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178 Consuming Media

Most discussions between the levels of the centre concerned opening times and
store mix. The rental contracts stated that tenants had to attend the jointly fixed
general opening times, or else pay high fines. Some small shops found it difficult to
be open anything like 360 days a year, whereas the management and the big stores
wanted to extend opening times to summer Sundays and all main weekends. Another
discussion concerned rental levels, which were increased rather steeply, in spite of
tough negotiations with the business association. Fewer and fewer small companies
could afford to pay these rents, with the result that big chains were gradually domi-
nating and the store mix was becoming progressively more uniform. This homoge-
nization runs the risk of making people bored with shopping centres that are
everywhere filled with roughly the same content. Another problem was that the
commitment of shops to the centre as a whole would diminish if their main alle-
giance was to the large chains. The Academy Bookstore did not, for instance, show
any particular interest in communal activities such as the Christmas celebration in
the centre. The Academy Bookstore chain centrally organized their marketing, which
had very few items specifically targeted towards the visitors of this particular centre.
All this added up to an erosion of the shared, unique framework that characterizes
each single shopping centre. On the other hand, Solna Centre was also a part of the
multinational Rodamco chain of centres, which to some extent counter-balanced this
centrifugal tendency to decreasing internal cohesion.
These examples indicate that power and resistance is not just a matter of conflicts
between big economic and political institutions on one side, and common people on
the other. Economic power and resistance are also executed within the market sphere.
It is often hard for ethnographic fieldwork to document such conflicts, since
managers and staff in the private sector tend to be reluctant to discuss openly those
kinds of antagonisms. While public institutions may feel they have some kind of duty
to be publicly responsible for what they do, and therefore let researchers in, private
companies have no such obligation. We experienced that when, for instance, trying
to talk to mobile phone stores and being refused entrance. Other than a considerably
longer kind of undercover fieldwork, passing hints and slips of the tongue may be the
only ways to access some of these intrasystemic tensions.

CULTURAL FRONT LINES: VISITORS AND CUSTOMERS
If the detailed workings of economic power are concealed behind the closed doors of
private ownership, the interaction between the shopping centre and its visitors are
more accessible. There are striking parallels between this interaction and, on one hand,
that between media industries and their consumers, and, on the other, the relation-
ships between urban planning and city dwellers. Ambiguity radiates from all parts of
modern society, where on every level rational strategies of production and control
encounter diffuse tactics of evasion and unintended uses that disturb the given order.
The media world may easily seem to be a very homogenous sphere, under total control
by a few major cultural industries that rationally divide up markets and steer their
audiences, but when the multifarious activities and interpretations made by media