Teea Palo

This paper examines how valuation practices shape place branding through the case of a city bidding to become European Capital of Culture (ECoC). While place branding research has emphasised stakeholder involvement and identity construction, less attention has been paid to how valuation practices shape what is considered valuable in branding processes. Drawing on valuation studies and orders of worth, we analyse how valuation devices such as bid books, scoring systems, and consultations mediate competing value claims during the bidding process. We introduce the concept of branding as valuation to show how place brands emerge through the negotiation and operationalisation of competing orders of worth within valuation assemblages. The study contributes to marketing theory by conceptualising branding as a constitutive valuation process and by showing how competitions function as valuation assemblages that organise and stabilise place brand value.

This study adopts a narrative lens to investigate how place shapes the emergence and work of cross-sector partnerships (CSPs). Based on a qualitative inquiry of the marketization of Lapland, Finland, as the home of Santa Claus, four matters of concern around the ethicality of marketizing Lapland are followed: revitalization, commerciality, distortion, and imbalance. The findings show how CSPs emerge in the marketization of place through the mechanisms of narrative contestations and misalignment of marketized place and place-identity, and their (re)alignment at the nexus of marketization. The contestations and misalignment generate matters of concern from place, which in turn mobilize CSPs via two interrelated narrative practices: (i) problematizing and (ii) reimagining the marketized place to realign it with place-identity. The paper contributes the construct of concerned partnerships to the literature of CSPs, a place-based form of CSPs which consist of both market and non-market actors, including the place and its social and material resources. They are formed through matters of concern that emerge through misalignments of marketized place and place-identity, to realign them and sustain a place at a nexus of marketization.

Socio-material conceptualisations of markets suggest that they are spatial formations. Yet, the everyday practical and spatial dimensions of market making have received little explicit attention. We thus introduce the concept of spatio-market practices, drawing on key ideas in market studies and spatial theory. We argue that examining spatio-market practices (and thus the spatial dimensions of markets) promises to provide fresh insight regarding what it takes to realise markets, their uneven distribution, and what and whom markets are (and are not) designed to serve. To demonstrate what the concept calls for, supports and promises, we take Humphreys’ (2010) influential paper as a starting point and draw on other secondary sources in order to articulate an alternative and spatially-oriented account of the growth and legitimacy of the American casino gambling market. This paper, in turn, contributes a subtle and yet incisive shift in thinking, which supports a more explicit means of exploring markets as spatial formations.

If you believe in Santa, do not read this paper. Through an in-depth, qualitative, empirical study, we follow the Santa myth to a remote northern location in Lapland, Finland where, for one month a year, multiple actors come together to create a tourist market offering: the chance to visit Santa in his ‘magical world’. We explore how the myth is transformed into reality through performative, organisational speech acts, whereby felicitous conditions for the performance of visits to Santa are embedded in a complex socio-material network. We develop the performative turn (Gond et al., 2016) in organisational studies by introducing a new category of speech act, ‘translocution’, a compendium of imagining, discussing, proposing, negotiating and contracting that transforms the myth into a model of an imaginary-real world. Through translocutionary acts, actors calculate, organise the socio-material networks of the market, and manage the considerable uncertainty inherent in its operation. Details of the myth become market facts, while commercial constructs fade into the imaginary. The result, when felicitous conditions are achieved, is a ‘Merry Christmas’ of magical, performative power.

This paper investigates practice dynamics in kitchens situated at the boundary between markets and consumption. The kitchen is conceptualized as a market-consumption junction, a space where multiple concerned actors in markets and consumption come to shape, and get shaped by, the practices in the kitchen. Drawing upon archival research of the Swedish household magazine Husmodern (1938–1958), this study traces two matters of concern in and around the kitchen: the scarcity of resources in food markets and the scarcity of time to prepare food for consumption. Findings reveal how thrifty and convenient practices became enacted, and their transformative implications for consumption, demand, and market action. The mechanisms involved in disrupting and reconnecting the dynamic elements of practices (meaning, competence, and objects) are explained through the notions of concerning, agencing, and overflows, which recursively work to redraw the boundaries between markets and consumption to establish novel practices.

Building long-term and close customer relationships is an ever-salient function in business-to-business organisations and, especially, in expert organisations where high levels of trust and close customer interaction are needed in the production of the services. A key account management (KAM) system, an organised way for managing key customers, can be a useful tool for this purpose. However, there are many factors to consider when implementing such a system in this context. The aim of this article is to describe the specific and challenging characteristics of KAM implementation in expert organisations. In particular, this article aims to describe the kinds of organisational capabilities required for KAM system implementation and what kind of KAM organisation is appropriate to dovetail with particular organisational characteristics. This study is based on a qualitative single-case study in an expert organisation constructing its KAM practices for the first time.