Doctoral Thesis Craft production in the Kingdom of Crystal (Glasriket) and its visual representation Constructing authenticity in cultural/marketing production Songming Feng Jönköping University Jönköping International Business School JIBS Dissertation Series No. 140 • 2020 Doctoral Thesis Craft production in the Kingdom of Crystal (Glasriket) and its visual representation Constructing authenticity in cultural/marketing production Songming Feng Jönköping University Jönköping International Business School JIBS Dissertation Series No. 140 • 2020 Doctoral Thesis in Business Administration Craft production in the Kingdom of Crystal (Glasriket) and its visual representation: Constructing authenticity in cultural/marketing production JIBS Dissertation Series No. 140 © 2020 Songming Feng and Jönköping International Business School Published by Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University P.O. Box 1026 SE-551 11 Jönköping NMÄ NE M RK Tel. +46 36 10 10 00 A EN ÄR E N K VA ET SV T www.ju.se S Trycksak Trycksak 3041 0234 Printed by Stema Specialtryck AB 2020 3041 0234 ISSN 1403-0470 ISBN 978-91-7914-003-8 Abstract Authenticity is a core concept and phenomenon in contemporary marketing, as both marketers and consumers seek the authentic. Individuals, companies, and industries all work to establish and accomplish authenticity for themselves and related stakeholders. As a marketing point for creating differentiation and singularity, authenticity has the potential to augment the value of a product above and beyond its promising functional, esthetic, or experiential significance. However, authenticity is a concept with heavily debated characteristics, and it is not well understood in its market manifestations. Academic work on authenticity remains vague in terms of both its definition and its marketing relevance. There has been limited empirical understanding of and theorizing about what is meant by authenticity and how it is manifested in production and consumption in the marketplace. In practice, the nature and use of authenticity in the field of marketing is still full of ambiguity and confusion. For marketers, brand authenticity is easy to recognize but hard to manufacture. How producers and marketers manage the development, positioning, and communication of authentic offerings and how they engineer, fabricate, or construct authenticity remain unanswered questions. This dissertation answers the call of Jones, Anand, and Alvarez (2005, p. 894) to determine which strategies are used for creating and defining authenticity and how these strategies shape our understanding of what is authentic and the call of Beverland (2005a) to find out how brands and marketers create and develop images of authenticity. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how authenticity of market offerings is constructed in two cultural/marketing production sites—the craft production of glass objects and commercial photographers’ image production as visual representation of the former—to understand the mechanisms behind the authentication of market offerings and the paradoxes within the construction work. This purpose was fulfilled by pairing the two theoretical domains of cultural/marketing production and authenticity for the investigation of an empirical site—the Kingdom of Crystal (“Glasriket” in Swedish)—located in southern Sweden. As a traditional craft-producing industrial region and a tourist destination, the site has been dedicated to making consumer glass products, maintaining its production mode and ethos as a handmade craft, for more than one hundred years. Being producer focused, the craft sector and craft production offer a strong empirical instantiation of authenticity and can serve as a fertile field to explore and problematize the issue of authenticity at the intersection with cultural/marketing production. The research was conducted over a three-year period with an interpretive and ethnographic approach tapping into multiple sources of data. This dissertation finds that the glass producers in Glasriket substantively construct five categories of authenticity (technique, material, geographical, temporal, and original) of market offerings via craft production and that commercial photographers communicate and authenticate the craft production world via their image-making practices, which are dimensionalized into a typology consisting of five categories of 7 practice: reproducing, documenting, participating, estheticizing, and indexing. Illuminating the two-step micro process of cultural/marketing production—the concurrent practices of the product makers and the promoters, this dissertation theorizes about how authenticity operates vis-à-vis two types of production (substantive product making and communicative image making), yielding a number of contributions to authenticity scholarship and the literature on cultural/marketing production. It provides managerial implications for marketers/producers in Glasriket regarding how they can leverage cultural resources to conduct retro marketing as well as suggestions for marketers beyond this context about visual marketing and authenticity-based marketing. Keywords: Glasriket, the Kingdom of Crystal, glass, craft, authenticity, cultural production, photography, image, semiotics, practice theory, materiality. 8 Table of Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 15 1.1 Craft: A subject with contemporary cultural relevance and an empirical instance of authenticity ......................................................... 16 1.2 The craft-producing region Glasriket as the research context.............. 18 1.3 Authenticity .......................................................................................... 19 1.3.1 Using “authenticity” as a theoretical lens and heuristic device ........... 19 1.3.2 Contributing to authenticity scholarship .............................................. 19 1.3.3 Contributing to marketing practices ..................................................... 20 1.4 Cultural/marketing production ............................................................. 21 1.4.1 Why focus on the production side? ...................................................... 22 1.4.2 Paradoxes in the construction of authenticity ...................................... 23 1.5 Purpose of the study and research questions ........................................ 24 1.5.1 Purpose of the study ............................................................................. 24 1.5.2 Research questions ............................................................................... 24 1.5.3 The loci of authenticity in this research context .................................. 26 1.6 Positioning of this dissertation ............................................................. 27 1.7 Key terms, terminologies, and glossary ............................................... 29 1.7.1 Key terms .............................................................................................. 29 1.7.2 Terminologies in semiotics applied in the analysis of visual data ....... 30 1.7.3 Glossary related to the research context ............................................... 31 1.8 Outline of the dissertation .................................................................... 31 2 The context: The Kingdom of Crystal (“Glasriket”) ......................................... 33 2.1 Seeing this research context theoretically ............................................ 33 2.2 Background information on this region................................................ 34 2.2.1 General profile ...................................................................................... 34 2.2.2 Community and regionality .................................................................. 37 2.2.3 Glass as a material and objects ............................................................. 38 2.2.4 Glass products in consumption ............................................................. 38 2.3 Authenticity anchors ............................................................................. 41 2.3.1 The craft mode of manufacturing: A key authenticity attribute ........... 41 2.3.2 Craft-manufacturing-induced tourism: Authentic experience .............. 42 2.4 Cultural/marketing production ............................................................. 43 2.4.1 Marketing communications of three types of organizations ................ 43 2.4.2 Photographer John Selbing: Exemplary creative worker and marketer ................................................................................................ 44 9 2.4.3 Photographic images as marketing texts and cultural products ............ 46 2.4.4 The art dimension in the region ............................................................ 47 3 Theoretical Inspirations ...................................................................................... 49 3.1 Cultural/marketing production .............................................................. 49 3.1.1 How does this study treat the two types of production? ....................... 49 3.1.2 Cultural production ............................................................................... 51 3.1.3 Cultural production at the intersection with marketing ........................ 54 3.1.4 Marketing literature examining “production” ...................................... 55 3.1.5 Research on photographers’ work within the field of sociology .........