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Franck Cochoy

Online publication date: 04 September 2010

Cochoy, Franck(2010) ''HOW TO BUILD DISPLAYS THAT SELL'', Journal of Cultural Economy, 3: 2,299 315

10.1080/17530350.2010.494380

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HOW TO BUILD DISPLAYS THAT SELL

The politics of performativity in American

grocery stores (Progressive Grocer, 19291946)

Franck Cochoy

Instead of looking at performativity in economics and politics, this paper proposes to explore the

economic politics of performativity. More precisely, it focuses on the politics of Progressive

Grocer, a trade journal which from the early 1920s thrived by promoting new ways to modernize

the grocery business for a readership of small independent grocers. This journal faced a dilemma:

while it had to bring some new thoughts, behavior and objects into the real world, it could

achieve this goal only through paper means. Progressive Grocer shows how thoroughly such a

dilemma can be overcome. This magazine does almost everything that can be done through the

mediation of simple paper. Progressive Grocer implements a true politics of performativity. This

politics consists of introducing a new kind of text, distinct from economic theories and managerial

textbooks. Instead of just putting words into its pages in the hope that they would ultimately

shape the external reality, Progressive Grocer relies on a language that mixes what is said and

what it does, signs and artifacts, reports of actual practices and dreamed states of commerce.

KEYWORDS: retailing; language; objects; performativity

If the notion of performativity met such success when applied to economic issues

(Callon 1998; MacKenzie & Milo 2003; MacKenzie et al. 2007), it is partly because the

economic field is one of the best examples of a clear relationship between a set of words

and a set of things: while economic models may be seen as pure literary fictions, economic

matters can be taken as highly tangible entities. These models are part of the political

game; they compete with each other and equip public policies (Callon, this issue). As such,

they call for a study of the political dimensions of performativity.

In this paper, I propose to study Progressive Grocer, a trade journal which from the

early 1920s thrived through its promotion of new ways to modernize the grocery businessto its readership of small independent grocers. As we will see, the journal helps shed a

different light on the three key elements: performativity, economics and politics.

As far as performativity is concerned, focusing on the grocery field moves us beyond

the simple notions of language and practice. Of course, semioticians and linguists long

anticipated the blurring of such entities: Austin (1961) focused on the material conditions

and practical effects of language acts; while well before Austin, Pierce (1934) envisioned

icons, symbols and indexes as part of an extended language. But as we will see Progressive

Grocer pushes this blurring even further: it produces a universe where words and images

Journal of Cultural Economy, Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2010ISSN 1753-0350 print/1753-0369 online/10/020299-17 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2010.494380


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on the one hand, and things on the other, rather than being the origin and result of action,

are combined to produce some different meanings and practices.1

Studying Progressive Grocer is also a means to focus on another aspect of the

performative dimension of the economy. Up to now, the stream of research initiated by

Michel Callon (1998) has postulated rather than demonstrated that economics is

performative. The supposed performativity of economics played the role of an axiom

from which it becomes possible to study how, and under what conditions, economic

concepts shape social practices. In other words, the idea was not so much to study the

linguistic aspects of the language of economics, but rather to take it seriously and describe

its power and impact. Significantly, the main effort in this research area has probably been to

trace the variety of equipment and social processes that make calculation possible; in

Austinian terms, this meant focusing on the conditions of felicity of the language at stake,

rather than on its distinctive features. In brief and as Christian Licoppe notes it in his

contribution to this issue, the focus has been on performation rather than performativity,

or, to put it in technical terms, it has been on perlocution rather than illocution (Callon, this

issue). In this paper I propose to complete the picture by focusing on both dimensions of

Progressive Grocers politics of performativity. This is of course because empirically, studying

a journal is not enough to fully account for its effects (although the journal is very clever at

staging and representing what it does). But this is also because illocution and perlocution are

closely linked, so that the latter is better understood when considered alongside the former.

Finally, Progressive Grocer is a good field to introduce another view of politics. The

classic view of politics is that of a macro realm and a specific matter, distinct from other

regions like society or the economy. In this paper, I will rather take politics as power, as

strategy, as local instant political discourse.2 My intention is to show that sometimes

politics is not beyond the market and far away, but at the heart of it, in situated scenesand actions. Of course, classical economists conceived the market as an alternative to

politics, hence as a domain external to economic matters (Hirschman 1977). But since the

visible hand of managers replaced the invisible hand of the market (Chandler 1977), we

know that markets are fully political (Fligstein 1996). In this paper, I will focus on the visible

hand of marketing actors, but also on what leads the hand (the journal) and what it

handles (the shopping equipment). The politics of Progressive Groceris all about managing

visible hands, visible tools and visible talks. The challenge at stake is about bridging the

gap between lay grocers and new economic ideas to transform the consumption arena

