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simply either here or somewhere else, but rather is some-thing that
emerges in parts. It will also be suggested that the brand is not a closed
object, but is, rather, open, extending into—or better, implicating
—social relations. It is some-thing that is identifiable in its doing, which
is why the
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chapter title asks not just of Nike but of brands more generally, ‘Just do
what?’. It is implicated in everyday life, and we are—sometimes only
just—implicated in it. Finally, it will be argued that the brand is not a
matter of certainty, but is rather an object of possibility. These, then, are
some of the things that should make the brand an object of interest to
sociology.
Before developing these arguments, though, let me try to address the
issue of how it is that something as abstract and intangible as a brand
may be described as an object at all. To get at what might be involved in
this claim, a discussion of something else whose objectivity we take for
granted may be helpful: let me take the example of a car. We are easily
able to accept that a car is an object, although it typically comprises
many thousands of parts or components. Moreover, while each of these
parts is more or less essential to the capacity of the object to move its
passengers from one place to another, it is their relation to one another
that makes the components of a car into a car. None of the individual
components suffices, and the components need to be in particular
relations with each other (a car is not just a heap of parts). We also tend
to think of the car as a fixed or closed object, but it is a functioning car
only when it is in a controlled relation to elements of its environment:
the driver, the atmosphere and the roads. This book will suggest that
both these ways of thinking about objectivity apply to the brand. In
short, the object-ivity of the brand emerges out of relations between its
parts, or rather its products (or services), and in the organisation of a
controlled relation to its environment—that is, to markets, competitors,
the state, consumption and everyday life.
But the book will describe the brand as being more than simply a set of
relations between products. It will argue that the brand is a set of
relations between products in time. Here, the book draws implicitly on
a tradition in philosophy in which time is internal to the processes by
which the (physical and social) world operates (Bergson, 1991;
Whitehead, 1967, 1977; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 1999). This is an
approach in which time is dynamic, where dynamism is not an activity
of fixed objects moving through static space, but a process of
differentiation. In this view, any object is not fixed, but is in itself a
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