Communication in global crises: critical discourses on consumption, culture, power, and resistance

ABSTRACT

The introductory article to the Special Issue asserts a convergence between communication, media studies, CCT, and critical marketing. Challenging the social amnesia surrounding global crises, this article highlights the importance of how global crises get communicated in the market and the associated issues of power dynamics. The article reinforces the value of placing power at the center of communication analyses in the market, examining the hegemonic communication practices of powerful market actors during global crises and exploring the disruptive, resistive counter-communications by marginalized and coerced consumers/actors that highlight the inequalities and power dynamics produced through such communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• global crises
• consumption power
• culture
• resistance

We'll meet again

Don't know where

Don't know when

But I know we'll meet again some sunny day— Ross Parker and Hughie Charles (singer: Vera Lynn)

The lines from the above song take us back to the WW II crisis and the hope (Halderman 1943) that unfolded alongside 1939 and changed the world forever in more ways than we could ever contemplate. In a televised address to Britain and the Commonwealth on April 5, 2020, Queen Elizabeth II referred to Lynn’s song while expressing her gratitude for the efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic virus and acknowledging the significant challenges for families around the world (BBC News 2020). Thus two different historical moments of global crisis got conflated into one. From the post-war situation to the post-COVID era, both had lessons to provide to the society, market, and its agents. Generally speaking, memories tend to fade away. Any unpacking of the chronology of human history indicates two phenomena: the inevitable cadence of apocalypse and the amnesiac populace.

Such amnesia towards human history is explicit in the academic fields of marketing (Tadajewski and Saren 2008) and communication/media studies (Basu 2018). These two epistemic spaces converge in this Special Issue. Late modernity and its unbridled commodification and consumerism have been instrumental in generating “social amnesia” (Jacoby 1975). This Special Issue does not claim to remedy amnesia towards any crisis of global magnitude in the market. The issue tries to trace the consumption culture and power dynamics during such crises and how in the market they get communicated. The articles explore the intersectionality of collective precarity and the realities of market, consumption, and culture as imagined through communication praxis. We focus on the power imbalances that flow from the perpetual mechanism of consumer vulnerabilities (Hill & Sharma 2020) and manifest in market-based communication practices. We hope that such an approach keeps structuralized social amnesia towards global issues at bay and any valorization of a “recency-only” attitude in check. In the papers submitted and the roundtable discussion, the Issue helps us connect the present with the past, recent events with memory invocation, and reconsider organisation-consumer relationships during a crisis. Importantly, consumption or identity performance as a communication practice during a crisis also helps the authors diagnose subaltern issues from the Global North and the Global South markets and the communication paradigm around them. The authors highlight the ignored and marginal subjects in the market and their culture, the amnesia towards their subjectivity at the market periphery during a global crisis, and their undermined sovereignty (Spivak 1985).

Crises manifest in various shapes: pandemics to economic recession, geo-political conflicts, or climate change (e.g. The International Debt Crisis of 1982, the Asian Crisis of 1997-2001, the Economic Recession of 2007-2009, the Gulf War, the tsunami of 2004, the 9/11 attack, the COVID-19 pandemic, geo-political events like the Russia-Ukraine War). These events emerge as a “black swan” for which the market, and its actors are not (or perhaps will never be) fully prepared. Crises of global proportions are not unique in world history. Still, the suddenness with which such crisis seems to emerge inflicts us psychosomatically: herein, the body often emerges as the site of passage and porosity (Butler 2016), and the resultant sufferings of the mind cross the individual limits of bodily boundary. The suffering emerges as overarching, temporal, and overwhelming experiences.

The enormity of the impact of these events goes beyond the loss of lives and includes various forms of social injustice, collective apathy, and insularity. In a connected world, experiences of vulnerability have persisted through crises. The COVID-19, in particular, exposed the weakness of the market apparatuses to ensure justice and access to resources, especially in the context of the Global South (Kelley et al. 2020). The aporia of angst and fallible collective memory (Casey 2004) became fertile breeding sites for agony and suffering.