(and make Progressive Grocer grow!). On the one hand, the promoters of the journal

wanted to bring some new concepts like open display and self-service into grocery

business (see below). On the other hand, they knew that they had to convince a

readership of hard-working men, carrying boxes and caring about money, without much

time for reading and thinking, and who were wary of words and ideas as against

experience and practice. In order to impose its own mediation, Progressive Grocer had to

overcome the anti-intellectualist prejudice of its readers through the invention of a

language that could bring reflexivity into commerce and be practical at the same time. It is

precisely the politics of such a language that I would like to describe. In order to

investigate these processes, I will begin with the analysis of a cartoon How to build

displays that sell. The analysis of this cartoon and its implications will help me explorefurther the politics of performativity, i.e. the particular techniques and rhetoric Progressive

Grocer uses and mixes to successfully promote the building of displays that sell. Finally,

300 FRANCK COCHOY


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I will stress the implications of this exploration of Progressive Grocers politics for the theory

of performative knowledge.3

I. How to Build Displays that Sell: The Magic (and Aporia) of

PerformativityTo my knowledge, there is no better illustration of the problem of performativity

than this cartoon published in 1946 (Figure 1). The cartoon stages a clerk seated on a soap

case, and immersed in a book entitled How to build displays that sell. The clerk is

fascinated by the promise of the new tricks of self-service that enable him to act without

acting, to sell without any salesman (Grandclement 2008). But his boss interrupts him to

show with a large gesture the almost empty shelves that can be seen all around. He thus

signifies that all the performative stuff embodied in the book may not be enough to

perform anything. The cartoon reminds us that sometimes, performative utterances like

I promise displays that sell do not work, and even worse, they may divert people from

action. To put it in technical terms, illocution (an enunciation open towards action) in no

way guarantees the realization of a perlocution (an action that stems from the

enunciation).

At first glance, the merchandising textbook is to the grocer what a book of magic

spells is to the sorcerer:4 it is a true book of magic sales, in that it proposes to build things

that are capable of acting like magic, all by themselves (Latour 1999). Thanks to particular

devices, such as self-service arrangements, open shelves and large gondolas, the tasks and

expertise required for selling and merchandising are delegated to material artefacts. In

the very same way that the barrier can keep the sheep in while the shepherd sleeps

(Latour 1996a), the new displays can sell goods while the grocer is absent. In this respect,

non-verbal elements are more reliable and more powerful than ordinary talk. But most of

the time, the grocers original script is not strictly executed but transformed or rather,

FIGURE 1

Progressive Grocer (1946, 08, 97)5.

THE POLITICS OF PERFORMATIVITY IN AMERICAN GROCERY STORES 301


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translated (Callon 1986) by the device to which the latter delegates it. As Latour (1991)

showed, the heavy key-fobs of the hotel keeper do not exactly convey the latters message

that calls for altruistic behaviour (please share the hotels viewpoint and return the key to

the desk); rather, it converts this message into an egoistic worry (I dont want my pockets

distorted). In a very similar way, displays may sell, but when they do, they dont proceed

exactly like the grocer would have: self-service devices may sell more, and morecontinuously, than human clerks. Devices are always there, but they cannot answer

questions and selectively adapt the information and commercial offerings to each

customer; rather, they universally promote brand names, fixed prices, detailed information,

and so on, thus transforming both retailing business and consumer behaviour (Strasser

1989; Grandclement 2008). Therefore, the performativity of the book of magic sales

conveys two lessons for performativity theory. First, this book shows that performative

effects are often indirect and mediated: performative speeches, instead of transforming

the world directly, may do things through delegating their power to some mediations like

market devices for instance (Callon et al. 2007; Cochoy 2007). Second, because of this

delegated character and because of the translating power of any mediation, what is

performed is not exactly what was initially meant.

But performing the world indirectly and/or differently are not the worst problems

that the book of magic sales has to face. More importantly, it has to perform something.

And performing something does not depend on the books power only. The boss who

questions the clerk as well as the persons who wrote the book know very well that there

will never be any magic without the help of a magician (Canu 2010), that words cannot do

anything by themselves, that theories are enacted only as far as action give them direction

and meaning. Now, the title How to build displays that sell suggests the particular

alchemy of make do patterns identified by Bruno Latour (1999) in his account of

situations where agency belongs neither to human beings nor to technical devices, but is

distributed among them. Latour gives the example of cigarette smoking: the smoker

cannot say that he controls his smoking action, since he finds it so hard to stop; but he

cannot say either that the cigarette smokes him, since obviously the cigarette cannot do

anything without him. Rather, the cigarette makes him smoke. Merchandising theories and

equipments work along the same type of pattern: building displays that sell is obviously

aimed at making things that make us do things. By means of merchandising knowledge

and techniques, by means of devices like open shelves instead of opaque counters, the

