Community relationships and the big–small business dichotomy

The relationship between businesses and communities is an interesting one, for a number of reasons. One, community is a concept that has come under significant scholarly scrutiny (Collins Reference Collins2009; Delanty Reference Delanty2003; Heller Reference Heller2008) not least because, under the effects of globalization, the demographic profiles of many communities have altered rather drastically as a result of inward and outward migration. The resulting tensions and conflicts – as populations become more diversified in terms of ethnicity and social class, as relatively unfamiliar languages, patterns of interaction, cuisines and religious practices, all become part of the local semiotic landscape – have created greater awareness that what is often taken for granted as a bounded territory with stable membership and cultural values is in fact undergoing important changes. These changes to the demographic and cultural makeup of a community are further intensified by the fact that rapid advances in telecommunications and modes of transportation have made the interconnections between ostensibly separate and distinct communities easier to cultivate, sustain and, as a result, harder to ignore. It is therefore possible to speak of a community at a number of levels (Delanty Reference Delanty2003: 2), from that of the global community, to that of the nation-state (Anderson Reference Anderson1983), to that of groups defined in terms of sexual orientation, or ethnic, political and professional affiliations (e.g. the gay community, the Hispanic community, the medical community). Community membership and attachment is as a result increasingly multiple, transnational and hybridized. The upshot of all this is that the constitution of community membership is not only shifting; its very nature has, in many cases, become more tenuous, transient and amorphous.¹

Two, there is an ideologically pervasive assumption that small businesses contribute more than big businesses to the health and vitality of a community (Jones Reference Jones2012). Community is here typically understood to mean the local neighborhood or perhaps the city at most, rather than, say, some larger or more abstract unit such as the nation-state or a culturally defined group. Health and vitality refer to the ways in which small businesses are apparently more sensitive to the needs of the local customers; they also supposedly contribute to the authentic identity of the community, which big businesses apparently do not. Thus, even as communities have become more varied and complex, there still appears to be – at least where businesses are concerned – an expectation that the local neighborhood or city should be particularly privileged in terms of attention to developmental issues. And it is small businesses that are assumed to be better positioned than big businesses to be able to meaningfully contribute to such development, not least because the latter are assumed to be only interested in profit rather than broader ethical considerations.

Three, not only are small and big businesses construed as having different impacts on the local community, the relationship between small and big businesses is also usually presented as a contentious one, with the former often seen as being chased out of the community by the latter. Small businesses simply cannot afford to compete with big businesses, certainly not when it comes to economies of scale. Big businesses, with their better inventory supply chains, can afford to offer a wider range of products at lower prices. And any losses incurred by one outlet can, if so desired, be offset by the profits gained from another – a strategic competitive option that small businesses lack.

These ideologically rich assumptions concerning big and small businesses, and their differential impacts on the local community can be observed in some of the statements made during the closing down of Cody’s, an independent bookseller. Cody’s closed its flagship store in Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, California, due to competition from chain stores and online booksellers. According to Rubenstein and Lee (Reference Rubenstein and Lee2006):²

The demise of Cody’s is particularly interesting because Berkeley has a strong and vocal tradition of supporting local business, as the following extracts from a local online newsletter demonstrate (emphasis in original):³

In the above extracts, it is suggested that locally owned businesses contribute to the community (i.e. the neighborhood or city) by being more sensitive to the needs or desires of local residents (e.g. “friendly retreat,” “extended browsing was encouraged”), or by making the community “stronger” and by “co-creating community tastes.” The reference to “co-creation” presumably relates to the preceding point about greater sensitivity to the wishes of locals. The implication then is that big businesses are less sensitive or even simply insensitive to what locals want; they have a pre-established identity and agenda that makes them less likely to accommodate local sensitivities. Put differently, locally owned businesses are ideologically portrayed as having a more flexible and accommodating interactional regime (Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck Reference Blommaert2005: 212–13).

