The Strategic, Shifting Work of Market Devices: Selective Stories and Oriented Knowledge

For the producers of food products originating in the tropics, far from consumers and their local farmers’ markets, vital processes of interacting and storytelling necessarily take place in grocery store aisles and rely on food product packages as vehicles for valuable stories. As a result, specialty food entrepreneurs are dependent upon food packages—market devices—to communicate about the goods they contain in order to create symbolic value on behalf of those goods. Packaging stories thus contribute to the contextualization of products whose qualities are not inherent, but are, rather, the outcome of ongoing processes of strategic qualification. Without them and the valuable discursive details they provide, the market of singularities could not function. In this article, I read closely the textual data contained on a nearly complete collection of a case-study firm’s food packages (N=75) that represents the firm’s longitudinal attempts to tell selective, oriented stories about a variety of Indonesian food products. I find three primary types of productive labor represented in the sample of packaging stories. I further describe the emergence and disappearance of such stories and their discursive details, given the timing of the release or revision of their market devices. By redirecting analytical attention toward the origins and production of market devices—rather than on their impact on consumers—this article investigates the strategic and shifting storytelling work of specialty food entrepreneurs who gain access to cultural intermediation through their own branded market devices.