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Purpose – We examine the meanings of objects that have indexical (or direct first-hand) connections to celebrities. In so doing, we distinguish between the meanings of proximal indexicality versus contagious indexicality. We reveal how these disparate meanings are linked to how consumers use a celebrity object, either by displaying the object or by using the object as the celebrity had originally used the object.

Methodology – Our informants were consumers participating in sales of celebrity-owned items. Data include videotaped depth interviews, photographs of auction participants and celebrity objects, field notes, and auction catalogue descriptions.

Findings – Some consumers were fans who desired to be close to the celebrity, while others participating in celebrity-object auctions desired to become a celebrity themselves. Those that desired to be close to the celebrity (fans) were attracted to the proximal indexical meaning of the object, in which an indexical link conveyed a perceived closeness between the perceiver and the signified (e.g., consumer and celebrity) through the indexically linked object. Those that desired to become a celebrity themselves were attracted to the contagious indexical meaning of the object which facilitates a perceived contamination of the perceiver (e.g., consumer) by the essence of the signified (e.g., celebrity) through the indexically linked object.

Contributions – We contribute to the Peircian semiotic framework as used in consumer research by differentiating between the meanings of proximal indexicality and contagious indexicality. We show these meanings are linked to consumers’ display use versus the original use of the celebrity-owned object.

This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions.

Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality.

The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community.

This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the key themes found within the volume Ethics and Integrity in Visual Research Methods, and provides a rationale for the volume’s focus on photography and film media. Drawing from other literature, the author discusses the significance of indexicality and visual language when working with photography and film in research contexts, and describes how these considerations set photography and film apart from other forms of visual data. The chapter concludes by outlining the format of the volume, which divides the nine chapters into three key areas of exploration: Voice and Agency, Power and Inequality, and Context and Representation.

Transnationalism is a multi-faceted phenomenon which has impacted on society and challenged, inter alia, the paradigm of national affiliations. The trasnationalisation of the European field has arguably contributed to a political arena where embryonic post-national identities and new forms of belonging are being negotiated, challenged and legitimised. By investigating the discourses of members of a transnational NGO of ‘active’ citizens, this chapter seeks to understand how current European identities are discursively constructed from bottom up in the public sphere. Appropriating CDA, this chapter offers insights into how discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the speakers and predicated on the indexicality of transnational frames, construct Europe and patterns of belonging to it. This chapter suggests different conceptual dimensions of transnationalism enacted by members in discourse which are conveniently summarised as nation-centric, Euro-centric and cosmopolitan.

In this article, the author discusses works from the French Documentation Movement in the 1940s and 1950s with regard to how it formulates bibliographic classification systems as documents. Significant writings by Suzanne Briet, Éric de Grolier and Robert Pagès are analyzed in the light of current document-theoretical concepts and discussions.

Conceptual analysis.

The French Documentation Movement provided a rich intellectual environment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, resulting in original works on documents and the ways these may be represented bibliographically. These works display a variety of approaches from object-oriented description to notational concept-synthesis, and definitions of classification systems as isomorph documents at the center of politically informed critique of modern society.

The article brings together historical and conceptual elements in the analysis which have not previously been combined in Library and Information Science literature. In the analysis, the article discusses significant contributions to classification and document theory that hitherto have eluded attention from the wider international Library and Information Science research community. Through this, the article contributes to the currently ongoing conceptual discussion on documents and documentality.

Michael Buckland's works have spanned theoretical, historical and practice-oriented foci and genre. This article focuses on some of his theoretical-historical works that span over 20 years, which demonstrate a reading and critique of European Documentation in terms of what has been called “Documentality.” This turn to a philosophy of information called “Documentality” marks the moment of “neo-documentation.” This article surveys this moment in Buckland's works by reading his articles “Information as Thing,” “What is a ‘Document’?”, and “Documentality Beyond Documents.” It shows the transition from Documentation as a philosophy of information as representation to Documentality as a philosophy of information as function and performance. Some concepts and works of Bruno Latour are used to illuminate this transition from Documentation to Documentality. Implications and further research directions are discussed at the end.

Conceptual and historical analyses.

The article follows a neo-documentalist transition in Buckland's works in the thinking of documents from an Otletian representationalist epistemology (“Documentation”) to a functionalist and performative epistemology (“Documentality”) for documents.

This is a conceptual work on a limited corpus in Buckland's oeuvre. It has a limited discussion of Documentality in the works of other writers, namely the works of Bernd Frohmann and Maurizio Ferraris.

The article points to historical shifts in the study of documents in Library and Information Science.

Documentality critically and materially studies documents in sociotechnical information management systems and elsewhere.

This work highlights the importance of the above works and the importance of the neo-documentalist perspective of Documentality.

The reflections presented in this paper were inspired by a simple consideration: that, although the kind of sociological investigation indicated as ethnomethodology originated as a reaction to the institutional sociological establishment, it has eventually become part of it (see Pollner, 1991). Some might quite rightly object that this is hardly surprising; actually, it is the destiny of most revolutionary movements inside and outside the sociological discipline. Moreover, the concern, often emerging from inside the field, that the term ethnomethodology has become no more than a confusing label for a variety of sociological investigations, may seem a pedantic issue of purity caused by the sectarian mentality of insiders.

I’m sorry, I’d really like to oblige but I cannot subject my precious paper to the brutal textual reductionism that is abstractisation. Aren’t abstracts most interesting for all they don’t say? Isn’t an abstract merely a textual device of indexicality, shouting and pointing “here is a paper” just like the disingenuous “last petrol before motorway” signs one learns never to believe because they really meant “last petrol before motorway” (not counting the other six petrol stations after this one). All you need to know, fellow marketing academics, is that you simply must read this commentary because, hey, you’re in it.

Despite the relatively low cultural status of department store music, it is proposed that music – the shopping soundtrack – is capable of transforming perceptions of the environment in which it is heard, and eliciting immediate emotional and behavioural responses, thus underlining the influence of music, regardless of whether it is passively heard as a background element or actively listened to as a live performance in a dedicated venue.

This study addresses a gap in the marketing literature for introspective research evaluating the experience of music in service environments. It draws upon auto‐ethnographic data through which participants ponder their own consumption experience and provide detailed, subjective accounts of events and memories.

When considering the effects of music upon emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses, it highlights the importance of musicscape response moderators.

The service environment appears more exciting and attractive and may encourage increased spending when background music is congruous with other servicescape elements. Music with positive autobiographical resonance elicits pleasurably nostalgic emotions, positive evaluations and longer stay. However, the aural incongruity of unexpected silence in music‐free zones produces feelings of discomfort leading to negative store evaluation and departure.

Qualitative data are deliberately represented using typically positivist discourse to encourage resolution of the inherent tension between interpretivist and positivist perspectives and stimulate increased methodological integration (e.g. through future studies of music combining quantitative and qualitative data).

This chapter investigates how musicians at jazz jam sessions engage in what I term “aggressive emergence.” In so doing, they introduce novelty, unpredictability and creativity in their spontaneous interactions with other musicians. In order to discuss this emergence, a notion of signs in musical communications as indexes, in the Peircean sense, is developed. To produce emergence in the ongoing development of a jam session performance, musicians must produce signs that index new directions that jazz playing can take, such as different rhythmic or harmonic accompaniments, or changes to the volume at which individuals play their instruments.