These ideologies about businesses and community identity are also nicely documented in Brown-Saracino’s (Reference Brown-Saracino2009) study of debates over gentrification and social preservation in three different neighborhoods. For example, in her discussion of Andersonville, a Chicago neighborhood with a strong Swedish American heritage, Brown-Saracino (Reference Brown-Saracino2009: 126–7, italics in original) points out that:

Brown-Saracino (Reference Brown-Saracino2009: 127) also quotes a young man who explained his concerns about the presence of chains in the neighborhood:

The size of a business is of course in fact quite separate from the issue of whether it is locally owned or not, even though it is generally the case that locally owned businesses tend to be small. Simply focusing on size also ignores the fact that businesses can be categorized as independents, franchises and chains. Nevertheless, the dichotomy between small and big business cannot be ignored, especially from a styling perspective. It is an ideologically significant one that businesses as well as communities draw on when engaging in public discourses. Thus, recall Chevron’s “We Agree” campaign,⁴ which consists of a series of statements that aim to show that Chevron is in touch with and shares the values of the general public (see chapter 1). Among the statements presented by Chevron are the following two:

Chevron is undoubtedly a “big business” and the statements expressed in (3–4) are intended to reflect generalized sentiments about how Chevron (and other oil companies) knows how the general public expects them to conduct themselves. The sentiments have no explicit stancetakers. They therefore represent values or attitudes that are supposed to be held by “most people” or “the general public.” Each statement, however, is accompanied by the assertion “I agree,” where the subject refers to a member of the public. Moreover, these statements are all part of Chevron’s advertising campaign, which has been named “We Agree.” This naming clearly is aiming at reflecting similar stances between Chevron and the public regarding values such as those expressed above.

The purpose of these advertisements is therefore clearly intended to explicitly convey that Chevron, despite being a big business, shares the sentiments expressed in (3–4). In order to convey just how much in touch Chevron is with these general sentiments, the online version of these statements makes use of a widget that allows the visitor, by clicking on “I agree,” to see exactly how many people also agree with these statements. For example, as of January 5, 2014, Chevron’s website reported that the number of people who agree with (3) was 46,388. And the number of people who agree with (4) was 43,245.

The Chevron example shows just how important it is for organizations to ensure that they are seen as being sensitive to the needs of communities. This is something that both small and big businesses attempt to do, though (as we will see below) there is the issue of scale that needs to be taken into account. That is, it would be disingenuous, not to say downright implausible, for a large company like Chevron to claim that the relevant community that it aims to relate to is the local neighborhood. Conversely, for a small business that is just starting up, asserting that its relevant community scale is the city or nation would be just as disingenuous. In contrast, a small business will have no problems taking the local neighborhood as its appropriate community scale.

There are consequently a number of interrelated though independent issues that we need to attend to. Therefore, to make the discussion more tractable, the first part of this chapter will focus specifically on the small and big businesses dichotomy, leaving the somewhat more nuanced discussion of independents, franchises and chains to the second half. As we will see in the course of the discussion, from the perspective of organizational styling, there are interesting things to be said about the semiotics of business identities, in particular, how different businesses attempt to establish relationships with communities.

I begin by discussing the organizational styling of a small business, Aquatic Living Laundry.

Aquatic Living Laundry

Aquatic Living Laundry is a small coin operated Laundromat located in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.⁵ In the summer of 2009, when I first visited the Laundromat, it was run by a Chinese woman. But when I visited it again in 2010, it had been taken over by new owners. Here is how the new owners introduce themselves (typographical errors are in the original; see Figure 1 below):

Figure 1 Aquatic signage

There are a number of things worth noting in (5). One, the owners aim to evoke sympathy and support by acknowledging that times are hard. Despite this, they are determined to succeed (“our mind is firm”) and are hopeful of success and expansion (“Give the best service,” “create jobs for others”). This points to the presence and influence of enterprise culture, albeit in a rather vague and general way insofar as the goal is for the business to succeed in a fairly competitive market by being sensitive to the needs of the consumer. This kind of vagueness is perhaps understandable since, as a newly created small business, it is hard for Aquatic to speak of grandiose plans without appearing immodest or unrealistic. Also, any narrative of growth and expansion would at this point be aspirational rather than a historical recount of actual achievements (chapter 3). As we will see later in the case of Walgreens, it is much easier to evoke a more fully developed narrative of enterprise retrospectively, that is, after a business has actually grown and succeeded. Hence, Aquatic’s relatively modest goals of providing good service and employment for others are probably appropriate at this early stage of its development. Even at this early stage, however, Aquatic is eager to talk about its “success stories”:

Two, the owners also present the business as a “part of this community.” One way in which Aquatic strives to manifest its claim to community membership is to feature the work of a local artist on its walls. This is a non-reciprocal relationship since the artist is not necessarily paying to have the work displayed. Nevertheless, for Aquatic, doing this helps establish its credentials as a member of the local community, concerned with local community endeavors. However, the company’s’s small size also makes it possible for it to invite a relationship of reciprocity (“bringing your business to us…gladly refer people to your business too”). This is clearly one way in which Aquatic aims to further demonstrate its sincerity in wanting to be seen as an active member of the local community. Aquatic’s invocation of a relationship of reciprocity is significant and interesting because, as we will see later in the case of a big business such as Walgreens, a relationship of reciprocity between a big business and a small community becomes less appropriate. Instead, it is more relevant to invoke a relationship of support.

Three, Scollon and Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon2003: 2) point out that discourses are often semiotically marked for just how long “in place” they are expected to be, that is, how temporarily or permanently they are expected to occupy the space that has been assigned to them. The temporariness of a sign (e.g. “Under repair,” “Closed for renovation”) can be discerned by its improvised nature or the use of fairly inexpensive materials. In this regard, it is worth observing that Aquatic’s statements in (5) are printed on a single sheet of paper and tacked onto a noticeboard (see Figure 1). This sign is clearly temporary because it is basically intended as a welcome where the new owners introduce themselves to the community. Presumably, the hope is that there will come a point where the business is sufficiently established that the sign becomes outdated.

The content aside, the typographical errors and the use of different kinds of thumbtacks (one metallic and the rest red) also index (albeit unintentionally) the temporary and improvised nature of this particular discourse. In addition to its temporary and improvised nature (or perhaps because of this), the notice in (5) does not occupy any particularly privileged spot on Aquatic’s premises. Instead, it is tacked alongside other notices such as those advertising taxi services and skin treatments. Other notices that were observed during my visit to the Laundromat included information about local theatrical performances, guitar lessons and yoga classes. This of course is a result of Aquatic’s attempt at constructing a relationship of reciprocity with the local community. But it also indicates a high degree of porosity in Aquatic’s organizational styling, where the semiotic boundaries of the business are not tightly regulated. Instead, other businesses and individual members of the local community are invited to post in a rather ad hoc manner whatever they wish on the noticeboard provided by Aquatic. Such reciprocity and porosity represent one way in which small businesses demonstrate their willingness to “create a more intimate dialogue that co-creates community tastes” (see above).

Four, Aquatic is keen to emphasize that its laundry services are in line with the ethical regime of being environmentally friendly, as shown in (7). While the use of a non-toxic solvent is needed in order to comply with the regulations imposed by San Francisco, the phrasing is intended to convey Aquatic’s sincere commitment to being “green” regardless of any externally imposed obligation.

These observations – the evocation of a (nascent) enterprise culture, the congruence between small business size and a relationship of reciprocity, the utilization of temporary and improvised signage, the porosity in the organization’s semiotic boundaries, and the commitment to an ethical regime beyond just the profit imperative – provide useful points of comparison when we move on to discuss the case of Walgreens, a big business.

For Walgreens, the scale of the community that it serves appears to be that of the city and beyond. Thus, various Walgreens stores in San Francisco declare themselves to be “proudly serving San Francisco since 1937,” and the company’s website describes itself as “America’s premier pharmacy.”⁶

Walgreens signage

Walgreens is a highly successful and established pharmacy “with 425 new stores opening each year and 7,000 planned by 2010.” Unlike Aquatic, whose presentation of itself as a newly set up and struggling business motivates its plea for sympathy and (reciprocal) support from the local community, a key aspect of Walgreens’ organizational styling is the success that it has already achieved. And this success is narrativized in relation to enterprise culture, where qualities such as the ability to innovate and capitalize on market opportunities are attributed to the founder, Charles R. Walgreen Sr., as well as his successors, as seen in the extracts below. Tellingly, the introduction to the historical narrative carries the headline shown in (8), the reference to innovation, growth and leadership unequivocally proclaiming that the story of Walgreens is also a story about enterprise.