selling agency is shared between the grocer who sets the displays, the selling affordance

of the shelves, and the knowledge which brings the grocer and the shelves together. In

the performative utterance I promise displays that sell, the I is immediately spread

among three instances: the clerk who builds the shelves, the shelves that do the selling

job, and of course the textbook which provides them with both the necessary ideas and

techniques. But if one of these instances happens to fail, there is a good chance that

nothing will be performed at all.6 This framework reminds us that, according to Austin

himself, there is nothing like pure performative utterances: the success or failure of such

utterances is linked to their conditions of felicity. When the book says: I promise displays

that sell, there is no certainty that either the retailer or the consumer will believe the

promise and act accordingly. Performing the book may depend, for instance, on the

coincidental presence of the boss, who wisely proposes to connect theory and action.Without him, it is highly possible that nothing would have happened (the clerk may not be

able to read or act; the consumer may refuse self-service and rather visit competitors, etc.).

302 FRANCK COCHOY


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The perlocutionary property of language is not a property of words, but rather a potential

inscribed between words and action. This difficulty may be presented as the aporia of

performativity: performativity is a linguistic theory whose complete success is abandoned

to hazardous extra linguistic circumstances. But what is a problem from the linguistic

standpoint is a windfall for sociologists . . . and ordinary actors. Words create occasions

that have to be seized and reworked. And creating and handling such occasions isprecisely what the book of magic sales, i.e. Progressive Grocer, tries to successfully master.

It is important to stress that the cartoon I started from appeared in Progressive

Grocer, a trade press journal, which is precisely oriented at doing things with words, at

building displays that sell. In my example, Progressive Grocer is both around and inside the

cartoon. It is inside, since How to build displays that sell is just a generic way to name

what Progressive Grocer, the National Magazine of the Grocery Trade and the monographs

it publishes Better Grocery Stores, Getting Down to Real Facts in the Grocery Business, The

Modern Grocery Store, etc., do. Progressive Grocer is full of performative-like titles such as

Pick Older Men for Butchers (1929, 10, 54); Treat Ladies with Biscuits and Honey (1930,

01, 90); Uses Billboards to Advertise Specials (1930, 02, 35); Boosts Fancy foods for

Summer Profits (1930, 06, 42); Pop Keener Explains How Small Stores Do a Big Business

(1930, 09, 24), etc. But Progressive Groceris also and more importantly around the cartoon,

since the latter is published in the very journal it figures. The cartoon and the journal

question but also displace and enrich the performativity framework.

Firstly, they astutely question the performativity logic in widening up the gap

between language and action. While on the one side the language is fully concealed on

the book cover, and somewhat trapped in the whirl of its self-referential content, material

configurations and real action are so to say suspended on the other. The dualistic staging

of the cartoon nicely underlines that managerial and economic forms of knowledge are

always half-performative only: they introduce a rupture, a suspension, a detour of

economic action. Things are said, and then done, rather than said-done as it is supposed

in the pure theory of speech acts. Rather than ignoring this problem it had better be taken

into account and dealt with, since it plays a crucial role in suspending the fluidity of

markets and the performativity logic.

But the cartoon and journal also extend the performative logic they happen to

suspend. They do so in paradoxically neutralizing its central speech feature. Significantly

enough, there is no utterance in this cartoon, except the mute title of the book. No words

are uttered, no one is talking, no caption is written. Like in a silent movie, only gestures

are telling the story: the simple gestures of reading and showing something that has to be

done are opposed to the missing gestures of working and talking. One could have

thought that in the absence of any speech, words would be replaced by force, meaning by

violence, right by might (Latour 1997), since in sociology understanding is often opposed

to objective causes. But what the cartoon shows is very different. What is done is physical,

but not violent; it is objective but also very delicate and subjective: the intervention of the

boss is not authoritative and forceful but interrogative and meaningful. This intervention

articulates two light gestures: the first one is just a tiny pressure of the boss s finger on the

clerks back to attract his attention; the second one is a large gesture of the other hand

aimed at showing where the clerks focus should be rather placed. The combination of the

two gestures forms a true language, which bridges the gap between theory and practice,but also promotes practice as the main (if not exclusive) theory. This language suggests

that only talking or talking too much, like the book, sometimes leads to doing nothing;



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conversely, it says that to do something one sometimes better not speak or read; but do

things without words. We thus understand that in the cartoon, language and meaning are

not deleted, but rather displaced. In subtracting almost all the features of classical speech

from the scene, the cartoon sheds light on another form of language, where human

behavior and material entities such as the box of soaps, the cans and the shelves could

be combined just like verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc., in order to develop both a meaningfulsequence and a proper action. Thus, the cartoon proposes to move from speech acts to

the language of acts.

