New PDF release: The Economy of Icons: How Business Manufactures Meaning

Though many nonetheless imagine that we are living in a knowledge financial system, Ernest Sternberg asserts that the motive force in 21st-century capitalism isn't really details, yet snapshot. via reports of nutrition processing, genuine property improvement, tourism, videos, and hard work performances, he examines how companies endow items with evocative meaning.

It has turn into universal knowledge that we are living in a postindustrial details society within which facts and calculation underlie wealth. yet now that details is as oftentimes produced as business or agricultural items, companies are studying that they most sensible in achieving aggressive virtue through generating what shoppers so much dearly seek—personal which means. The 21st-century economic system produces simply that: no longer in basic terms info, yet evocative photographs; not only commodities, yet meaning-laden icons. As Sternberg indicates, meals now attraction via their sensuality and nostalgia; homes and shops draw shoppers via their exoticism; humans promote their exertions throughout the planned functionality of the self for the marketplace; and vacationer locations provide up conscientiously crafted thematic stories. while farms, factories, and data processors as soon as stood on the middle of the financial system, now motion picture studios do, generating the product valued certainly, significant content material, from which downstream corporations collect the subjects that animate desire.

Now that that means pervades creation, Sternberg argues, modes of inquiry as soon as reserved for the arts make feel within the research of the financial system. Drawing on paintings historical past and aesthetics, he introduces iconography as a method of cultural research tailored to the learn of business construction. via comparative reviews of various fiscal sectors, starting from nutrition processing to tourism, Sternberg contains out an iconographic research of the recent economic system. this can be a provocative learn for students, scholars, and execs facing advertising and customer study, tradition and media reviews, socio-economics, and monetary geography.