones (1976).

via Christopher Columbus and other Europeans (Jones 1976; Snyder 1985). In 1609, Henry Hudson, who was exploring America for the Dutch, was the first to bring Santa Claus to the North American mainland. Hudson founded the city of Manahatta in New England where, in thanks for their safe passage to America, the townspeople erected a statue of Saint Nicholas in the town-square. However, most New Englanders, including the Pilgrims and Puritans, refused to recognize the "frivolous" holiday of Christmas and thus, too, Saint Nicholas' association with the holiday. In fact, in 1651, the Massachusetts legislature


passed an act declaring a fine imposed on those citizens found celebrating Christmas. Thirty years later, the act was rescinded, but many New Englanders still failed to recognize Christmas in any form except religious ceremonies. Because of this prevailing attitude towards the holiday, few documents and records exist on the iconography of Saint Nicholas in America from 1609 through the 1700s (Jones 1976). In the early nineteenth century, Saint Nicholas was beginning to assume the role of an American cultural fixture (Curtis 1995; Jones 1976). Perhaps, this is because it was important for parents that their children believe in Santa Claus to decommoditize the gifts "he" was bringing; the gifts came from Santa Claus, not from shops (Nissenbaum 1996). Or, perhaps it is because America was struggling to find it's own identity and it had to find ways to bind people of many nationalities. This cohesiveness became possible through the invented tradition of Christmas (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). So, because Saint Nicholas was familiar in European cultures, he could become familiar to all Americans and history could be used to legitimize American rituals and enhance group bonding. That is, collective memories acquired from a variety of sources could be shaped to become American collective memories. Regardless, the folklore of Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, was becoming an important part of the American tradition. In 1812, Washington Irving published Knickerbocker's History which described Nicholas as flying over the tops of trees in a wagon and, in 1821, William Gilley wrote a poem which described Santa in a sleigh pulled by one reindeer (Charles and Taylor 1992). Then, on December 23, 1823, Clement Moore's "An Account of a Visit from Saint Nicholas," commonly known as "Twas the Night Before Christmas," was published anonymously in New York's Troy Sentinel (Charles and Taylor 1992). The poem, describes Saint Nicholas as "a little old driver, so lively and quick," "dressed in fur from his head to his foot," with "twinkling" eyes, "merry" dimples, "rosy" cheeks, and a nose like a "cherry." The poem also says St. Nick's beard is "as white as snow" and he's "chubby and plump, and a right jolly old elf." He smoked a pipe, carried a bag full of toys on his miniature sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer, and delivered the toys by sliding down the chimney (Moore 1822). This poem placed a vivid image of St. Nick in American thought (Figure 3). One early usage of Santa for commercial purposes, perhaps the first, was on a flyer for a New York jewelry store in the mid-1820s, but this was just in narrative form (Nissenbaum 1996). Though an image


Figure 3: Saint Nick (1840s) Source: Jones (1976).

of Santa had been published in the Troy Sentinel around the same time as Moore's poem, the first "popular" visual image of Santa was published in 1841 in a New York paper. This Santa had a benevolent smile illustrative of his love for children and had his hands were full of toys. This image was reproduced in a variety of printed forms and one Philadelphia shopkeeper even created a life-size model of this Santa (Niessenbaum 1996). The earliest known American painting of Santa Claus is that of Robert Weir (1837). Weir depicted Santa as elf-like with a short, thin body and wearing cape and boots. Though he carried a bagful of toys, he also had a frightening sneer to reflect the punishing side of Santa; i.e., you have to be good to get toys (Restad 1995; Waits 1993). These early images demonstrated the jumbled lineage of Dutch, German, European, and American background (Restad 1995).


The customs that comprise Christmas (tree, gifts, Santa) coalesced in the mid-1800s (Barnett 1954). It was about this time, around 1862, when Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist, was Santa's "champion" in Harper's Weekly. Nast performed one of Santa's biggest image reconstructions in American culture (Jones 1976; Restad 1995). In his paintings, Nast depicted Santa Claus as a busy man rushing from rooftop to rooftop and, in his most famous painting, decorating a tree and making toys (Gopnik 1997). Nast was probably the first to expand Santa folklore to Santa making toys (Restad 1995). In addition, during the Civil War, at the request of President Lincoln, Nast illustrated Santa with the Union troops. This image allegedly caused the morale of the Confederate soldiers to plummet (Paton 1998). To create his image of Santa Claus, Nast borrowed memories from images of Pelze-Nicol he brought from his birthplace of Landau in Germany. Pelze-Nicol was a skinny, saintly man who brought candy to good children and coal to bad ones (Gopnik 1997). Nast's images, which also drew upon Moore's description (Charles and Taylor 1992; Restad 1995; Snyder 1985; Waits 1993), portrayed Santa as a short, round man-like gnome, with a white beard and smoking a pipe (e.g., Figure 4). His suits varied in texture and print, some had stars and stripes while some were plain, but usually he wore a thick belt with a buckle. His hat and shoes also underwent alterations, and varied with each of Nast's depictions. Nast drew in black and white, but stated that he envisioned Santa's suit being made of tan fur. However, because the brown color was considered too drab, Santa emerged dressed in a bright red suit trimmed with white ermine when Nast was solicited to illustrate "Santa Claus and His Works" for Harper's in 1866 (Jones 1976; Restad 1995). Because of Nast's illustrations which were widely distributed, new printing technology, and the importance of the Christmas holiday in American culture, Santa began to have a more uniform visual perception by the end of the Civil War (Restad 1995; Schmidt 1995). Nast was responsible for popularizing his round cheeks and white hair and beard (Restad 1995), but he never settled on a consistent size for Santa (Belk 1993; Charles and Taylor 1992). However, by the late 1800s, Nast's depiction of Santa as a gift bearer, who carried a sackful of toys and traveled from his home at the North Pole via a sleigh drawn by a reindeer, became the accepted stereotype (Barnett 1954; Restad 1995). Santa had become as important in the American Christmas celebration as gift giving (Restad 1995).


Figure 4: Thomas Nast's Santa (1881-1882) Source: Jones (1976).

Santa Claus began to appear at Sunday school festivals and for charitable events. He was prominent in the postbellum marketplace on holiday trade cards that merchants gave out as souvenirs. These cards reprinted Moore's poem and Nast's drawing and were often used by consumers as Christmas tree ornaments (Schmidt 1995). Merchandisers, who varied his image, began to use Santa as their spokesperson. By the mid 1880s, merchants chose a Santa who looked "like a peddler with a magical and inexhaustible bag of presents or like an elfish gnome from an enchanted world of mysterious treasures" (Schmidt 1995, p. 134). In the 1890s, some stores began to use "live" Santas in their window displays and toy departments


and by 1910, the presence of a "live" Santa was mandatory for any department store (Schmidt 1995). Pictures of Santa began to show more presents and possibilities available for Christmas morning and he also began to advertise specific products. One of the first was a 1910 ad for Ivory soap that depicted Santa "washing up" after coming down the chimney (Snyder 1985). With a "live" Santa presiding, Gimbel's famous holiday parade was inaugurated in Philadelphia in 1920, Hudson's in Detroit in 1923, and Macy's in New York in 1924 (Schmidt 1995). Christmas had become commercialized and Santa had become an advertising tool. After Nast's death in 1902, Santa no longer had a consistent image (Charles and Taylor 1992); however, as noted above, he was popular and appeared everywhere. His size, shape, clothing, and facial appearance differed according to the artist (Jones 1976). Santa was depicted in numerous ways: tall or short, round or thin, adorned in a long jacket or a robe, and possessing different types of facial features, including an Oz-like caricature or a grandfatherly persona, such as that created by Norman Rockwell. Though not every Santa wore red, by the 1900s, red was the predominant color of choice (Snyder 1985). Sometimes Santa also was dressed in blue, white, yellow, purple, green, or black (Charles and Taylor 1992; Schmidt 1995; Snyder 1985). Demand for street-corner Santas, who collected money for charity, and department store Santas rose steadily and, by 1937, the first training school for Santas was opened in Albion, New York (Waits 1993). These schools helped Santas learn appropriate demeanor and "selling" techniques. They also helped them develop an appropriate, and believable, appearance. Santas knew to wear high-quality red suits and black boots and they actually grew or attached whiskers to their faces, making them seem more "real." It is likely this "school knowledge" was derived from current perceptions of collective memory. The current perceptions were reflected in a 1927 article in The New York Times, which suggested that a "standardized" Santa wear red, and have a hood, ruddy cheeks, and white whiskers. He also should carry a bag full of toys. It was this depiction, along with the works of Moore and Nast, which influenced Haddon Sundblom's Coca-Cola Santa Illustrations (Charles and Taylor 1992). Santa Claus: Coca-Cola Style Coca-Cola adopted Santa as a spokesperson in the 1920s, but no artist was able to capture the spirit like Haddon Sundblom, commissioned


in 1931 by the company to create Santa Claus for their advertising (Charles and Taylor 1992). Coke wanted to increase sales to children but, because it the early days it was believed that Coca-Cola used coca (a narcotic plant), it was taboo to direct advertising at children under the age of twelve (Pendergrast 1993; van Renterghem 1995). So, Coca-Cola decided to show a friendly Santa drinking Coke served by children or enjoying a Coca-Cola after a hard night's work of delivering toys (Pendergrast 1993; van Renterghem 1995). In the weeks building up to the 1931 Christmas season, all the major magazines, billboards, and retail counters carried pictures of the first Sundblom Santa, who happened to be promoting Coca-Cola. "The reaction of the public was immediate and unanimous-they loved him" (Jones 1976, p.110). The Sundblom Santa combined a colorful version of Nast's drawings with Moore's description of Santa in "Twas the Night Before Christmas" (Charles and Taylor 1992), but he made Santa even bigger than Nast's and he replaced Santa's pipe with a bottle of Coca Cola (Belk 1993). Santa was "jolly, roundish, and ruddy with twinkling eyes" (Jones 1976, p. 110). He was remarkably human, standing sixfeet tall and wearing a red and white suit based on Coca-Cola's theme colors (Figure 5). Sundblom s friend, Lou Prentice, was his first model and then, after his death, a friend suggested he look in the mirror for his next model (Jones 1976). Sundblom continued his Santa series for each Christmas until 1966. His portrayal was a bit more innovative each year and the themes of joy, frivolity, and lightheartedness dominated the advertising campaigns. During World War II Sundblom’s Santa helped conquer the world (van Renterghem 1995). Sundblom's paintings both reflected and created American's collective memory of Santa Claus. Sundblom reflected the Santa folklore by illustrating Santa with children, toys and presents, elves, Christmas trees, reindeer, a whip (to make the reindeer move faster), and evidence that Santa had come down the chimney. He also read his letters from children, made toys, and checked his lists in the illustrations. His paintings helped to create a picture of a large and lavish Santa Claus. Because he disliked the "cheap costumes and meager look common to department-store and charity Santas, Sundblom countered with abundance-a lavish use of fur and leather (belt, boots, and gloves were all massive), a billowing beard, and a waistline so ample it required a belt and suspenders" (Charles and Taylor 1992, p. 16). In this costume, he was often shown grasping for toys from an


Figure 5: Haddon Sundblom s Santa for Coca-Cola (1931-1966). See

also Color Plate 2. Source: Jones (1976). over-filled bag with one hand and holding a bottle of Coke with the other (Louis and Yazijian 1980). Santa Claus: Post-Sundblom Santa Claus has been and continues to be a popular subject in literature, media, television, and movies (see Belk 1993 for a thorough


review). Santa is an especially popular figure in children's books. For example, Frank Baum wrote the popular The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, first published in 1902, which chronicled the life of Santa. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an animated cartoon first produced in 1964, continues to be popular with children, who can see it every year at Christmastime on network television. Santa also has-been a popular subject of a number of American films, many of which are shown yearly on television, including Babes in Toyland (1934), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), The Bishop's Wife (1947), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), The Christmas that Almost Wasn't (1966), The French Connection (1971), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), A Christmas Story (1982), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Santa Claus: The Movie (1985), Home Alone (1990), The Santa Claus (1994), and Jingle All the Way (1996) (Paton 1998). These elements of popular culture help to perpetuate the Santa myth. Santa can be different, but not so different that he is not perceived as believable. Santa also has to fit with society's current needs to become part of collective memory. Santa also continues to be a popular spokesperson for consumer products and a part of many holiday rituals. For example, for many American children, sitting on Santa's lap await with much anticipa-tion. Parents, though likely frazzled by the event, record this ritualistic holiday outing through photos or video and Malls are quite happy to support this family ritual. In addition, through the Internet, Americans and people around the world can send and receive letters from Santa, check the weather at the North Pole, and see images of Santa Claus collectibles. Demand for Mall Santas remains high, though Santa is now more ethnically diverse [(Macy's started integrating Santa in the 1970s), e.g., Lee 1995; Schmidt 1995], and dressing up as Santa is an important part of some people's lives. For example, Dayton C. Fouts is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest run of dressing up as Santa (1937-1997). Coca-Cola continues to reap benefits from the Sundblom Santa campaign. Writers in a recent trade journal, Beverage World, discuss the "perennial history lesson" the industry receives and Coke's desire to tell the whole world that it hired Haddon Sundblom to illustrate Santa Claus for print advertising in the 1930s (Prince 1995). In addition to the history lesson consumers receive every year at Christmas, Coca-Cola shares the rich collection of Sundblom's art in a series of exhibitions across the United States, Canada, and Japan (Phillip F. Mooney, Archivist for Coca-Cola Company, quoted in Charles and Taylor 1992). When the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto exhibited


Sundblom's paintings of Santa enjoying a bottle of Coke, critics blasted the museum for putting its imprimatur on junk food and for further linking the Christmas holiday with consumption (Belk 1993; Godfrey 1991). The Museum's curator defended the show saying it illustrated the power of advertising to shape culture and traditions (Godfrey 1991). Coca-Cola defended the show saying that the show was about the images that transcend the soft drink itself (Belk 1993; Godfrey 1991). The Coca-Cola Company also operates museums in Atlanta and Sydney that chronicle the history of Coca-Cola's advertising. CocaCola World in Las Vegas illustrates the images of Santa through time and attempts to reinforce Coke's assertion that they are responsible for the modern-day image of Santa. Today, the company uses the Sundblom Santa not only for beverage packaging and entertainment/ educational purposes, but also, more recently, for introducing new products including greeting cards and wrapping paper. A recent Coca-Cola Collector's Catalog offered playing cards ($24), figurines ($39-69), ornaments ($13), bottles ($349), and holiday china ($79 for a set of four, 5-piece place settings), all displaying the Sundblom Santa image. In addition, in the secondary market, collectors desire antique cardboard display pieces, which Petretti's Coca-Cola Price Guide (1997) values up to $4,000 in mint condition. As Slater (1999) discusses, many Coke collectors seem to be extremely brand loyal in that they would not consider collecting another brand's paraphernalia, nor would they consider drinking another branded soft drink. They also seem to feel indebted to Mooney for archiving the company's history, because this enhances their knowledge of previous promotional items (Slater 1999). DISCUSSION Coca-Cola's Role in Shaping Collective Memory In the opening pages of this article, the question was posed: is it possible to attribute the image of Santa Claus to one source, as Coca-Cola's 1995 advertising message suggests? The historical analysis of Santa folklore demonstrates that though Coca-Cola advertising contributed to the image of Santa as we know him today, the company should not be given exclusive credit for this image. This interpretation is consistent with Lipsitz (2000) who notes, because influences come from a variety of cultural elements, including electronic media and popular cultural


elements, it is impossible to attribute images or practices to just one source. However, perhaps the more important question is: did Coca-Cola play a role in shaping collective memories? The answer is an unequivocal yes. Today in America (and much of the rest of the world as well) Santa always wears a red suit, a suit designed to attract attention and assert the power of the transcendent (Clark 1995). Though popular opinion suggested Santa wear red a priori to Sundblom, it would not have been abnormal to see a Santa in blue, white, yellow, purple, green, or black early in the 20th century (Charles and Taylor 1992; Schmidt 1995; Snyder 1985). Today, a Santa dressed in blue would either be an "old" Santa or not "really" Santa. The American Santa is also associated with material abundance (Belk 1989; Belk and Bryce 1993; Hirschman and LaBarbera 1989). Even if Sundblom s illustrations with a lavishly dressed Santa did not cause this materialistic association, they certainly perpetuated it with Santa's extravagant dress and bulging bag of gifts. In addition, the image of Santa is that he is fat (Clark 1995). In fact, one of Clark's (1995) child informants noted that Santa could not diet, because if he did, there would be no Santa. Santa's large size can be attributed to Sundblom, who made him even bigger, and consistently bigger than Nast's images (e.g., Belk 1993; Charles and Taylor 1992). Why was Coca-Cola able to shape collective memories? Collective popular memory is not static, rather it is a selective and often paradoxical process of remembering and forgetting (Lipsitz 1990). How was Coca-Cola able to shape collective memories? The answer to this question is complex. The "reconstructed" Santa Claus not only argues in favor of advertising's contribution to collective memory, but also supports the validity of a single, all-encompassing theory of collective memory (Schudson 1989; Schwartz 1991a,b; Swidler and Arditi 1994). The concept of Santa Claus and its history, dating from his birth in 270 A.D., restricted how Sundblom framed his depiction within CocaCola's campaigns. Coca-Cola reconstructed Santa by altering his image, originally derived from Nast and Moore (Belk 1993; Charles and Taylor 1992), to meet the company's marketing needs within the confines of the current popular culture. Sundblom's illustrations reinforced previous images, including Santa's white beard, jolly smile, twinkling eyes, and rapport with children, which were consistent with society's collective memory and Santa folklore. Thus, the images reflected society's current understanding of Santa. At the same time, they slowly created, or altered,


other images including, Santa now holds a bottle of Coca-Cola as opposed to a pipe, he is bigger, his suits are always red and more lavish, and he is primarily pictured indoors. Certain features, or characteristics, of the "original" Santa are still there, but, as he has been used in different contexts, his image has shifted over time. As the transformation occurred, the artist built upon what was stored in the collective conscious, and as new elements were added, the images not only had to resonate with society's previous memories, but also had to fit with society's present concerns. Santa folklore has been perpetuated from generation to generation in one form or another, and, as noted earlier, America was clearly becoming a consumer culture. Society was mass-producing and consuming. Merchants were handing out souvenir trade cards, department stores were trying to gain a competitive advantage by offering consumers incentives to patronize their stores, and holiday parades were being sponsored by Gimbel's, Hudson's, and Macy's. Coca-Cola's lavish Santa, which displayed material abundance, fit with the cultural norms of that period. By the 1920s advertisers had begun to realize that advertising was not just a one-way communication of product (or image) meaning, but rather a collaboration between advertiser and consumers to create meaning (Lears 1982). That is, advertisers realized that to create cultural meaning, they must also reflect it. Thus, as the all-encompassing theory of collective memory suggests (e.g., Straub 1993), when consumers decode advertising messages, the present message is not independent from their past experiences and knowledge. Similarly, when advertisers create, or encode, their images, they must do so within the confines of consumers' collective memories or frame resonance will not occur and they must understand how consumers will use these images in their everyday lives. When consumers are confronted with a new communication situation, they will recall elements of the past. Their recollections are imaginative constructions that take place in light of present conditions. Consumers attach meaning to such recollections, and that meaning is derived from past and present communication, narration, and other sociocultural influences (Straub 1993). That is, as argued by Thompson and Haytko (1997), consumption meanings are not simply handed down by cultural intermediaries and the fashion system; consumers actively participate in the assignment of meaning to different consumption images. For example, the consumption meaning of the Ikea brand was transformed and adapted by a group of lesbian consumers staging a March in the UK (Ritson et al. 1996). This group


did not passively accept the meaning assigned to the brand; rather they adapted the meaning of the brand to fit their present social and personal needs. Correspondingly, Holt (1997) argues against the "movement of meaning from marketers to consumers" and suggests that the same object, or image, can be understood in many different ways-objects are polysemic symbolic resources that allow for variation in consumer interpretation and use. Advertising, along with other marketing and cultural institutions (e.g., distribution, media, family, religion, education), contributes to the cultural meaning of material objects or images (e.g., Holt 1997; McCracken 1986; Pollay 1986; Sherry 1986; Tharp and Scott 1990; Thompson and Haytko 1997). The cultural meaning is derived from a process of interaction between cultural institutions, material objects and images, and consumers (McCracken 1986). The more marketers interact with other cultural institutions, the more complex the meaning attached to the object or image becomes as layers upon layers of meaning are added to it (Tharp and Scott 1990). These objects and images may be materialized and durable; however, the "objects as such do not carry knowledge or meaning. Meaning exists only for those individuals, who, based on their experiences and knowledge are able to 'read' and actively attribute meanings to specific objects. The 'reading' of symbolic objects is, in general, a constructive endeavor" (Straub 1993, p. 116). For shared meaning to occur, individuals have to be able to interpret the contents of symbolic meanings, and consumers will not be able to interpret the message if advertisers are not able to accurately assess their collective memories. That is, advertisers must frame (encode) and consumers must decode. These two processes are active and independent, but not mutually exclusive. Consumers' recollections of Santa Claus are carried from the past but tied to the modern-day idea of Christmas. Coca-Cola's image of Santa Claus perpetuates the Christmas story and the consumption practices associated with Christmas. During 1933-1966, the practice and expression of Christmas was shifting from a religious holiday to a consumption celebration (Schmidt 1993). Coke's Santa typified that shift in not only his design but that he was projected as an advertising image. Consequences of Commercializing Santa Claus through Collective Memory As noted previously, Holt (1997) and Thompson and Haytko (1997) argue that commercial messages may be interpreted in different ways


by different individuals or collectivities. Analysis of academic research and popular media on Santa Claus' historical progression reveals these divergent interpretations. Santa Claus has been used to sell everything from soap, to typewriters, to tobacco, to soft drinks as well as to cast a positive hue on department stores and malls that hire him. Some in the popular press have chosen to view Santa's commercialization positively. For example, an author for Good Housekeeping writes:

As an adult, I'm no longer put off by Santa's commercialization. In fact, each time I run into another street-corner Santa, my heart is warmed. For it reminds me once again of the awesome power of this ancient symbol to evoke faith, hope... and love (Rivinus 1986, p. 50).