Thirdly, the cartoon and Progressive Grocer are wonderfully reflexive. In allowing

itself to be represented in this cartoon, Progressive Grocer looks at itself in a mirror and

poses the very problem it faces: that of a journal aimed at selling how to build displays

that sell, but a journal which is far from being sure of succeeding in such a project. Yet in

showing the problem the way it does (through the cartoon), Progressive Grocer finds the

means to solve it. Indeed and as we just saw, doubting a pure linguistic performativity is a

means to find a broader and more efficient language. As we will see, Progressive Grocer is

not only a journal about words, theories and ideas, but it is also a journal about real action,

live testimonies, tangible equipments and cash money. The journal is not only a set of

formal performative utterances addressed to an outer material world, but it is also a more

or less articulated collection of propositions, shows, ideas, pictures, concepts, commercial

ads, drawings, photographs, etc. Progressive Grocer gathers, hybridizes and articulates all

these resources in a complex and multidimensional language which looks as if it was

aimed at performing performativity. In the remaining sections of this paper, I propose to

explore these politics of performativity which are suggested in the cartoon, but which take

much more varied and sophisticated forms in the journal at large.

II. Field and Methodology: An Archaeology of Present Times

We cannot fully understand the politics of performativity of Progressive Grocer

without presenting the journal itself in more detail; the method I propose to use is to trace

its features.

A. Progressive Grocer: The Very Best of Displays that Sell

Progressive Grocer is not the bulletin of a professional association, but rather an

independent trade press business. It was founded in 1922 by journalists who thought that

there was a niche, in the America of the roaring 1920s, for a publication oriented towards

the modernization of small retailing, along the modernizing rhetoric of the Progressive

Era (see the journals title), at a time when independent grocers were fighting against

the rising threat of chain stores (Haas 1979; Seth 2001).7 In its very beginnings, Progressive

Grocer appeared as a booklet in pocket format8 financed through advertising, issued on a

monthly basis, with tens of thousands of copies sent for free to American grocers (1929,

09, 1). If Progressive Grocer was oriented towards grocers, its clients were rather the

advertisers, i.e. all the companies which sold store furniture, cash registers and other

commercial equipment, but also all the popular magazines (Companion, Ladies HomeJournal, Life . . .) which advertised in Progressive Grocer to sell their own public and

advertising space, and of course all the food manufacturers, who tried to convince grocers

304 FRANCK COCHOY


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to display their products. Progressive Grocer was a business per se, trying to impose its

mediation between manufacturers and retailers.

It was rather successful in this respect, if we refer to the rise of its readership, the

variety and number of its advertisers, and the continuous growth of its size, first in number

of pages, and later in terms of format. Progressive Grocer explicitly celebrated this kind of

accomplishment. In 1930, with a double page advertisement entitled MORE MONEYEVERY YEAR, it proudly displayed a chart showing the exponential rise of its advertising

turnover from 1922 to 1929, accompanied with the following message:

During each succeeding year, more and more money is spent in the advertising of food

and grocery products. And every year a constantly growing share of this expenditure

goes into advertising that reaches the grocer and his jobber through THE PROGRESSIVE

GROCER . . . this increase . . . is really far more than a prideful boast of growth. Its steady

upward trend traces a great industrys realization of the value of promotion at the point

of sale. It indicates, too, a mounting confidence in THE PROGRESSIVE GROCER as a medium for

such promotion, a confidence supported by an advertising investment that has nearlytripled since the publication was founded in 1922. (1930, 01, 23)

This argument shows how efficient Progressive Grocer was, well before the cartoon I

started from, in building and promoting itself as the best display that sells, and moreover

in linking this reflexive display to the building of the real selling displays it tried to sell (see

the comment: [the charts] steady upward trends traces a great industrys realization of

the value of promotion at the point of sale). What was striking, and what Progressive

Grocer eagerly wanted to outline, was that the magazine made progress at a time when

the general economy, but also and more importantly its public, experienced the Great

Depression. Without waiting for the tangible effects of the crisis (and their possible impact

on the journal itself), Progressive Grocer took the discrepancy between the general

economic slump and its particular success as an argument that should not be missed: on

the very first page of its November 1931 issue, Progressive Grocer published a full page

advertisement which proudly proclaimed, in large bold characters: In spite of the well-

advertised business depression, manufacturers have again invested more money in The

Progressive Grocer in the first 11 months of 1930 than in any previous 11 months period

(1930, 11, 1). The idea was to show that one could win at a time when everybody was

losing (or at least afraid of doing so) . . . provided one read and applied i.e. performed

Progressive Grocers solutions. This strategy, which is highly similar to the rhetoric used by

the founders of the Journal of Marketing in 1936 (Cochoy 1998), consists of substituting

one performance for another: the money manufacturers invested in Progressive Grocer to

advertise displays that sell was presented as the proof of the practical efficiency of the

same displays.