The extracts in (8–10) would appear to violate some kind of Modesty Maxim (Leech Reference Leech1983: 132), given Walgreens’ assertion that it is “one of the most respected American corporations” (9) and the series of rhetorical questions in (10) suggesting that qualities such as the provision of “super customer service,” “innovations in merchandising” and “commitment to providing genuine value to the customer” were embraced and realized by Walgreen while at the same time absent in other pharmacists. While such assertions might be construed as unduly immodest, it is important to recognize that the competitive element so prevalent in enterprise culture has the consequence that promotional discourse is increasingly an acceptable “condition of contemporary culture” (Wernick Reference Wernick1991: 181, see also chapter 3). The apparent lack of modesty is also mitigated by the suggestion (especially clear in (10)) that the various qualities that Walgreens is proud of are qualities that are geared towards maximizing the benefit to customers. That is, the qualities that Walgreens is touting are presented as not being solely about itself but about how it has succeeded in serving others. This orientation towards the consumer, too, is a key feature of enterprise culture. One prominent feature of enterprise culture is that the consumer is “sovereign,” since it is the consumer who exerts “a high degree of control over what is produced” (Keat Reference Keat, Keat and Abercrombie1991a: 6–7; see also Corner and Harvey Reference Corner and Harvey1991: 11; Keat Reference Keat, Keat and Abercrombie1991b: 227). Enterprising producers (such as Walgreens – both the man Walgreen and the organization Walgreens) are those who are most able to anticipate, keep up with, and even influence consumer expectations.

The enterprise culture narrative is sustained until the very end (11), where Walgreens emphasizes the success it has achieved (“Today, with 425 new stores opening each year …”) as well as its confident anticipation of further success (“Walgreens continues to innovate”). And as noted previously, there is a shift where the enterprising qualities that were originally associated with the founder Charles Walgreen are now presented as qualities attributable to the organization itself. Thus, we have “Walgreen grew increasingly knowledgeable …” (10) and “Walgreens continues to innovate” (11).

The final sentence in (11) (“After all, you can’t move forward if you’re standing still.”) is especially interesting because the second person pronoun “you” is a generic reference, which gives the sentence the status of a proverb. Proverbs, as White (Reference White, Holland and Quinn1987: 151) points out, are generally regarded as “repositories of folk wisdom…essentially concerned with morality, with evaluating and shaping courses of action and thus are frequently used in contexts of legal and moral argumentation.” The fact that Walgreens chooses to end its narrative with this particular proverb points to the taken-for-granted nature about the various assumptions associated with enterprise culture, in this case, the need to be constantly taking active and strategic steps to shape one’s future. Content aside, proverbs are pragmatically markers of high performance. They achieve their pragmatic effect by getting listeners to appreciate that some common sense or folk wisdom is being conveyed via formulaic language (White Reference White, Holland and Quinn1987: 168–9) and in this way, are form-focused because attention is drawn to the poetic and metalinguistic functions of language (Coupland Reference Coupland2007: 147).

Walgreens’ considerable success makes it inappropriate for the organization to be asking for a relationship of reciprocity. Rather, as a very successful business chain, Walgreens’ relationship is one of support to multiple communities. Thus, consider (12–13).⁷ Extract (12) carries the heading “In your neighborhood.” This contrasts nicely with Aquatic, which, as we saw, presented itself as a member of the neighborhood. Walgreens’ use of the second person possessive pronoun makes it clear that while the organization is keen to help, it does not claim to be a member of the local neighborhood. And this is further evidenced by the text, which explains that Walgreens has collaborated with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) to provide health services:

In a similar vein, (13) carries the heading “Giving back to the community.” Again, this is consistent with the stance already observed in (12), where Walgreens, rather than claiming to be a member of a single or specific community, is instead presented as providing services to many different communities, in this case, spreading from the East to the West coast of the United States.