This author demonstrates that he actively interprets the meaning associated with the commercialization of Santa. Scholarly work suggests another positive consequence of Santa is that he may help in the socialization of children. Clark (1995) suggests that for children belief in Santa is an essential experience through which to indoctrinate the value of faith, through, for example Yes, Virginia There is a Santa Clans or Miracle on 34th Street. Though children lose the literal belief in Santa, they retain the ability to believe in whatever provides meaning. In addition, during the Christmas holiday "other members of the culture socially situate themselves vis-a-vis children" (Clark 1995, p. 40). In doing so, the culture reinforces the role of others, including parents and Santa, for children. Finally, as noted previously, a visit to Santa Claus at a local department store is an important tradition for many American families and children await his arrival with great anticipation and excitement. Despite the joy such experiences may bring to some, the goodness of Santa is contentious. This controversy stems largely around the fact that though Christ's birth is the reason given for the Christmas celebration, the dominant figure in the holiday seems to be Santa Claus (Jacobson and Mazur 1995; Schmidt 1995). That is, Santa Claus is the ultimate symbolic image of the material world and has led to the replacement of a religious culture with a commercial consumer culture (Schmidt 1995). Further, the current image of Santa encourages an unChristlike view of the poor-Santa gives gifts to good children, but not to bad ones. Thus, those who are poor and who may not receive gifts may conclude they are bad (Jacobson and Mazur 1995). Clark's (1995) study shows these may be legitimate concerns as she found it


was common for kids to associate God with Santa, perhaps because of his Godlike qualities (i.e., he knows all). Another concern of the ubiquity of Santa's modern image is that, because of his secularism and emphasis on gift giving, his image has contributed to the making of materialism associated with Christmas (Belk 1987, 1993; Hirschman and LaBarbera 1989). The images of Santa Claus socialize children to believe in boundless abundance and to believe that we get what we deserve and deserve what we get, and, thus, adversely affect the poor (Belk 1987). Several studies have legitimized these concerns. Clark (1995) found children most often associate Christmas with the receiving of gifts. Further, Hirschman and LaBarbera (1989) found that some adult consumers interpret the promotion of Santa Claus over Christ with negative emotions, an interpretation which reflects the negative affect some consumers associate with secular materialism. Other research shows that many Americans find the task of Christmas shopping a depressing, albeit mandatory, effort (e.g., Fisher and Arnold 1990; Otnes et al. 1992; Sherry and McGrath 1992). Two studies show how these concerns are reflected in American popular culture. Belk (1989) documents the role of other movies, as well as television, magazines, stories and novels, and comics and cartoons in perpetuating Christmas mythology. This study demonstrates that only comics and cartoons give us a reality check on the discomfort many feel with the commercial images which attempt to promote material goods and exalt material abundance. In another study, Belk and Bryce (1993) examine the changing role of shopping in Christmas celebrations by analyzing two films about the Christmas shopping experience, Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and Scenes from a Mall (1991). The first film demonstrates that one's faith can be rewarded when one dreams of happiness through consumption. The second, made about forty-five years later, explores the dark side of resting one's happiness in material consumption. It shows that even though we can now have it all, we are not happy. Belk's critical analysis of these elements of popular culture suggests that the Santa myth may be crumbling for those who question his commercialization. The final consequence of the commercialization of collective memories examines the effects of the reverse migration of Santa's image into other cultures. Perhaps no image of Santa Claus has been as pervasive worldwide as that created by Haddon Sundblom, because of advertising's (i.e., Coca-Cola's advertising) omnipresence around the globe. In fact, Coca-Cola is one of the "world's most


widely distributed and most famous products, with a brand name so powerful it dominates almost every consumer survey" (Pendergrast 1994, p. 26). Thus, how will Santa affect the shaping of collective memories in other cultures? In 1902, a British historian analyzed the historical progression of Saint Nicholas and concluded that Americans had their own distinct and unique version of Santa Claus. Dawson (1902/ 1954, pp. 309-310) writes:

But Every nation has its idiocratic notions, minute and otherwise, and it is not strange that the Americans, as a creative people, have peculiar and varied ways of their own in keeping this, the most remarkable day of the calendar... An old English legend was transplanted many years ago on the shores of America, that took root and flourished with wonderful luxuriance, considering it was not indigenous to the country. Probably it was taken over to New York by one of the primitive Knickerbockers, or it might have clung to some of the drowsy burgomasters who had forsaken the pictorial tiles of deal old Amsterdam about the time of Peter de Laar, or II Bombaccia, as the Italians call him, got into disgrace in Rome. However this may be, certain it is that Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas, the kind Patron-saint of the juveniles, makes his annual appearance on Christmas Eve, for the purpose of dispensing gifts to all good children. This festive elf is supposed to be a queer little creature that descends the chimney, viewlessly, in the deep hours of night, laden with gifts and presents, which he bestows with no sparing hand, reserving to himself a supernatural discrimination that he seems to exercise with every satisfaction. Before going to bed the children hang their newest stocking near the chimney, or pin them to the curtains of the bed. Midnight finds a world of hosiery waiting for favours; and the only wonder is that a single Santa Claus can get around among them all. The story goes that he never misses one, provided it belongs to a deserving youngster, and morning is sure to bring no reproach that the Christmas Wizard has not nobly performed his wondrous duties. We need scarcely enlighten the reader as to who the real Santa Claus is. Every indulgent parent contributes to the pleasing deception, though the juveniles are strong in their faith of their generous holiday patron.

Most scholars today also conclude this Santa is uniquely American (Belk 1987, 1993; Golby and Purdue 1986; Jones 1978). For example, Belk (1987, p. 87) notes five major differences between the American Santa and his predecessors: he lacks religious associations, he lacks riotous rebelliousness, he lacks a punitive nature, he is more tangible than his predecessors, and he is the bringer of numerous and substantial gifts. As the American Santa has begun a reverse migration, consumers in many countries are including him in their holiday traditions


(Belk 1987; Ger and Belk 1996). For example, Ger and Belk (1996) note that Coca-Cola's Santa illustrations could be observed "hanging from a thatched roof in a remote hill tribe village in northern Thailand" and that this symbol as well as the Coke itself is seen as exotic in other cultures (p. 272). Miller (1993) also describes how the American Santa Claus is adopted in Trinidad. In Trinidad, an important Christmas ritual is preparing one's home to be presentable for receiving guests during the holiday season. The home may be made more presentable by adopting Christmas symbols such as an American Santa Claus (Miller 1993). Though American cultural symbols have infiltrated their Christmas rituals and consumers are exposed to images of a commercialized holiday season, Trinidadians still maintain many Christmas rituals of "old Trinidad" (e.g., buying ham). But how does the presence of Sundblom's Santa shape their collective memories of Santa? Miller's (1993) study seems to suggest that Trinidadians do distin-guish between what is "Trinidad" and what is "other." This seems to demonstrate the delicate task of manipulating collective memory. If new images do not resonate with a culture's current understanding of rituals, the meaning attached to them may be seen as distinctly "other." Does this image resonate with the culture in Trinidad? Are these images reshaping the collective memories of people in Thailand, Trinidad, and the rest of the world? They most likely are. However, though the image of what Santa looks like to the society may have changed, the cultural meaning of Santa may be unique to each society. People do "understand, and thus consume, the same consumption object in many different ways" (Holt 1997, p. 333). "The true meaning of Christmas lies within each of us; and for each of us, it is a unique truth" (Hirschman and LaBarbera 1989, p. 145). Consumers are not passive recipients, but willingly and knowingly take part in constructing the material desire associated with Christmas (Belk 1993). CONCLUSION Society's collective memory of Santa Claus reflects the dynamic and interactive process between advertising, as well as other cultural institutions, and consumers. Coca-Cola's advertising has maintained, transformed and mass-produced the image of Santa Claus over time. Consumers have numerous experiences with Santa Claus— they have


watched, listened, read, and even dreamed of Santa Claus. As consumers experience Santa, they actively combine and adapt cultural discourse to fit with their individual, familial, and cultural traditions (see for example Holt 1997; Thompson and Haytko 1997). As Holt (1997, p. 344) suggests, "Different collectivities can find the same object meaningful in different ways." For example, as noted previously, the American Santa Claus is exotic in Thailand (Ger and Belk 1996). As the global migration of the American Santa Claus continues, the future may well hold new shaping for the collective memories associated with Santa. As new cultures adapt the meaning of Santa to their traditions, a more global meaning of Santa Claus may emerge. Could Santa be so powerful as to unite people of various backgrounds and ethnicities throughout the world? That remains to be seen, but there is s evidence that the global marketplace has resulted in global consumers (see, for example, Ger and Belk 1996). Though different Americans and different scholars interpret the commercialization of the collective memory associated with Santa Claus in different ways, it is clear that Santa's progression through American history, is an integral, and perhaps uniting, part of the consumer culture and consumer rituals of today. Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank the editor, reviewers, and Mark Ritson for their helpful comments. REFERENCES Anonymous

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Counter-Culture and Consumer Society John Desmond*, Pierre McDonagh** and Stephanie O'Donohoe***

This paper addresses a topic which has been relatively neglected in the marketing and consumer research literature. Our aim is to rejuvenate discussion of what constitutes counter-culture and what it implies about culture and consumption. Drawing on Hegel's lord-bondsman tale, we present three different ways of framing this complex subject. These frames are entitled authentic counter-culture, the mediation of counter-culture and counter-culture as difference. Through the frames we chart the transition from revolutionary to aesthetic counter-culture and the central role played in this process by the developing commodity culture. Next we discuss the implications of the aestheticization of social space for counter-cultural theory and practice, illustrating this with examples of various British and American counter-cultural groupings and activities. In charting these changes we discuss how the ultimate aim of counter-culture has shifted from transcendence to resistance, and ask whether the return to some more global theory might ever again be possible. Finally we evaluate the usefulness of Hegel's tale in the light of the previous discussion and suggest issues which require further attention from researchers interested in culture and consumption.

* Reader in Management, St. Andrews University, Scotland. E-mail: [email protected] ** Lecturer in Marketing Communications, Dublin Institute of Technology, School of Marketing, 40-45 Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1, Ireland. E-mail: [email protected] *** Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Department of Business Studies, University of Edinburgh, 50 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JY. E-Mail: s.o’[email protected]


INTRODUCTION The nature of counter-culture, and its implications for marketing and consumer society, have virtually been ignored in the consumer research literature. This is scarcely surprising as nowadays the term may seem to be over-loaded and anachronistic, a throwback to what some describe as the misplaced angst of the 1960s (Arnold and Fisher 1996). Our interest in revisiting counter-culture at this point is not motivated by nostalgia, but by a conviction that it has considerable contemporary significance. The idea of counter-culture is irretrievably bound up with, and central to, an understanding of the culture to which it refers-and as culture evolves, so too does counter-culture. Furthermore, the concept of counter-culture seems to resonate with recent phenomena, such as the demonstrations and riots surrounding the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, consumer protests against genetically modified foods, and the use of the internet as a way of linking disparate groups of consumer activists. Despite the lack of explicit attention devoted to counter-culture in recent marketing literature, there has been much discussion of related issues, such as the colonizing tendencies of consumer culture (Miller 1996; Klein 2000), consumer resistance and its relation to culture or community (Gabriel and Lang 1995; Hermann 1993; Penaloza and Price 1993; Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Firat and Dholokia 1998; Cova and Cova 2000), and the status of the movement towards voluntary simplicity (Rudmin and Kilbourne 1996). We believe that revisiting the concept of "counter-culture" can add to these literatures, providing fresh contexts for the understanding of terms such as "power" and "resistance". This raises the question of how counter-culture might be contextualized or framed. Two approaches are available. The first would be to judge the usefulness of a frame which has already been developed as a means for organizing the maze of different definitions and descriptions of counter-culture. Alternatively one could seek to build a frame from the ground up. In this paper we consider the usefulness of an "off-the-shelf" frame provided by Hegel in his tale of the relation between the lord and the bondsman. This was chosen for the following reasons. Firstly Hegel's master-slave dialectic forms the context for the work of a range of authors in social theory, including Kojeve (1996) (who changed the ending), Marx (Kedourie 1995), (who inverted it), Lacan (1977) (who turned it inside out) and more recently, Fukuyama (1992), who out-hegelianized Hegel in suggesting


that the end of history was not reached at the battle of Jena, but resulted from the end of the Cold War. Secondly, as perhaps the most enduring myth of the twentieth century, Hegel's tale provides a useful template to explore all "centre-periphery" views which seek to relate culture to its other. In particular, it serves to illuminate accounts of the counter-culture in various ways. We will elaborate upon these in more depth following a brief articulation of the tale itself. THE LORD-BONDSMAN TALE The myth of the Lord and Bondsman, which Hegel described in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1996) retails the story of the dramatic events surrounding the first of all human conflicts, its outcome, and the contradictions which ensue from it. In seeking to explain how consciousness comes into being, Hegel suggested that self-awareness can only spring from the consciousness of that which is other to the self. Consciousness requires an object from which to differentiate itself. In the first instance this object is to be found in nature. Once perceived as separate from consciousness, the object (nature) is feared as it is now thought to be foreign and opposed to the self. At the same time consciousness mourns its loss and craves to be reunited. The other thus becomes the object of an intense desire, in that consciousness wants to strip the foreignness away and make the object at one with itself; however this is impossible as it would entail its own destruction. Hegel sought to get around the unsatisfactory situation of this unresolved desire by postulating not consciousness and its object, but two self-consciousnesses which are locked in a deadly struggle for recognition. This outcome of the struggle is that one self-consciousness emerges victorious, the lord. The other consciousness is reduced to the role of bondsman as it is no longer for itself but in thrall to another. The conflict ends with the bondsman recognizing the master: to the bondsman the lord's view is the only view; he is pinned in place by the gaze of the lord. However while the lord may have won he has not really gained the craved recognition (of an equal) but only that of a bondsman. The bondsman is regarded as an object by the lord and works on (subjugated) nature to create the fruits for the lord's enjoyment. As the narrative unfolds a transformation takes place. Through work, by recognizing himself in the objects which he has fashioned, the bondsman comes to recognize his own mind as his own creation. The master who is alienated from nature may come to pine for the lost


unity and seek to rejoin with it. Change and transcendence are now possible. Hegel's tale frames the relation between "mainstream" and "counter" culture in a complex manner. Counter-cultures are admixtures of two groups: slaves who have achieved consciousness or self-awareness to the extent that they demand recognition, and masters who feel alienated from nature and who seek reconciliation with their "true" natures. The fashioning of a "counter-cultural" identity, like any identity, requires a leap of imagination which supersedes otherness or difference in reaching for self-sameness. The implication is that in making a claim to recognition and identity a counter-cultural movement seeks to create itself around the myth that it is the real, true, authentic counter-culture. This provides the first frame for our analysis of the diverse literature on the topic. This brings us to the second frame which is employed in the paper; the mediation of counter-culture. Hegel's tale illustrates the paradoxical relation between the slave and the master. This is characterized by the interplay of struggle and desire, involving mirroring and the fear of absorption and loss of identity. From the slave's perspective, the master seems to fill the horizon and there is always the danger that in acting out its resistance to the master, the slave comes to mirror that which it seeks to destroy. The master fears and at the same time desires re-integration with nature from which he is now separated. This can lead to an intense drive to incorporate nature and emerging slave "counter-culture" by taming it and reproducing it, and to an equally intense desire to turn away from identity (from convention and culture) in a bid to return to nature. 1

The third and final frame emerges as we push the second frame to an extreme. If culture is mediated, then perhaps the driving tendency behind counter-culture is not identity or sameness but othering or difference. This is because when viewed in terms of its composition, the counter-culture is not monolithic but rather comprises different groupings. This "reveals" the first counter-cultural frame as a typical instance of identity construction which requires processes of abstraction and totalization if it is to succeed (through constructing a fiction of the counter-culture counterposed to the mainstream). The "lord-bondsman" tale also illuminates the linkage between knowledge and power. Initially the lord knows (the fear of) the other and this is his power. However the bondsman comes to a sense of his worth through his work on nature and this knowledge provides him with the means to recognize himself in the fruits of his production.


Relations between identity and power are threaded through our discussion, as are themes of space and time. Hegel's tale highlights the importance of locating the subject in space and time. The story unfolds in space and through time; indeed, prior to the rupture which produces identity (consciousness) there can be no space or time because these require a consciousness to perceive them. We now proceed to the first frame in considering counter-culture as the counter-culture. COUNTER-CULTURE I: THE AUTHENTIC COUNTER-CULTURE Within the hegelian perspective the term counter-culture is rooted in ideas of identity and its formation in relation to an other. With counter-culture there is an automatic link to the (un-articulated and anonymous) mainstream. Within this binary scheme issues of coherence, power (A/b) and of right and wrong (white/black) are simplified; the counter-culture is the authentic counter-culture and there are no shades of grey. There is evidence to substantiate this in a number of texts on counter-culture, most strikingly in the extent to which authors refer to the particular counter-culture which interests them as the counter-culture (cf. for example Roszak 1970; Nelson 1989; Green 1986; Davidson 1992). Within this view the counter-culture is counterposed to the mainstream across a whole range of dimensions. Examples of such definitions are "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behavior patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (Batzell 1994, p. 116) and "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society" (Leech 1973). Similarly, for Dessaur et al. (1974), counter-culture

...refers to a coherent system of norms and values that not only differ from those of the dominant system (where this and nothing else is the case we speak of subcultures) but also comprise at least one norm or value that calls for commitment to cultural change, that is to a transformation of the dominant system of norms and values.

Represented in the terms of the lord-bondsman tale, Dessaur's view of counter-culture as a coherent system of values, which differs substantively from the mainstream and calls for change, implies a conscious critical self-awareness. The counter-culture does not represent the (unreflective state of) the slave who has been subjugated (which approximates better to the term "sub-culture") but rather the


slave who has attained a sense of self-recognition and who seeks to challenge the "mainstream".2 This is the sense within which counterculture is set apart as being "authentic". For example Braungart and Braungart (1994) appear to draw upon this frame in arguing that subcultural groups tend to withdraw from conventional society, while counter-cultural groups are more rejecting and confrontationaleither in expressive (punk) terms or by engaging in rebellious political activity. Similarly, Langman (1971-72, p. 82) argues that

The counter-culture seeks a fundamental transvaluation of ethics, alternate life styles, and transformations of consciousness. The "youth culture", as we call it, is more of an ideology, theme, or style than a clearly designated group.

This view is shared by Umberto Eco (1994). Despite offering several readings of counter-culture, Eco elevates over others the definition of counter-culture as "an active critique or transformation of the existing social, scientific or aesthetic paradigm". Within this frame youth culture is labeled as being inchoate, literally "sub-culture", subaltern to the mainstream and lacking in the vital ingredients of self-recognition and self-awareness indicative of genuine, authentic counter-culture. Awareness is key to the idea of "resistance"; it is only through becoming self-aware that the slave can come to recognize his or her self-worth and can develop those values which are different to the mainstream. Dependent on the mainstream, sub-culture can do little more than mirror the values of the mainstream within whose bounds it is immersed. In this context authors describe drug culture and hippy culture as being parasitic (Eco Ibid., p. 123), dependent on the mainstream for their very existence (Ruether 1972). The question of authenticity played a key role in the discourse surrounding youth culture and counter-culture during the 1950s and 1960s. The preoccupation with authenticity is scarcely surprising when one considers that much of 1960s US and European counterculture was fuelled by middle-class intellectuals and youth, who, one could argue, were able to play with the idea of counter-culture and if they didn't like it, move back to their comfortable lives. For example Emmett Grogan talks of the "pleasant fakery" of the "adventure of poverty" followed by many young white people (Fountain 1988). In this context, it is not difficult to understand why within this view much of 1960s counter-culture was considered ersatz and inauthentic.


Where does the demand for authenticity spring from? This may be answered by addressing the foundational myth of the very idea of culture itself, for is not counter-culture the other of culture? Auge's (1995) discussion of "anthropological place" is helpful here in linking cultural identity to myth. During the course of his research, Auge noted the tendency for different groups to construct unique foundational narratives or myths; often tales of war and flight across the territory which secured the identity of the tribe as being the people. The metyonmic substitution of the part (the tribe) for the whole (the people) is of course, patently false, as it masks the reality of the existence of other groups and as such the foundational myth is always a semi-fantasy because nobody has ever been unaware of existence of other groups:

There is nothing to suggest that yesterday or today, the image of a closed and self-sufficient world could ever-even to those who diffuse it and therefore identify with it-be anything more than a useful and necessary image: not a lie but a myth, roughly inscribed on the soil, fragile as the territory whose singularity it founds (1995, p. 47).

The reality of other groups is dealt with by casting their stories as being inauthentic; "we" are "the" people; our story is the one true story, all others are false. While a number of such alternative cultures may exist at any point in time the members of each come to believe that their culture represents the one true culture. The difficulty in believing that "my" culture is the culture lies in the need to dis-confirm the presence of others. The simultaneous preservation of a foundational fantasy and its projection into the future is reflected ironically by Lacan (1977) who substitutes the impossible space/time of the future anterior "I am where I will have been" for that of the self-knowing subject in the present. Keeping the faith by preserving and transferring the values of the culture is central to the idea of being authentic. The above discussion provides a possible explanation for the importance of authenticity in relation to concepts of culture and counter-culture and how such identities are based on the preservation of a foundational myth or fantasy, constituting a sense of place, which is projected into the future. Such myths are embedded in many of those "counter-cultural" texts where the author discusses a particular instance of counter-cultural development as if it were the counterculture (Green 1986; Roszak 1970). The discussion also highlights the fragility of such identities in that the myths which sustain them can of


necessity be challenged by others. Next we describe two exemplars of "authentic" counter-culture, revolutionary and aesthetic counterculture. Revolutionary and Aesthetic Counter-Cultures Several authors (Ruether 1972; Harvey 1989; Bauman 1993) have discussed movements in culture and counter-culture which are characteristic of two broad tributaries, the apocalyptic or revolutionary, and the aesthetic, or gnostic. These represent different space/time responses to living with the otherwise intolerable reality of the crushing power of the mainstream. Revolutionaries are motivated by the principle of Becoming, the promise of transcendence in the time to come, and invest all their will and effort in fighting the mainstream in the furtherance of this vision. In contrast the aesthetic response to force is to privilege Being, or space over time, in searching for timeless and immutable values. The search for such values may lead in any number of directions, in terms of seeking to build the space of community through the projection of a foundational fantasy into the present, mysticism or drugs. Revolutionary Counter-Culture During the twentieth century, a revolutionary ethos became equated not only with the idea of counter-culture but as the only way of doing social theory. Harvey (1989, p. 205) notes with some astonishment that until very recently, social theory focused on processes of social change, modernization and revolution which take progress as the key theoretical object and time as the main dimension (to the exclusion of the aesthetic). Revolutionary counter-culture was composed of a mixture of disaffected intellectuals and the downtrodden-with the downtrodden portrayed by the intellectuals as those whose consciousness must be raised in order to provide the cut-throat blow to the mainstream. For Marx the vanguard was to be the working class; for Lenin, faced with the practical non-existence of a working class it was to be the peasantry, raised to the collective critical consciousness of a "second culture" (Semsek and Stauth 1988). In later years the intellectual stimulus came from critical theorists such as the "Frankfurt School", those fringe professors of the French Academy of 1968, artists of the avant-garde and many others united by their urge to transform the values of "mainstream" society. For most radical


intellectuals the twentieth century was a period of waiting for the (never to be realized) revolution. Within the marxist perspective, authenticity (via the need to provide "credentials" and a constant vigilance against "revisionism") has been considered crucial as the culture orients itself towards the preservation into the future of a text (Das Kapital). Classification is of the utmost importance as the entire edifice is based on class. Thus in early "base-superstructure" models the "superstructure" or culture, is entirely dependent on the interest of the economic "base". The insistence on the primacy of social class has been remarkably persistent. Writing many years later within a much more sophisticated genre where the primary topic is youth sub-culture, Clarke et al. (1989) are at pains to insist that social class or "class culture" is the most fundamental "parent" category of which sub-cultures are smaller, more localized and differentiated structures. In its simplest manifestation society is composed of two mutually opposed classes, capital and labor (which take the roles of "master" and of "slave" respectively). Social transformation is linked to the developing class-consciousness of labor and to the ultimate collapse of capitalism under its own contradictions (through the extraction of surplus value, the immiseration of the working class and the creation of a collective consciousness). The aim is ultimately one of transcendence, the creation of a truly free and "truly" rational society based on the liberation of labor. 3 As we shall see under the discussion of "mediation", while capitalist social organization constitutes the "mainstream" to which revolutionary counter-culture is counterposed, two things are notable about their relation. The first is that both "mainstream" and revolutionary "counter-culture" share several fundamental aspects in common and secondly that both "mainstream" and "counter-cultural" writers have combined to attack a quite different form of social organization based on a different system of value-the aesthetic. Aesthetic Counter-Culture While the Soviets were organizing their revolution, a group of academics and other intellectuals settled on Mount Verita near Ascona in 1917 in an attempt to live out a solution to the problem of unbehagen, civilization and unhappiness posed by Freud; Green (1986) describes this as the emergence of the counter-culture. This economically and educationally privileged group felt themselves to be more unhappy than primitive peoples. They laid the burden of their unhappiness at


the doors of industrialization and urbanization, which they linked in turn to a rootless individualism and atomization associated with a process of "Americanization" (1986, p. 220). By withdrawing from the cities to Ascona, the group sought to recreate a sense of rootedness and community in their own (German) cultural past. Inspired by the writings of Nietzsche, by theosophy, Tolstoyism and nature cure, the Ascona group lived out a radical social experiment which celebrated the values of Dionysus, Eros and Pan and challenged "refined" taste by privileging the instinctual, the feminine, the "primitive" act and "untamed" creativity. Aesthetics was the primary mode of expression of this group and in their daring experiment on Mount Verita the Ascona group sought to fashion their own communal alternative space in which to live. Because the main point of Ascona was to act out new possibilities they have left no written legacy:

...they thought of Freud and Weber as enemies; Freud and Weber thought of them as fools... these "fools" have been consigned to the dustbin of history it was a risk which they ran-now, they look flimsy against the serried volumes of Freud and Weber (Green, 1986, p. 2).