B. An Archaeology of Present Times to Study Displays that Sell

As we can see, Progressive Grocer does not rely on words only, but also on money,

economic facts, advertisements, and so on. The magazine takes care to insist on its

material character: in most of its self-advertisements, it represents itself as a logo where it

is placed in the pocket on an anonymous reader (Figure 2). The pages of the magazine aredog-eared and the hand ready to draw it like a gun. This suggests the willingness of

Progressive Grocer not to be reduced as a set of abstract, theoretical and floating



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messages, but rather to be used as a real and practical tool, always situated and ready for

action, like Roland Canus in use advertising booklets and flyers (Canu 2009). The

advertisements themselves (but also all the papers) are both intellectual and practical: they

combine images and text, they mix the direct display of objects, facts and scenes with the

comments and discourses aimed at giving them meaning and commercial appeal. How

can we account for such a rhetoric which closely mixes the intellectual and the practical,

the linguistic and the materialistic, the performative and the performed? In order to cope

with this particularity, I have proposed elsewhere to supplement the traditional literary

socio-historical approach with an archaeology of present times (Cochoy 2009).

Indeed with Progressive Grocer, one cannot rely only on the classical historical

method. This method relies on handwritten or typed documents which themselves

privilege the facts that matter from the actors point of view. Such facts attract the

attention of persons and thus they entice the use of writing practices. But writing often

neglects the flux of gestures, the ordinary events of daily life, all the matters that are done

instead of being said or written, all the things that are made rather than thought, all the

objects that we use but do not talk about. These many elements thus face the risk of beingforgotten, of escaping the recollecting work of history. By chance, Progressive Grocer

precisely brings the two together: it is aimed at showing a set of things a priori without

FIGURE 2

Progressive Grocer (1930, 05, 2).

306 FRANCK COCHOY


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great importance and giving them force and meaning. The journal articulates text and

images; it writes papers on small and great stakes; it also gathers a whole series

of illustrations, drawings, advertisements, photographs that help us to seize often

indirectly these objects and behaviors that make up the real life of trade but on which it

is often hard, if not impossible, to find some written sources.9 Progressive Grocer does

words with things, and the other way around: along the way it supplements symboliclanguage (and its performativity) with a theater of objects (and their performance).

Hence, if we want to account for what the journal does, we really have to cross the

methods of history and archaeology: we have to be as attentive to discourses as to the

mute objects of the past.

The journal displays both a linguistic and pictorial rhetoric, and the real effects of it.

It does not exactly utter words that do things; rather, it articulates some tangible words

with some meaningful things, in order to transform the state of business thinking and

practices. More precisely, it aims to show that business thoughts and actions are already

transformed and that one cannot but act accordingly. In the following section, I would like

to present some of the most striking features of these politics of performativity.

III. How to do Business with Things and Words: The Tricks ofPerformativity

A. Scale Models

As the cartoon How to build displays that sell indicates (Figure 3), modernizing the

grocery business is delicate: one has to find the means to rely on a symbolic language,

since for a journal such a language is the only way to describe and perform new

merchandising solutions (which do not necessarily exist). But at the same time one has to

avoid relying on words only, since even if words are capable of transporting or inventing

the world from a distance, they also may be accused of being too abstract, too rhetorical

and theoretical, too far away from the stakes of real practices and material settings that are

of prominent importance to ordinary business actors.

In its early years, Progressive Grocerfound that one of the best solutions to overcome

this difficulty was the use of scale models. The first devices of this type were developed in

1927, when Progressive Grocerworked hard to promote open display, then a new concept

in merchandising developed especially to modernize the independent stores in the face of

competition from the chains, while still preserving their owners strong attachment to

service (1930, 06, 24). The idea was thus to design an intermediary solution between

counter and self-service: open display was meant to give customers better visual access to

the products, so that they may get extra ideas and buy more than they planned. But it was

also aimed at preventing the same customers from touching the products on the one

hand and at preserving service on the other, so that the grocers could keep full control on

what was going on in their shops. Open display, far from being just a concept, was also a

real technology. In order to implement the idea, the long counter of the ancient store had

to be replaced with a small desk, so that customers may circulate in the shop; new

furniture had to be introduced, such as island show cases. This furniture, fully equipped

with windows, widened the sight of the customers while preventing them from touchingthe products. In order to put this idea to work, Progressive Grocer thought that showing

it was better than just talking about it: the magazines staff built a scale model,



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FIGURE 3Progressive Grocer (From top to bottom: 1930, 06, 24; 1941, 07, 67; 1945, 02, 36).

308 FRANCK COCHOY


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photographed it, and circulated millions of copies of this picture among retail

professionals.

