Jon Schroeder

Human skin, photography, and consumer culture combine to produce striking images designed to promote visions of the good life. Branding and marketing imagery mobilize skin to resonate and communicate with consumers, which influences the meaning-making possibilities of skin more broadly. Representations of skin in consumer culture, including marketing communications, are anything but ‘blank’ backgrounds or ‘neutral’ meaning spaces. We analyse how skin ‘appears’ to work, and how its appearance in consumer culture imagery reveals ideological and pedagogical aspects of skin. Building upon psychodynamic and interdisciplinary understandings of skin, we discuss dimensions of the body that feed marketing communications and branding. We highlight representational fetishization and the epidermal schema as conceptual tools to interrogate the commodification of skin and as constitutive elements in processes of skin commodification. We provide theoretical insights to address the ways in which skin is implicated in new and emerging concerns of digital representational practices.

Aesthetic leadership concerns the manner in which artists, and other aesthetic workers, perform leadership functions within groups, communities and culture, often outside established positions of authority. In this sense, aesthetic leadership connotes attainment beyond the insularity of particular aesthetic fields, such as art or literature, by gaining attention within a broader cultural or political arena. Recently, artists have been called upon for aesthetic leadership in management - as leaders, practitioners, visionaries, and inspirers (e.g., Austin and Devin, 2002; Hatch, Kostera and Kozminski, 2004; Schroeder, 2005). Thus, aesthetic leadership need not refer merely to creativity or vision; rather aesthetic leadership may emerge from insight into cultural, political, or interpersonal issues, aesthetic statements on social injustice or crucial cultural concerns, or, at a more general level, providing alternative ways of seeing problems, history, or received wisdom. In this way, aesthetic leadership may either complement or contradict more traditional leadership forms, such as politics, religion or management Aesthetic leadership may emerge from leadership qualities such as charisma, interpersonal skill, and vision, yet remain elusive, and difficult to categorize or cultivate.

The article reviews the conceptual foundations of advertising polysemy the occurrence of different interpretations for the same advertising message. We discuss how disciplines as diverse as psychology, semiotics and literary theory have dealt with the issue of polysemy, and provide translations and integration among these multiple perspectives. From such review we draw recurrent themes to foster future research in the area and to show how seemingly opposed methodological and theoretical perspectives complement and extend each other. Implications for advertising research and practice are discussed.