Authenticity was important to the Ascona group to the extent that in the midst of massive social changes they sought to retreat to the authenticity of timeless "primordial" values. While each group may have shared a common concern with the apparently voracious onslaught of industrial capitalism on all that they held to be sacred, they adopted quite different responses to it. Marxist revolutionaries chose to engage with capitalism head-on, on its own turf, by seeking to supplant it with a more rational society based on free labor; in contrast, the Ascona group actively withdrew from the maelstrom in order to (re)create a new set of values based on the notion of a "primitive" community. While the revolutionary concern with authenticity was linked centrally to classification, this aesthetic was concerned with the creation of an experiential community. We now turn to discuss these and other issues in our second frame on the mediation of counter-culture. COUNTER-CULTURE II: MEDIATION OF COUNTER-CULTURE The mediation of counter-culture which we explore in this section considers that knowledge which both master and slave repress from


view, namely that identity is mediated. While some authors sought to claim the entire territory of "counter-culture" for "their" version, such claims have been greeted incredulously by McKay (1996, 1998) who charts the narratives linking "sixties" counter-culture in Britain with later expressions such as punk. With other authors (cf. Fountain 1988), McKay traces lines of resistance (and the often heavy-handed response of police) from the actions, lifestyles and cultural productions of hippy and punk eras to the 1990s. In this frame the counter-cultural "voice" is mediated through time and is also (at times) transmitted across cultures. In this section we first consider a range of definitions of counterculture which overtly recognize the mediation of counter-culture and follow through the implications of this for the "counter-cultural" status of terms such as "sub-culture". We next consider the mediation of counter-culture given the major shift towards aestheticization in social spacing during the twentieth century, and we suggest that the proliferation of media has contributed significantly to this process. We then proceed to discuss how, depending upon which frame is used, the meaning of terms such as "power", "resistance" and indeed the very idea of what may be "counter-cultural" is changed. Finally we consider the implications of changes in cultural spacing for what it means to be counter-cultural. Mediation within Counterculture Ruether (1972) argues that revolutionary and aesthetic "countercultural" movements can be traced to the most ancient societies, further suggesting that these are composed of disaffected intellectuals and others from the dominant class in addition to those from the subordinate class. Thus while a strict focus on identity (sameness) seeks to preclude difference, as in the first frame which we used, it is clear that counter-cultures are not unitary formations. The Ascona group for example was composed of radically different points of view. However it could still be argued that the members of this group shared an interest in common in that, by and large, they came from the upper echelons of society. This is the argument deployed by Clarke et al. (1976) with respect to the U.K. variants of "Beat", "Peacenik" and "Hippie" 1960s counter-culture, which they suggest were almost exclusively composed of middle-class youth in dissenting from their "parent" culture; "dropping-out" of society might be cool but it probably could only be achieved comfortably with parental support. The


authors argue that in contrast working-class youth found expression through the stylish re-appropriation of commodities through a succession of sub-cultural milieu, from "Teddy Boys" to "Mod", to "Skinhead"-developments which, they argue, only made sense with reference to their working-class "parent" culture. Similar themes are evident in a more recent study of the symbolic creativity threaded through the everyday lives of working class youths in Britain; Willis (1990) documents the ways in which these young people "use, humanize, decorate and invest with meanings their common and immediate life spaces and social practices" (p. 2). Ruether (1972) suggests that the pre-cursor to the US counterculture of the 1960s was when young, white, middle-class, civil rights activists experienced the "immiseration" which was taken for granted by Southern blacks. One could perhaps tentatively reinterpret Clarke et al.'s analysis (op. cit.) to suggest that by "dropping out" of society middle-class youth were motivated by a desire to rid themselves of the trappings of their parents' material consumer culture, in order to get closer to nature, while working class youth were motivated by the opposite desire to gain entry to and expression in the world of goods. The continued association of the middle-classes with counter-culture is currently reflected in the composition of cyberpunk and Hacker culture (Ross 2000). Mediation between Counter-Cultures The idea of the mediation of counter-culture lends itself to definitions which frame it as a "collective label" (O'Sullivan et al. 1983) or "a variegated procession constantly in flux, acquiring and losing members all along the route of the march" (Roszak 1971). According to this perspective, a diverse group of interests acts collectively to form the meta-level of "counter-culture"; different counter-cultural groups relate to the centre in different ways, and the cumulative effects of their activities are then referred to as "counter-culture". In the American "counter-culture" of the 1960s, for example, there were some who sought to revolutionise society by engaging in the South's civil rights campaigns or new-left campus politics while others withdrew into bohemian lifestyles, drugs, religious cults, or some combination of these (Batzell 1994; Anderson 1995). Within this context authors argue that "sub-cultures" are counter-cultural. For example McKay (1996, p. 6) states that "Cultures of resistance feed the culture of resistance. Put another way, subcultures feed the counterculture".


This argument is bolstered by O'Sullivan et al. (1983) who argue that the ideologies and actions of these diverse groups could as a whole be seen as expressions of youthful political protest and resistance against the older establishment. The range of sub-cultural movements from hippy through punk through rave and others contributes to the increasingly resistant lifestyle or perspective of counterculture. McKay (1996, 1998) notes that contemporary counter-cultures sometimes refer to previous counter-cultures in constructing a sense of identity; on other occasions he detects a considerable amount of "ahistoricism" at play. Mediation between Revolutionary and Aesthetic Counter-Cultures Within the context of revolutionary and aesthetic counter-cultures discussed in our first frame, the issue of mediation invites us to consider what relation (if any) existed between these movements and others and also between them and the mainstream to which they were opposed. With respect to their wider impact, the massive impact of revolutionary counter-culture on twentieth-century social and political organization is beyond doubt. However what of the aesthetic counter-culture of the Ascona group which actively withdrew from the political scene? Despite this withdrawal it seems clear that this group was extremely influential at the time and for subsequent generations. The group formed part of an elite European social milieu including many of the European literati who visited Ascona (such as Hermann Hesse, Kaflca, Isadora Duncan, Jung and D. H. Lawrence) and those who shared some of their ethos, such as the English critic F. R. Leavis (who was also concerned about "Americanization") and Mahatma Gandhi (who formulated his resistance movement based on passive resistance, simple living and Swadeshi, self-reliance). Despite the fact that they left virtually no written legacy, this group inspired a number of subsequent groups and styles including the Nazis, Essalen, the German "Greens", the "Peace Movement" and modern dance. What of the relations between such groups? While Green (1986) does not mention the relations between those at Ascona and the Soviet revolutionaries, one can deduce from the former's rejection and the latter's embrace of scientific rationality, that they did not see eye to eye on that subject. The rejection of modernity, flight from industrial "progress" towards a simpler way of life and the aesthetic preoccupation of the Ascona group stands in stark contrast to the


rational, progressive urge of revolutionary counter-culture. In general it seems fair to say that revolutionary writers have been quite disparaging about aesthetic counter-culture, seeing it as a waste of time or just downright dangerous. Thus for Norman Brown (1966), steeped in the aesthetic tradition, 1960s counter-cultural experimentation with new aesthetic forms and drugs offered the promise of a trip on the royal road to transcendence. For Marcuse (.1964), however, it bred nothing more than doped and duped dependency. Marcuse's reaction calls to mind Adorno's infamous lumping together of everything from polkas to Charlie Parker under the banner of the "opiate of popular music", positioning this against more "authentic" classical music (Eisenberg 1987, p.19). Writing after the event Clarke et al. (1976, p. 73) noted that two distinctive strands of the 1960s counterculture were

...via drugs and mysticism to a revolution in life style into a Utopian alternative culture or alternatively via community action, protest action and libertarian goals into a more activist street politics.

The play on action/ (passivity) and Utopian/(non-Utopian) in this passage convey the impression that while the aesthetes fiddle with style, revolutionaries get things done. In a later passage the authors joke that the (aesthetic) notion that a "revolution is in the mind" is "mindless" (1976, p. 77) There is (or ought to be) some irony here: it could be argued that the Clarke et al. paper (Ibid.) with its focus on various spaces of resistance, is itself a product of the gradual aestheticization of English revolutionary discourse. In the 1950s, authors had to fight for the view that it was admissable to research culture (and not class). By the 1990s, however, it had become difficult to fmd anyone in "cultural studies" who was not exploring the dynamics of incorporation and resistance with respect to cultural spaces. We now turn to consider the role played by counter-culture in this process of aestheticization. Triumph of the Aesthetic While we have discussed several differences between aesthetic and revolutionary views of counter-culture, there does appear to be one concern which united those at Ascona, their revolutionary counterparts and the mainstream of the time. We have already mentioned that those at Ascona shared a concern about "Americanization" with


F. R. Leavis. According to Green (1986), this sprung from the fear that industrial progress linked to rapid urbanization and individualization would destroy all hope for community or collective action and which in turn led to their withdrawal from society. In a text which partially covers similar ground with respect to English culture Dick Hebdige (1988) discusses the fear of "Americanization" shared by Leavis and others in the British cultural elite, including the BBC, journalists, cultural critics, the British Modern Design establishment, authors and critical theorists who together stood up against the decadence of American commodity culture:

They are seen to pose a threat to native traditions of rugged self-reliance, selfdiscipline and the muscular puritanism of the stereotyped (male) workforce, thereby leading to a "softening up" and "feminisation" of the national stock (Hebdige 1988, p. 9).

Hebdige (1988) argues that the main target of critical theory was not consumer society per se, but the associations that this had with aesthetic, feminine and American values. Thus "authentic" masculine values associated with social stability, substance and a form of elitism were placed under threat by the fear of incorporation by a brash new American culture which celebrated style over substance via such vulgar pursuits as jazz and rock n'roll and constituted a levelling down of (British) "high" culture by means of standardisation and streamlining. (Hebdige 1988, pp. 68-71). Given Bourdieu's (1994) insights into the working of cultural capital, it is hardly surprising that those possessing it in abundance should be concerned about the devaluation of their currency (through the "levelling-down" effects of popular culture and the rise in the currency of the female). According to a number of prominent authors the rapid growth of a popular culture centred around commodities came to play a central role in the transformation of social space itself from a cognitive to an aesthetic logic (Harvey 1989; Baudrillard 1990; Bauman 1993, 1995). This transformation involved breaking down the rigidity of existing social structures based on the codified regulation of social distances, and replacing them with a panoply of new spaces (mass media, retail, body-zones). Various authors suggest that the rational, hierarchical, linear and progressive organization of space/time has lurched towards a more fragmented scene characterized by pools of space/ time where hopes of sustaining identity, never mind progress have reached vanishing point (Bauman 1995). This change has had major implications for counter-culture which itself in the 1960s played


a pivotal role in the transition towards this new state of postmodernity (Harvey 1989, p. 38). As we shall see, this shift in sensibility has led authors to reinterpret the dynamics of twentieth-century counterculture, reaching conclusions that would no doubt have startled those who felt that they were participants in social transformation at the time. The shift has also had profound implications for the very idea of "counter-culture" and for related ideas of "power" and "resistance". For example Hebdige (1988) describes how, in Britain, this transformation emerged in youth culture, first in the "Teddy Boys" in the early 1950s. It was to reach its apotheosis in the shift from the motorcycle to the scooter; from "substance" to "style" and from "masculine" to "feminine" as expressed in the transition to "Mod": As Hebdige (1988, p. 110) notes,

According to sociological and marketing sources, Mod was largely a matter of commodity selection. It was through commodity choices that mods marked themselves out as mods, using goods as "weapons of exclusion" to avoid contamination from other alien worlds of teenaged taste that orbited round their own (the teds, the beats and later the rockers).

Hebdige suggests that Mod's significance and influence stretched beyond the confines of the "subcultural mileu". It led to the creation of new aesthetic spaces, from coffee stores, shirt stores, boutiques and discotheques to the development of Mod television programs such as Ready Steady Go. One would be hard pressed to detect the revolutionary flavor of a "second culture" here. From an "authentic", "revolutionary" perspective, Mod has none of the credentials of the repressed struggle for transcendence; Mod would be taken as a form of capitulation, a sign of absorption by mass consumer culture. In commenting on the aestheticization of everyday life, Hebdige's work is itself illustrative of that "sea-change" which, we noted earlier took effect in English social theory. But how did this come about? Mechanics of Transformation What of the mechanics of this transformation from a cognitive (apocalyptic, revolutionary) to an aesthetic organization of social space? Several authors (Harvey 1989; Bauman 1993, 1995, 1997; Brennan 1993) suggest that the revolutionary excavating impulse of modernism is itself responsible for this change. As an example, Harvey (1989) invokes Marx's famous description of capital as the "annihilation of space through time" to describe the modern imperative to pulverize


space, and capital's forward rush to overcome the friction of distance in the bid to colonize every space. Harvey notes that while this process has been ongoing for at least 100 years, it has accelerated as the turnover time of capital has itself accelerated. However the key contradiction noted by Harvey is that in seeking to colonize space, new spaces must be created. For example since the early days of the Industrial Revolution there has been a vast proliferation of new spaces: the railway, vast networks of roads, motorways and bypasses, the telegraph, "air-space", the media spaces of TV, radio and the internet and the "space" of the body. Political space has been redefined and with it the spatialization of power. This has had profound implications for the conception of what constitutes power. The Hobbesian notion of a unitary sovereign space with a ruler at its center, the aristocracy at its core and subjects at its periphery, gave way to a differentiated classificatory control apparatus, more fitting to the exercise of discipline in the faceless state of modern liberal democracy. Power has become more diffuse and faceless as the liberal state has itself been "rolled back" and its functions privatized. According to Harvey (1989) and Bauman (1993, 1995) the pulverization of space into a series of pools of space-time has led to the fragmentation of life, a life which can no longer be lived as a coherent project, with the consequent disembedding of identity. Within this situation where all seems ephemeral these authors note a nostalgic common desire for immutable timeless values (the aesthetic), leading some tribes to retrench, with frequently appalling consequences for those "strangers" who inhabit the same space (as evidenced by the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, for example, and increasing support for fascism in parts of Europe). On the other hand, as Maffesoli (1996) has observed, new tribes are formed who come to inhabit new spaces, such as cyberspace with its associated promise of new forms of community (Venkatesh et al. 1997; Bell and Kennedy 2000). The effect of this change had truly shattering consequences for social theory, as the fundamental category of "class" unravelled amidst a sea of counter-claims (from feminists, gays, ethnic groups, disabled people and other minorities). Baudrillard notes, in the context of the collapse and interpenetration of all categories that; "Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic". He adds that: "(T)he fact is that the revolution has well and truly happened, but not in the way we expected" (1990, p. 4). With the benefit of hindsight it makes sense to argue that what was truly "counter-cultural" in that it represented a radical break with the past


was the irruption of popular culture which rode in on the crest of a wave of styles, commodities and ultimately commodity-styles. This view is advocated by Clarke et al. (1989) in noting for example that long before Oz began its campaign against a restrictive sexual morality, that morality had been undermined by the language of mass advertising and magazines-noting that Playgirl moved in where Oz had feared to tread (1989, p. 77). When viewed through the aesthetic lens revolutionary counterculture loses much of its radical edge as it mirrors the form of the mainstream modernism to which it is opposed, by dint of its focus on rationality, the future resolution of contradictions and of revolutionary progress to the "time to come", whether this be the millennium, or the revolution. The view that twentieth-century revolutionary counter-cultural organization acts as a double or mirror of the mainstream has been argued and noted by a number of authors (Marcuse 1964; Roszak 1970; Baudrillard 1981). Bauman (1997, p. 38) reflects on the process by which modernity bred cadres of revolutionaries pledging to replace the revolutionary generalizing, classificatory style of modernism:

From that perspective, the counter-order could appear only as another, opposing classification and a reversal of categorical hierarchy. Those bent on doing the reversal could be seen only as aspiring alternative classifiers and legislators of categories.

Aestheticization of Space: Spaces of Resistance We have mentioned that nowadays one hears little talk of transcendence. In its stead is a stream of discourse which seeks to prise open and pore over spaces of resistance; the resistance of advertising space (through anti-advertising and the "tactics" of resistance), resistance against roads (through tunnelling and seeking to "reclaim the streets"); resistance against capitalism (through spectacular rallies); resistance against consumer society (through skip diving, No Shop Day and a myriad other actions); resistance to home ownership (Gurney 1999); resistance around the dinner-table (Martens and Warde 1999); resistance through the construction of temporary autonomous zones, including "rave" spaces and "mystic spaces" (Bey 1996); the "reclamation" of the body through tattooing or piercing, resistance through the creation of web-spaces via the development of new "communities" (Gals on Web, netchicks, Napster.com). If the sheer weight of reported action counts for anything then surely the Western


world is passing through its most resistant phase ever! What is the nature of such "resistance", however? How does "resistance" relate to the actions of the self-critical subject? How is such resistance mediated? These questions are addressed below. Strategic and Tactical Spaces De Certeau's (1984) division of spaces into strategic and tactical corresponds broadly to the division between the revolutionary and the aesthetic. Taking a relatively naive conception of space, what matters to revolutionaries is the occupation of strategic space-those public spaces, the streets and squares which make up the city together with the strategic public media of radio and television. On the other hand De Certeau's concept of tactical space sits well with the aesthetic, in that it is micro-political (fashioned in response to the totalizing discourse of Foucault's Discipline and Punish) and composed by the actions of those millions of people who daily traverse public spaces. De Certeau likens such action to that of the nomadic reader, arguing that this is one action which must always be free of determination because it is neither here nor there, it has no place. Much of the discussion of counter-cultural media centres on the one hand on counter-cultural attempts to gain a voice through the construction of strategic spaces (via magazines and TV programmes). Others have eagerly seized upon de Certeau's ideas in discussing consumers' tactical resistance to the spaces and texts of "mainstream" media. Mediation of Strategic Space The power of counter-culture is portrayed quite differently depending on whether one is talking of strategic space or tactical space. With respect to strategic space, narratives of counter-cultural media often chart a path from the optimism of beginnings to the bitterness of closure. While authors point out the more positive aspects of counter-cultural media, 5 the discourse is haunted by the fear (and realisation) of mainstream incorporation. One of the most well-known counter-cultural media organisations is the Toronto-based Adbusters Media Foundation (incorporating the "Culture-Jamming" network and Adbusters magazine). Seeking no less than "to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21 st century", it works towards this goal by providing a focal point for developing and


disseminating critical thought, parodic advertising and resources for those interested in countering consumer culture. Adbusters was inspired by the FTF (First Things First)6 Manifesto developed by Ken Garland, a London based graphic designer in 1964. One change worth noting since the 1960s is that the ambivalent approach to technology of those days has given way to its wholehearted embrace: the Adbusters website plays a crucial role in providing content for and making links with like-minded individuals and organizations. How might we interpret the work of the Adbusters Media Foundation? A modest interpretation would place this as the latest development in the stream of counter-cultural mediation (McKay 1996). The notion of "counterproductions" resonates with Firat and Dholakia's (1998) discussion of how consumption became separated from production in modernity. Postmodern consumption, they suggest, resynthesizes the two, to the extent that "the separation between moments and sites of production and consumption will gradually disappear" (1998, p. 101) and possibilities for a new space open up. On the other hand we may read Adbusters' counter-productions as a rather picturesque form of incorporation, a constant theme in studies of counter-cultural media (Fountain 1988; Nelson 1989). After all, Handelman (1998) notes that a significant proportion of Adbusters magazine subscriptions are taken out by inhabitants of Madison Avenue. 8

Fountain (1988) notes how Oz became trapped in "mainstream" discussions with respect to hierarchies and disputes with labour unions. The irony in such situations was detected by Eco (1967), long before those in the firing line:

Certain phenomena of "mass dissent"(hippies, beatniks, new Bohemias, student movements) today seem to us negative replies to the industrial society: The society of Technological Communication is rejected in order to look for alternative forms, using the means of technological society (television, press, record companies...). So there is no leaving the circle: you are trapped in it willy-nilly. Revolutions are often resolved in more picturesque forms of integration.

Penaloza and Price (1993) make the point more succinctly in suggesting that one cannot fight fire with fire. The warning that the use of technology to defeat Technology merely recuperates and invigorates Technology has largely fallen on deaf ears. Rudmin and Kilbourne (1996) make a telling point when they describe how the "adbusters" of the 1920s, those media which had been set up to espouse the values of voluntary simplicity later became so thoroughly assimilated into


the mainstream that they became beacons for the values of consumption. Foucault (1979) might have argued that power generates its own forms of resistance. This illustrates Davidson's (1992) point that advertising's reflexivity allows it to use the forces ranged against it for its own ends. It also supports the broader argument that the boundaries between consumption and resistance are porous, and that there is an immediate and recursive interplay between resisters and marketing agents and institutions (Penaloza and Price 1993; Gabriel and Lang 1995). Turning to the mass media, these tend to be viewed in three main ways from a counter-cultural perspective. First they are depicted as having the ability to render the suffering of the oppressed and protest movements visible-as famously happened at Kent State University and with respect to Vietnam (Ruether 1972). Secondly they are accused of rendering the activities of counter-cultural groups risible.9 Finally they are held responsible for simulating images of "counterculture" and circulating them within media discourse as just another referent system for the composition of style. The incorporation of "counter-cultural" imagery within commodity-culture is most noteworthy with respect to youth culture, for example with respect to the appropriation of signifiers of punk or street fashion (Ewen 1988; Davidson 1992). As the 1960s counter-culture took the commodity to its heart, so commodification has advanced to the heart of those spectacular spaces which once constituted the core of counter-cultural expression, the rock concert, where everything (including the grass) is now a vehicle for some form of promotion (Klein 2000). Within an advertising system where brands routinely base themselves on the "anti-hero" referent system (Williamson 1979), where some (such as Sprite) even de-bunk the consumerism on which they rely for their survival, Adbusters' parodic "anti-advertising" may simply be regarded as another form of advertising. Mediation of Tactical Space In the media consumption literature much of the research with respect to tactics applied a useful corrective to the "mass ideology" thesis, with authors noting that audiences are active and can decode texts in radically different ways to those intended by the sender, depending on the frame of reference (Roscoe et al. 1985) or as shaped by prior ideological discourses (Morley 1995). Writing in this vein, Miller (1996) deploys a semiotic approach in suggesting that the


"Coca-Colinization" thesis (exemplified in the homogenizing and globalizing tendencies of consumer culture) cannot be sustained. However a veritable industry has sprung up around the deployment of tactics which seeks to radicalize these to the level of resistance. For example Fiske (1989, p. 37) likens youth to "shopping mall guerillas par excellence" and likens their "tactics" (changing price tags on clothing) to those used by the Vietcong. With respect to advertising, Elliott and Ritson (1997, p. 192) describe a "battle of the titans" with "the powerful commodity-text of advertising" on one side of the ring and "countervailing opportunities for symbolic resistance through polysemy and active re-signification of meaning by subcultural practices", on the other. Others challenge the appropriation of "resistance" for such purposes. Roach (1997, p. 59) for one argues that it "belongs to a political vocabulary of movements in opposition to real oppression, where the physical and personal stakes (such as life/ death) are extremely high". By the end of the 1980s it seemed the audience was always active and that media content was always polysemic (Evans 1990). This led to concern that the freedom of the media consumer has been romanticized to the extent that the question of media power is becoming invisible. Morley (1995, p. 310) laments the "facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and... an undocumented presumption that forms of interpretive resistance". Indeed, Morris (1988, p. 20) suggests that writing about resistance has become an industry in its own right, with "thousands of versions of the same article about pleasure, resistance and the politics of consumption... run off under different names with minor variation".l0

In our view the issue of what is, and what is not resistance owes much to the "aestheticization" of the entire social space. We share the disquiet of Roach and others about the manner in which petty theft or different readings of soap opera storylines is rendered similar to situations where people risk injury or even death. One could argue, however, that in the current age the "heroic" or revolutionary conception of "resistance" to which these authors refer becomes increasingly nostalgic. This shift in the conception of "resistance" from that of the self-critical subject to the micro, or what Baudrillard (1990) refers to as the fractal level, chimes well with the idea of the fragmentation of social space into a series of space-time pools. However this raises a conceptual problem about the meaning of the signifier "resistance". As mentioned earlier, Eco (1994) offered a definition of "authentic" or "heroic" counter-cultural resistance as "an active critique or transformation


of the existing social, scientific or aesthetic paradigm". If in its "heroic" manifestation, resistance refers to conscious, self-critical action; then in its aesthetic or "everyday" dimension one might say that "resistance" is equated with the tactical, those largely unconscious, unreflective actions which produce what Eco (1979) calls the "aberrant" decoding of texts. At the very least, as Willis (1990, p. 156) argues,

...common culture has produced increasing numbers of independent and recalcitrant ordinary citizens and voters who are very much more difficult for everybody to handle or understand.