The contrast between the kinds of community relationships that Walgreens and Aquatic attempt to construct confronts us with the issue of scalability (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2003: 608; Herod and Wright Reference Herod, Wright, Herod and Wright2002). Scale is often conceptualized in terms of “the bounding of areal units, with the ‘urban scale’ or the ‘regional scale’ or the ‘national scale’ or the ‘global scale’ being seen to encircle all those within a particular territorial expanse” (Herod and Wright Reference Herod, Wright, Herod and Wright2002: 6). This does not deny that scales are semiotic phenomena that are socially produced and negotiated, and it raises the interesting question of the extent to which actors are freely able to move across scales (ibid.: 10–11). In this regard, our observations of Walgreens and Aquatic suggest that organizations do face certain scalar constraints in terms of the kinds of communities they wish to relate to. As a business grows from “small” to “big,” it would appear that relationships have to shift from ones of reciprocity to ones of support. Thus, a big business that insists on a relationship of reciprocity with a local neighborhood might easily be accused of being petty. In contrast, a small business that aims to address the global community might be considered overly ambitious. In either case, questions might be raised as to just how sincere each organization is about achieving the community-related goals that it has set for itself. Related to this issue of appropriateness in scale, I suggest that organizations may in fact be ideologically constrained so that a movement across scales may not only be mandated, but the “scalar leap” (Herod and Wright Reference Herod, Wright, Herod and Wright2002: 4) is also accompanied by a forgoing of the smaller scale. That is, the movement across scales is not cumulative so that as an organization grows in size, it retains its smaller scale community relationships while accumulating newer larger scale community relationships. Rather, there is a “doughnut” effect where the leap to the larger scale means that the smaller scale has effectively “dropped out.”⁸ In other words, Walgreens is no longer a member of the local neighborhood in the way that Aquatic is, even though Walgreens may have started off as a neighborhood drugstore (9). Its current status as a large pharmaceutical chain means that it has forgone any claim to neighborhood status, even though it has stores located in specific neighborhoods throughout the USA. Similarly, should Aquatic achieve the same level of success as Walgreens (in this case, by having a chain of Laundromats), it too will have to forgo any claim to being a neighborhood business, despite having started off as one.

This doughnut effect in the case of organizational styling contrasts with that of persons, where it is still possible for an individual who has achieved a high degree of success to scale down. Thus, consider descriptions of the Hollywood movie star George Clooney as a “regular guy,” when he decided to stay at a modestly priced hotel while filming the movie Michael Clayton. The hotel staff described him as “low maintenance” and someone who tried to “blend in with the locals.”⁹ Similarly, residents of the town of Tioga have also described the country singer Randy Travis as another “regular guy” because of his volunteerism, community work and because “he treats people the way he’d like to be treated.”¹⁰ From a scalar perspective, what we have here are instances where individuals can stylistically scale downwards from their higher social status (in this case, status arising from their celebrity).

But why would such downward scaling not be possible in the case of organizations? Put differently, why is the scale upwards transformative for organizations in a way that it is not for persons? To understand why, we have to return to the ontological differences between persons and organizations. Persons have both personal and professional identities, and while upward scaling is manifested in one’s professional identity, the ability to shed the trappings of successful upward scaling is manifested in one’s personal identity. In other words, in the case of persons, downward scaling occurs in the personal identity domain. Hence, the references in the cases of Clooney and Travis are to them being “regular guys,” that is, people without airs. In contrast, organizations have no personal and professional identities. Being entities that have been constructed to pursue particular goals, organizations have only professional identities. As a consequence, the upward scaling of an organization encompasses the organization’s identity as a whole. There is no personal aspect that the organization can shift into in order to scale downwards.

Let us now move on to consider the issue of signage. Recall that Aquatic made use of a clearly improvised sign, in the form of a printed sheet with typographical errors, to introduce itself to the neighborhood. In contrast, the signage in Walgreens does not index improvisation. It is carefully prepared using relatively expensive materials and quite likely constructed by a professional organization that specializes in creating signs (rather than constructed in-house). The signage is also unified in that all Walgreens stores carry the same sign, with careful attention given to ensure that the color, font and materials are consistent across each token of the sign. This attention to the unified nature of the signage is of course commonplace with large organizations, to ensure that organizational styling is as consistent as possible. Thus, in their discussion of the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway, for example, Scollon and Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon2003: 122) point out that “In Hong Kong the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) is another unified complex which carries throughout its entities a single semiotic system. Throughout the territory color schemes, train, station, and platform designs, colors, and materials are uniform.”