Given these realities, we suggest that the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of a world-turned-upside-down by crisis, calls for a radical reimagining of what constitutes markets, consumers, and consumption and what it means to communicate in such redefined settings. It becomes imperative to probe how consumers relate to markets, make demands of organizations as social and cultural actors rather than only economic agents, and accept or challenge consumption culture. For example, the current COVID-19 situation compels a re-interpretation of markets as “political sites of contestation where various stakeholder groups compete for resources—economic, political, and symbolic” (Mumby 2016). To stabilize the effects of the global crisis and control the individual idiosyncratic responses to the same, markets, generally, have taken recourse to the Tannenbaumian conceptualization of “control” (Tannenbaum 1968, 3), whereby structured influence over fringe-actors of the market have been increased to enable a greater degree of their integration in the market. However, any such control in a post-Fordist liquid modern world (Bauman 2013) — where the markets must move away from solid structures to virtual online processes, employees have evolved to knowledge workers from industrial laborers, and the economy has moved beyond stability to become a gig-economy—is conditioned by ideologically-designed communication structures (Mumby 2015). The COVID-19 that has reified a liquid market system has no less promulgated the hegemonic capillaries of control through communication, market redefinition (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017; Hewer 2022), and consumption. Yet, there is also evidence of counter-discourses and practices that resist and subvert hegemonic market narratives during the crisis.

This Special Issue goes beyond the surface-level realities of business communication around markets and consumers during a global crisis to examine the ideological impact of such communication. For example, communication researchers focused on COVID-19 have highlighted aspects of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in a flipped normal condition (viz. work-from-home [Choudhury, Foroughi, and Larson 2021; Raišienė et al. 2020; Valet 2020], marketing communication’s shift to the digital and social media platforms [Balis 2020; Mheidly and Fares 2020; Taylor 2020a; 2020b], and insistence on AI and digitally mediated communication replacing face-to-face communication [Marr 2020; Sivasubramanian 2020]). There have also been unquestioning assumptions of the “positive/effective vibes’ of strategized crisis/risk communication in an organization (Argenti 2020; Holtom, Edmondson, and Niu 2020; Honigmann, Mendy, and Spratt 2020). This list suggests that the literature on communication (and associated crises) at the intersection of ideological discourses, dialectics, and perhaps dystopia (Bradshaw, Fitchett, and Hietanen 2021) has come a long way. But, research that crosses consumption, markets, culture, and communication during a crisis remains novel, and in this Special Issue we reinforce the value of placing power at the center of such analyses, examining the hegemonic communication practices of powerful market actors during global crises and exploring the disruptive, resistive counter-communications by marginalized and coerced consumers/actors that highlight the inequalities and power dynamics produced through such communication.

An example of such communication practice, within a market structure and conditioned by a dominant patriarchal culture, is state-sponsored public relations or public policies ignoring the gendered impact of COVID-19 that treats women laborers as disposable or unwanted receivers of communication and ignore the work-life balance and psychosomatic well-being of these subaltern market actors (European Network of Migrant Women 2020; Lewis 2020). The concerns are far graver if women belong to the subaltern sections of refugees, asylum seekers, geriatric population, and service providers of precarious trade (European Network of Migrant Women 2020). On the other end of the spectrum, we have a more disruptive example where the CEO and President of Boston Pride, Linda DeMarco, negotiated the otherwise hegemonic scopes of computer-mediated communication to host a Zoom Pride Party with online dance parties, digital drag shows, and online pride networking (Jebara 2020).

This authors in this special issue all deploy a critical lens to unpack the devices of market imperfection and consumer discourses of resistance, which shape communication and configure the politics of crisis and social imagination (Schulz 2016) that include markets, consumers, and consumption. They revisit concepts and theories to address the increasing global paranoia (Liu 2021) and politics of erasure, successfully bringing out the gestalt in our everyday thinking and positing solid arguments in favor of critical communication discourse. In the following section, we summarize the contributions for the benefit of our readers.

The articles

The issue opens with a virtual roundtable discussion of the broad themes informing the special issue. Dennis Mumby, Debashish Munshi and Clea Bourne, all leading scholars in the fields of critical communication studies, markets and their operations, joined the editors to discuss the way power imbalances and resistances take shape during global crises, prompting a rethink of market-culture convergence both during and after the actual moment of crisis. The discussion focuses on how market discourses from the center are deployed during crises, through performances, narratives, and communications by market actors that contribute to the unfolding situation. Placing power imbalances between center and margin at the heart of the discussion, the participants reflect on the role of the market and the ethics around consumption; the algorithmic principles of profit-oriented capitalism during the crisis and the resistive responses to the same; the ways in which neoliberalism instills ontological insecurities in the consumer during a crisis; and the various subversions that counter these feelings of instability. They reflect on the role of organizational communication within these contexts, and the power/knowledge with which it is invested as it is used to negotiate the challenges and tensions that arise during crisis events. The possibilities of alternative discourse that subverts the capitalist agenda of the market during a crisis, including possibilities of transformations, especially in the Global South, are heralded as decolonizing moves that strengthen indigenous perspectives of market performances. That said, and while the discussants note several cases where market subalterns extend an alternative narrative during global crises, the spectre of resistance being appropriated by the hegemonic market persists.