In this incarnation, the signifier "resistance" loses much of its substance and takes on the appearance of pure formality; resistance as the (inevitable) return of the repressed, of the excess over the power which seeks to control it. We do not believe that this conceptualization of "resistance" is necessarily a bad thing, just that it can quickly become a "catch-all" label for many diversely motivated and un-motivated actions and so requires much further discussion. Cova and Cova (2000) offer a welcome step in this direction with their distinction between appropriation of unordered space (mastery over the law of nature) and re-appropriation of ordered space (mastery over the law of the owner), and their discussion of "twist", consumers' reappropriation of marketing space. In this context, Aubert-Gamet's (1997) observation of consumers in two French banks led to the identification of 830 actions in the space which contravened the norms of the bank. This brings us to our third and final frame which considers what forms of action are appropriate for a fragmented space/time complex. COUNTER-CULTURE III: COUNTER-CULTURE AS DIFFERENCE The idea of counter-culture as difference rests on the idea that countercultural groups have long been characterised by looseness, openness, chaos and disorder (Musgrove 1974). They may also be "as hostile towards and out of step with one another as each of them is committed to the task of transforming the prevailing culture" (Dessaur et al. 1972, p. 2). On the other hand, the break between the counter-culture and the mainstream is not as clean as it seems. Roszak (1972) claimed that the enemy of 1960s counter-culture sat across the breakfast table,


raising the notion that one can be a "part-time" member of the "counterculture". McKays (1998, p. 2) analysis of "DiY [do-it-yourself] culture" in contemporary Britain resonates with this perspective:

DiY culture, a youth-centred and-directed cluster of interests and practices around green radicalism, direct action politics, new musical sounds and experiences, is a kind of 1990s counterculture ...Like the 1960s version we tend to associate the word "counterculture" with, DiY Culture is a combination of inspiring action, narcissism, youthful arrogance, principle, ahistoricism, idealism, indulgence, creativity, plagiarism, as well as the rejection and embracing alike of technological innovation.

These views chime with the point made by Firat and Dholakia (1998) that the counter-cultural movement was "decentered, spontaneous, fluid, diverse, multi-hued and fragmented-a quintessentially postmodern movement". This notion of counter-culture is quite different to the idea of the consciously self-critical "authentic" subject which we discussed in our first frame. In this section we consider how for many (but not for all) the idea of transcendence has given way to that of an infinitude of practices of resistance which seek to pervert, by means of re-signification, those codes which organize the various forms of aesthetic spacing. Within this view, class-the fundamental particle of revolutionary consciousness described in our first framehas imploded, leaving a thousand shattered spaces as the sites for discursive struggle. How then, does counter-cultural discourse" seeks to engage its other in the aesthetic age? Countering Consumer Culture Given that consumer culture is bound up with the production of aesthetic spaces then in what ways can it make sense to form a cultural mass which seeks to counter this? In a society in which the space-time of identity is increasingly fragmented is it possible to make the imaginative leap to identity, to formulate that other against whom self must be pitted? To select the aesthetic space of consumer culture as a mass against which to construct an identity seems as woolly as pitting oneself against candy floss, or in mounting a crusade against FUN. In Consumer Society, Baudrillard (1981, p. 54) presciently noted the fragmentary nature of the (post) modern consumer experience:

As a consumer, humans become again solitary, cellular and at best gregarious (for example in the family viewing TV, the crowd in a stadium or at a


movie house etc.) The structures of consumption are simultaneously fluid and enclosed. Can we imagine a coalition of drivers against car registration? Or a collective opposition to television? Even if every one of the million viewers is opposed to television advertising, advertisements will nonetheless be shown.

There is certainly evidence for the existence of different “countercultural" voices or "tribes" in contemporary society. Growing access to the internet makes it easier for these voices to locate and communicate with others, but these disparate voices defy totalization to the status of the counter-culture. As Bauman (1993, p. 199) points out, these are generally dedicated to the pursuit of a single task, "and by the very fact of being single issue they confirm the principle of singularity and the assumption of autonomy or the self-containment of issues". Totalization of Identity in the Age of the Aesthetic? One could perhaps seek to totalize the actions of animal rights activists, voluntary simplifiers, road protestors, anti-shopping protestors and even anorexics as united in their desire to resist the excess of contemporary (and often corporately motivated) aesthetic forms of spacing with respect to "speed-up" (Harvey 1989), roads, supermarkets and shopping malls, the activity of shopping itself, the body, etc. Klein (2000, p. xviii) moves some way towards this, characterising reactions against the "global logo web" as "a largely underground system of information, protest and planning, a system already coursing with activity and ideas crossing many national borders and several generations". It is important not to stretch this point too far, however, especially when it can be argued that such activism might simply enlarge the scope of these spaces. For some protesters the totalization of identity seems to be as strong as ever, particularly in the rush to target and demonize individual instances (companies such as McDonald's and Nestle) as exemplars of all that is rotten in society. For example, the 1997 "McLibel" court case in Britain involved two members of London Greenpeace being sued for libel by McDonald's Corporation due to allegations made in a leaflet distributed outside the restaurants. This resulted in a trial lasting 312 days, involving 180 witnesses and purportedly 18,000 pages of testimony (Vidal 1997). The creation of a "McSpotlight" website served as a focal point for those unhappy with McDonald's social, economic and environmental impact. The "McDonald's" portrayed on the "McSpotlight" site is


much more than a problematic peddler of burgers. It is constituted there as the "McDonald's" of George Ritzer's "McDonaldization of Society" (1996)-a cultural icon which provides a rallying point for "countercultural" forces. Parker (1997) however warns against adopting the potentially elitest anti-American critique of the "levelling down" of mass consumer culture and mockingly suggests that "Ritzer seems to see resistance as eating with a knife and fork". Resisting attempts to totalize McDonalds, Parker objects that this signifier means different things to different people in different places and parts of the world. The refusal to totalize in this way leads to a Gramscian or Althusserian perspective, whereby we recognize that the centre itself is split between different interests which may in turn exert pressure on one another. This may better explain the complex web of relations between contemporary counter-cultural voices and the "centre". For example, a range of different interest groups participated in the McLibel trial, including the protagonists, the founders of the McSpotlight website, the courts and the media. This led to criticism of some practices engaged in by McDonald's by others who we may consider to inhabit "central" space with the corporation. The judge, for example, found that some of the claims made by London Greenpeace were justified, and many mainstream media accounts of the trial were favourable to those who took up arms against the Goliath of the burger industry. The recent history of Napster.com is another interesting illustration of fissures and fluid alliances. Napster made it easy for consumers to share digital music files on-line, evoking the wrath of the music industry whose revenue and distribution systems were threatened. The company's anti-establishment aura was enhanced when during the recent controversy over Bruce Springsteen's s "American Skin (41 shots)", the track could only be heard on Napster and copycat sites (Guterman 2000). Although Napster is at the time of writing engaged in legal battles with record companies, it has enjoyed the support of artists ranging from Limp Bizkit to Prince and the Grateful Dead. Ultimately, Napster may be a beacon for the record industry by showing how new distribution channels may operate. In the meantime, there is some evidence that this allegedly subversive company serves as a catalyst for on-line and off-line sales, with digital downloads increasing rather than sating consumers' appetite for CDs, etc. (Carr 2000). Indeed, Napster has requested its supporters to stage "buy-colts" by purchasing CDs of Napster-friendly artists (Simon 2000).


A final example of such complex relations (which also resonates with our earlier discussion of mirroring and the fear of absorption) is provided by the experiences of Swampy, a British road protester. The mass media spotlight fell on him when he was the last person to be removed from the protest tunnel underneath a contested road development. He quickly became the "acceptable face" of eco-warriors, and took a break from his usual activities to model Armani suits for one newspaper, write a weekly column for another, and appear on a satirical current affairs television programme (Bellos 1997). Such activities may have softened mainstream views of road protestors and eco-warriors, but within movements like Swampy s, opinion has been sharply divided on the wisdom of "cuddling up" to mainstream media (Aufheben 1998). Indeed, Swampy later expressed regret at his involvement with the media, feeling that he had been exploited and patronised and that his activism had been trivialised. These shifting, tactical alliances sit well with an age where, as Bauman (1997) says, life can no longer be lived as a project. Any person, it seems, may sample the terrors and delights of the entire gamut of post-modern identities in one lifetime: now a "stroller", then a "tourist", here a "player", and there a "vagabond". In this context, it is not surprising that we may find ourselves speaking in counter-cultural voices on one stage, and joining a more mainstream chorus on another. Fractal-Culture and the TAZ Taken to the extreme, counter-culture becomes synonomous with Hakim Bey's (1991) idea of the "Temporary Autonomous Zone" (TAZ). The idea of the TAZ resonates well within the general discourse of the aesthetic; for example Bey describes such zones as; "successful raids on consensus reality, breakthroughs into more intense and more abundant life ". Lest we become convinced that some possible transcendence is behind this, Bey adds that "we have attended parties where for one night a republic of gratified desires was attained". McKay (1996) seeks to make something more of the TAZ by characterising it as "a guerrilla operation" which liberates an area (of land, of time, or of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/ elsewhen. Rave culture, with its "discourse of technocelebration", its temporary and often illegal locations and its attempts to construct a new "sphere of sound" are offered as examples. Collin (1997, p. 5) describes the idea of the TAZ as "a mission to reappropriate consciousness, to invent, however briefly, an idea of utopia". This raises the possibility


that such brief re-appropriations of consciousness comprise the terminus where "counter-culture" has come to a dead stop. DISCUSSION According to Arnold and Fisher (1996), American experiences of the 1960s had a profound impact on the development of marketing thought. One legacy was the development of a "reconstructionist paradigm", reflecting a climate where institutions were challenged, materialism was rejected, and new concerns for social justice were raised:

Materialist aspirations were highlighted as a common outcome of marketing activity and served as justification for deep introspection and conceptual reconstruction of marketing's foundations. In addition, the idea of social justice was a focal point in suggested humanistic revisions to the marketing concept (p.128).

Thirty years on, it seems that varying forms and notions of "counterculture" still give marketers, consumers and researchers pause for thought. Indeed, considering the rich terrain of culture and consumption from the vantage point of counter-culture allows us to look afresh, not just at phenomena which we may take for granted, but at the very ways we represent them. In this paper, we explored three frames for exploring the concept of counter-culture from Hegel's tale of the lord and bondsman. In what sense does this extend the understanding of counter-culture? Uses of the Framework We offer the framework derived from Hegel's tale as a rhetorical device which can help interrogate the complex topic of "counterculture". The framework encompasses three perspectives on counter-culture: as authentic, as mediated, and finally as difference. By framing counter-culture in these ways, we have sought to move beyond stereotypical approaches to counter-culture which associate it with a particular place and time, such as the 1960s. Rather we suggest that the idea of "counter-culture" is as old as Western culture itself (in so far as this has been inscribed in Hebrew and Greek texts), and one which has suffered from widely varying definitions of the term and the often conflicting "dialogue" between authors on the subject.


Forms of mis-meeting between Authors In the paper we have shown how a major source of conflict between authors is based on a form of "mis-meeting" between those who hold different perceptions of what "counter-culture" is and what it ought to be. We note how those who hold the view that counter-culture is related to transcendence, authenticity and revolutionary zeal believe that the concept of "resistance" has been trivialised by associating this with the pleasure-seeking actions of sub-cultural groups. For example Thornton (1995) recreates a typically "revolutionary" discourse in dismissing the idea that "rave" culture, which she associates with capitalist values, might in any way be associated with "resistance", which she sees as concerned with real political behavior (in what we call strategic space). We argue that this debate is not simply about "resistance" but is located in the long-standing antipathy between two ways of "doing" counter-culture, as expressed in revolutionary and aesthetic contexts. These are based on quite different principles of Becoming and Being, which in turn organize the orientation of other dimensions of: time/space; engagement/ flight (withdrawal); categorization/ togetherness; individual /crowd; cognition (rationality)/aesthetic; strategic/tactical. Within the context of revolution the only purpose of resistance is that form of struggle which can lead to transcendence; it takes place in the strategic spaces of politics, the streets and the television station, and projects its values and vision into the future. Such descriptions have little relation to the idea of resistance in the "eternally present" spaces of the aesthetic, where "resistance" itself becomes associated with the endless perversion of organizing discourses. We believe that in articulating more clearly the differences between revolutionary and aesthetic views we can usefully add to the project of providing a more differentiated understanding of consumer resistance initiated by Penaloza and Price (1993) and recently discussed by Cova and Cova (2000). Mirroring Effects The notion of an "authentic" counter-culture chimes well with the views of many authors that prevailing cultural values can only securely be challenged by a system of thought which is equally selfreflective. This begs the question of the process of mediation. The discussion of the mediation of counter-culture showed the extent to which "self-reflective" counter-cultural movements such as the


revolutionary counter-culture of the twentieth century, while being substantively different to the mainstream which they oppose, mirror the form of that system. We have discussed how authors have noted that such mirroring is also a feature of those who wish to practice an anti-aesthetics. This replication of the form is understandable if one holds of Foucault's (1979) view that resistance is constructed as a response to a system of power; as such, mirroring is implicated in the extent to which counter-cultural "resistance" is equated with the return of what has been repressed by power. We have noted how Galbraith and Bauman share the view that power is still intact in the postmodern aestheticized landscape. These authors cite as evidence the existence of those who are excluded from a consumer society which projects its disorder outwards, to those who must play out their lives in its shadow as members of the criminalized underclass. This pattern also appears to be developing in cyberculture, despite the democratizing potential of the internet, and the plentiful rhetoric (with some political action) towards the ideal of social inclusion (Hoffman and Novak 1998). Mirroring: A Warning to Academics Both Galbraith and Bauman also note the relative impossibility for an academic (who is after all a master, or one who is a product of the culture of contentment), to seek to mount a critique of this culture from inside this discourse. The ability to describe is thus linked, literally and intimately to a person's point of view. In this respect it is useful (if rather painful) to note how major cultural and political change, when it does come, seems to completely wrong-foot most academics, flying in the face of their cherished theories. For example as several authors have noted, prior to the "happening" of 1960s counter-culture, most academics considered social revolution to be the last thing on the mind of the well-fed, comfortable, duped US youth. In a striking replay of this folly, Diuk and Karatnycky (1993) cite evidence to support the view that, just prior to the developments which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, most western experts had concluded that communism had produced "a new bland homogenized people who were beyond nationality", "a docile citizenry". The danger for the academic is not only to totalize and "massify "the other, but also to weave into the actions of the other the traces of one's own desire. This is incredibly difficult to avoid, indeed a useful debate could be engaged in considering whether it is actually possible or desirable to


suppress one's desire. It is rendered even more difficult through the point raised by Rudmin and Kilbourne (1996) that two people who are ostensibly engaged in the same activity, may be doing it for quite different reasons and be motivated by quite different economic circumstances and convictions. This raises a question as to what counts as evidence or data with respect to research. Given the difficulties we have described with respect to desire, observation alone would not be sufficient. Counter-Cultures as Alternating Currents of Desire? In the paper we discussed evidence to suggest the links between mirroring and desire, whereby desire (similar to the "grass is greener" idea) links what is desired to the position of the other. Those middleclass (masters) who are free to change position have always been able to play with identity. In this context, counter-cultural identities can represent a protest against what is perceived to be the flux of an oppressive and alienating culture and to offer the promise of binding once more with (alienated) nature. For the poor who are fixed into place, counter-culture represents the opposite ideal, of an escape from nature into the good life offered by culture. One might thus characterize counter-cultures as encompassing two alternating currents of desire. Castells (1997) offers yet more support for this view in describing the nature of the Mexican Zapatista movement as composed of educated left-wing radicals who were working towards a revolution and peasantry who wanted access to the goods offered by the consumer society. Incorporation The other side of reflection is incorporation. Hebdige (1988), Penaloza and Price (1993) and Gabriel and Lang (1995) remind us, that expressions of rebellion (such as bleached or torn jeans) can be commodified. As Davidson (1992, p.190) observes, the music and fashion industries frequently package the music and dress codes of the very groups who use music and clothes to counter their social subordination. Since industry's loyalty is to the profit motive, once that is catered for, companies "are hardly likely to feel the victims of consumer sedition". Such cautionary tales emphasize yet again the need for a more nuanced and differentiated understanding of what "resistance" is. In this paper we have placed more emphasis on the fear of incorporation


which runs as a constant theme through counter-cultural discourse. But what of the mainstream desire to incorporate the counter-culture? Brennan (1993) seeks to explain this as an effect of mediation; in this view the counter-culture which has been projected by the mainstream as "other", is dangerous and represents an enemy which must be identified (made the same) by means of assimilation. In our view while Brennan's explanation fits well theoretically within the frame of a hegelian explanation, this is a topic which could be explored empirically. The Dynamics of Change The final aspect for discussion in relation to mediation is that of the dynamics of change. Despite the (serious) dangers of simulation, the retrospective manufacture of truth-effects, and the mirroring effects which we discussed above, it seems tempting to seek to open up lines of connection in order to better explain how processes of change come about, in focusing more attention on the historical patterning of the relations between culture and its counterpart(s). At the same time, it is important to construct "histories of the present", so that "thick descriptions" (Geertz 1973) are available for future analysis. We have mentioned how the dynamics of change has been partially addressed by several authors (cf. Harvey 1989). However there remains much to be done and there is thus much scope for historical study in this respect. This might enable researchers to tentatively ask some "big" questions such as: Does change come about as the result of the system collapsing in upon itself? Or by pushing the system to its extreme? By fighting it? Or by ignoring it? Then perhaps we might be in a better position to reflect on possibilities such as those suggested by Firat and Venkatesh (1995), who argue that the "way forward" is to seek a space beyond the market:

It is therefore necessary to identify a social space beyond the reach of the market by positioning the consumer in the "lifeworld" and outside the market system... True emancipation of the consumer can materialize if s/he were able to move in these social spaces without the perennial panopticon of the market.


NOTES 1. From the days of the ancient Greeks there have been those who have

privileged the physis, the natural state of humanity against nomos, State imposed law (Kerford 1981, pp. 11819, 129).

2. One may usefully enquire as to how counter-cultural consciousness is attained. To fully explore this would require another paper. However since the time of ancient Greece the disaffected intellectual has played an important role in spearheading various counter-cultural movements. More recently Bourdieu (1984) and Roszak (1970) discuss the role played by intellectuals in counter-cultural moves in France and in the USA.

3. In the Weberian variant it is commodity rationality, the "machine culture" or the "technocracy" which is regarded as the point of focus.

4. In which the counter-culture played a major role. 5. Nelson (1989) highlights the role of IT and Oz in providing a unifying

voice and sense of purpose for a range of disparate groups in the 1960s. For example the ninth issue of Oz in 1968 helped construct a narrative identity for contemporary countercultural groups through a long piece on the history of the "Diggers", which was then related to a recently established London Digger Love Commune. In America, the Village Voice and Rolling Stone are obvious candidates for playing such a role.

6. "The critical distinction drawn by the manifesto was between design as communication (giving people necessary information) and design as persuasion (trying to get them to buy things). In the signatories' view, a disproportionate amount of designers' talents and effort was being expended on advertising trivial items, from fizzy water to slimming diets, while more "useful and lasting" tasks took second place: "street signs, books and periodicals, catalogues, instruction manuals, educational aids, and so on". Source: http://www.adbusters.org/infonnation/ foundation/ index.html

7. The use of the web by Adbusters is thus not surprising; Drew (1995), for example, describes the work of grass-roots political activists who have recognized that "new technology can be used for progressive ends", and become community radio DJs, "zinc publishers, computer hackers, and low-budget camcorder documentary makers". For example, Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish Television in America, and Undercurrents in Britain have taken advantage of camcorders, public access television and satellite technology to produce and disseminate material offering accounts which differ from the mainstream media in their treatment of issues such as racism, strikes, the Gulf War and environmental issues (Drew 1995; Harding 1998). Fiske (1994, p. 240) argues that the multiplication of technologies offers a major prospect for the proliferation of resistance.

8. Although Adbusters now claims a readership of 60, 000. 9. In constructing and circulating a set of stereotypical collective labels to

recycle counter-culture to a mass audience one could argue that the media created a resource base or toolkit for the dissemination of counter-culture at the same time as they exorcized its demons. From Teddy-Boys to Mods n'Rockers, Punk and New Age, each period has been characterised by its own cult of celebrity from James Dean to Elvis, the Beatles, Hendrix, Joplin, the Sex Pistols, Muppet Dave and Swampy, a British road protester who had his I S minutes of fame in 1997. Stereotypes of "counter-culture" have been embodied in comic characters like the whacky "Wolfie" Smith of the "People's Liberation Front" in the BBC comedy Citizen Smith, and Neil the dim but lovable, lentil eating, knit-your-own-muesli, guitar playing, anti-hunt, protect the whales and baby seals, just hold hands, make love not war caricature in BBC's comedy programme The Young Ones.


10. For those interested in pursuing this further then Ien Ang (1996) agrees with Morris, pointing out that for the purposes of cultural critique, validating audience experience alone is not enough. She suggests that much "reception" and "uses and gratifications" research is bounded by the communications transmissions model which foregrounds that spatial /temporal moment of direct contact between media and audience members. Ang argues that simply showing how audiences are active meaning producers or imaginative pleasure seekers can become a banal form of political critique if the popular itself is not seen in a thoroughly social and political context; furthermore, it is unwise to equate an "active" audience with a "powerful" one. She calls for a more thoroughly cultural approach to reception, which would address differentiated meanings and the significance of specific reception patterns in articulating more general cultural negotiations and contestations.

11. Used herein the sense often employed by Foucault in taking the term to enveolop both language and practice.

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Gay Men on Film: A Typology of the Scopophilic Consumption Pleasures of Cultural Text Steven Kates*

In this paper, drawing on feminist film criticism, cultural theory, and reader response criticism, I discuss the consumption experience of viewing in the context of the analysis and interpretation of Hollywood films that represent gay characters. I then discuss various films in light of these concepts: The Boys in the Band from the 1970s, Cruising from the 1980s, and several films from the "Gay 90s" including Philadelphia and In & Out. Portrayals of gay men have changed dramatically over the years: from those of lonely, sad, and self-loathing queens to dangerous and perverse leathermen to the very positive and seemingly affirming representations in 1990s films. A theoretical interpretation-in the form of a typology of scopophilic pleasures-is offered to further an understanding of these filmic portrayals and the consumption pleasure viewers may derive from watching.

Show me a happy homosexual, and I'll show you a gay corpse.

-Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (01970) AFTER STONEWALL: AN ERA OF GAY MEN ON FILM After the June, 1969 Stonewall riots and the advent of recent gay and lesbian activism, many mainstream popular films featured homosexual characters. Indeed, it is arguable that "gay films" have been legitimized as a recent form of filmic genre. Consider the

* Senior Lecturer, Monash University, Dept. of Mktg, 100 Clyde Road, Berwick, VIC, Australia 3806.


following list of recent "gay films" (i.e., those films that prominently feature gay characters in circumstances which many would consider gay themed): Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997), In & Out (1997), The Birdcage (1996), Jeffrey (1995), Longtime Companion (1990), The Crying Game (Britain 1992), Philadelphia (1993), It's my Party (1995) and so on. Many of these movies feature famous and accomplished Hollywood actors such as Tom Hanks, Debbie Reynolds, Kevin Kline, Robin Williams and Patrick Stewart, just to name a handful. Have Hollywood producers and artists decided collectively that homosexuality and gay characters are no longer taboo topics from which conservative American audiences must be protected? Or is homosexuality simply the creative equivalent of "the flavor of the month" these days? At this juncture, I would like to discuss the purpose of this paper and the contributions I seek to make in it. It is encouraging that the consumer research field is now being deepened and furthered by contributions addressing gay and lesbian consumer patterns (e.g., Kates 1997, 1998; Wardlow 1996). For the past decade, the popular press has been touting the gays as "the dream market" (Penaloza 1996) and some marketers have begun to target gays and/or lesbians as potential consumers. Yet, I would like readers to share some of my discomfort about this ostensibly positive business development. Critical voices and perspectives in this discourse are conspicuously absent from the consumer field. Yet, fields such as queer theory (e.g., Butler 1990, 1991; Jagose 1996; Seidman 1996) and other social studies (see Gluckman and Reed 1997) have occupied themselves with the question of queer representations and cultural products for the past few years. Further, as an overall contribution to the consumer research literature, I seek to critically explore scopophilia-- the pleasurable consumer experience of viewing-in more depth, theorizing that it is connected to the potential meanings that a consumer may find himself or herself assuming in the context of watching a film (Byars 1991; Hall 1997; Mulvey 1975; Pribram 1988; Traube 1992). Using myself as a consumer of film, I seek to explore meanings constructed for gay viewers (see De Lauretis [1984] for extensive use of this method). Further, drawing from. film theory and cultural theory, I argue that dominant, heterosexist meanings may be interpreted from even the most seemingly progressive filmic texts and the implications for different types of consuming pleasures (see Barthes 1975, 1977; Foucault 1970; Hall 1980, 1997; Hirschman 1998; Holt 1998).


