Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: With the weather turning cooler, I was recently reminded that my boots had reached the point of being beyond repair.And so, I went online to find a new pair, grumbling as usual about how physical stores no longer carry sizes small enough for my feet.Between the different styles, colors, and materials, there were thousands of possibilities available.But this was not the first time I wondered why everything seemed to look alike while feeling resentful that the year's fashions were a far cry from my own tastes.Claudio E. Benzecry's The Perfect Fit provides some answers for this, to me at least, unsatisfying state of affairs.Of course, speaking to the petty complaints of disgruntled consumers is not Benzecry's main purpose.But he did choose the women's shoe industry as a case for investigating how knowledge is mobilized and coordination is realized in an industry dependent on global commodity chains in part because we all wear shoes.More to the point, he believes the creators of mundane objects deserve the same scrutiny as the highly educated workers in fields, such as science or finance, that have received attention from scholars interested in the generation of knowledge among people at great physical distance from one another.Through focusing, not on the factory workers who comprise the most exploited and expendable laborers, but instead on those workers involved in the design phase of shoe production, Benzecry seeks to show how global infrastructures are developed, maintained, and sometimes dismantled.Benzecry adopts a "follow-the-thing" approach, which has become increasingly common in studies of globalization, consumption, and cultural production (e.g., Childress 2017; Rivoli 2015).By tracing the "career" of an object, the researcher necessarily travels across geographic and social sites, contends with the varying interests and perspectives of people involved in different stages of an object's evolution, and illuminates the relations of dependency and inequality that tie these people together.Benzecry's research involved ethnographic work in the United States, China, and Brazil as he focused on mass-produced mid-range women's footwear produced for an American market.Such shoes are often designed by Americans working in New York, who take their inspirations from fashion trends in a small number of cities, primarily in the United States, Europe, and Asia.Ideas are then turned into actual shoes in places such as South China by technicians and related workers originally from Taiwan and Brazil as well as China.Shoes and designers fly back and forth across the world throughout this process, while systems are created to allow
Source: Sociological Forum
DOI: 10.1111/socf.12930
Author: Laura J. Miller
Institution: Brandeis University
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4380886570