With the scale model, the displays that sell are not, as in our cartoon, around the

book of magic sales, but right inside it (when reproduced in Progressive Grocer) or an

extension of it (when circulated in a separate form). Moreover, these displays are not any

displays, like those photographed in many pictures. Indeed, there is a big differencebetween the picture of a shop and a scale model. A picture has the big advantage of being

much more real than the model, but it has also the inconvenience of referring to a

particular shop. And what is particular, in terms of size, equipment, organization, etc. is not

flexible at all: it is easy to show wonderful modern shops (as Progressive Grocer often

does!), but grocers may object that the shops shown are obviously not like their own

shops, and that it is quite impossible for them to transform the latter into the former.

Conversely, the scale model has the drawback of being much more abstract than real

ones, but this flaw is also its main advantage. The scale model helps moving from this rigid

particular case to a much more flexible generic type. Scale models are both material and

symbolic, theoretical and practical; they are less abstract than words, but more abstract

than things, as we just saw: this ambivalent character helps them to work as a bridge

between language and practice. They are embodied theories, concepts changed in

objects, words made things, but also signifying matters, meaningful artefacts, displays

that talk. Just like the business plans of today that simulate the business to come

(Giraudeau 2008), scale models present themselves as some plans of possible businesses

which work as already performed performative proposals; they arrange the different things

spread in the journal not only as a meaningful narrative, but as a convincing practical

exhibition.

Moreover, and in so doing, scale models suggest that a shop may be considered

from a distance, in a reflexive manner, and that any grocer can play on its components to

improve his business. With the scale model, the grocer moves from his routine settings

and stable identity to the new position of the experimentalist working on a machine-like

store. Through the reduction of their scale, shop equipment looks much more mobile than

before; scale models give the idea that one can play with displays, like a doll s house, or

rather like a scientist with his rats. Scale models are not only examples of possible shops,

but a true pedagogy of modernization, which brings new ways of thinking and acting. It is

no surprise, given these properties of models, that the firms selling new commercial

equipment or business solutions used Progressive Grocers politics of the scale model to

promote their own affairs, as the advertisements of Steiden (an equipment manufacturer)

and the National Cash Register show (see Figure 3). From one advertisement to the other,

the status of the grocer changes as the scale narrows: in Steiden s ad, a first reduction

helps transform classic grocers into expert ones, working with their shop like scientists

with their lab experiments. In NCRs ad, a second reduction of a bigger store transforms

the laboratory grocers with their white coats into a more remote and abstract type of

scientist: sitting with his suit and glasses, the chin on his hand, this man is obviously

studying rather than acting, surveying his business to figure out how to answer this

delicate question: How well do you know your own business? As the grocery is

modernized, so is the grocer; by means of scale models, one moves from displays that sell

to grocers that think about building displays that sell more. The loop is closed: with scalemodels, there is no longer a gap between theory and practice; thoughts and things

become just one and the same.



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B. Testimonies

But it would be misleading to think that models completely replace ordinary words

as a means to perform the new ways of selling groceries. In fact, Progressive Grocerdid not

hesitate to use mundane language. It did so of course because as a press outlet, its core

business is to write papers and promote ideas. But the magazine used classical languagealso because it knew that words could paradoxically be made as hard as real things. This

is evident in the widespread use of reports, testimonies and quotes. Some Progressive

Grocer articles are nothing more than collections of (supposedly?) true-life experiences

which appear like the readers mail. One of the best examples of this is a 1943 paper

entitled 12 Food Merchants Say: Self-Service Solves Many of Our Wartime Problems. In

this paper, one finds statements like the following:

Since I changed to semi self-service we dont need a lot of help. Customers are their own

clerks. Sales the last week of 1942 were more than double the sales of the last week in

1941. All information I received came from THE PROGRESSIVE GROCER and your book, Self-

service and Semi-Self-Service Food Stores. T. W. Smith, Tom Smith Grocery, Miami, Fla.

(1943, 05, 58)

At first glance, such information is made of nothing else than words, meaning, ideas,

opinions. But a closer examination shows that it is much more than that. The brackets and

the signature (see the italics) make a big difference. The quote is made of words, but these

words come from the outside and from real grocers. In her ethnography of the

supermarkets jungle of paper, Catherine Grandclement (2008) recently showed that

prices are not only abstract symbols and economic variables, but also, and more

importantly, colorful and material artefacts, with their own appeal and affordances. In a

very similar way, testimonies like the one quoted above are not only words, but portionsof the real grocery world. They are materialized and circulating discourses. Now, if we look

closer at what such discourses say, we discover that everything looks as if the readers were

themselves filling the book of magic sales they are supposed to read. The selected

testimony conveys a strong formula Customers are their own clerks that gives flesh

to/complements the very ideas of building displays that sell and self-service. This formula

is not a magic but an accounting one, as evidenced in the weekly sales which more than

double[d] from one year to the other. Finally, the testimony acknowledges the selling

power of the book of magic sales it received, in closing once again the loop going from

the reader who writes to Progressive Grocer (All information I received came from The

Progressive Grocer and your book). Progressive Grocer and the testimonies it carefullyselects function as a double mirror: on the one hand, the magazine is reflected in the

readers discourse, while on the other hand and by means of this first mirror, the readers

see and recognize themselves, both as a collective and as some new professional

identification. At last, one mirror reflects into the other, so that it becomes impossible to

trace the origin of what is said and what is done, of opinions and facts, of what is

performative and what is performed.