AN INTRODUCTION TO FILM THEORY The rich and intellectually diverse field of feminist film studies (Byars 1991; Carson, Dittmar and Welsch 1994; Kaplan 1983; Mulvey 1975; Penley 1988; Pribram 1988; Traube 1992) has addressed the theoretical questions posed by the portrayal of women on screen, usually (although not strictly) from a Freudian-Lacanian point of view, attempting to recuperate Freud and demonstrate the usefulness of his perspectives in understanding women's subjugation and objectification as represented in popular artforms. As one might expect, findings and critiques have been mixed. And curiously, while consumer research has an emerging, vital strand of textual analysis (e.g., Kates and Shaw-Garlock 1999; Scott 1994a,b; Stern 1989,1993,1996) applied to the interpretation of advertisements, it has not aggressively pursued and applied the field of feminist film studies to consumption texts such as film (but see Hirschman 1998; Holt 1998, pp. 9-10). This is something of a shame, as consumer researchers of a feminist bent would find existing and developed perspectives "off the rack" which have been productively applied to cultural forms other than advertising. Moreover, one can argue that many advertisements resemble films more than they do poems and stories, both stylistically and structurally. Yet, to be fair, there may be at least one good reason for consumer researchers' reluctance to adopt and apply feminist film theory in their endeavours. The latter discipline reached a theoretical impasse in its consideration of filmic representations. The gaze was always considered male, and the objectified female character in the film was always objectified by both men and women spectators (Byars 1991; Kaplan 1983). To use language employed by film theorists, women were generally co-opted into receiving the visual gratifications of film ("scopophilia") from a dominant, male subject position. In other words, they were "invited" to enjoy film from the particular vantage point of the ideal viewer/reader/interpreter (see Scott 1994b), ostensibly identifying against themselves, a phenomena which inevitably led to gender[ed] subjugation. Fortunately, largely by adapting Gramscian perspectives from cultural studies, the film field has overcome this impasse to theoretical and substantive development. Film theorists have recently crafted some sophisticated, nuanced, and theoretically dense works (Berenstein 1996; Byars 1991; Clover 1992; De Lauretis 1984; Modleski 1988; Penley 1988; Pribram 1988; Traube 1992) that painstakingly


analyze and interpret filmic products from a variety of perspectives, incorporating semiotics, new historical analysis, queer theory, Gramscian/ Marxist analysis of ideology, and Foucaultian discourse analysis, to state a complex matter rather simply. For example, in her study of 1950s melodrama, Byars (1991) emphasizes that the misleading notion of "American Ideology" is better replaced with American ideologies all of which compete for influence in the cultural arena. Thus, a lived hegemony (Thompson and Haytko 1997; Williams 1977) emerges from experience with various popular culture (e.g., film, television dramas, soap operas, etc.) and other forms of hedonic consumer behaviors. Interestingly, within the more fragmented, confusing, and contradictory context of a constantly reproducing cultural hegemony, resistance is possible to women and marginalized minorities such as gay men and lesbians. Thus, it is possible for consumers to "read against the grain" of a text (Byars 1991; Carson et al. 1994; Traube 1992) and engage in creative play with its content and style, framing it within various discursive fields of meanings, while accepting, refusing and negotiating with the received, accepted, preferred, or dominant ideological codes (Hall 1980). The consumer/ interpreter may know his or her ideological "place" (i.e., subject position), but he or she need not assume it unproblematically. One more important point must be made here about feminist film theory. While it draws diversely from many fields including sociology, classical semiotics, Freudian-Lacanian theory, cultural studies, and Foucaultian discourse perspectives, and thus has been the site of much heated scholarly debate, most of its scholars will agree with the following observation: it has an explicitly activist intent. In short, not only does film theory attempt to understand film, but, as a politically informed mode of praxis, it attempts to change it as well (Carson et al. 1994; Johnston 1973). Laura Mulvey, for example, is both a film theorist and filmmaker, and it is she who wrote what many consider to be feminist film theory's seminal work (Mulvey 1975). Feminist film praxis seeks to critique how women are objectified and subjugated by the (male) cinematic gaze and through its film-making practice, it attempts to subvert or deny the pleasure received by that objectification (Carson et al. 1994). Thus, I begin where much feminist film theory "leaves off', studying gay films-a form of hedonic consumption (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982)- in order to further theory in the consumer research domain and contribute to an emerging understanding of the consumer experience of viewing film (see Holbrook and Hirschman 1982). I would also


like to introduce various ideas taken from film theory and media studies to this branch of consumer research and address the following theoretically related questions. What subject/spectator positions are made available to the gay male social spectator? And how are these spectator positions accomplished by plot, narrative, film form, and characterization? And most importantly, how are consuming pleasures and meanings constructed by these films? Readers should note that, in the spirit of feminist film criticism, my questions incorporate an activist agenda. As an openly gay male and consumer researcher, I unapologetically argue that many films may be labelled as homophobic or heterosexist, and the meanings derived from the texts have implications for the pleasures derived as well. By "heterosexist", I mean that filmic text may encode and incorporate (and subtly so, sometimes!) assumptions about the superiority of heterosexuality as an institution, ideologically reinforcing the hetero/ homo sexual binary which is the central construct of interest to queer theory (Butler 1990,1991; Segal 1994, 1997; Sedgwick 1990; Seidman 1996), even in more recent "progressive" films. Furthermore, I explicitly reject the popularly held notion that films (or any cultural forms such as advertising) act as unproblematic "mirrors" of our society. Rather, I argue that films are forms of representation (see Hall 1997) which rework images, discourses, and ideas in our culture, usually in an ideological fashion (Eagleton 1991) in order to entrap the viewers in different kinds of pleasures and interpellate a social subject (Althusser 1970). As various audience research has demonstrated, however, cultural forms have varied success in doing so (Brunsdon and Morley 1980; Hall 1980; Morley 1980,1981), for spectators may employ a variety of interesting reading or interpretive strategies. Holt (1998, pp. 9-10), for example, discusses the differential reception of cultural texts between High Cultural Capital (HCC) and Low Cultural Capital (LCC) consumers, noting that the former generally engage in critical, artistic evaluations while the latter engage in referential interpretations. Complementing this analysis, scholars working in cultural and media studies have noted that there are a range of nuanced responses to cultural texts, offering a variety of viewing pleasures (e.g., Fiske 1987, 1989; Hall 1980; Morley 1986; Radway 1984) and consumers negotiate a diverse range of situated readings. The present work seeks to develop, extend, and explore these types of interpretations. As such, I develop a typology of consumption pleasures that a gay audience member may experience while watching


these films (Holt 1995) also discusses the different modes of consuming within the ethnographic context of baseball. In contrast, the present work extends this polysemous perspective to the consumption of filmic text, given this type of consumption's often solitary (and somewhat voyeuristic) context. Drawing from the literature in cultural and media studies and from the experience of my own consumption, I identify three types of scopophilic pleasures on which I elaborate below: resistant pleasures characterized by reading against the grain; complicit or "guilty" pleasures in which I felt I was entrapped within a dominant set of sociocultural meanings, and identificatory pleasures in which I genuinely felt for the characters and their dilemmas. These types of readings are variations of-but are not identical toHall's (1980) three reading strategies (see also Hirschman and Thompson 1997). Reader-response theory also informs this present study and the theoretical argument I seek to forward. Although I acknowledge that the formal or structural elements of a cultural text do shape its interpretations (Eco 1979; Stern 1989), it is the broad cultural conventions shared among interpretive communities and groups of similar readings that permit similar shared readings to be realized during consuming contexts (Culler 1975; Fish 1976,1980; Iser 1978; Mailloux 1982; Scott 1994b). Thus, as I demonstrate, my interpretations and pleasures derived from these filmic texts-although shaped by the film texts-in-themselves to a significant degree-are informed by my dominant socializations as avid (yet politically militant and savvy) gay consumer of film and as a socially reflexive consumer researcher "steeped" in critical postmodern literature and experiences of gay activism. Thus overall, my primary objective is to demonstrate the ways that consuming is inflected by felt affiliations to multiple interpretive communities (see Hirschman 1998; Scott 1994b) and by formal elements the text itself (Stern 1989,1993), producing different types of consumption pleasures. I should note here that this study has the following limitations. First, I restrict my study to those films released after 1969 in order to focus on developing representations which emerged after the watershed Stonewall riots (i.e., during the most aggressive era of modern gay liberation activism). Second, I intend to focus on mainstream American Hollywood films produced for a general audience (such as Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia) and upon "little films" produced for primarily gay audiences (such as Norman Rene's Longtime Companion). However, I shall incorporate into my interpretation interesting moments from one film produced outside of the United States


(The Crying Game 1992) for purposes of contrast and comparison. Finally, it should be acknowledged that consuming film is not always a solitary experience. The pleasures derived from film viewing may often be very much social in nature, for home or theatre audiences may discuss and share their thoughts and feelings while or after viewing. 1 This is a productive area for future research. GAY MEN ON FILM: A TYPOLOGY OF SCOPOPHILIC CONSUMING PLEASURES Below, I have chosen to interpret a small sample of "gay themed" films released from 1970 to 1997. All films below were released in the United States on screen and VHS tape. I do not claim that these films constitute a representative sample of gay films. My purpose is to develop theory about the changing portrayals of gay men over this time period, highlighting the implications for consumption pleasures. ResistantlOppositional Pleasures: The Representation of Gay Friendships The Boys in the Band (1970) is the first mainstream film to, depict homosexuality openly and to represent it virtually exclusively. All the characters but one (and there is some debate about the one) are self-identified as homosexual to the audience. It is an excellent starting point for my purposes herein for a number of reasons. First, it was released immediately after the Stonewall riots and as such, acts well as a representational "benchmark" of just how film artists chose to depict male homosexuals at that pivotal point in history. Second, the film was one of director William Friedkin's first films. He subsequently directed both The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), the former which garnered him an Academy Award win, the latter another Oscar nomination. Thus, Friedkin is no unknown director directing an obscure film. On the other hand, one may consider him a well known and accomplished directoraddressing a gay project. To a 1990s audience, Boys in the Band may seem offensive and antigay. The plot centres around a group of gay men attending a birthday party for one of them, Harold. As the evening progresses, the men behave viciously and cruelly to one another, exposing their faults, vulnerabilities, and insecurities. Michael, the host of the party, is revealed to be an alcoholic spendthrift and a guilt-ridden Catholic.


Harold, the birthday boy, is given "Cowboy", a male hustler, implying that he is too old (32!) and unattractive to obtain sexual gratification without paying for it. The one gay couple in the group, Hank and Larry, are continually arguing because of the latter's infidelity. Overall, the film portrays gay friendships as shallow and somewhat vicious, gay love relationships as prone to inevitable failure due to homosexual infidelity, and gay existence as pathetic and tragic. If the film seems offensive and dated to my 1990s sensibilities, it is necessary to question just why this is so. First, I contend that the subject position(s) offered to the gay spectator by Boys pose an unenviable dilemma for potential identification: wretched alcoholic, unfaithful lover, unattractive "older" man, or the lisping, effeminate stereotyped queen as represented by Emory. The pleasures afforded by these subject positions are also problematic. The experience of viewing affords some humour, but only at the cruel expense of the characters themselves, for they are exposed as deficient, unhappy individuals. Thus, a politically savvy, somewhat militant 1990s "ideal" reader might be prone to reject outright various interpretive positions and the text as "authentic" gay experience. But we must take into consideration at least two important factors which may lead audiences to this conclusion. First, the interpretive position of our 1990s audiences is framed discursively by almost three decades of aggressive gay rights activism and approximately 15 years of AIIDS activism. The discursive formation which is engaged by Friedkin's film is informed by the contradictory meanings associated with internalized homophobia ("gay is bad and so am I") and gay liberation ("gay is good"). The film's text might have offered legitimate subject positions for gay men in 1970, easily assumed by social subjects, but the meanings of the film have necessarily changed as the cultural world and social landscapes in which the film is embedded transformed as well (cf. Kates and ShawGarlock 1999). In other words, the text has been "shifted" by changing social context, and these shifts have implications for the meanings that a consumer may realize (see Bennett and Woollacott 1988). The various gendered representations of the gay men are also notable in Crowley's work. The representations may appear somewhat progressive in that only one character is portrayed as overtly effeminate. Yet, many of the characters are represented stereotypically as "less than real men". Michael, the host of the party, takes an obvious interest in shopping, traditionally women's gendered domain. Emory, the interior designer, is the stereotypical effeminate


queen. He lisps and minces his way around New York, and behaves in a generally campy manner. Interestingly, Hank and Larry, the attractive couple, are both represented as stereotypically masculine in appearance and demeanour. Yet, it is telling that neither man is completely happy or fulfilled by their relationship. Their interactions suggest that any masculine man cannot submit to the commitment of a gay relationship. Critically, the failure does not appear to lie with the men themselves as both are successful professionals. It is the concept of the gay relationship which is deficient, on the other hand. Thus, gay men are depicted in their "true" or "natural" state-their default sexuality, so to speak-in masculine promiscuity and the constant seeking of new sexual partners. Yet, both masculine and effeminate men are included in this stereotype, a seeming paradox. The gay audience is invited to identify with the masculine Hank and Larry and their struggle and to distance themselves from Emory, the latter represented as marginalized among an already marginalized group of men. The Boys in the Band makes an interesting study, for it represents Hollywood's first attempt to depict homosexuals frankly and openly. Yet, we must question its success in doing so. One is struck that the film is depicting homosexuality or the homosexual subject position (Foucault 1970, 1980) as opposed to real, flesh and blood social subjects. The characters talk about their coming out experiences and how they cope with being gay for most of the narrative, that is, when they are not attacking one another, physically or verbally. For the most part, this film represents gay men as insecure, narcissistic, self-loathing, and vicious, quite similarly to earlier non-mainstream films (Dyer 1990). Yet, gay audiences in the 1990s are especially privileged when interpreting this film. They can "read against the grain" and label the movie "homophobic" and an anachronism, benefiting from almost three decades of aggressive gay and lesbian activism. But for audiences in the 1970s, this is less likely (but not impossible) to be so. For all of its stereotyping, the film does portray internalized homophobia and gay self-loathing. According to gay activist discourse, this too is a social reality of many gay men's lives-even in the gay 90s. Resistant/ Oppositional Pleasures Derived from the Film The dominant emotion I experienced while watching this film was one of (self-) righteous anger. I felt that the director and writer were exploiting common stereotypes of gay men and their friendships. The film seemed to say "here are a bunch of mean-spirited, sad, bitchy queens"


who have developed very superficial, yet parasitical, relationships among each other. The characters appear to feed off one another's insecurities, enjoying the pain they cause themselves. This anger I felt toward the film (initially) was quite pleasurable, interestingly. It felt good to me to outright reject such stereotyped, homophobic caricatures that failed to represent the strong bonds-political, sexual, and platonic-among real flesh-and-blood gay men that I myself have experienced. Fiske (1989) has argued that opposition (or resistance) is relational; it is opposition to something else. In this case, I interpret my oppositional response to Boys in the Band as an angry and political response to what may be termed a dominant set of homophobic sociocultural meanings that has remained quite resilient, despite decades of gay and lesbian activism (e.g., see Butler [1990] for a cogent critique of heterosexism in feminist theory). Moreover, the gay characters are presented as tragic, vicious, and sad individuals. In other words, the narrative seems to suggest, "here are the negative individual outcomes (loneliness, alcoholism, drug abuse, narcissism, infidelity, etc.) of this personal flaw in character", explaining the characters' predicaments through putatively interior characteristics and character traits. Nowhere does the film explore the pertinent aspects of the deplorable historical and sociocultural conditions that may have collectively led to their destructive actions. In this manner, Boys in the Band subscribes to a thoroughly psychologistic theory of character (see Fiske 1987, p. 168). Thus, the oppositional pleasures I derive from this nasty little film help to place me-however imaginatively-in a morally superior position to those homophobic bigots who would espouse such a narrow view of gay men and homosexuality. However, such an oppositional view of my response to the film would be incomplete. The meanings that I realize from this film are somewhat more complex. Despite my socialization into the gay liberation politics and the postmodern critiques associated with their respective interpretive communities, I was, however unwillingly, forced into what we may label the subject position of the ideal reader. As the narrative unfolded, I also felt the undeniable pleasures of feeling morally superior to the sad characters themselves. I do confess to feeling both disgust and some pity toward these men. I cannot help but feel that in spite of my years of gay activism and study, that the film was somewhat successful in getting me to identify against myself, as a gay man. (However, a more comprehensive discussion of complicit pleasures will be made below.) Ideology, at a very basic level, entails a social struggle over meanings (Turner 1996). Despite


my concerted and conscious efforts to develop a critical and socially reflexive view of this particular cultural text, recognizing its potential to denigrate my interests and social location, I still feel-at a visceral, "gut" level-the disgust that some people might feel toward these gay men and their obvious "personal failings". In such a manner, hegemonic struggle works not only at the discursive level of the clash of meanings but at the emotional, "extradiscursive", or preconscious level (see Byars 1991).

Failing to Identify and Even More Resistant Pleasures: Cruising: The Shocking Truth about the Dark, Twisted, and Disturbing Lives of Gay Men!!! This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world which is not representative of the whole.

-Disclaimer preceding the film Cruising (1980) Let us fast forward another 10 years to director Friedkin's s next work which represents the lives of homosexual men. Many audiences-gay or straight-may have found watching Cruising (1980), a film about a serial killer gruesomely murdering gay men in New York's leather/S&M community, disturbing. In it, the heterosexual police officer Steve Burns (played by actor Al Pacino) goes underground, hunts for the killer, and undergoes a mysterious, dark, and disturbing transformation in the process. Cruising is a remarkable film for many reasons. First, it is notable for both the graphic depictions of gruesome serial murders and of certain "heavy" S&M sexual practices practised by some gay men. It appears to suggest that these phenomena are somehow linked: like breeds like, in other words. The S&M community of New York's Greenwich village is depicted as a dark, dangerous, and depraved netherworld within which the heterosexual protagonist must descend if he wishes to apprehend the serial murderer. The setting is an ideal happy hunting ground for the killer, who turns out to be a sick and twisted homosexual who writes pathetic letters to his late father, begging for acceptance and love. Theoretically, Cruising is important for another reason: the preferred subject position created by the plot and characterization is disquieting (see Hall 1980, 1997). The audience is forced to identify with a heterosexual actor (Pacino) playing a heterosexual police officer protagonist who himself is playing the role of an unemployed homosexual man pretending to engage in the S&M leather scene. It is


an uncomfortable spectator/ subject position for a gay audience to occupy in terms of its potential (in)ability to identify with Steve Burns, the dubious hero. On the one hand, the murders are vicious and repugnant, and the audience may feel extreme antipathy toward their twisted perpetrator. But it is difficult to identify with Steve Burns, too. He is the "tour guide" descending into the exotic and dangerous gay netherworld, safely guiding both gay and heterosexual audiences through the Land of the Freaks. Yet, approximately halfway into the narrative, we as audience may begin to question the guarantee of our safety. It is subtly suggested that Steve Burns is not the distanced and capable protector of middle-class, conservative sensibilities that his profession symbolizes. He confides to his detective boss, played by Paul Sorvino, that he cannot cope with the stress of the assignment. In a series of plot twists, he discovers the identity of the serial killer, stalks him, confronts and then stabs him. But there is no satisfaction in Steve's victory, and audiences-gay or straight— may derive no psychological pleasure that the heterosexual symbol of order and virtue has overcome the dangerous, murderous, and perverse symbol of homosexual chaos. For Steve Burns seems transformed by the experience and not for the better. At the end of the film, he looks sadly into the mirror as he shaves, and the skyline of New York City is superimposed over that shot. During his undercover work, he has been "roughed up" by other police officers, tied up by a possible suspect, engaged in drug use (amyl nitrate or "poppers"), and has broken up with his girlfriend. No doubt, he has been changed by his experiences. Thus, it is not possible for him, or anyone-including the audience— to remain detached and untouched once contaminated by the unsavoury and unwholesome gay subculture. Like Steve, we too are sullied by the contact with the unspeakable, and for a gay audience, identifying with such a dominant, preferred reading is tantamount to internalized homophobia. In a disturbing sense, watching Cruising may inspire a gay consumer to identify against himself. Interestingly, Cruising makes very effective use of filmic form in order to interpellate a gay consumer that may identify against himself while watching the film (see Modleski, pp. 5-7). During the first few minutes of the film, the camera slowly pans over the half naked gyrating bodies on the dance floor of a leather/S&M gay bar. We as audience are viewing the scene from the killer's perspective, and like him, we too make our choice of victim. Yet, during the scene of the first brutal and violent murder of the film, the camera becomes a voyeuristic


instrument exposing the activities of both killer and victim. As the two men kiss pre-murder, they are shown reflected in a mirror on the other side of the room. Thus, the audience is forced to shift identifications from killer to detached voyeur. In another scene, as star Pacino lounges against the wall in a leather bar, six men "cruise" him. The camera is used both innovatively and disturbingly. The six men come at Pacino's character one by one, from opposite sides of the frame, stop briefly to check him out, and seemingly pose for him in startling close-up shots. It is us, the viewer, who is being cruised, and this innovative camera arrangement forces us into Pacino's perspective. Near the end of the film, when Pacino's character spies on the suspected killer, there is a dramatic reverse camera shot during which the killer realizes that he-that is us, for Burns is gazing right at the audience and we are staring directly at him from the perspective of the killer-is being watched and stalked by Burns. Thus, the camera often works startlingly and effectively to suture the consumer into the narrative (Modleski 1988), forcing a disturbing identification with the killer. With such camera technique, in Cruising, there is no stable point of identification, no neutral vantage point, no safe refuge. Oppositional Pleasures Derived from the Text It is interesting to contrast the gendered portrayals of Friedkin's two gay films. In Cruising, the mean-spirited cattiness and overwhelmingly fey quality of Band's characters are completely absent. Gay men have embraced a virile machismo, diametrically opposite to the gender stereotypes of the earlier work. But they are just as other and foreign. Furthermore, they are implicated in murder violence, and perversity. The best negotiated meaning might be that the film depicts the lives of some gay men, as the disclaimer indicates. Audiences have yet another option regarding the contestation of the films' meaning: flat out rejection. Indeed, even during the filming of this work during 1980, political groups protested, and this film was widely denounced as homophobic once it had been released. True enough, the disclaimer notes that Cruising was only "intended" to portray a "small segment" of the gay world. Yet, I urge readers to view such a claim skeptically. First, the film may perform a culturally metonymic function: the leather/S&M part may be taken to represent the gay whole, in spite of any authorial claims or intentions to the contrary. This portrayal may only serve to reinforce audiences'-gay and straight-existing prejudices and homophobia, for this film dwells firmly within a dominant medical discourse-gay men as sick and perverse (Foucault 1980). And second, we may justifiably question just why the producers chose this


