Janet L. Borgerson
Writing/Lecturing at intersections of Philosophy, Business, & Culture. BOOKS: Designed for Success: Better Living and Self-Improvement with Midcentury Records (Borgerson & Schroeder, MIT Press, 2023);
Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Records Taught America to Dance (Borgerson & Schroeder, MIT Press, 2021);
Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (Borgerson & Schroeder; MIT Press, 2017);
Caring and Power in Female Leadership: A Philosophical Approach (Borgerson; Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018);
From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands (Wu, Borgerson, & Schroeder; Palgrave, 2013).
ARTICLES: “Making Skin Visible: How Consumer Culture Imagery Commodifies Identity,” Body and Society, 2018 (w/ Schroeder); “Scalable Sociality and ‘How the world changed social media,'" Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2016 (w/ Miller); "The Flickering Consumer: New Materialities and Consumer Research," Research in Consumer Behavior, 2013.
CHAPTERS: “Humility and the Challenge to Decolonize the ‘Critical’ in Critical Management Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies, 2016.
Held tenured Associate Professor positions: University of Exeter, England and Stockholm University, Sweden before returning to US.
Advisory Board, Race in the Marketplace
Former Trustee, Eastman Museum, Rochester NY.
Book in progress on Islamic thought and models of intersubjectivity.
Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Records Taught America to Dance (Borgerson & Schroeder, MIT Press, 2021);
Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (Borgerson & Schroeder; MIT Press, 2017);
Caring and Power in Female Leadership: A Philosophical Approach (Borgerson; Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018);
From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands (Wu, Borgerson, & Schroeder; Palgrave, 2013).
ARTICLES: “Making Skin Visible: How Consumer Culture Imagery Commodifies Identity,” Body and Society, 2018 (w/ Schroeder); “Scalable Sociality and ‘How the world changed social media,'" Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2016 (w/ Miller); "The Flickering Consumer: New Materialities and Consumer Research," Research in Consumer Behavior, 2013.
CHAPTERS: “Humility and the Challenge to Decolonize the ‘Critical’ in Critical Management Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies, 2016.
Held tenured Associate Professor positions: University of Exeter, England and Stockholm University, Sweden before returning to US.
Advisory Board, Race in the Marketplace
Former Trustee, Eastman Museum, Rochester NY.
Book in progress on Islamic thought and models of intersubjectivity.
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New Book by Janet L. Borgerson
For the midcentury Americans who wished to better their golf game through hypnosis, teach their parakeet to talk, or achieve sexual harmony in their marriage, the answers lay no further than the record player. In Designed for Success, Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder shed light on these endearingly earnest albums that contributed to a powerful American vision of personal success. Rescued from charity shops, record store cast-off bins, or forgotten boxes in attics and basements, these educational records reveal the American consumers’ rich but sometimes surprising relationship to advertising, self-help, identity construction, and even aspects of transcendentalist thought.
Relegated to obscurity and novelty, instructional records such as Secrets of Successful Varmint Calling, You Be a Disc Jockey, and How to Ski (A Living-Room Guide for Beginners) offer distinct insights into midcentury media production and consumption. Tracing the history of instructional records from the inception of the recording industry to the height of their popularity, Borgerson and Schroeder offer close readings of the abundant topics covered by “designed for success” records. Complemented by over a hundred full-color illustrations, Designed for Success is a wonderfully nostalgic tour that showcases the essential role these vinyl records played as an unappreciated precursor to contemporary do-it-yourself culture and modern conceptions of self-improvement.
Books by Janet L. Borgerson
Not just decorated cardboard that protected the vinyl disks within, record album covers in the 1950s and 1960s served commercial, pedagogical, and rhetorical purposes. Record albums, as popular and mass culture artifacts, were designed to teach US citizens about ideal lifestyles in postwar America. Record albums suggested how to entertain at home, appreciate diverse cultures, and travel the world. The book explores the contribution of record albums, as material artifacts, to the imagination and construction of modern US identity and global citizenship, and discusses how the Cold War raging between the two postwar superpowers encroached upon the design, music, and marketing of mainstream albums. These midcentury LPs – featuring the Cuban playground released before Castro, jazz albums adorned with abstract art, and lifestyle LPs with attractive images of appliance-filled kitchens – appear as subtle elements of the ideological struggles of the era. Drawing upon notions of materiality and agency in the constitution of consuming subjects, and informed by critical visual and cultural analysis, the book reveals how peripheral objects, such as record albums, reveal hidden pedagogical aspects of popular culture.
The book is organized into “home” and “away” sections. As recording technology emerged and developed, it brought sounds, sights and specially designed furniture – including the hi-fi – into the home. The home section reveals how the US home became an entertainment zone – a place to play music, prepare dinner, and show off one’s taste for guests – in postwar popular culture. The analysis shows how record albums occupied a space evoking identity and group membership in many US homes during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The away section examines LPs from an influential era in the development of international tourism for a mass US population, when the marketing of hi-fi equipment, Broadway shows and movies such as Flower Drum Song, The King and I, and South Pacific, and packaged tours united to create a sense of the good life, which included a vision of the rest of the world and how to travel through it. Beyond issues of graphic design, the book emphasizes social and cultural themes that animate these LPs via their liner notes, music, and cover design.
Materiality by Janet L. Borgerson
Ethics, Philosophy, & Organization by Janet L. Borgerson
Creates a philosophical/poetic dialog with Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, regarding parallel oppressions of women and animals. Draws together notions of hierarchical dualisms and the possibilities of Self/Other relations that do not subordinate.
