Creative Conflicts: Regimes of Justification in Advertising Work

• In Event: 2451 - Economic Sociology and the Valuation of Work

Abstract

This article takes a pragmatic economic sociological approach (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Stark 2009) to examine conflict in advertising agencies, suggesting such conflicts can be better understood as inevitable clashes between different regimes for justifying the value of advertising work. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic work and 81 interviews conducted across four American advertising agencies, the article examines three such regimes that advertising practitioners use to justify the work they do: the regime of partnership, the regime of expertise, and the regime of brokerage. Each regime supposes its own definition of what is good advertising work, how that work is evaluated, and how that work should be done, as well as what relationships there should be between the agents who do the work and their clients. Furthermore, each regime has its critiques of the others, and compromises between regimes are unstable and temporary. The different types of conflicts that arise from clashes between these regimes can be understood as the outcome of threats to the different social bonds supposed by each of those regimes.

Author

• Andrew C. Cohen, Yale University