Iqani and Kenny take as their focus the context of South Africa, where the pandemic, though worse than most crises, was nonetheless part of a pattern of crises that the population regularly endured. Taking as their case the protests and lootings that occurred mid-2021, they adopt a long view of events, noting the specific context of South African apartheid as a mode of exclusion often focused on markets, the role of consumption as a locus of aspiration and inclusion in contemporary societies, and the commonplace nature of looting in many post-crisis moments, illustrative of the ways that this kind of “deviant consumption” can also be understood as a form of resistance by those forced to the periphery of the marketplace. Through a discourse analysis of four iconic videos of the looting that circulated widely on South African social media, they show how participants used humor and reframed looting as an exercise in freedom that ignores the rules and surveillance of market participation. In the context of South Africa, these presentations allow participants to highlight the social inequalities and broken promises that they are subjected to by government and assert their agency as citizens and consumers. At the same time, their actions sustain the market and all its imperfections as a space where true freedom might be obtained in a more equal world. As the authors argue, the looting and its narratives “speak to the pathos of South African desire, belonging and futures in the face of pandemic pessimism and enduring, indeed deepening, inequalities”.

Surveillance and resistance are given new perspectives in Dutta and Rahman’s article. The article focuses on the immigrant Bangladeshi laborers working in Singapore, and its, and the ways their actions and communication subvert the governmentality and its hegemonic communication during COVID-19. Contrary to its narratives of an equity-enabling, emancipatory, power-rebalancing, participatory, digital smart-city (Kong and Woods 2018), the Singapore model of smart-city making, promulgated by the government, promotes the erasure of migrant workers. The neoliberal, smart-urban repression of the workers, including any their communicative infrastructures that might allow them to voice agency, is documented and analysed by the authors through ethnography and in-depth interviews. The research utilizes Dutta’s Culture Centred Approach (CCA) (Dutta 2008) to create a register of resistance from the margin of the market, enabling migrant worker voices to subvert “colonial, capitalist, racist and patriarchal systems of organizing political, economic, social, and cultural resources” during COVID-19, and connecting their health and well-being with the communicative infrastructure. The paper is an extension of broader CCA research activism that mobilizes secure (communicative) infrastructure for subaltern market participants.

Just as in the Global South, late capitalism can accentuate anxiety and crisis among hapless consumers in the markets of the Global North by inducing overwhelming self-actualization. Takhar’s analysis of the creation of reproductive hyper-anxiety among consumers seeking children, engineered through narratives of bioprecarity and infertility, argues against the discursively constructed crisis and highlights a lack of consumer awareness and consumer-driven campaigning against the same. Takhar touches upon the ideologies of perfect parenting, as furthered by the neoliberal market and ascertained by the media, and analyses how artificial reproductive technology (ART) is presented as a solution for consumer needs. The commentary opens spaces for new research that can focus on consumer resistance, ethics around ART marketing communication, and consumer rights to bias-free information.

The piece by Dholakia et.al. is equally sharp in its criticism of multiplicity and spread of information. Drawing an analogy from the European middle-age conjecture (or the lack of it) about the mechanism of the spread of diseases, the authors argue that the current epidemic of information is precisely devastating in its effects, as the consuming society overlooks the virulence of uncontrolled viral information in this age of social media. While freedom of speech has been a major point of debate in political terms, these arguments at the intersection of marketization, governance, and morality of information consumption will perhaps become even more relevant as the world moves from one crisis to another. The paper is particularly successful in building up this particular argument and opening spaces for a new contribution in this fledgling area of inquiry.

Taken as a whole, the roundtable and papers cover a wide range of starting points for thinking about the ways in which markets, organizations and consumers converge in communicative spaces, manifest through communication, and leverage communication for their own purposes during global crises. We hope readers find inspiration in these ideas, methods and reflections to continue research on their variable effects and the ways in which communication can facilitate or shut down opportunities for pursuing more equitable and just outcomes for all, during global crises.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).