C. Photo Novels

If words may be transformed into things with scale models and testimonies, they

may also be reinforced with pictures. See some papers which, instead of illustrating

310 FRANCK COCHOY


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words with images in the classical way words on the one side and pictures on the other

rather mix and combine them, as if they were belonging to one single extended

language, where real things may be articulated with symbolic meanings.These excerpts of two articles one entitled: Checkers are important people; the

other How to lose customers without talking wonderfully mix the real and the artificial,

the human and the non-human, the discursive and the objective. These papers present

themselves as true photo novels. They feature a set of shelves, words in upper and lower

cases, two female clerks, many questions, a cash register, several suggestions, a consumer,

smiling packages, a paper bag, four captions, many different products, four pictures, a

shopping cart, cartoon-like narratives, and so on. These elements are both naturalistic and

staged. The grocery settings are real, but the characters are extras: the two women and the

devices are playing the roles of smiling cashiers and faulty artefacts to illustrate the

relevance of a retail technique and the importance of a technical detail (respectively). Instaging the reality, Progressive Grocer combines the power of performativity with that of

performance: like in theater plays, the words said are directly put in motion. This process

goes through the use of cartoon bubbles, which moves what the captions suggest directly

into the action, so that the gap between the how to build and the displays that sell (or

dont sell!) closes. The generic performative utterance which subsumes the four scenes I

declare the store self-service is doubled with a corresponding generic performance: I

show you what a real self-service store should be . . . or should not be. Indeed, two

different ways of building the right discourse and action may be seen in our photo novels:

the one proposes what to do (suggesting additional purchases); the other does the sameby antiphrasis: it suggests doing things that prevent people doing their shopping (putting

rubbish in the aisles, placing products almost at the ground level, etc.). In this latter case,

FIGURE 4

Progressive Grocer (1946, 09, 78; 1946, 02, 72).



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the idea is to paradoxically reinforce performativity in anticipating its failures or misfires

(see Butlers and Callons contributions to this issue).

Last but not least, these cartoons fully generalize the universe of performative logics.

Instead of reproducing the great divide between words and things, meaning and force,

human beings and material things, the photo novels extend thinking and talking abilities

to mute things and, conversely, they give some objective-like properties to human actors:while rubbish and shelves ironically shout at the consumer, the female cashiers are meant

to deliver their professional smiles and scripted speeches in a repeated and mechanical

manner to the clients.

Conclusion: An ANT Reading of the Politics of Performativity

Progressive Grocer is just a particular occurrence of the more general category of

market devices it belongs to: that of trade press. Trade press is often used as a primary

source of information for socio-historical studies of business practices rather than studied

per se. As we have seen, a trade press journal is wary of pure words and speeches, which

may be too abstract, too complex and too remote from the real action and actors it tries to

impress. Trade press faces a severe dilemma in this respect: while it has to bring some new

thoughts, behavior and objects into the real world, it has no other choice than to achieve

this goal by means of distant paper only. Progressive Grocer shows how such a dilemma

could be overcome. As we have seen, this magazine does almost everything that can be

done with a simple paper mediator. Instead of just putting words into its pages,

Progressive Grocer rests upon a new kind of language, different from economic theories

and managerial textbooks, where it is often difficult to distinguish what is said from what

is shown, signs from artifacts, etc. Many elements that Progressive Grocerputs forward are

neither words nor objects, but rather a hybrid form of the two that could be called

wordjects, and which is best illustrated with cartoons, scale models, testimonies, photo

novels, and so on.

The sociology ofProgressive Grocernot only shows that we can do things with words

but that we can also do words with things, and of course more things and words with these

word-things, or wordjects. Words, things and people are in fact working together. In this

respect, the idea of conditions of felicity is both instructive and questionable. It is

instructive, since it indicates that words are always indexed to some real situations; what

words mean and do is deeply rooted in their objective counterpart (Latour 1996b). But the

idea of conditions of felicity is questionable, since this expression connotes a given

situation distinct from the words which refer to it. Progressive Grocerrather shows that such

conditions can be made, transformed, uttered, articulated in the language itself see the

testimonies and pictures. Words and things do not belong to two separate universes

language on the one hand and the world on the other. Some actors are clever enough to

mix and articulate them in a broader language, along a continuous circularity: things build

words that build things that build words-things (or wordjects), etc. In Progressive Grocer,

what is performed is both before and after the speech: the reality is the starting point as well

as the horizon ofProgressive Grocers rhetoric, and the other way around.

