Article
Secret Agencies: How a Critical Media Scholar Got Inside Advertising
Advertising & Society Quarterly
(2022)
Abstract
This access narrative recounts how I conducted ethnographic research on the lack of diversity within advertising agencies in New York City during the summer of 2010. It positions this effort as a response to the scholarly tendency to make semiotic analysis the dominant mode of critical advertising studies and follows Richard Johnson’s call to “decenter the text” and move the attention of cultural studies toward what Marx called “the hidden abode of production.” My hope is that this essay will help demystify my process for securing entrance to agency settings and thereby encourage emerging critical scholars to generate new methods of understanding (and disrupting) the closed social networks that enable and perpetuate White opportunity hoarding throughout the creative industries.
Keywords
- advertising,
- research,
- cultural studies,
- ethnography,
- diversity,
- racism
Disciplines
Publication Date
Winter January 28, 2022
Citation Information
Christopher Boulton. "Secret Agencies: How a Critical Media Scholar Got Inside Advertising" Advertising & Society Quarterly Vol. 22 Iss. 4 (2022) ISSN: 1534-7311 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/chris_boulton/38/
Creative Commons license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC-SA International License.