For the midcentury Americans who wished to better their golf game through hypnosis, teach their parakeet to talk, or achieve sexual harmony in their marriage, the answers lay no further than the record player. In Designed for Success, Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder shed light on these endearingly earnest albums that contributed to a powerful American vision of personal success. Rescued from charity shops, record store cast-off bins, or forgotten boxes in attics and basements, these educational records reveal the American consumers’ rich but sometimes surprising relationship to advertising, self-help, identity construction, and even aspects of transcendentalist thought.
Relegated to obscurity and novelty, instructional records such as Secrets of Successful Varmint Calling, You Be a Disc Jockey, and How to Ski (A Living-Room Guide for Beginners) offer distinct insights into midcentury media production and consumption. Tracing the history of instructional records from the inception of the recording industry to the height of their popularity, Borgerson and Schroeder offer close readings of the abundant topics covered by “designed for success” records. Complemented by over a hundred full-color illustrations, Designed for Success is a wonderfully nostalgic tour that showcases the essential role these vinyl records played as an unappreciated precursor to contemporary do-it-yourself culture and modern conceptions of self-improvement.
Not just decorated cardboard that protected the vinyl disks within, record album covers in the 1950s and 1960s served commercial, pedagogical, and rhetorical purposes. Record albums, as popular and mass culture artifacts, were designed to teach US citizens about ideal lifestyles in postwar America. Record albums suggested how to entertain at home, appreciate diverse cultures, and travel the world. The book explores the contribution of record albums, as material artifacts, to the imagination and construction of modern US identity and global citizenship, and discusses how the Cold War raging between the two postwar superpowers encroached upon the design, music, and marketing of mainstream albums. These midcentury LPs – featuring the Cuban playground released before Castro, jazz albums adorned with abstract art, and lifestyle LPs with attractive images of appliance-filled kitchens – appear as subtle elements of the ideological struggles of the era. Drawing upon notions of materiality and agency in the constitution of consuming subjects, and informed by critical visual and cultural analysis, the book reveals how peripheral objects, such as record albums, reveal hidden pedagogical aspects of popular culture.
The book is organized into “home” and “away” sections. As recording technology emerged and developed, it brought sounds, sights and specially designed furniture – including the hi-fi – into the home. The home section reveals how the US home became an entertainment zone – a place to play music, prepare dinner, and show off one’s taste for guests – in postwar popular culture. The analysis shows how record albums occupied a space evoking identity and group membership in many US homes during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The away section examines LPs from an influential era in the development of international tourism for a mass US population, when the marketing of hi-fi equipment, Broadway shows and movies such as Flower Drum Song, The King and I, and South Pacific, and packaged tours united to create a sense of the good life, which included a vision of the rest of the world and how to travel through it. Beyond issues of graphic design, the book emphasizes social and cultural themes that animate these LPs via their liner notes, music, and cover design.
Creates a philosophical/poetic dialog with Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, regarding parallel oppressions of women and animals. Draws together notions of hierarchical dualisms and the possibilities of Self/Other relations that do not subordinate.
In this paper’s pre-Facebook era, we interrogate how an exclusive group of partying consumers, the Stockholm "brats," act out, or perform, their gender identities by embodying traits, poses, and gestures – building blocks of figurative tropes, or pictured persuasive arguments – prominent in and provided by advertisements that exist within their digital consumer environment, including what we call ‘brat brands’.
realm of earlier forms of IT and provide productive fresh perspectives on technological innovations. Changes in image production during the Renaissance advanced possibilities for art to address or "hail" the viewer in
more personal ways, implicating patrons and consumers alike within the artwork's system of meaning and value. Renaissance patrons successfully appropriated the form and symbols of religious art; contemporary
corporations likewise appropriate cultural referent systems within marketing and image campaigns. By considering painting as an IT, we gain theoretical links between disparate yet interlinked cultural fields such as
photography, art, marketing communications, and the Internet.
theory and art criticism is developed to analyze contemporary images of gender. Utilizing and expanding upon visual research techniques, a selection of ads from contemporary fashion magazines and catalogs was assembled to illustrate particular themes suggested by research on the representation of gender in advertising. The body-and what it expresses-is a site of central concern, and discussion focuses on how female and male bodies are represented in advertising. The conventions of art history, when framed within a social science perspective, offer unique contributions to the study of advertising and gender, well suited for researchers interested in the culture of consumption.
This study reveals Chinese consumers’ desire to express deep resonance between Chinese values and aesthetics, and favored indigenous brands, such as Shang Xia, a high-end luxury brand. Findings demonstrate how brand literacy works in an emerging market, as an initial step toward a more developed theory of brand literacy.
Under what conditions may we perceive the many ways in which branding – and brands themselves – go beyond cultural branding, and indeed, co-create culture in relation to consumer processes and practices? One way of thinking about how brands and culture interact draws upon the notion of brand literacy – how well consumers are able to “read,” understand, and engage brands and brand messages. We explore a growing brand literacy among Chinese consumers, and reveal how brand literacy is embedded in a cultural context and contributes to brand culture. This study highlights multidimensional aspects of brand literacy and represents an initial step toward a more developed framework in the context of brand culture.
apparent. Indeed, the battle raging between the two superpowers encroached upon the design, music, and marketing of mainstream
albums.