particular small segment of gay men. The rhetorical metonymy of presenting the S&M part for the gay whole serves a constraining, restrictive, performative and political function, serving to lead consumers to a familiar, conservative, and accepted meanings (see Paine 1981). Like Boys in the Band, this Friedkin film yielded more angry, oppositional pleasures from me. Yet, the film, on further reflection, yields oppositional pleasures of a different sort. Camp has been an important institution in gay men's communities for almost a century (see Chauncey 1994; Kates 1997). Camp is described as an ironic sensibility that challenges received categories. We may usefully conceptualise it here as a manner or style of consuming (see Holt 1995) characterized by the ironic appreciation and celebration of excess, exaggeration, and flamboyance, reworking the conventional meanings of things, icons, and publicly figures associated with popular culture (Ross 1989; Sontag 1964). Looked at in this way, as an example of "failed art", Cruising is a hopelessly camp cultural artifact. Pacino, in his role as Detective Steve Burns, efforts to appear as a gay man involved in the leather crowd are crude and laughably naive. In one scene, Burns is cursed at by an angry leather man for wearing the "wrong" handkerchief in his back pocket. (Burns is wearing a yellow handkerchief, indicating a predilection for being urinated on. In fact, Burns had misunderstood this symbolic short hand for indicating a taste for sexual voyeurism.) When Burns finally encounters the serial killer and indicates his interest in having sex with him, he asks to "see the world", provoking my only laugh during the entire film. While it is true that the film did not provoke guffaws and giggles from me on any viewing occasion (I was, quite frankly, too disgusted by the explicit violence and the degrading portrayal of the gay men's community so voyeuristically objectified by the camera), it did inspire the frequent sneer of ironic contempt. Overall, Detective Burns, by trying so hard to gain entry into the leather sub culture, poses as a very clumsy and "inauthentic" gay man-which allows the film to succeed well in a classically "over the top" camp manner. Camp serves as a cultural lens from which to appreciate and consume the social world. However, the formal aspects of the film the clumsily employed gay lingo, Burns' demeanor (he acts like a straight man pretending to behave like a gay man), and the unremitting sexualized texture of the film itself-help facilitate the exaggerated readings so vital for camp consumption. The film may be consumed in yet another subtly camp manner. While straight audiences have presumably taken this film seriously as a "true" representation of


the gay demimonde, gay audiences may feel united in their privileged, shared knowledge and contemptuous ironic pleasure derived from the text. No leather queen would ever make such an elementary mistake of choosing the wrong handkerchief-or behaving as consistently absurdly as Burns does. Finally, oppositional pleasures are derived from our shared political understanding that the caricatures depicted in Cruising are one-dimensional and bear no likeness to the diversity of gay men we as audience have experienced. Complicit or "Guilty" Pleasures: The Gay Character as Saint If, in the 1970s, gay men were represented as hedonistic, self-loathing narcissists, and if in the 1980s, they were depicted as (or only associated with) dangerous, perverted sex fiends and serial killers, then the 1990s must be the Gay Nineties indeed; for during the present decade, it appears as if gay men can do no wrong, as far as Hollywood is concerned. The decade began with the 1990 release of Longtime Companion, directed by Norman Rene and at the time of this writing, there have been two very recent popular films about gay men: Love! Valour! Compassion! a screen adaption based upon Terrence McNally's play and In & Out directed by Frank Oz, the latter being a big budget production featuring very famous and well-respected actors: Kevin Klein, Debbie Reynolds, Wilford Brimley, and Joan Cusack. Longtime Companion has been touted as the first mainstream film about AIDS. My impression of it is just that-it seems very, well, mainstream. Or at least the characters do. It is both refreshing and rather problematic to see three gay male couples-Fuzzy and Willy, Sean and David, and Howard and Paul-in everyday, mundane situ-ations such as cooking, cleaning, having breakfast, or having lovers' quarrels. Audiences may marvel at just how "normal" these men seem and act. They go to work, eat, sleep, and yes, die just like heterosexuals. Well, not quite the same way. For these men are all coping with AIDS, in one way or another. During the movie, three (and perhaps four) of them die. And with them die certain old stereotypes which have been represented in the films discussed above: gone are the histrionic, narcissistic queens of The Boys in the Band and the dangerously sexual and perverse leathermen of Cruising. This film, along with the other which I shall discuss below, attempt to inspire empathy and understanding in audiences: "see we are human like you", they appear to say, and say it eloquently in contrast to the two


films discussed above which underline and construct the differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals. The men in Longtime Companion are represented as figures with whom middle America may empathize. Fuzzy is an entertainment lawyer. David is independently wealthy, and Howard is a manager of some sort. All are quite conventionally masculine. What is so remarkable about this film is how darn likable and noble each of these.characters are. David nurses his sick partner Sean until the very end. In one of the film's most poignant and central scenes, as Sean lay dying, David encourages him to "let go". Willy works at a gym and volunteers at the Gay Men's Health Crisis. Fuzzy, an entertainment lawyer, argues vociferously with a producer who will not hire Howard because it is rumoured that the latter has AIDS. Interestingly, this seems to relate to one of the central themes of the film: that AIDS has brought out the very best qualities in these men; they are so courageous in their day to day lives that they personify grace under pressure. This theme appears to be continued in the film Philadelphia (1993) which is the first large budget, mainstream gay film to feature both AIDS and major stars: Tom Hanks, Mary Steenburgen, Antonio Banderas, and Denzel Washington. In this film, Tom Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a top-flight lawyer who seems to have it all: a wellpaying job, a hot Latin lover, a cool loft apartment, and yes, AIDS. Andrew is bright, kind, and very good at his job. Gay critics have argued that there was nothing "gay" about Andrew at all, except for the fact that he had AIDS, a point they found offensive. This issue of Andrew's so-called "non-gayness" is more problematic than these rather disingenuous critics proclaim, nonetheless. Andrew is definitely a sympathetic character, if closeted to his law firm. In a remarkably touching and emotional scene, Andrew and his lawyer, Joe Miller, listen to an aria sung by Maria Callas (Andrew can't be that non-gay, if he loves opera, I suppose), and Andrew movingly translates and explains what she is singing. Joe, who is openly homophobic, appears to be transformed. He is allowed some understanding, and from here on, he respects Andrew and appears to overcome some of his own prejudices. It is interesting to note that a character such as Andrew achieves an appropriate congruity with gay and lesbian political ideology, if we may call it that. Immediately after the Stonewall riots of 1969, gay liberation assumed an aggressive, unapologetic, and anti-assimilationist stance with respect to relations to the heterosexual majority (Altman 1982; D'Emilio 1983; Kinsman 1987). Yet, after the brief


period of "in your face" AIIDS and queer activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a shift in the political agenda did seem to occur; gays and lesbians protested and demanded the right to serve in the military and the right to marry. Further, AIIDS activism embarked upon a campaign which has been labelled "the degaying of AIIDS" (Rotello 1997), emphasizing the common risks both homosexuals and heterosexuals may experience. These developments may appear somewhat conservative and assimilationist in light of the movement's objectives of the early 1970s (Harris 1997), as some activists have observed, and none too fondly so! My point here is that Andrew Beckett-clever, kind, and honourable, and yes, white, affluent, and middle classrepresents a worthy emblem of this kind of political agenda. And so, gay goes Hollywood, as long as it can portray the gay characters as fine, upstanding, young, white, middle class, non-promiscuous, and respectable men with whom conservative American audiences can easily identify and like. Consider Philadelphia's working title while it was being filmed: People Like Us. The working title invites both identification with the characters and complicity in a political agenda. To be fair, there may be nothing insidious about portraying one character as particularly meritorious as Beckett. What is wrong with a few positive role models? It achieves various political goals of the gay liberation movement (the portrayal was painstakingly gay positive) whilst satisfying the creative and marketing imperatives of Hollywood. Immediately preceding and following this film, gay men have been consistently portrayed as good-hearted and likable in a series of films: Graham, who saves Allison from the insane, murderous Hedra in Single White Female (1992), Eddy, the decent but confused university student in Threesome (1994), the good hearted actor/ waitor who swears off sex in Jeffrey (1995), Nick, the dying and much loved son, brother, and friend of It's my Party (1995), Armand and Albert, the honest and caring (if somewhat unconventional) gay male couple and nightclub owners in The Birdcage (1996), wise and witty George, Julia Roberts' best (gay) friend in My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) and smart, well-dressed, and decent Howard in In & Out (1997). Moreover, even the drag queens portrayed in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) are portrayed as caring, kind, sensitive, and fastidiously honourable. They act more as unpaid social workers who solve other people's problems: One character, Carol Ann, an abused spouse and Chi Chi, a heartbroken, disappointed drag show contestant. Vida, played brilliantly by the consistently macho hunk Patrick Swayze (whoever thought he would be a good enough actor to play


a drag queen?) punches out Carol Ann's abusive husband and assumes the role of mentor to the younger Chi Chi (played by John Leguizamo) and preaches the values of respect, selflessness, and concern for other people as integral to the drag queen identity. One of more important insights which strikes me about many (if not all) of the 1990s films is that the gay characters are no longer isolated in their own (nether) worlds. In The Boys in the Band, Michael, the host, views a visit from his presumably heterosexual friend, Allan, as a threat, for it will expose all of the invited guests as homosexuals. During the climax of the film, Michael cruelly taunts Allan and accuses him of being a "closet queen" and denying his own sexual feelings for men. In Cruising, the "small segment" is represented as very much hermetically sealed off from the heterosexual world of family and work, suggesting possible contamination if these two societies should ever meet. Yet, they do, through the character of Steve Burns, and the results are disturbing, for he appears transformed in an odd but uncertain way. Yet, in the 1990s gay films, the central gay character(s) is often literally surrounded by tolerant, accepting, and loving friends (or chosen family) and biological family members. In Philadelphia, one of the most notable scenes is the one in which Andrew holds his infant niece, signifying that people with AIDS should not be shunned, can be touched with no risk of transmission, and that the family accepts and loves him, regardless of whether he has AIDS or not. On his deathbed, each of the family members says goodbye and goodnight, some tearfully. In Threesome, Eddy is accepted and loved by both his heterosexual roommate, Stuart, and by the female member of the triad, Alex. They both encourage him to come out of the closet and attempt to set him up with dates. In the Birdcage, Armand and Albert are represented as very much connected to their community. The flamboyant and kind Albert goes shopping in the neighbourhood, dressed in semi-drag, and yet, no one stares or makes any expression of disapproval. In It's My Party, Nick, the gay man who has chosen to commit suicide after an elaborate two day bash with all of his friends and family present, is literally surrounded by loving people: his accepting mother and sister, his alcoholic father who finally accepts his sexuality, and dozens of well-wishing and loving friends who communicate their thanks and appreciation to him, just for being part of their lives for so long. One can argue that this is a very encouraging development within Hollywood films. Gay men are portrayed as healthy, kind, and intelligent


people who are well integrated with the larger social (read: heterosexual) world. They are usually accepted by their biological families (with some notable exceptions, of course), and they are socially embedded within large networks of both gay and straight people who care greatly about them. In the comedy In & Out, Howard's mother assures him of her undying love, "just as long as [he] get[s] married!" But even this qualification of her love is later viewed as gratuitous, for she, Howard's father, and her small group of older friends ultimately accept Howard for who he is and admire him for his honesty in coming out of the closet-while about to take his marriage vows. In one hilarious scene in Jeffrey, Jeffrey announces to strangers on the sidewalk that he has given up sex. About half a dozen of them chase after him and convince him that he should reconsider the decision and date the "dreamboat" Steve. Even heterosexual strangers seem to care about gay men! Moreover, the heterosexual characters in question are portrayed as good, loving, and worthwhile people who genuinely care about their gay friends and family members. Thus, the social positioning of gay men in nineties films is dramatically different from that of the other two films I have discussed above. Gay men are not the sad and pathetic outcasts of the previous two films noted. On the other hand, they are consistently shown as attractive, kind, intelligent, loving, caring, and well-dressed. This last insight is perhaps best illustrated by Rupert Everett's memorable role of George, Julia Robert's new gay best friend in My Best Friend's Wedding. Like many of the other gay characters in other films, George is attractive, well-dressed, and likable. More specifically, he is conspicuously ethical, particularly in contrast to the scheming Julianna who is trying to prevent the wedding between Michael and his bride-to-be, Kimmy. George gives Julianna sage and compassionate advice, even if it is rather too late: "Tell him that you love him!" George is drawn into Julianna's intrigues, and for one segment of the film, he pretends to be her fiance, in order to make Michael jealous. His performance in this role is over the top and hilarious. He completely charms Kimmy's family, to the point where they all break out into song during lunch. Despite this minor transgression, he appears to make up for it when he leaves at the airport, telling Julianne, "He'll [Michael] choose Kimmy. Just kiss him and say goodbye. That's what you came to do". Not only is the audience meant to like George (arguably) for his endearing and charming qualities, but also, we are led to respect him, a critical difference. The pathetic,


self-loathing queens of The Boys in the Band, and the sex-hungry leathermen of Cruising may earn contempt and hatred at worst and pity and compassion at best. But George wins us over with his kindness, sincerity, and integrity. Finally, at the end of the film, when Julianna has lost her man to Kimmy, George suddenly appears at the wedding to console his friend. Who would not desire a friend like George, gay or straight? No Easy Way Out: Guilty, Complicit Pleasures Derived from these Texts The gay men in these films are also, with a few exceptions, portrayed as white, affluent, middle-class, and "straight looking and straight acting". Howard Brackett is a well-respected school teacher, if a little "prissy" according to his students. George is a magazine editor. Eddy in Threesome is a student, and portrayed as very intelligent, especially when he does his roommate's homework. Moreover, the stereotypes and effeminate mannerisms of The Boys in the Band are almost absent from the films. When campy references do occur, they are gently mocked and satirized. In In & Out, Howard's passion for Barbra Streisand is criticized by a heterosexual friend: "I hated her in Yentl! She was too old!" Howard then attacks the friend and the other men at the stag party must break them apart. Camp humour itself, often viewed as the hallmark of gay sensibilities (e.g., Harris 1997; Kates 1997; Sontag 1964), is itself put under a campy interpretive lens and presented as humorous. In spite of myself, it seems, I enjoyed these films. It was refreshing to see different kinds of representations of gay men who were not caricatured histrionic, self-loathing (and loathsome), and tragic queens or sex-hungry, murderous fiends. The men depicted in these nineties films were invariably refreshingly attractive, humorous, and appealingly masculine in demeanour and appearance. I enjoyed seeing "people like us"! In doing so, I believe that I was trapped, if momentarily, within the pleasure-of-the-text (Barthes 1975). Yet, my pleasure derived from these films is not undiluted, and so becomes a form of guilty pleasure, for I understand this pleasure as anathema to many of the dominant meanings associated with gay liberation. From my social immersion in the liberationist gay politics associated with a particular interpretive community, I understand that these films are celebrating a particular type of heterosexual masculine presentation. I am reminded of a particularly humorous and deconstructive t-shirt slogan that I viewed during a Lesbian and Gay Pride celebration: "I don't mind straights as long as they act gay in public". It is as if these films are eliding the effeminacy and radical presentations of


gender historically associated with gay and lesbian culture (Harris 1997; Jagose 1996; Seidman 1996). The film In & Out, directed by Frank Oz is particularly clever, I believe, in entrapping the consumer in guilty, complicit pleasures, in spite of any deeply felt political affiliations. It does so primarily through the skilful use of humor. Particularly, it is the film's pervasively ironic tone that invites identification with its presentation of gay characters and its obviously contrived use of several traditional camp cliches. Howard Brackett is presented as a man who, due primarily to his neat appearance, humane treatment of others, and interest in English literature, just has to be gay, despite his initial protests to the contrary. This obvious use of camp cliche appealed to my ironic sensibilities as I viewed the film. Yes, the cliches are tired and old, but they appeared to "work" in the context of the inspired silliness of the film. With a conspiratorial nudge-nudge, wink-wink, the narrative seems to acknowledge that gay audiences must know that Howard is gay and invites them into the story, playfully respectful of their privileged camp knowledge, attempting to bond with them: "Let's have some good-natured fun with the straights who just might not be in the know. We know what's really going on!" Such is the promise of complicit viewing pleasures. They interpellate the subject consumer seemingly on his own political and social terms by acknowledging his social location. Ironic inversion, so often a potential destabilizing force for exposing social hierarchies through the production of multiple contradictory meanings (see Babcock 1978), is appropriated by the makers of the film. Thus, one might ask, is something else being obscured by this ironic pleasure? Viewers of My Best Friend's Wedding, In & Out, and The Birdcage know that these three films ended with weddings-heterosexual weddings, an event that traditionally indicates that harmony and stability has been restored after a period of unstability, unrest, and upheaval (Turner 1999). In the film In & Out, Howard Brackett eventually comes out of the closet by admitting that he is gay-in front of the entire congregation of wedding guests. In a series of events, his parents and friends come to accept this fact and respect him for his honesty. At the end of the film, Peter Malloy, the gay television anchor who has stalked Howard after the outing on Oscar night, and Howard are seen putting on their tuxedos for a wedding, and the audience may speculate that it is they who shall be married. Alas, no, it is not so. Hollywood and the conservative American public is perhaps not ready for that possibility! Bernice and Frank, Howard's


parents, have decided to renew their wedding vows after 42 years of marriage. And so, Bernice gets the wedding she passionately desired, but for herself. But before the wedding, there is one very telling and important line which appears to "give away" the film's ideological potential. As they are suiting up, Howard remarks dryly that Peter may try to film the wedding. But Peter denies this, claiming "there are some things more important than showbiz". And what is one of these "some things"? It is a heterosexual wedding! In a performative contradiction (see Eagleton 1991), the line frames all of the events that have occurred to Howard before this wedding as "showbiz", not real or important (just pretend), no matter how much fun the audience had. But now that Howard has come out of the closet, the film's narrative can turn to the serious concerns of the real world: the symbolic enactment of heterosexuality's hegemonic struggle with homosexuality (Butler 1990; Jagose 1996). Chaos has reigned for a short period of time in the little town of Greenleaf, Indiana. But order and stability is signalled with the renewal of Howard's parents' marriage vows. I maintain that this line of dialogue ("more important than Showbiz") is by no means trivial or incidental to the plot. Throughout the film, the gaze of Malloy's television camera has been an active force in constructing the narrative, revealing to the audience that they are getting "inside" entertainment. Further, when viewing the entire narrative of In & Out, one is struck often with the postmodern, tongue in cheek, irreverent style and execution of the film, indicating that this is the make believe world of show business. For example, when Cameron Drake arrives at the Oscars and receives his award, one may interpret the satirical treatment of this portion of this film as blatant self-referentiality (Brown 1995), a movie satirized within a movie. The audience is not meant to take this film all too seriously, it is suggested. Yet, at the end of this film, it is declared that "showbiz" has come to its narrative end. What follows is important real life. And so the film ends harmoniously with a wedding and a subsequent party, during which all of the guests dance wildly to the tune of Macho Man by the Village People, another ironic touch. Now, order has been restored, and while homosexuality has been accepted and even appreciated somewhat, it is restored to its position of lesser social importance. The gay consumer may feel complicit pleasures in this film. But by doing so, however, a whole set of homophobic, relatively enduring social relations is obscured. Acceptance may temporarily reign in the small conservative town of Greenleaf, but what about in the


consumer's own life? Such agreeable viewing pleasures—understood through the workings of ideology-may obscure the social reality still to be found off screen (see Mercer 1986). Thus, I am frankly disturbed at the undeniable pleasures that I experienced while watching In & Out. Despite the fact that I understand that I was reading within the dominant cultural code of what we might term "middle-class heterosexual respectability"-and the ways that this hegemonic code marginalizes "radical" gays and lesbians who do not fit into this mould (see Butler 1990; Segal 1994; Seidman 1996)-I still laughed along at Howard Brackett's misadventures. I also felt a warm glow in my chest when the entire community stood up-Capra-esque style-to announce "I'm gay!" and thus support their gay hero. Thus, my pleasures in this film are guilty pleasures, indeed. Arguably, despite my socially reflexive, raised political consciousness (developed through many hours of attending gay and lesbian activist meetings, marches, and the like), the contestation of meanings interpretable from this filmic text may still result in the semiotic closure of a straight victory, achieved through the entangling complicit pleasures of viewing Mea culpa. Identificatory Pleasures: Some Non-Hollywood Gay Films (Note: Spoiler Warning!) The important ways gay men are represented in Hollywood can be brought into relief if we compare these films with those of independent film-makers and foreign films. Two films are particularly noteworthy for their complex and layered portrayals of gay or queer characters: The Crying Game (1992, Britain) and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997, USA, independent). In these films, the characters are not required to be perfect. Indeed, Fergus, the protagonist of the former film, is an IRA terrorist who kidnaps Jody, a British soldier, and is partly responsible for his death. Moreover, Fergus is not homosexual; he happens to be attracted to a woman who just happens to be a biological male. (I apologize if I have given away the central plot twist to those who have not seen the film.) Dil, who lives and dresses as a woman, is complexly portrayed as lonely, courageous, sexy, loyal, and unapologetic about her desire to live as a woman. The writer/ director Jordan was also not hesitant to portray her as a killer, for it is Dil who shoots the IRA fanatic Jude at the end of the film. Jordan was also not squeamish about portraying a very queer situation: a heterosexual man who falls in love with a (wo)man and is still attracted to


him/her once he makes his shattering discovery of Dil's penis. Such incongruence between biological sex, gender identity, and sexual desire is still relatively unknown to Hollywood film. Love! Valour! Compassion! deserves special mention for quite a number of reasons. First, there is a quiet beauty which pervades the film and frames its potential interpretations. The eight gay men portrayed are not the heroes of mainstream Hollywood gay productions. Over the course of a summer, the audience obtains an insightful and intimate understanding of the complexities of their relationships and characters. Buzz, played by Jason Alexander, is HIV positive, but he is hopeful and cheerful most of the time. Yet, in a moving scene, he discloses his fear to a friend who promises to be at his deathbed. We are not required wholeheartedly to like or admire the characters, as we are in In & Out and Philadelphia. John, brilliantly played by John Glover, is a bitter man and sometimes cruel to others, a decidedly unsympathetic person. Glover also plays the character's twin brother James, who is as gentle and kind as his brother is cruel and acerbic: "James the fair and John the foul", as one character dubs them. John hates his brother, who "got the good soul" in the family, and wishes AIDS upon one of the friends. Ramon, John's boyfriend, attempts to seduce Bobby, who is Gregory's lover. Yet we cannot hate or condemn Ramon for this, unproblematically. He is young and thoughtless, but not cruel and mean-spirited, and his vitality adds much spice to the relations among the group. McNally is not reluctant to disturb his audiences either. The scenes are emotionally "messy" and their issues left unresolved, in dramatic contrast to the films I have discussed earlier. For example, in one hilarious, brilliant and at the same time, darkly beautiful scene, the men dress up as ballet dancers and rehearse a comic routine for an AIDS benefit. At first, the effect is comical and welcome. But then "reality" sets in, and James, whose health has been progressively deteriorating due to AIDS, falls and must rest. Then in a bizarre and unnerving fantasy-like sequence, the camera focuses on each man dancing in slow motion, and the voiceover of each man speculates on just how he will die. Some will die soon, others much later. The audience is led to believe that the loose threads of their lives will not be sewn up carefully, and this is one of the strengths of the film. Before its ending, when all of the characters except John go swimming in the lake, we know that there will be no satisfying, triumphant, happy, or Capra-esque ending as in In & Out when the entire community gets to its feet to announce its "homosexuality" to the world. The characters


will continue their lives after the credits roll, some for a long time, and others not. Such a lack of a satisfying resolution precludes unambiguous semiotic closure, and meanings can spin out relatively unconfined (Derrida 1976). It is tempting to compare this film to The Boys in the Band, which portrays a similar situation: a group of gay men socializing. It is true that the characters in Love! do hurt one another, and are weak and cruel at times as well. But they hurt one another as human beings who are weak and strong, not as vicious, self-loathing homosexual stereotypes. Their homosexuality is never at issue here; rather, it is their humanity and individuality that is portrayed and developed in the film. Themes common to all people are deftly handled in this film: loneliness, fear, joy, jealousy, and love, without making the spurious claim that "we are just like you". Perhaps it is only this film that will resonate unequivocally with gay men, as it beautifully portrays People Like Us indeed. The Crying Game and Identificatory Pleasures Derived from these Films Barthes (1975) likens jouissance, physical pleasure inspired by the text, to orgasm, a bodily response that is beyond ideological socialization. However, ideology shapes the ways that we understand such pleasures. As Modleski summarizes the postmodern view, "pleasure . . . remains the enemy for the postmodernist thinker because it is judged to be the means by which the consumer is reconciled to the prevailing cultural policy, or the 'dominant ideology"' (Modleski 1986, p. 158). Yet, it is important to avoid the error of textual essentialism by attributing a particular ideology to one particular film or interpretive community. Rather, although a preferred or dominant reading (i.e., "reading within the dominant code") may be facilitated quite easily by a particular text, it may also polysemously facilitate other more oppositional readings (as above where I discuss Cruising, for example). Although the orgasmic pleasures of jouissance may be a somewhat strong term for what experienced while watching The Crying Game, I am surprised at the level of identification I felt during watching it for the third or fourth time. As Fiske (1987) argues, viewers identify with characters in television shows by liking the characters and becoming implicated in their actions. When I saw the film for the first time, and when it was revealed that Dil possessed a penis, I was honestly surprised. Nobody had spoiled the plot twist for me, and although I found Dil somewhat enigmatic (she seemed just a trifle "butch" for a woman), I had not guessed at her biological sex. When her/his robe fell and one of the film's secrets revealed, along with


