3 resultados para retailers

em Royal College of Art Research Repository - Uninet Kingdom


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A series of five articles, published over six months in 2010, which explained the key ethical issues relating to sourcing gold. The Ethical Gold Series was written for practising jewellers, industrial jewellery manufacturers and the wider design community. The Ethical Gold Series was published in the Benchpeg Newsletter, an online jewellery industry journal, which in 2010 had over 5,500 subscribers. The material for the articles was drawn from a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the UK jewellery sector, funded by the AHRC, and field visits to preserved, operating and proposed gold mining sites in Alaska, California, Sweden, Wales and Scotland. The ethnographic fieldwork included ‘ethical gold’ promotional events, private industry meetings and jewellery trade shows and meetings with jewellery manufacturers and retailers, assayers, gold refiners and traders and environmental and fair trade campaigners.

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During the late twentieth century the supply chains for gold were considered by the majority of consumers (when they were considered at all) to be driven by simple commercial imperatives. That notion was shattered during the first decade of the twenty-first century by the appearance of ethical campaigns, led by advocates determined to present major players in the gold industry as morally reprehensible. The ‘No Dirty Gold’ campaign sought to shift the purchasing of gold onto a moral register, in order to challenge the activities of large mining corporations. It was followed by the Fairtrade Foundation’s ‘Fairtrade Gold’ initiative, which had aspirations to support subsistence mining communities at the expense of big business. By directly targeting a luxury material and playing on its inherent social ambiguities, campaigners hoped to thoroughly moralise the purchasing of gold objects. Dr Oakley’s presentation will examine the forces behind this developing social phenomenon, describe the trajectories of a selection of major campaigns, and consider the extent to which these have impacted on public attitudes, gold miners and the actions of consumers, producers and retailers of luxury goods.

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Today the high-price mechanical wristwatch is recognized as a luxury object redolent with notions of adventure, sporting achievement, elevated social status, and technical precision. Through an examination of the segmentation of the current luxury wristwatch market and key moments in the historical development of the wristwatch, this article will explain why these connotations exist. In particular, the article will explain the role that the early development of the wristwatch as a piece of military technical equipment and the mechanical wristwatch’s revitalization as a luxury good in response to the development of commercial quartz timekeeping technology have played in reconstructing the wristwatch as an object type. By utilizing network theory and the analytical tool of complexity, and drawing on fieldwork undertaken in London and Switzerland amongst the manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers of high-value wristwatches, the article will explain how the wristwatch can simultaneously be seen as functional tool, fashion statement, status symbol, and anachronism. This insight into the true nature of the wristwatch as a multivalent and semiotically charged object will also be used to inform reflections on the likely impact of generally perceived current threats to the luxury watch industry: the rise in ethical material sourcing campaigns, the stubborn gender imbalance in watch sales, and the recent appearance of smart watches and similar digital devices.