CONSUMING CLASS: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico
Since the 1980s, Mexican leaders have followed other Latin American countries in pursuing neoliberal economic policies designed to stimulate foreign investment, reduce public spending, and promote free trade. Recent studies of indigenous movements and popular protests challenge the idea that these market-based economic reforms enjoy a broad consensus and suggest that elites impose them by force. By turning the focus to middle-class Mexicans, I argue that some nonelite sectors of society avidly welcome the reign of the free market. Although they do not profit directly from unregulated capitalism, the middle class looks to neoliberalism to ensure access to the material markers of class status. The rising popularity of multilevel marketing companies in Mexico, which glorify consumption and celebrate the possibilities of entrepreneurship, demonstrates the appeal of neoliberalism to citizens fearful of diminished purchasing power. By tying consumption to globalized free markets, neoliberalism does not need coercion to win acceptance.
The good payers': Exploring notions of ownership in the sale of pay-as-you-go solar home systems
Pay-as-you-go financing models have been heralded in the solar off-grid industry as the solution for making access to clean, renewable energy affordable. Further, they are understood by the solar sector as an engine for financial inclusion and as an opportunity to also fashion new consumer subjects for new markets ‘beyond energy’. This paper engages with notions of ownership in relation to pay-as-you-go solar home systems, exploring both with what motives and to what ends solar off grid companies sell the products as well as, in turn, the various registers and meanings of values that consumers attach thereto. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with consultants, investment advisors, employees and customers of off-grid solar companies, the paper argues that to gain a deeper understanding of how solar home systems are sold to off grid customers and what these products are ‘made to be’ as they are bought and put to use, a more fine-grained engagement with the wider significances of ‘creditworthiness’ is necessary. The various accounts discussed, foreground that products are valued for the basic form of electricity they provide, but have, at the same time, also become important symbolic markers of new consumerist practices and the establishment of creditworthiness more generally.
Marketing of Belief: Intertextual Construction of Network Marketers' identities
Network marketing, as an enterprise `using' friendship to promote products, has been notorious for its exploitative use of interpersonal meaning. This study examines how identities are textually transgressed and manipulated in network marketing discourse, a nexus of business, interpersonal, and institutional relationships. Using Halliday's systemic-functional framework, a comparison of five director's messages, three from network marketing organizations, one from an ordinary business enterprise, and one from a voluntary social organization shows that network marketing texts are constructed intertextually and dialogically in sophisticated ways. It is argued that network marketing organizations (NMOs) do not simply sell their products; they also attempt to reconstruct their sales agents' identities to the advantage of their business operations.