Communicating from a distance
The rise of omnivorizing consumer preferences (Hirsch 2011; Johnston and Baumann 2007)—in combination with new critiques and anxieties relating to the industrialization of food production and the resulting health and environmental impacts—has transformed both discourses and practices of culinary cultural consumption (Jackson 2010; Szasz 2009). Mistrust of standardized foods produced by industrial agriculture has added salience to transparency in agricultural production practices (Bowen 2011) and quality has come to be seen as intrinsically linked to issues of origination and production (Murdoch et al. 2000). At farmers' markets, as a result, producers tell stories of localness, authenticity, and value by communicating with consumers about their particular nonindustrial production conditions (Ocejo 2014; Winter 2003).
It is not possible, however, for all food producers to sell directly to consumers at local markets. Even if producers genuinely enjoy or appreciate the interactions and opportunities such spaces facilitate, some food products are impossible to both grow and sell locally: tropical commodities like cacao and coconut sugar, for example, require environmental conditions that, largely, do not exist anywhere in the US. Yet the producers of tropical commodities want to reach US consumers, many of whom—especially consumers of specialty foods—prefer to have these kinds of interactions with the producers of their food. Fortunately for such producers, their inability to interact directly with far flung consumers can be compensated for through "'face-to-shelf' interaction"(Cochoy 2007, p. 116) in the store. As Marsden et al. (2000) suggest, it is not the number of times a product is handled or the distance over which it is ultimately transported which is necessarily critical, but the fact that the product reaches the consumer embedded with information . . . which enables the consumer to confidently make connections and associations with the place/space of its production. (425)
As is clear, within the economy of culinary qualities, even substantial distance between production and consumption can be overcome by strategically valuable details. For the producers of tropical commodities who cannot sell their products at local farmers' markets even if they wanted to, it is both possible and critical to infuse product packages with informative stories about the people, places, and cultures engaged in their production (Raynolds 2002). As a result, producers strive to communicate with consumers from a distance, using product packages to do so (Latour, 1987; Singer 2018).
Although the average specialty food entrepreneur has generally never created a value-enhancing brand strategy for a food product, this task is nonetheless one of their many responsibilities. In the specialty food industry, firm directors are likely to occupy what Ocejo (2014, p. 195) has identified as "dual roles": they not only produce but also, and simultaneously, promote their own branded goods. Acting as both producers and promoters, they regularly design and author their own communicative food packages.Footnote 4 My focus in this paper is, therefore, on cultural production. How consumers might respond to such food packages, while important, is beyond the scope of this study. Contributing to an emerging literature on the cultural wealth of nations, I focus intentionally on the strategic efforts of specialty food entrepreneurs to communicate on behalf of their branded food products. This emphasis on the articulation and creation of cultural value from a distance and from within a particular national location attends to the vital importance of communicative stories and, simultaneously, to the efforts and emotions of their authors.
The emotional & imaginative labor of cultural producers
Economic transactions are like other interactions in that they require communication and occur within particular structural and cultural constraints. They contain varying degrees of uncertainty and therefore require confidence and positive emotional assessment to be completed. Buyers in a given market must feel that they are making informed distinctions between products since their eventual choice reflects something about who they are and has repercussions for how others perceive them (Bourdieu 1984; Wherry 2008). Emotions, or the states consumers experience when presented with particular products or market information, are, therefore, an essential part of transactions (Bandelj 2009a, 2012). The emotions of sellers, however, have not yet been sufficiently attended to in studies of emotions in markets, yet they, too, are engaged in economic interactions and transactions which likewise require emotional labor if they are to evaluate risk and communicate effectively.
It is vital to recognize that when specialty food firm directors in Indonesia act as cultural intermediaries on behalf of their inarticulate goods, they imagine their potential consumers in the US in order to craft effective stories about the most valuable qualities of food products. Unable to have face-to-face conversations, they prepare instead to have face-to-shelf interactions via product packages (Cochoy 2007). More specifically, the authors of these packaging stories are attempting to anticipate not only their target audience's potential questions about specialty foods, but also their possible fears and concerns about Indonesian food products in particular. The expectations that guide them in the production of such packaging stories and marketing materials are therefore second-order expectations—not expectations that one personally holds about oneself, but those one believes specific others hold in the given situation (Ridgeway and Correll 2006; Troyer and Younts, 1997). Such second-order expectations about relevant social distinctions are a form of status belief and, so, a type of social reputation.
In other words: during the necessary and value-enhancing process of cultural production, when firm directors attempt to describe and promote their food products to US consumers, what is most relevant is not what they themselves know or believe to be true about Indonesia as the place where their food products originate (and where they themselves reside), but what they imagine their US consumers believe or fear about Indonesia itself given its international reputation. As a result, Indonesia's international reputation—as it is imagined by both firms' directors as they attempt to forecast the expectations of their target consumers—plays a determinative role.
