Use value and exchange value, concepts explored by Aristotle, are terms dealing with the natural function of an object and the object's worth in an exchange, respectively. In this work, Aristotle's concepts are applied to contemporary marketing practices and other aspects of culture in order to evaluate the way in which meaning is ascribed to objects. The role of the brand, for example, is to alter the exchange value of an object, while the use value can be left unchanged. Brands are indicative of exchange value because they have no substance to speak of, and they are a matter of convention; what they are and what they stand for is in no way fixed. Marketing practitioners develop brands largely by fusing objects with culture, and culture as well as cultural perceptions can change. As a reflection of culture, marketing practitioners use stories and identities in much the same way that culture independent of marketing would ascribe meaning. While branding and other marketing practices rely extensively on culture to form their bases, they are not the only source of cultural meaning because factors such as family and tradition also have influence. When factors such as these imbue objects with meaning, they, too, can affect exchange value, but they have origins outside the marketplace. I use the term narrative value to differentiate this source of meaning from marketing practices. Narrative value has to do with tradition and collective understandings of community, whereas brands are constructed by external means, as works of fiction. When culture is placed in objects as a reflection of the marketplace, the culture lacks the structure and durability of more traditional culture, and such ascribed meaning can be easily altered or eradicated. Narrative value, then, is an idea separate from marketing yet with the ability to impact worth in exchange. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Communication and Rhetorical Studies / PhD / Dissertation

This study is about helping managers identify and enhance the idiosyncratic firm resources required for delivering superior perceived use value to customers. Specifically, the research has focused on the organisational knowledge required for routinised service delivery, and has operationalised this organisational knowledge as activities. Project 1 was a comparative study involving observation and interviews in two similar but differentially performing financial services organisations in order to identify the activities involved in service delivery and the differences between the two operations. Project 2 identified customers’ perceptions of value through customer interviews, and then mapped the links between these and the service delivery activities identified in Project 1. Project 3 involved a clinical inquiry intervention aiming to encourage and leverage the firm specific resource of inter-team coordination to enhance the delivery of customer value. The research has confirmed the role of firm specific resources as a source of competitive advantage, and has demonstrated a link with customers’ dimensions of perceived use value. In this study, effective inter-team coordination is identified as the firm specific strategic resource that appears to enable effective service delivery as perceived by customers, through the sharing of knowledge and interpretations, and the development of service process innovation. Many of these coordination activities are discretionary rather than prescribed, with implications for management practice. From this research, a framework has been developed for considering and managing firm specific sources of advantage at the detailed operational level. This is a micro level approach that makes specific links between the customer experience and internal activities, through identifying internal and external competitiveness factors, mapping the ‘inside-outside’ connections, and achieving alignment between internal activities and customer perceptions of value.

This study is about helping managers identify and enhance the idiosyncratic firm resources required for delivering superior perceived use value to customers. Specifically, the research has focused on the organisational knowledge required for routinised service delivery, and has operationalised this organisational knowledge as activities. Project 1 was a comparative study involving observation and interviews in two similar but differentially performing financial services organisations in order to identify the activities involved in service delivery and the differences between the two operations. Project 2 identified customers’ perceptions of value through customer interviews, and then mapped the links between these and the service delivery activities identified in Project 1. Project 3 involved a clinical inquiry intervention aiming to encourage and leverage the firm specific resource of inter-team coordination to enhance the delivery of customer value. The research has confirmed the role of firm specific resources as a source of competitive advantage, and has demonstrated a link with customers’ dimensions of perceived use value. In this study, effective inter-team coordination is identified as the firm specific strategic resource that appears to enable effective service delivery as perceived by customers, through the sharing of knowledge and interpretations, and the development of service process innovation. Many of these coordination activities are discretionary rather than prescribed, with implications for management practice. From this research, a framework has been developed for considering and managing firm specific sources of advantage at the detailed operational level. This is a micro level approach that makes specific links between the customer experience and internal activities, through identifying internal and external competitiveness factors, mapping the ‘inside-outside’ connections, and achieving alignment between internal activities and customer perceptions of value.

