Managing Indeterminacy: Culture,Irishness and the Advertising Industry

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with advertising practitioners working in Ireland, this article investigates how Irishness is discursively constructed by these workers and focuses particularly on their tendency to shift between a view of Irishness as fluid and uncertain and a view of it as fixed and essential. Rather than consider these positions contradictory, I regard practitioners’ wavering constructions of Irishness as provisional truths born of advertising’s need for predictable or fixed solutions. I further suggest that subtending this decentring and recentring of Irishness is an ‘old’ idea of culture, namely the idea that culture is the complete way of life of a particular people. Importantly, this idea also depicts culture as objective, knowable and actionable, which is crucial to advertising’s professionalization project. The article concludes by examining a recent book on branding, written by the ‘grandfather’ of Irish advertising, John Fanning, as an industry account of (and response to) cultural change in Ireland.