As soon as language is extended to the world itself, as soon as signs are taken in

their full materiality, as soon as one focuses on the grammar articulating words and things,as soon as one takes the cultural and the economic as two intertwined sets of vocabulary

and/or artefacts (McFall 2008), performativity is performed. This is the great lesson of

312 FRANCK COCHOY


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Progressive Grocer. The journal shows that in order to bring performativity back to its

original inspiration and make it efficient, one had better focus on performativity as

performance, in the theatrical sense (Butler 1988). Building displays that sell is all about

playing the economy. What is at stake in the book of magic sales of our cartoon and

journal is the recovery of the lost link between knowledge and practice. But recovering

this link goes through language as well as through objects; it is a matter of signs andmeaning as well as voice and gestures; it rests on socio-technical agencements (Callon

2005). There is no privilege of speech. We may utter or read words that do something (or

nothing: see the clerk of the cartoon), but we may also show some things that work like

words (see the boss). Now, even when something is done which corresponds to what is

said, we will never be certain that the words are fully responsible for the action at stake.

Performativity always entails a problem of causal imputation. One thing is to point at the

speech acts and their indexation to practice; another is to attribute the observed

transformations to the speech at stake. In the case of Progressive Grocer, however, this

problem may be overcome if we conceive the action of the journal as aimed towards the

management of a flow.10 Organizing the commercial innovations along the stream of the

twentieth century is close to having blocks of wood go down a river. Progressive Grocers

discourse will neither reverse the direction of the stream nor hamper its flow. However, its

action can impact the speed of what the river carries: the journals job, like wood

conveyors on large rivers, is to align things as they should be, in the proper order and

direction, in order to prevent any bad arrangement to hamper the flow of the moving

elements and make them progress efficiently.

NOTES

1. In this respect, one may say that in so doing, Progressive Grocer foreshadows a process

described by Barbara Czarniawska in her forthcoming book on press agencies. According

to Czarniawska, news producers introduce an ongoing circularity between facts and

literary accounts; the loop which connects facts and news and make them circulate

combines constative and performative statements and thus invalidates the distinction

between two separate worlds: the media on the one hand and the reality it is supposed

to account for or target on the other (Czarniawska forthcoming).

2. On the relationship between performativity and powers operations, see Bell (2006).

3. This study is the result of a research trip to the University of California at Berkeley which

took place from 14 July to 8 August 2006. I thank Catherine Grandclement for the idea

and the Education Abroad Program for funding the research. I am also very grateful to

Jutta Wiemhoff, Martha Lucero (NRLF), Steve Mendoza (main library) and three other

anonymous librarians of the Business/Economics Library and Environmental Design

Library at Berkeley. I am indebted to David Vogel for his support, the Haas School of

Business for its material help and Carmen Tapia for her administrative assistance. I thank

Anni Borzeix, Roland Canu, Laure Gaertner, Martin Giraudeau and Liz McFall for their

comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am very pleased to include the Progressive

Grocer material used with the permission of Nielsen Business Media, Inc. When writing

this text, I benefited from the material and intellectual support of the School of Business,

Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.4. For an argument about the relevance of the witchcraft metaphor for a better

understanding of grocery practices, see Cochoy (2008a).



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5. Throughout the paper, I use the code yyyy, mm, ppp-ppp where yyyy designates the

year, mm the month and ppp-ppp the pagination of the quoted documents of

Progressive Grocer.

6. On performativity failures or misfires see Judith Butlers and Michel Callons

contributions to this issue.

7. Progressive Grocer is an offensive rather than a defensive publication: it was founded in1922, three years before Chain Store Age, the magazine of chains that grocers were

supposed to counter-fight, and 14 years before Supermarket Merchandising, the

magazine of large self-service stores, which was launched in 1936.

8. The number of pages of each issue exceeded 200 in the 1930s. Half of these pages were

devoted to advertising. The other half was dedicated to articles about merchandising, the

evolution and current state of retailing, etc.

9. See the history of shopping carts: if Catherine Grandclement (2006) succeeded in

documenting the industrial history of these devices, their ordinary use may be more

difficult to seize, except if we rely on other sources than texts, for instance on all the

pictures where they can be seen in action (Cochoy 2009).

10. As it is the case of any press outlet (Czarniawska forthcoming)

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Franck Cochoy, Professor of Sociology, University of Toulouse II, CERTOP Maison de la

recherche, bureau C 437, 5 allees Antonio Machado, 31058, Toulouse Cedex. Tel. 05

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