How does material production become socially recognised in capitalism? This is a fundamental question to be addressed in capitalist production, since material production takes place privately and independently in a global and atomistic system. This thesis shows that the question is tackled by Marx in the first three chapters of Capital. The process of social recognition of material production is that of the realisation of work carried out privately and independently as part of the social labour. For Marx this occurs through the private and independent work becoming objective social labour as the substance of the value of commodities, and through the latter finding its necessary developed mercantile expression in the price form of commodities. Therefore, private and independent work becomes social labour through the recognition of its product as equivalent to a certain amount of money. The thesis argues that Marx’s answer is powerfully insightful but flawed because it did not succeed in fully characterising the historical specificity of commodity. Commodity is not merely the differentiated unity of use value and value but of use value and mercantile use value, and of labour value and mercantile value. The former dialectic is immediate and distinguishes between the utility of commodity as a direct means of consumption or production and that as a means of exchange, fully determining the behaviour of the private and independent commodity producer. The latter dialectic is objective and distinguishes between commodity as the embodiment of the social labour necessary to reproduce it and as the embodiment of command over social labour, enabling the adjustment of the productive structure. Both dialectics are mediated by the mercantile form of value, which allows the indirect expression of labour value as the gravitational force of the system. The theory of commodity offered in this thesis, unlike that of Marx, consistently hinges on the atomistic private and independent commodity producer. The thesis shows that commodity production is the organisation of society’s labour for its material reproduction, just as in any previous mode of production. The discovery of the generic aspect of commodity production breaks the false immediate link between production and supply, and that between the labour theory of value and both the supply-side-determined theory of price and the single-factor theory of production. The thesis also shows that the mercantile form of value is what allows society’s labour to become an objective and autonomous materially abstract substance regulating the adjustment of the productive system under the form of material signals. This is the specific aspect of a global mode of production comprised of free and independent individuals. The mercantile form of value is thus Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Finally, the thesis analyses some implications of the framework with regard to the analysis of monetary phenomena, capital accumulation and sustainable development, and reviews the most popular Marxian topic in Economics: the transformation of values into prices of production.

The study examines the experiences of street hawkers and contributes to the current but less represented debate on hawkers’ ways of appropriating the urban space through space modification and codification that serve greatly their capitalist purposes and how those daily activities influence their sense of belonging to the urban public space. The hawkers in the study area; La- Nkwantanang-Madina Area, Ghana show some social concerns in their informal day-to-day street activities that account for some of the relocation issues that render the repressive measures of city authorities futile. In understanding the space appropriation and sense of belonging from the hawker’s perspective, the study introduces the concept of “right to the city” for which the purpose of this study conceptualizes it as “the right to the street” so it can better attend to the experiences of place and sense of belonging by the hawkers, the informality concept and the urban citizenship. The study uses qualitative approach which included methods; participant observation, in-depth interviews and Focus group discussion to help unearth some of the issues that contribute to the debate. The research finds that although the space contestations between the street hawkers and city officials still lingers on, the hawkers are able to successfully reproduce their belonging to the urban streets through exchange value of space and the diversification of urban streets which forms part of the urban fabric without dominating the streets to obstruct the use value for other urban dwellers.

The present thesis aims to provide new insight into the motives and aspirations behind self-initiated renovations of owner-occupied housing by applying a critical perspective to the phenomenon of home improvements. Furthermore, the thesis argues that the concepts of use value and exchange value point to how economic and non-economic factors are interconnected in contemporary home improvement practice. Moreover, by connecting economic and non-economic factors, the thesis goes beyond previous research in the field, which has been preoccupied with either one or the other. An empirical study consisting of eight semi-structured interviews with homeowners in Uppsala was conducted to support the thesis’s theoretical argument. This study found a combination of vagueness and certainty in the motives behind the participants' renovations. The thesis then recontextualized its seemingly paradoxical findings in terms of use value and exchange value, showing how renovating homeowners navigate contradictory considerations in pragmatic ways. In turn, showing how home improvement needs to be understood with reference to structural mechanisms and individual preferences – taking care to centre how these two aspects are interconnected. Additionally, tied to its conclusions, the study shows how homeowners balance ideals of self-expression with a norm of neutrality stemming from the demands of the property market.

[pt] A tese O fazer-comum das ocupações na luta pela produção do espaço tem como objetivo geral analisar como as ocupações se configuram como comuns urbanos e como elas possuem potencialidades para as lutas anticapitalistas pela produção do espaço. Assim, buscou-se fazer uma discussão acerca da circulação do capital e sua interferência na produção do espaço, hoje, metropolizado. Em seguida, discute-se os conceitos de movimento social e ocupação, com intuito de demostrar as potencialidades das ocupações urbanas. Ao final, a partir da conceituação de comum, objetivamos demonstrar que as ocupações urbanas se configuram como importantes formas de luta pela cidade e, por meio delas, poder se-ia estabelecer o comum e a produção de um espaço urbano anticapitalista. Neste sentido, buscou-se demostrar que a espiral capitalista em sua busca contínua por acumulação também abre brechas para o fim da circulação capitalista e que o espaço metropolizado aparece como uma oportunidade para tal, a partir de seus espaços heterotópicos, como as ocupações. Assim, defende-se que as ocupações, ao praticarem o fazer-comum, rompem com várias das amaras capitalistas e podem modificar nossa sociedade por dentro e criar espaços outros nos quais o comum seja o princípio político, definindo espaços limiares e tramas comunitárias. / [en] This thesis, entitled O fazer-comum das ocupações na luta pela produção do espaço, has as main objective to analyze how squats can be configured as urban commons and how they have potentialities for anti-capitalist struggles for the production of space. First, a discussion about the circulation of capital and its interference in the production of space, today, metropolized, was presented. Then we discuss the concepts of social movement and squatting, attempting to demonstrate the potentialities of urban squats. Finally, based on the conceptualization of common, we intend to demonstrate that urban squatting is an important form of struggle for the city, and could establish the common and the production of an anti-capitalist urban space. In this sense, we tried to demonstrate that the capitalist spiral in its continuous search for accumulation also creates gaps for the end of capitalist circulation itself, and the metropolized space appears as an opportunity to that end, based on its heterotopic spaces, such as squats. Thus, squatting, by practicing the commoning, can break several of the capitalist bonds and can modify our society from the inside by creating other spaces in which the common is the political principle and, defining threshold spaces and community fabrics.

