This article provides an ethnographic examination of olfactory consumer testing in the perfume industry. What kind of reality is generated within such practices? The analysis is focused on one particular testing method used in order to assess the hedonic performance of fine fragrances. The...

The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for investigating and intervening in social reality. A particular group of these, exemplified here by the experiments of Moreno, Lewin, Bion, Milgram and Zimbardo, worked by establishing suggestive...

In 1999, Carruthers and Stinchcombe provided the classic discussion of ‘the social structure of liquidity’: the institutional arrangements that support markets in which ‘exchange occurs easily and frequently’. Our argument in this paper is that the material aspects of these arrangements...