the feeling of shocked surprise, I also felt like cheering. When it was revealed that Fergus still cared and returned to her/him, I experienced a thrill of pure pleasure and amusement. Certainly, this relationship represented the queerest, most paradoxical situation I had ever seen depicted on screen, for it destabilized gender and sexual categories and defied conventional explanation (Jagose 1996; Seidman 1996). If Fergus still cared for Dil, once it is revealed that s/he was a (wo)man, then he certainly must have "really" been gay all along. But wait! Fergus was initially attracted to her because he sincerely believed that s/he was a woman-as did I (and the entire audience, presumably). Thus, Fergus must be straight. But wait! Fergus cannot be straight and gay. Perhaps he is "really" bisexual, then? Yet, if Fergus is sexually attracted to both men and women, why does he vomit when he discovers that Dil possesses a penis? With little doubt, I experience pure pleasure over this preposterous priapic paradox. The Crying Game provides a delightful example of queer gender trouble. The confusion of non-congruence among biological sex, gender, and desire depicted in The Crying Game is doubtlessly a source of great subversive pleasure for me (see Butler 1990). Despite having viewed them several times, I cannot help but conclude that the above films, for the most part, provide me with the undiluted, politically acceptable, guilt-free, non-complicit pleasure of knowing that I am reading within an sexual code that is very much opposed to the heterosexist sexual binary (Butler 1990). But we might interpret my strong feelings of pleasure and identification with these texts as largely conforming to the accepted politics and culturally dominant meanings associated with the gay and lesbian interpretive community (a form of "preferred" reading). Interestingly, depending on the political perspective or social allegiance assumed to be fixed at any provisional moment, my undiluted, purely pleasurable, "preferred" reading of this film may also be considered oppositional or resistant (see Fiske 1989, p. 45), given my antagonism to the evil forces of homophobia and sexual McCarthyism associated with much of American society (e.g., Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, etc.). CONCLUSION: THE HEGEMONIC POTENTIAL OF "GAY" FILMS In this paper, I have presented and discussed a typology of scopophilic viewing pleasures: oppositional pleasures, complicit (or guilty) pleasures,


and identificatory pleasures. It should be noted, nonetheless, that any one film as polysemous text is open to many interpretations and pleasures. Thus, it is unsurprising that In & Out is open to complicit and oppositional readings. At different moments during the diegesis, one particular consumer might be hegemonically resistant (i.e., reading in opposition to the dominant cultural code) or complicit (i.e., constructing a preferred reading within the cultural code), depending on shifting social and political allegiances to various interpretive communities. Complicating matters is the workings of hegemony in film (see Gramsci 1971). Over the past three decades or so, mainstream film producers have-in some instances-become genuinely accommodating to gay and lesbian audiences, and in so doing, have incorporated camp humor and sympathetic portrayals of gay and lesbian characters into film. This places the gay consumer with a social allegiance to a liberationist agenda (such as myself) in an interesting interpretive quandary. On the one hand, it is pleasurable and agreeable to see "positive role models" of gay men portrayed in popular texts such as film and even advertisements. Indeed, one of the political prerogatives of gay liberation was to end gay invisibility and "come out". On the other hand, the consumption pleasures that the reflexive gay consumer (such as myself) takes in this ostensibly more even-handed treatment is not undiluted. The consumption pleasures I experience when viewing gay film are tinged with the nagging doubts and guilty pleasures from realizing that these filmic portrayals are also in significant ways opposed to the radical or progressive political agenda of the gay interpretive community. (I should acknowledge that this "agenda" has changed over time and has always been controversial among gay men, lesbians, people of colour, queers, etc. Perhaps some of the discomfort of the pleasures that I experience, moreover, are derived by my understanding of the androcentric, sexist, and sometimes subtly racist nature of that political agenda.) Such realizations of being caught "betwixt and between" is a tension that is not easily resolved within the fragmented, media saturated communication environment of postmodern culture. One might argue that such fragmented, unstable, and downright uncomfortable reception conditions are politically encouraging, for they are the antithesis to the stable, coherent, and uniform cultural conditions required for a wholly successful hegemony. Affiliation and a reflexive allegiance to multiple interpretive communities have enabled me as a gay consumer to read within the context of an alternative cultural set of meanings (see Scott 1994a). Thus, the process of


identification and accompanying production of scopophilic pleasures cannot be considered mere escapism. Further, by interpreting among multiple contexts of meaning, it is unlikely that one culturally dominant (i.e., hegemonic) ideology may reproduce itself unproblematically (see Thompson and Haytko 1997). Yet, an important question still remains-are dominant cultural conditions successful enough? Despite the contradictory and often bitter struggle over meanings, many gay consumers may be seduced by the agreeable nature of these pleasures not to question the contingencies of their social circumstances.

Filmography Film Year Director The Boys in the Band 1970 William Friedkin Cruising 1980 William Friedkin Longtime Companion 1990 Norman Rene The Crying Game 1992 Neil Jordan Single White Female 1992 Barbet Schroeder Philadelphia 1993 Jonathan Demme Threesome 1994 Andrew Fleming Jeffrey 1995 Christopher Ashley It's My Party 1995 Randal Kleiser To Wong Foo ... 1995 Beeban Kidron In & Out 1997 Frank Oz Love! Valour! Compassion! 1997 Joe Mantello My Best Friend's Wedding 1997 P. J. Hogan

NOTE

1. I acknowledge and thank an anonymous CMC reviewer for making this point.

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Culture and Corruption in International Markets: Implications for Policy Makers and Managers H. Rika Houston* and John L. Graham** A managerially useful measure of corruption of countries is presented. Scores from Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (TICPI) are compared to other measures of corruption appearing in the literature and convergence is found. The measure is then further considered within the context of a model of the antecedents and consequences of corruption. In the model culture (i.e., religion, language, and values) is hypothesized to predict the corruptness of countries, and the corruptness in turn predicts the attractiveness of foreign markets for American firms. The various statistical tests provide support for the theory and the nomological validity1 of the constructs. The article is concluded with a discussion of the implications of the fmdings for both policy makers and managers. One of America's leading exporting firms provides an extensive training program regarding the federal government's 1977 anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), and its implications for managers. The program materials include a sixteen-item list of "red flags" that executives must be alert to in the everyday management of international marketing operations.2 First on the list is, "The payment is made in a country with a widespread history of corruption." The problem facing international marketing managers is figuring out how to determine the extent of corruption in countries of operation— that is, which countries have a "widespread history" of the problem. Over the years, several measures of the corruptness of countries have been suggested and tested (e.g., Graham 1984; Beck 1991; Hines 1995). But, most recently a German non-governmental organization called

* College of Business and Economics, California State University, Los Angeles. " Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine. ** Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 315, Number 3, 207-343


Transparency International (www.transparency. de) has developed and published their Corruption Perception Index (TICPI); and it is based on the most complete study of the phenomenon. Herein we consider the validity (i.e., both convergent and nomological validity) and usefulness of the TICPI for international marketing managers. Using the TICPI we then examine the apparent effects of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on the behavior of American firms in the global marketplace. We find that American firms' share of imports to those countries rated as more corrupt declined immediately following the 1977 passage of the FCPA and generally have not yet recovered their pre-FCPA levels. The remainder of the paper is presented in four sections. First are descriptions of the theoretical foundation of the study and hypothesis statements. Next, methods are described with special attention given the measurement of the constructs-in particular the convergent validity of the TICK Third, results are reported. The results are then discussed in the last section of the paper with special comment regarding related ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. The paper is concluded with implications for policy makers and international marketing managers. THEORY AND PREDICTIONS In Figure 1 the theoretical model examined in this study is presented. Two fundamental aspects of culture (i.e., religion and language), and managerial values (i.e., regarding the salience of social context) are seen as predicting the level of corruption in countries. Corruption is hypothesized to be less prevalent in countries with higher percentages of Protestants, in countries whose national language is closer to English, and in countries with values reflecting higher salience of social context. Then, because of the impact of the FCPA, American managers are then predicted to have found the more corrupt countries less attractive and to have concomitantly reduced their marketing efforts there. Level of economic development is included as a control variable in the model. These concepts are defined and interrelationships are specified in more detail below. Corruption The central concept in the model and in the study is corruption. Those who have spent a long time studying corruption generally agree that


Figure 1: Predictors and Consequences of Perceptions of Corruption


its definitions are fraught with subjectivity and cultural relativism. Examples abound. For many in Russian today, profits are a kind of corruption. In collective societies such as Japan, the individualism so highly valued in the United States is often seen as a kind of corruption. In India many see the causes of corruption as having to do with more with the new rampant consumerism than with the old traditions of reciprocity. In many countries R-rated American movies are seen as a dangerous form of corruption. Others have labeled American religious missionaries and intellectual property laws alike as corrupting influences. In the latter case, just a generation ago in China individuals could not own property, much less an idea. Most recently, in East Asia, currency speculation has achieved the new status of corrupt behavior. Others warn that trying to study corruption is even more hazardous than merely defining it. Pavarala (1996) criticizes the extant research, "The main problem with most of them [existing studies], however, is the underlying assumption that corruption as a `phenomenorican be studied 'obi ectively' and that its causes can be unraveled by'neutral' observers employing 'scientific' methods" (p. 82). Noonan (1984) goes even one step further with his admonitions about comparisons and quantification. Our research problem, however, is made somewhat simpler because we are not really interested in coming up with a universal definition of corruption. Instead, we are interested in how American managers define corruption and how they behave with reference to that definition. We fully recognize the ethnocentricity in this perspective, and we will address that issue explicitly in the Discussion section of the paper. Fortunately, Webster's Dictionary, the U.S. Congress, and the OECD, among others, help us define the term for our purposes. Prominent in the dictionary definition are terms such as, ". . inducement to do wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery)." The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act specifically attacks bribery as the key kind of corruption in international business. Indeed, that is consistent with the U.S. Constitution wherein only two crimes are specifically mentioned-treason and bribery. The OECD Convention (U.S. Department of justice 1997) calls for member countries to make it a criminal offense "for any person intentionally to offer, promise or give any undue pecuniary or other advantage, whether directly or through intermediaries, to a foreign public official, for that official or for a third party, in order that the official act or refrain from action in relation to the performance of official duties, in


order to obtain or retain business or other improper advantage in the conduct of international business." All these definitions are entirely consistent with Noonan's (1984) notions of bribery. So the American concept of corruption is tied directly to bribery. Profits, individualism, even rampant consumerism and currency speculation are not seen as forms of corruption in the United States. Paying government officials to influence their decisions is corrupt (ing)-both within and outside the country, the latter thanks to the FCPA. And, most important for our purposes here, researchers have tried to determine the prevalence of corruption/bribery in other countries. Noonan (1984) was mistaken when he wrote, "Quantification is conceivable. It has never been systematically attempted" (p. xii). As far as we can tell comparisons of the corruptness of countries (i.e., using the Western definitions) began to appear in the literature as early as the 1970s. And quantification endeavors have grown in elegance since. Most recently Transparency International, a non-profit organization headquartered in Germany, has developed a Corruption Perception Index (TICPI) that has gained much notoriety in recent years. Details are provided in the Methods section of the paper. Cultural Predictors of Corruption Pavarala (1996) summarizes the causes of corruption found in the literature as "administrative /bureaucratic, political, economic, and cultural" (p. 81). Here we focus on three kinds of the last type. Noonan (1984) most clearly describes the roots of the Western notion of corruption and bribery to be Protestantism and the English language in the 16th and 17th centuries. His writing leads us directly to our hypotheses about religious history and language as aspects of culture that predict levels of corruption and the prevalence of bribery. Careful readings of Hall (1976a), Hofstede (1991) and Triandis (1995) lead us to the idea that corruption will be more prevalent in hierarchical/ collective countries, even though none of the three authors explicitly mention bribery or corruption. Religious History Perhaps the single most important book on the topic is Bribes by Noonan (1984). Its historical comprehensiveness is its most impressive characteristic. Noonan makes the point that reciprocity is crucial in all civilizations, and even Christianity itself can be seen as a kind of bribery-giving gifts to God leads to His granting of salvation. However, he clearly states that the rise of Protestantism


lead to a "special" prohibition of certain kinds of reciprocity. A few historical details are instructive. The construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was expensive. In order to pay for it the papacy at the time created a system of "indulgences" which allowed parishioners to buy absolution of sins and release from purgatory. Protestant leader Martin Luther in his Ninety-five Theses delivered in 1517 specifically attacked the system of indulgences, and argued that faith only could open Heaven's gate. In other religions, reciprocity can influence perspectives on bribery in different ways. One such example is Shinto, the oldest formal religious tradition and the only native one that thrives among the primary forces that dominate Japan's theater of religious pluralism (Earhart 1997). In Shintoism, a polytheistic religious tradition, reciprocity is deeply embedded within the relationship between humans and the gods. Gods are viewed as dualistic in nature, possessing both benevolent and destructive tendencies. Reader (1991) emphasizes that this view of the gods fosters the cultural propensity to honor, placate, venerate, and thank the gods. It is believed that such behavior will in turn maintain a balanced relationship that will allow humans to realize the compassion and protection of benevolent gods. This religious philosophy, continues Reader (1991), creates a "matrix of reciprocity" which calls for the creation of obligations, a receipt of benevolence, and a response of gratitude that is mirrored in all standard social relationships within Japanese society in general, regardless of religious affiliation. Consequently, even in the dynamic and cosmopolitan atmosphere of contemporary Japan, the significance of the creation and repayment of obligations continues to resonate in the behavior of most Japanese. This strong cultural norm of reciprocity provides the contextual setting for "bribery." It also places "bribery" squarely within the centuries-old practice of gift giving. This pervasive practice serves as a social lubricant that controls the complex network of mutual obligations shaping the majority of Japanese social interactions (Befu 1971, 1986). At least in Japanese culture, the religious norm of reciprocity provides a fertile ground for viewing bribery from a perspective of cultural relativism. Thus, the most basic foundation of Protestantism is different from other religions such as Catholicism or Shintoism. Instead its historical roots reflect a kind of religious anti-bribery concept. We would expect to see this thinking reflected more strongly in countries with higher proportions of Protestants in their populations. 3


Hypothesis 1: Countries with higher percentages of Protestants will be less corrupt. Language How might language spoken be related to bribery and corruption? Again, Noonan (1984) provides an answer. He states, "Linguistic ambiguity in the term for bribe in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin marks the cultural resistance encountered by the concept" (p. xx). That is, the unambiguous term meaning precisely "a corrupt gift" enters the English language (and flourishes in the English literature) in 16th century England. Shakespeare continues the theme into the 17th century, and then in the 18th the American Constitution elevates bribery to the stature of "high crime." Consequently, Noonan concludes that the existence of the clearly defined term has influenced values about corruption in all English speaking countries: Even today ambiguous terms are used commonly in most other countries-e.g., mordida (the bite) in Mexico, pot-de-vin (a jug of wine) in France, or wairo (a gift, usually money, given to a person in a position of power when making a special request) in Japan. As implied in the previous section on religious history, the last term may carry little in the way of pejorative connotations in that country because of the powerful reciprocity norms and the pervasiveness of gift giving as a social lubricant. West and Graham (1998) present a measure of Linguistic Distance from English based on the genealogical (genetic) classification of languages. For example, Dutch and English are both Germanic languages and thus Dutch is closer to English than is Chinese-the last is not in the Indo-European family of languages (Crystal 1994). They argue that cultural values are related to language spoken and indeed demonstrate empirically that corruption level (as measured by Transparency International CPI) tends to increase as a country's language differs from English. Hypothesis 2: Countries whose languages are farther from English will be more corrupt. Cultural Values Almost everyone writing in the area has described bribery and corruption as being in part determined by cultural values (e.g., Kaikati and Label 1980). Indeed, Husted (1999) reports significant relationships between TICPI and two of Hofstede's measures of values, Individualism and Power Distance. Similarly, we use the constructs and measures of cultural values developed by Hofstede (1980, 1991) and supported by Triandis (1995) and Hall (1976a,b). Although


Hofstede and Bond's (1988) scheme includes five dimensions of cultural values, two have proven more salient in several empirical studies (e.g., Husted 1999; Roth 1995; Graham et al. 1994)-Individualism/Collectivism and Power Distance. "Individualism (IND) pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family" (Hofstede 1991, p. 51). Its opposite is collectivism, where group membership and cooperation are paramount. "Power distance (PDI) can therefore be defined as the extent to which less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally" (p. 28). In high power distance countries people tend to accept authority and dependence. Both these notions are very much related to Hall's (1976a) descriptions of high- and low-context cultures. In low-context cultures the social context of communication (e.g., who says it, when it is said, how it is said, where it is said, etc.) has little to do with the interpretation of what is said. Alternatively, in high-context cultures what is said can be understood only with a deep knowledge of the important social context factors surrounding the communication. Social hierarchy and relationships are important "it's not what you know, it's who you know that's important." Hall's (1976a) descriptions of high-context cultures helped Hofstede (1991) form his ideas about collectivistic cultures-"high-context cultures make greater distinctions between insiders and outsiders than low-context cultures do" (p. 112); and high power distance cultures-"Also in high-context systems, people in places of authority are personally and truly (not just in theory) responsible for the actions of subordinates down to the lowest man" (p. 112). Hofstede makes several other such references to the close connections between collectivistic, high power distance, and high-context cultures (e.g., pp. 37, 60, 128, and 157). Hofstede (1980) also notes the high correlation between IND and PDI in his own data (r = .67) suggesting that collectivism and hierarchy coincide. Triandis (1995) interprets this coincidence by describing "vertical collectivism" and "horizontal individualism" as being typical patterns around the world, although he does cite a few exceptions (e.g., Australia and France). We interpret all this to suggest that Hall's ideas about high/low context communication styles subsume both Hofstede's IND and PDI dimensions of values. Conceptually we integrate these notions into what we call Social Context Salient Cultures. That is, in some cultures, particularly the


vertical collectivistic ones, social context is salient (valuable information) for the interpretation of signs and symbols including interpersonal communication. How might cultural values be connected to corruption? As mentioned earlier, Hall, Hofstede4 and Triandis all avoid the uncomfortable subject of bribery and corruption in their books. However, it is quite clear from their descriptions that in Social Context Salient Cultures (hereafter referred to as SCSCs) personal relationships, harmony, and hierarchy are primary, while rules institutions, economics, and the marketplace are secondary. These descriptions of SCSCs are also quite consistent with the "nepotism, cronyism, and corrupt politics" often ascribed to Asian cultures (The Economist 1998a). Relatedly, in his article about commercial networks Thorelli (1986) points out, ... power, information, money and utilities flow along the links of the network" (p. 39). Fukuyama (1995) defines culture as "inherited ethical habit," suggesting its influence on behavior. We believe that patronage is one sort of network maintenance tool used particularly in the highly networked SCSCs. All countries have laws on the books discouraging patronage and bribery in both political and commercial settings. In SCSCs such statutes will be less important than the maintenance of strong personal relationships. Rules will be more easily ignored when the laws conflict with personal relationships. Hypothesis 3: Countries where social context is more salient (vertical collectivistic) will be more corrupt. Interrelationships As can be seen in Figure 1 we also hypothesize relations between religion, language, and cultural values. Hofstede (1980) quite clearly draws a causal connection between religion and PDI-- "Catholicism with the supreme authority of the Pope and the intermediate authority of the priest corresponds more to a large power distance than Protestantism with its general priesthood of the believers" (p. 104). And certainly the earliest Protestant leaders such as ignored the power of popes and queens in their religious teachings. Hofstede also attributes higher power distance to the religious caste system in India and to Confucianism in Japan (imported from China). Likewise, individualism is a fundamental aspect of Protestant teachings (Triandis 1995; Dumont 1986)-man's relationship with God is a personal, individual one that cannot be mediated by the church or clergy.


Hypothesis 4: Social context will tend to be more salient in countries with lower percentages of Protestants. Ronen and Shenkar (1985) note the association of management values to language. Indeed, they label the majority of their country clusters using linguistic terms-i.e., anglo, germanic, latin, and arabic. Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf were perhaps the first to describe the influence of language on thinking early in the 20th century. Their hypothesis has been attacked by cognitive psychologists (e.g., Pinker 1994), although convincingly only in a narrow way. Most anthropologists and linguists still see great value in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and West's and Graham's (1998) empirical work directly supports the notion that language influences managerial values. The latter report strong relationships between their measure of distance from English and Hofstede's IND and PDI dimensions. They describe in some detail how English, as it is learned, tends to "teach" individualism and egalitarianism. For example, in English the word doctor is ambiguous as to gender, in Spanish the speaker must choose either doctor or doctora depending on the gender of the referent. Thus, understanding of the social context is more crucial for correct Spanish speech. Relative to other languages, the structure of English helps English speakers ignore social context and subtly tends to elevate individuals vis-a-vis their groups. Differences in the importance of social hierarchy is also reflected in a fundamental aspect of English, the word you. In Spanish there is to and usted, in Chinese Mandarin there is ni and nin-- in both cases the first form is less formal, less respectful, and more familiar. English speakers need not learn such distinctions and rules about usage. These last two examples are intended to be illustrative only, not comprehensive. Readers are referred to the West and Graham (1998) paper for additional details. However, the basic point remains that learning English leads to more individualistic and egalitarian values. Hypothesis 5: Social context will be more salient in countries whose languages are more distant from English. Controlling for Stage of Economic Development Pavarala (1996) provides a concise summary of the mechanisms explaining how stage of economic development might influence corruption levels. The studies he reviews seem to suggest corruption


comes from too little capitalism and too little pay (of government employees). In the present study we focus on cultural issues, but it is both necessary and easy to include a measure stage of economic development for the sake of completeness. So, consistent with all the writers in this areas. 5

Hypothesis 6. Countries at higher stages of economic development will be less corrupt. Hofstede (1991) discusses the relationship between cultural values and economic development. He concludes based on his analyses that it is more likely that individualism is influenced by stage of economic development rather than the opposite. He explains, "When a country's wealth increases, its citizens have access to resources which allow them to 'do their own thing"' (p. 76). He finds that explaining the relationship between power distance and economic development a bit more difficult: "National wealth ... in itself stands for a lot of other factors, each of which could be both an effect and a cause of smaller power distances" (p. 45). Weber (1905) argued the opposite, that culture causes economic development. In the ninety years since Weber's writing the criticism has been legion (e.g., Tawney 1926). However, Fukuyama (1995) and Landes (1998), having most recently reviewed all sides of the dispute, conclude that Weber was right. We are actually ambivalent about the causality of the values/ economic development relationship. However, we model economic development here as exogenous to be consistent with Hofstede's empirically-based position on the matter, and to take the more conservative approach. That is, even better evidence for the salience of cultural variables is provided if variance can still be explained after removing variance due to economic factors. Hypothesis 7. Social context will be less salient in countries at higher stages of economic development. Attractiveness of Foreign Markets Since the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977 a matter of great debate has been the relative competitiveness of American firms in foreign markets where corruption and bribery are prevalent. Since no other foreign government has had FCPA-like laws, executives of firms in other countries have been relatively free to bribe


in their export markets (bribery is of course illegal in domestic markets). Indeed, in some countries, Germany is the most prominent example, firms are allowed to take foreign bribes as tax-deductible expenses. Consequently many American executives have reported business lost to such foreign competitors because of the FCPA (Peat et al. 1979; U.S. Department of Commerce 1980; Kim 1981; Kaikati and Label 1980; U.S. General Accounting Office 1981).6 There is also substantial and more recent evidence that American firms have responded to the FCPA by changing business policies and processes and by "walking away" from questionable foreign business (Perry 1992; Milbank and Brauchli 1995; Sheffet and Calantone 1993). It seems that many U.S. managers are heeding De George's advice, "If a firm cannot operate ethically in a corrupt environment, it must either withdraw from that environment or work to change it" (1993, p. 112). Indeed, Peter Clark (1996), head of the FCPA cases at the U.S. Justice Department claims that American companies "are much cleaner than they were before" the law was enacted. So, beginning in 1978, foreign markets where corruption and bribery were more prevalent became less attractive to American firms for two reasons: (1) the competition against other firms from countries without anti-bribery laws became tougher, and (2) the FCPA itself brought with it the risk of fines and jail time for involved American executives. Hypothesis 8: Foreign markets that are more corrupt have been less attractive to American firms since 1977. During the years since the passage of the FCPA at least four empirical studies have been conducted investigating this hypothesis. Graham (1984) reports contrary results based on a comparison of trade flows (i.e., total trade and four separate SITC categories of imports) before and after 1977. However, the other three studies report findings consistent with the hypothesis. Beck et al. (1991) reported a negative impact of the FCPA on imports by "briberyprone" countries outside of Latin America. Hines (1995) considers a broad range of control variables and concludes that the FCPA has clearly, negatively affected American business activity in foreign countries in four categories-foreign direct investment, capital/ labor ratios, joint-venture activity, and aircraft imports. Most recently Wei (1998) links perceived levels of corruption and foreign direct investment.


