Page 189 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 176

176 Consuming Media

spaces, public spaces are increasingly virtual and mediated. But even the most
advanced media use remains bound to specific localities, and there is a continuing
need for physical meeting places where people can do things other than selling,
selecting and buying commodities.
Consumption sites, on the other hand, are never pure market places. The more
they grow and swallow up their surroundings, the more practices they have to accom-
modate. There are reasons to fear the growth of a totally administered panoptic
surveillance society where state and market institutions integrate all sectors in maxi-
mally profitable structures. But contradictory moments remain active within these
structures, where even the most commercial shopping centre is still an ambiguous
space.
ECONOMIC FRONTLINES: MARKET AND MANAGEMENT
The relationship between the municipality and the shopping centre clearly has an
economic side of taxes, ownership, rents and commodity exchange. There is also
economic power involved in the exchanges between individual customers and the
shops. However, one particularly striking lesson from our ethnographic fieldwork was
that the market sphere is far from unified, so that economic power needs to be differ-
entiated into forces that not always go hand in hand, even though they all confront
consumers as belonging to a capitalist and profit-driven sphere of society.
Solna Centre was directed by a local management team consisting of the managing
director with an assistant, officers responsible for marketing, the letting of premises
and the operation of daily routines, and two property technicians. Such a local
management unit is posited at an intermediary level in the hierarchical structure of
this whole organization. At the top level resides the management of Rodamco
Sweden, together with the highest international Rodamco management, located in
the Netherlands. The ground basis of the organization is the operative level of shops,
cafés and restaurants in the centre. They supply commodities and services to
consumers and are thus the most visible level to ordinary visitors. To match the centre
management, those corporate tenants that rent stores, restaurants, cafés and offices in
the centre have formed a business association that functions as the partner but also
counterpart of the management. This business association has regular meetings to
make decisions for the tenants’ collective about how to deal with demands and rules
set by the management, for instance concerning opening times and other issues of
mutual interest. As a matching party to the local management, this association inserts
a kind of horizontal division into the strictly vertical hierarchy of the centre. This
opens up potential tensions between the two, in rare cases where the shared profit
interests do not automatically decide the outcome of decisions.
But things are even more complicated, since the shops at the lowest level often
have other loyalties other than to the centre they inhabit. Several of them are inte-
grated into larger regional, national or even international chains such as the interna-
tional Expert chain referred to earlier in Chapter 6. Most of the single shops thus
have a double loyalty: towards the local centre, and towards the branded chain to