Price and the person: markets, discrimination and personhood

Moor, Liz and Lury, Celia. 2018. Price and the person: markets, discrimination and personhood. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(6), ISSN 1753-0350 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

The paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons (Hacking 1986; Carrier 1994), and how the ability to ‘personalize’ price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate persons. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others are novel and likely to be contested. We argue that many newer pricing techniques make it harder for consumers to identify themselves as part of a recognized group. We conclude that contemporary price personalization should be understood in terms of the intensification of individualization in combination with dividualization (Strathern 1988), and as such, contributes to what Fourcade and Healy (2013) describe as ‘classification situations that shape life-chances’.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1481878

Keywords:

price, pricing, personhood, data, marketing, transcontextual

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Dates:

DateEvent
22 May 2018Accepted
22 June 2018Published Online

Item ID:

23366

Date Deposited:

24 May 2018 13:49

Last Modified:

22 Nov 2019 02:26

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23366

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