This paper aims to assess the current status and effectiveness of coastal wetland utilization in Duy Xuyen district, Quang Nam province, and to propose solutions to improve land use and conserve the existing wetlands of the locality. Research results show that there are five types of wetlands in Duy Xuyen district: wetlands with tidal forests, streams, freshwater ponds, aquaculture ponds, and irrigated land. The wetland areas in Duy Xuyen district are mainly distributed in 3 communes: Duy Thanh, Duy Nghia and Duy Vinh and there is a noticeable decrease in the period from 2010 to 2016. The calculated results show that the total economic value of wetlands in the study area includes: direct use value is 41,276,949,000 VND/year (accounting for 99.61%), non-use value is 162,855,000 VND/year (accounting for 0.39 %). In which, the social and environmental economic values of wetland use types are totally different. / Bài báo này nhằm mục đích đánh giá thực trạng và hiệu quả sử dụng đất ngập nước ven biển trên địa bàn huyện Duy Xuyên, tỉnh Quảng Nam, trên cơ sở đó đề xuất những giải pháp nhằm nâng cao hiệu quả sử dụng và bảo tồn diện tích đất ngập nước hiện có của địa phương. Kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy, trên địa bàn huyện Duy Xuyên có 5 kiểu đất ngập nước: vùng đất ngập nước có rừng gian triều, sông suối, vùng nước ngọt, ao nuôi trồng thủy sản, đất được tưới tiêu. Diện tích đất ngập nước trên địa bàn huyện Duy Xuyên chủ yếu phân bố ở 3 xã: Duy Thành, Duy Nghĩa và Duy Vinh và có sự biến động giảm rõ rệt từ năm 2010 đến năm 2016. Kết quả điều tra cho thấy tổng giá trị kinh tế của đất ngập nước trên địa bàn nghiên cứu bao gồm: giá trị sử dụng trực tiếp (41,276,949,000 đồng/năm, chiếm 99.61%), giá trị phi sử dụng (chiếm 0.39% đạt 162,855,000 đồng/năm). Trong đó, hiệu quả xã hội và môi trường giữa các kiểu sử dụng đất ngập nước không đồng đều.

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How does material production become socially recognised in capitalism? This is a fundamental question to be addressed in capitalist production, since material production takes place privately and independently in a global and atomistic system. This thesis shows that the question is tackled by Marx in the first three chapters of Capital. The process of social recognition of material production is that of the realisation of work carried out privately and independently as part of the social labour. For Marx this occurs through the private and independent work becoming objective social labour as the substance of the value of commodities, and through the latter finding its necessary developed mercantile expression in the price form of commodities. Therefore, private and independent work becomes social labour through the recognition of its product as equivalent to a certain amount of money. The thesis argues that Marx's answer is powerfully insightful but flawed because it did not succeed in fully characterising the historical specificity of commodity. Commodity is not merely the differentiated unity of use value and value but of use value and mercantile use value, and of labour value and mercantile value. The former dialectic is immediate and distinguishes between the utility of commodity as a direct means of consumption or production and that as a means of exchange, fully determining the behaviour of the private and independent commodity producer. The latter dialectic is objective and distinguishes between commodity as the embodiment of the social labour necessary to reproduce it and as the embodiment of command over social labour, enabling the adjustment of the productive structure. Both dialectics are mediated by the mercantile form of value, which allows the indirect expression of labour value as the gravitational force of the system. The theory of commodity offered in this thesis, unlike that of Marx, consistently hinges on the atomistic private and independent commodity producer. The thesis shows that commodity production is the organisation of society's labour for its material reproduction, just as in any previous mode of production. The discovery of the generic aspect of commodity production breaks the false immediate link between production and supply, and that between the labour theory of value and both the supply-side-determined theory of price and the single-factor theory of production. The thesis also shows that the mercantile form of value is what allows society's labour to become an objective and autonomous materially abstract substance regulating the adjustment of the productive system under the form of material signals. This is the specific aspect of a global mode of production comprised of free and independent individuals. The mercantile form of value is thus Adam Smith's invisible hand. Finally, the thesis analyses some implications of the framework with regard to the analysis of monetary phenomena, capital accumulation and sustainable development, and reviews the most popular Marxian topic in Economics: the transformation of values into prices of production.