METHODS Sampling Frame The sampling frame for the study is limited by the overlap of countries considered in the Hofstede (1991) and Transparency International (1997) studies. Those 42 countries and their respective scores on all measures used in the present study are listed in Table 1. Measures Corruption Transparency International provides the best available measure of the perceived corruptness of 52 countries. Their Corruption Perception Index (TICPI) is by far the most widely cited such measure. The Transparency International website (www.transparency. de) provides a wealth of information regarding methodological details. We will only summarize them here. The TICPI integrates scores from six survey sources: Gallup International, the World Competitiveness Yearbook, Political & Economic Risk Consultancy (in Hong Kong), DRI/McGraw-Hill Global Risk Service, Political Risk Services (in Syracuse, NY), and data gathered via the internet directly by Gottingen University (http://Www.unigottingen.del-uwvw). The reported correlations among these diverse sources range between 0.64 and 0.97. "The index is a poll of polls, putting together the subjective evaluations of business people, political analysts, and the general public." TI defines corruption as, "... the misuse of public power for private benefits, e.g., the bribing of public officials, taking kickbacks in public procurement, or embezzling public funds." They add, "The external surveys we included were mostly very close to this definition." (TI 1998). For our analyses we used the results of the 1997 survey. The correlations among the 1995,1996, and 1997 indices are all above 0.93 (Cronbach's a = .99) and the 1997 version is described as the most "precise" in the TI materials. Finally, they explain the scores (listed in our Table 1), "A ten stands for a highly clean country while zero equals a country where business transactions are entirely dominated by kickbacks, extortion, bribery, etc." Please note that for the correlation and structural equations analyses the TICP197 scale is reversed (i.e., subtracted from 10) from that appearing in Table 1 so that higher scores reflect higher levels of perceived corruption. Convergent Validity of the TICPI We have checked the TICP197 for convergent validity7 against other measures of corruption levels appearing in the literature. Graham (1984) compiled data from three


NOTE: Originally, in Consumption, Markets and Culture Volume 4, Number 3, Table 1 extended from page 328 to 330. For this PDF re-creation, the table was compressed, and page 330 is intentionally left blank to maintain the page integrity of the original document.

Table 1: Country data Country 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

GDP

Capita ($000S)

(lo) Prot

DF Eng IND PDI TICPI

97

SH 1972- 1976

SH 1978-1982

MA 1978-1982

SH 1991-1995

MA 1991-1995

Argentina 8.1 2 4 46 49 2.81 18.3 24.5 6.2 21.3 3.0Australia 18.0 41 1 90 36 8.86 17.8 18.8 1.0 22.8 5.0Austria 25.0 8 2 55 11 7.61 3.0 3.5 .5 4.0 1.0Belgium 22.9 2 3 75 65 5.25 7.7 8.7 1.0 5.1 -2.6Brazil 3.4 7 4 38 69 3.56 23.6 17.3 -6.3 22.7 -.9Canada 19.6 41 1 80 39 9.10 68.8 70.4 1.6 66.0 -2.8Chile 3.6 6 4 23 63 6.05 27.4 24.2 -3.2 22.9 -4.4Colombia 1.6 1 4 13 67 2.23 40.7 37.3 -3.4 34.0 -6.7Costa Rica 2.4 2 4 15 35 6.45 34.7 35.5 0.8 47.2 12.5Denmark 28.1 96 3 74 18 9.94 6.2 6.0 -.2 5.0 -1.2Finland 18.9 91 7 63 33 9.48 3.1 3.4 .3 6.9 3.8France 23.5 2 4 71 68 6.66 5.7 5.6 -.1 8.4 2.8Germany 25.6 54 2 67 35 8.23 6.9 6.0 -.9 6.9 .0Greece 7.7 0 5 35 60 5.35 10.1 8.2 -1.9 3.7 -6.4Hong Kong 21.7 18 8 25 68 7.28 12.7 11.5 -1.2 7.4 -5.3India .3 3 6 48 77 2.75 17.4 11.5 -5.9 10.3 -7.0Indonesia .9 7 7 14 78 2.72 11.7 12.2 .5 12.3 .6Ireland 13.6 4 1 70 28 8.28 5.7 8.3 2.6 16.4 10.8Israel 14.4 2 7 54 13 7.97 20.1 19.7 -.4 18.1 -2.0Italy 19.3 9 4 76 50 5.03 8.2 6.9 -1.3 5.1 -3.0Japan 34.6 0 7 46 54 6.57 18.4 15.6 -2.8 22.9 4.6Malaysia 3.5 6 7 26 99 5.01 9.8 12.8 3.0 16.6 6.8Mexico 4.0 3 4 30 81 2.66 78.2 78.7 .5 71.9 -6.2Netherlands 22.0 27 2 80 38 9.03 11.6 11.6 .0 8.0 -3.6New Zealand 13.2 49 1 79 22 9.23 11.7 13.1 1.4 18.4 6.8Nigeria .3 50 8 20 77 1.76 9.0 7.2 -1.8 9.5 .5Norway 26.5 89 3 69 31 8.92 5.1 5.3 0.2 7.7 2.6Pakistan .4 1 6 14 55 2.53 22.0 12.3 -9.70 10.0 -12.0Philippines 1.0 8 7 32 94 3.05 23.6 22.3 -1.30 19.1 -4.4Portugal 9.4 1 4 27 63 6.97 9.4 10.1 .70 3.3 -6.1Singapore 23.4 10 8 20 74 8.66 11.9 11.9 .00 15.8 3.9South Africa 3.0 59 2 65 49 4.95 15.7 13.7 -2.00 12.5 -3.2South Korea 8.2 30 7 18 60 4.29 25.6 21.0 -1.6 22.2 -3.3Spain 13.3 2 4 51 57 5.90 12.9 10.4 -2.50 7.3 -5.6Sweden 23.6 68 3 71 31 9.35 6.8 7.7 .90 8.7 1.9Switzerland 37.2 44 3 68 34 8.61 8.1 9.9 1.80 6.6 -1.5Taiwan 12.1 7 8 17 58 5.02 25.4 21.8 -3.60 19.9 -5.4Thailand 2.2 0 7 20 64 3.06 11.3 12.3 1.00 11.6 .3Turkey 2.5 0 7 37 66 3.21 13.9 8.1 -5.80 10.8 -3.0United Kingdom 18.4 72 1 89 35 8.22 8.9 10.8 1.90 11.9 3.0

Uruguay 4.0 2 4 36 61 4.14 11.1 12.1 1.00 9.5 -1.5Venezuela 2.8 4 4 12 81 2.77 37.7 37.8 .10 45.8 8.2


Table 1: (Continued)

1. Gross Domestic Product per capita in thousands of dollars. 2. Percentage of Protestants. 3. Distance from English. 4. Individualism Index (Hofstede). 5. Power Distance Index (Hofstede). 6. Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (1997). 7. U.S. Share of Imports, Average 1972-1976. 8. U.S. Share of Imports, Average 1978-1982. 9. Market Attractiveness 1978-1982 (Share 1978-1982 less Share 1972-1976). 10. U.S. Share of Imports, Average 1991-1995. 11. Market Attractiveness 1991-1995 (Share 1991-1995 less Share 1972 less 1976).



sources— a U.S. Commerce Department poll, a geographic classification scheme suggested by Basche (1976), and a content analysis of articles on bribery appearing in the Business Periodicals Index and the Wall Street Journal Index during the period 1975-1981. Beck et al. (1991) augmented Basche's approach with SEC reports and Wall Street journal citations to develop their measure of corruption. Hines (1995) used an index developed by Business International wherein countries were classified according to "the degree to which business transactions involve corruption or questionable payments" (p. 7). Finally, Howell (1992) used a corruption index reported in The Economist (1986). Excepting the BI index used by Hines, we were able to assemble all the measures described above into a database. The correlations among them were generally high except for The Economist index— thus, it was dropped from the analysis.8 The correlations among the remaining indices, including the TICP197 were encouragingly high with a Cronbach's a of 0.80. Thus, the measure of perceived corruption we use in our analysis, TICPI97, demonstrates excellent convergent validity characteristics, even across the substantial span of our data between the 1970s and 1990s. Religion We used The Economist Atlas (1991) to measure the percentage of Protestants (% Protestants) in each country. Language Our measure of distance from English (DFEng) is derived directly from the work of West and Graham (1998). We determined the dominant language used in each country by reference to Crystal (1994). We then classified each language into eight categories (ordinally distant from English) using genealogical (or genetic) distance as in West and Graham (1998),9 lexical overlap, and other linguistic characteristics: English =1; German, Dutch, and Africans = 2 (all three are western Germanic as is English); Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish = 3 (northern Germanic); Romance languages = 4 (a high degree of lexical overlap and a similar alphabet); Greek and Slavic languages = 5 (not the same degree of lexical overlap and substantial differences in alphabets); Hindi, Panjabi, Farsi = 6 (Asian Indo-European languages); most non-Indo-European languages = 7; and Chinese and African languages = 8 (characters, tones and other sounds are important). Cultural Values We obtained scores for Individualism (IND) and Power Distance (PDI) directly from Hofstede (1991) and combined them using a reflective indicator approach in PLS to measure Social Context Salient Cultures (SCSC). The PLS latent variable loadings for IND and PDI were -.94 and .87, respectively, suggesting both indices appear to be reasonable measures of the same construct.


Additionally, Hall (1976b) and Graham et al. (1994) provide information to support the ranking of several countries according to Hall's High/Low Context dimension of culture. This ranking is strongly correlated with both IND and PDI with a Cronbach's a of 0.90 for the three measures combined. Unfortunately the number of countries ranked according to Hall's High/Low Context scheme is small and does not well overlap with the Hofstede and Transparency International countries. However, the convergence of Hall's ranking and IND and PDI does suggest an encouraging degree of convergent validity for our measure of SCSC. One reviewer expressed a reasonable concern that is certain to be shared by others. That is, Hofstede's data were collected in the early 1970s and might their age limit their comparability to the TICP197 given its creation some 25 years later? However, the potential age problems of Hofstede's data are mitigated by the reported resilience of cultural values. For example, Fukuyama (1995) argues most eloquently that culture changes only very slowly. Indeed, profits and individualism are still unpopular concepts in both Russia and China today despite revolutionary changes in political and economic systems in both countries. Moreover, the fast growing body of citations of Hofstede's work (now greater than 2000) attests to its validity and continuing relevance. Also, we have already mentioned recent studies demonstrating the current nomological validity of both IND and PDI (Roth 1995; Graham et al. 1994), and there are many, many others. Economic Development 1994 per capita gross domestic product (GDP/C) was used to measure stage of economic development (World Fact Book). Attractiveness of Foreign Markets to American Firms after 1977 Two variables were created to measure this construct. As in Graham (1984) and Beck et al. (1992), the differences in average share of U.S. imports before and after 1977 were used to measure the effects on the passage of the FCPA on American firms' efforts and success in the 42 countries involved in the study. The share of U.S. imports averaged over the years 1972-1976 was subtracted from the share averaged over 1978-1982 to form MA 1978-1982. The 1972-1976 share was subtracted from the 1991-1995 share to form MA 1991-1995. The first variable reflects the immediate effects of the FCPA and the second variable reflects the persistent, long-term affects. Such difference scores preclude several kinds of potential confounds such as market size, country/product mix, and such.


Other researchers (e.g., Hines 1995, Wei 1998) have used economic measures other than imports as dependent variables, such as foreign direct investments (FDI). We have more narrowly focused on sales to the various countries because they are most directly affected by bribery, corruption, and the FCPA. We certainly do not mean to imply that other aspects of commerce such as FDI and joint venture activity are not influenced by corruption. However, all the most important FCPA related cases have involved bribes made by marketing executives to sell things-e.g., the Lockheed scandals in the 1970s and 1990s, the George McClean/International Harvester case in the 1980s (see Graham 1984 for details), the huge General Electric fine ($69 million) paid in 1992, and the current trouble brewing about IBM's systems sales in Argentina (The Economist 1998b). Lastly, the data we have employed represents merchandise trade only, and ignores the increasingly important trade in services and the continuing substantial smuggling of goods worldwide. Analysis Parameters were estimated using Partial Least Squares (PLS). PLS is particularly appropriate when different levels of measurement (i.e., the ordinal measure of DFEng) and small sample sizes (i.e., n = 42) pertain (Falk and Miller 1992). The statistical significance of the parameter estimates was determined by using the PLS latent variable correlation matrix as input for a second structural equation analysis using LISREL (Fornell and Bookstein 1982). RESULTS The reader will please recall that for the analyses and results reported below the scale for the TICP197 measure is reversed from that which appears in Table 1. In Table 2 can be found descriptive statistics and the correlation matrix of the variables in the study. Hypotheses 1 and 2 were not supported by the analyses. In the context of the structural equations model estimated, the percentage of Protestants in a country was not found to be directly related to corruption level (% Protestants � TICP197 = -17, not significant), and neither was a country's language distance from English (DFEng � TICP197 = 02, n.s.).


Table 2: Variables and descriptive statistics (n = 42)

Variable (Symbol) Mean (s.d) Correlation Matrix GDPI % FEng IND PDI TICPI MA MA C Protest 97 1978- 1991 ant 1982 1995 Gross domestic product per (GDP/C) 13.0(10.5) 1 capita Percentage of Protestants (% 22.1(28.7) .434* 1 Protestants Distance from English (DFEng) 4.5(2.3) -.308 -.329* 1 Social context salient cultures Individualism index (IND) 46.6(24.8) .640* .548* -.707* 1 Power distance index (PDI) 53.5(21.5) -.566* -.511* .561* -.639* 1 Transparency international (TICP197) 5.94(2.53) -.781* -.580* .462* -.680* .731* 1 corruption perception index, 1997 Market attractiveness Immediate (MA 1978- -.76(2.9) .312* .200 .372* .365* -.255 -.395* 1 1982) Long-term (MA 1991- -.47(5.2) .192 .188 -.221 .200 -.251 -.340* .588* 1 1995)

+ For the analysis the scale is reversed so that higher numbers =greater levels of corruption. That is, the scores in Table 1 are subtracted from 10 *p <.05.


Hypothesis 3 was supported by the analysis. Countries where social context is more salient were more corrupt as measured by the Transparency International CPI (SC SC � TICP197 = .35, p < .05). Hypotheses 4 and 5 were supported. Countries with lower percentages of Protestants tended to be have values scores reflecting higher salience for social context (% Protestants � SCSC = -.24, p < .05). Countries with languages more distant from English had values scores reflecting higher salience for social context (DFEng � SC SC = .51, p < .05). Hypotheses 6 and 7 were both strongly confirmed. Countries at higher stages of economic development were found to be less corrupt (GDP/C � TICP197 = -.47, p< .05). Countries at higher stages of economic development tended to have values scores reflecting lower salience for social context (GDP/C � SCSC = -.41, p <.05). Two separate models were tested for each of the dependent variables. Because only the dependent variable differed across the tests all parameter estimates were identical except for those associated with Hypothesis 8. Both tests proved positive. American firms appear to have had less interest and success in foreign markets with higher levels of corruption since the passage of the FCPA. The effect is observable in the five years immediately following 1977 (TICPI97 � MA 1978-1982 =-.40, p <.05) and in the longer run as well (TICPI97 � MA 1991-1995 =-.34, p <.05). Percentage of Protestants, DFEng, and GDP/C combined to explain 78% (p < .05) of the variance in SCSC. Those three variables, combined with SCSC, also explained 74% (p < .05) of the variance in TICPI97. Finally, TICP197 explained 16% of the variance in MA 1978-1982 and 12% (both p <.05) of the variance in MA 19911995. The Root Mean Squares of the two models were .62 and.60, respectively. DISCUSSION Interpretation By all indications the TICPI measure appears to provide a useful answer to the question of which countries have "a widespread history of corruption."


Convergent Validity When corruption is defined as the prevalence of bribery then the TICPI appears to be a valid measure of the concept. It converges nicely with measures developed by other researchers based on geography, a survey of U.S. Commerce Department personnel, and content analyses of articles in the popular press and SEC reports on bribery in foreign countries. The TICP197 itself combines six different measures of corruption that are all strongly correlated. The correlations among the scores reported in the TICPI across years 1995 to 1999 are above 0.90. Further, this "agreement" on the prevalence of bribery in countries spans decades, the 1970s to the present. The convergent validity of the TICPI is excellent, and the prevalence of bribery across countries appears to be quite persistent over the years. Nomological Validity When we cast a nomological net with the TICPI at its center, the construct (and measure) demonstrates useful characteristics in the context of theory and policy making. Consistent with Pavarala's (1996) ideas, both culture and economics appear to be important predictors of levels of corruption in the fortytwo countries studied. Religion and distance from English are not directly related to prevalence of bribery. So, our interpretations of Noonan's (1984) notions appear to be somewhat off the mark. However, religion and language, along with stage of economic development as predicted by Hofstede (1991), do predict values. Greater value is placed on social context in countries less influenced by Protestantism (consistent with Triandis 1995; Hofstede 1980, 1991) and the English language (consistent with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the most recent empirical findings of West and Graham 1998). And to the extent that religion and language are indirectly related to corruption level via cultural values, perhaps Noonan's ideas are partially supported. The prevalence of bribery appears to have had a clear effect on American manager's interest and success in marketing products in the forty-two countries. Compared to the five years preceding the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act the U.S. share of imports to the countries listed as more corrupt declined significantly, both in the short and long term. Aside from the statistical analyses reported above, comparing share of imports to the fifteen countries rated as most corrupt to the fifteen rated as least corrupt is illustrative. The share of U.S. firms' imports to those countries perceived as most corrupt declined on the average 1.8% from 1972/1976 to 1978/1982 and declined 2.4% from 1972/1976 to 1991/1995. Alternatively, U.S.


firms' share of imports increased to the fifteen countries rated as least corrupt immediately by 0.7% and in the 1990s by 1.9% (both differences are statistically significant, p < .05). A 1% decline in American firms' share of imports to the fifteen high-corruption countries listed (which includes Mexico and S. Korea) corresponds to approximately $8 billion in sales foregone. Both FCPA related explanations for the declines common in the literature-reduced competitiveness and greater risk of prosecution-are most certainly operating here. These findings are in stark contrast to those of Graham (1984) who reported no relationship between FCPA passage and American firms' success, but they are entirely consistent with Beck et al. (1991), I Fines (1995), and Wei (1998). Implications for Researchers The study is important for several reasons. First, it demonstrates how culture, including values and associated law making, can influence trade relationships and potentially other economic activities. Indeed, our findings seem to lend support to the both Weber's and Fukuyama's (1995) arguments about culture causing economic performance. In one sense the FCPA itself can be viewed as a tool of American economic hegemony—"Clean up your business system or we won't offer you our great American products." And the term "clean up" is quite clearly defined in American terms. Certainly, U.S. trade and foreign policies reflect this thinking in other aspects such as most favored nation controversies and embargoes of Cuba and the like. More study of such mechanisms will be worthwhile. Implications for Policy Makers We mentioned above the view of the FCPA as a tool of hegemony. A colleague suggested another interesting interpretation of the FCPA (McKean 1994). He argued that from one perspective the FCPA simply represents the federal government exercising control over American multi-national firms with regard to who will bribe foreign government officials. That is, both the CIA and USAII) give money to other countries to influence policy making. If Lockheed, GE, and other MNCs do the same, but with different purposes, that tends to interfere with the effectiveness of U.S. government "bribing." The fans of conspiracy theories will love this notion.


American managers have responded to the passage of the FCPA by reducing marketing efforts in the more corrupt countries. So, the law appears to be serving its intended purposes. As OECD and other important trading countries are adopting similar laws it is reasonable to expect managers in those countries to likewise eschew the increasingly "risky business" in 'foreign markets they perceive to be more corrupt. Indeed, the Transparency International CPI will continue to become increasingly influential in management decision making. Despite the not unfounded complaints about its cultural biases, to the extent that managers in major trading nations pay attention to the TICPI, citizens in the "more corrupt" countries will suffer the consequences of reduced choice in the marketplace. Indeed, policy makers in countries that are represented as more corrupt in the TICPI appear to be taking notice. Low scores have recently stirred debate about government leadership and policies in countries such as Argentina, Malaysia, and Pakistan (transparency.de). Implications for International Marketing Managers Finally, the TICPI provides international marketing managers an answer to the question about which countries have a "widespread history of corruption." Further, the TICPI definition of corruption as bribery is quite close to those serving as the basis for the American FCPA and the other similar policies being adopted in the European Union, the OECD, and the Organization of American States. The information provided in the TICPI, in conjunction with other sources, can be useful in making both strategic and operational decisions about foreign markets. NOTES

1. Nomological validity is defined by Zaltman, Pinson and Angelmar (1973) as "The extent to which predictions based on the concept which an instrument purports to measure are confirmed." (p. 44)

2. The entire list is included in the Appendix and should be of particular interest to international marketing managers.

3. Hofstede (1991) attributes much of the differences in Protestant-country values versus Catholic-country values as having more to do with the historical boundaries of the Roman empire in Europe, that is, a political matter, not a religious one.

4. Hofstede also mentioned the correlation between some of his dimensions of culture and the Transparency International CPI during a key-note speech at the Academy of Management (International Track) national meetings in San Diego, CA on August 10, 1998.


5. In his aforementioned speech Hofstede also commented on the importance of considering the simplest explanations (i.e., economic) in addition to the cultural ones.

6. Certainly Richman (1979) and Donaldson (1989) are among those who best argue the opposite-that the FCPA actually helps American company competitiveness because they are seen as "clean" by many foreign buyers.

7. Zaltman et al. (1973) define convergent validity as "The degree to which two attempts to measure the same concept through maximally different methods are convergent. It is generally represented by the correlation between the two attempts." (p. 44)

8. Indeed, Howell (1992) reports his own problems with The Economist index.

9. We expanded their four categories to eight. REFERENCES Basche, J. R

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and Winston. APPENDIX SIGNS OF POTENTIAL VIOLATIONS OF THE FOREIGN CORRUPT PRACTICES ACT "Red flags" appear most commonly as proposed contracts or billing requests are reviewed. Any of the following requests are widely accepted as indications that a Representative or Distributor may be taking action that could expose a Company to potential FCPA liability.

• The payment is being made in a country with a widespread history of corruption;

• A Representative or Distributor refuses to confirm that he will abide by the provisions of the FCPA;

• A Representative or Distributor has family or business ties with government officials;

• A Representative or Distributor has a bad reputation in the business community;

• A Representative or Distributor requires that his identity not be disclosed;

• A potential government customer of authorizing agency recommends a Representative or Distributor;

• A Representative's or Distributor's business seems to lack sufficient staff to perform the services offered;

• A Representative or Distributor is new to the business, or cannot provide references to document his claimed experience;

• A Representative or Distributor makes unusual requests, such as requests to back date or alter invoices;

• A Representative or Distributor asks for commissions that are substantially higher than the "going rate" in that country;


• A Representative or Distributor asks for payment by unorthodox or convoluted means, such as through bank accounts outside the country where the services are being offered;

• A Representative or Distributor requests over invoicing; • A Representative or Distributor requests checks be made out to

"bearer" or "cash" or requests payments to be made in cash or some other anonymous form;

• A Representative or Distributor asks for an unusually large credit line for a new customer;

• A Representative or Distributor requests unusually large bonuses or similar payments; or

• A Representative or Distributor requests substantial and unorthodox up-front payments.


COLOR PLATEFigure 1 St


COLOR PLATE 2. See Cara Okleshen et al. Figure 5. Haddon Sundblom's Santa

Claus for Coca-Cola (1931-1966)

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