That social relations matter in markets is a trademark contribution of economic sociology. Overall, the importance of social relations has been captured by the notion of embeddedness, deriving from Granovetter's (1985) pioneering argument that economic behavior, like human behavior more broadly, is embedded in networks of social relations. That such social relations exert influence over economic behavior and economic outcomes is now even more fully understood as research has continued to investigate how network embeddedness and social ties shape economic decision-making. More recently, economic sociologists have begun to broaden their understanding of social relations to include "relations between actors, shaped by affect, meaning, and asymmetries in power" (Bandelj 2009b, p. 227). Building on conceptual innovations by Viviana Zelizer (2005, 2012) and her focus on relational work—the effort by which people try to find appropriate matches between and among social relations, economic transactions, and instruments of exchange—such research takes seriously the symbolic work of meaning-making in which economic actors engage and also the role of emotions in their economic processes (Bandelj 2009b).
I argue that despite a recent theoretical emphasis on emotions as constitutive of economic action, scholars have generally refrained from examining the efforts of producers to create and sustain emotional connections between their prospective customers and their products. The growing literature on emotions and the economy reveals that economic actors—most often consumers—use emotions to guide their purchasing decisions but pays little attention to how the emotional connections between purchaser and product are constructed by profit-seeking producers and the stories they tell. In this article, I demonstrate that cultural producers play a critical role in this process by exploring how the directors of two case study firms in the same industry and the same national location construct claims to cultural wealth differently.
National reputation & impression management
Brand management and the projection of ideal images represent a form of impression management in creating and enhancing brand reputation through the intentional work of constructing a set of positive associations on behalf of the brand's identity and products (Beverland 2005; Goffman 1959). Research has failed, largely, to examine how profit-seeking food firms build such reputations through careful impression management, especially when geographic associations at the national level—containing valuable forms of cultural wealth, expressed on behalf of food products through stories and details—are potentially negative. I address those gaps by examining how specialty food companies create and maintain valuable associations on behalf of their brand identities and products, especially as they relate to place.
Similar to national governments, firms accomplish this goal largely through the symbolic work of strategically creating and managing their own reputation. A recent study takes up the question of how cultural wealth at the national level can be managed in response to a threat to its international identity by focusing on how the Croatian government transformed impressions of that country in the aftermath of its well-publicized violent war (1991-1995). Rivera (2011) argues that a Goffmanian theoretical framework provides a useful way of understanding impression management strategies when the identity at hand—in this case, that of an entire nation—might be tarnished or stigmatized. Croatia looked across the Adriatic Sea and symbolically linked its own touristic characteristics to those of Italy, substituting a highly valuable set of national symbolic resources for a less valuable one. Relatedly, this paper's focus on Indonesia makes visible the cultural opportunities available to food entrepreneurs within the same national location and the same globalized marketplace, on behalf of the same reputation and audience.
My analysis also, however, suggests that such cultural opportunities must first be perceived and imagined as valuable to specific others if they are to become viable as impression management projects. The upscale, expanding, and competitive specialty food industry in the US is an ideal and analytically productive example of such a globalized marketplace. After describing why specialty food entrepreneurs in Indonesia might be concerned about the place-based associations US consumers might hold, I analyze two case study firms both based in Indonesia to explore how food producers can make claims to valuable forms of cultural wealth through reputation-enhancing impression management projects that are articulated by their packaging materials and the stories contained therein.
Indonesia's international reputation
The last years of the 20th century brought seismic social change to Indonesia. As a result, conditions created in Indonesia led to largely negative impressions outside of it. Indonesian entrepreneurs are widely aware of how Indonesia and its products are perceived by international consumers, so specialty food entrepreneurs working in Indonesia to sell Indonesian food products engage in strategic impression management projects as they communicate with their target market—consumers in the US.
In 1997, largely because of the Asian financial crisis, Indonesia's national currency depreciated almost 80 percent against the US dollar; food and gas prices shot up as a result, and many Indonesians could no longer afford daily necessities. Food shortages and mass unemployment led to widespread political unrest in several Indonesian cities, but when four university students were killed by armed police during a protest in Medan, violent riots broke out around the country. These riots—known in Indonesia as "The 1998 Tragedy"—led to the death of over 1,000 Indonesian protestors, looters, and ethnic Chinese shop owners, according to local estimates (Vickers 2005).
Enormous changes in the years that followed—the period of Reformasi—increased already tense conflicts between coexisting religious groups in Indonesia and likely accelerated a process of Islamic radicalization (Aspinal 2009; Vickers 2005). With increasing frequency, Indonesia has been the site of violent terrorist attacks. Foreign embassies and hotels in Indonesia's larger cities have been frequent targets, ensuring that details of the bombings reach news outlets around the world. Especially after the events of September 11, 2001, religion and Islam have become a focal point of international interest in Indonesia, widely recognized as having had the world's largest Muslim population in 2001 (Hellwig and Tagliacozzo 2009). Such demographic statistics about Indonesia were not socially relevant until the events of 9/11 gave them their current particular meaning.
Indonesia's history of political turmoil and internal religious conflict, when coupled with violent attacks targeting foreigners that have become even more frequent and deadly since 9/11, has led to international associations of dangerous violence and Islamic extremism with Indonesia (Praja 2006). Foreign governments have officially issued warnings about traveling to Indonesia.