This attention to semiotic unification, not surprisingly, also means that Walgreens’ organizational styling, unlike Aquatic’s, is less porous. This is not to suggest that Walgreens would never allow the posting of local businesses or neighborhood activities on a signboard. Rather, we would anticipate that should such a signboard be made available, it would be specifically dedicated to businesses and activities that are clearly signaled as distinct and separate from Walgreens. The Aquatic situation is observed in Figure 1, where postings from Aquatic are – in terms of the materials employed in sign preparation as well as in terms of spatial location – mixed together with postings from outside Aquatic. We might even expect there to be more active policing of the boundaries between Walgreens and that which is not Walgreens, so that, for example, individuals who wished to have their notices placed on the signboard might be asked to first submit these for formal approval. This would help to ensure that Walgreens exerts greater control over those activities or businesses with which it wants to be associated, or be seen as supporting.¹¹

Finally, recall that Aquatic prided itself on its “green initiatives.” The issue of environmental sustainability is an ethical regime that many businesses want to be seen as being committed to, and Walgreens is no exception, as seen in (14). However, as befits a large company, the scope of Walgreens’ commitment is much more ambitious than that of Aquatic. Thus, the company uses energy-efficient light bulbs in its stores, has installed solar panels in its various stores across the country, and even plans to offer electric vehicle charging stations.

In addition to the dimension of scope, Walgreens is also involved in multiple ethical regimes. The “Social Responsibility” link on its website includes references to “disability inclusion initiatives” and a “commitment to diversity.” These commitments to environmental sustainability, disability inclusion and diversity are, strictly speaking, ancillary goals. However, what Walgreens wants to communicate is that these goals are deeply integrated into the way the company goes about its business, as seen in (15), the introductory statement to Walgreens’ various social responsibility initiatives. This, as we have already noted, is where sincerity as a dimension of organizational styling comes into play. This focus on sincerity is sustained (how else to be sincere?) in the more specific descriptions of Walgreens’ activities, as the different statements in (16) show.

Organizational sincerity is also demonstrated by the telling of “small stories” (Bamberg Reference Bamberg2006; Georgakopoulou Reference Georgakopoulou2006), in this case, short anecdotes that serve as concrete illustrations of Walgreens’ commitment to various ethical regimes, such as the commitment to diversity (17), environmental sustainability (18) and disability inclusion (19).

Unlike the traditional focus on large-scale biographies that highlight temporal distance and self-reflection (Bamberg Reference Bamberg2006: 146), the notion of small stories is instead “an umbrella-term that covers a gamut of under-represented narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell” (Georgakopoulou Reference Georgakopoulou2006: 123). While the category is undoubtedly a heterogeneous one, small stories typically are shorter “snippets of talk” that have a more dynamic and immediate nature (ibid.: 123, 126). Thus, they are not just smaller in length (i.e. shorter than biographies); they are also smaller in scope or ambition (i.e. less concerned with ruminating over the significance of a life story and what this says about the way the narrator remembers herself or wishes to be remembered, than with reworking “slices of life”) (ibid.: 126). As with the notion of styling, the notions of large-scale biographies and small stories cannot be directly mapped onto organizations. Nevertheless, these notions are useful for shedding light on organizational styling. The organizational equivalent of large-scale biographies would be narratives of growth and expansion. The equivalent of small stories would be these anecdotes presented by Walgreens to update the general public about its various activities, as well as the “success stories” presented by Aquatic (6). These anecdotes serve to highlight “personal” experiences. These are “personal” in that they have been selected by the organization to highlight details about specific individuals or specific events. Moreover, with the use of multimedia, many of these small stories are readily available for public consumption, since any visitor to the Walgreens site, for example, can access them in the form of videos so that emotional nuances of these stories are conveyed in more than just words.

Localizing community relationships

Joseph (Reference Joseph2002: vii) points out that the notion of a community is “almost always invoked as an unequivocal good, an indicator of a high quality of life, a life of human understanding, caring, selflessness, belonging.” In this “discourse of community” (Joseph Reference Joseph2002: 1), notions of the local are often conjoined with that of community and contrasted against the apparently deleterious effects of capitalism and big business. Joseph (Reference Joseph2002: 147, italics in original) observes:

Joseph’s remarks serve to recall the observations that were made at the very beginning of this chapter, in particular, the claim that small businesses are better than big businesses for the health of a community. The basis for the claim lies precisely in the assumption that the notion of a community refers to a naturalized collectivity, and more specifically one that exists independently of any links to capitalism (ibid.: 1). This romanticized portrayal of the community suggests that any business (small or big) is presented as existing quite separately from the community proper. Nevertheless, small businesses are more easily seen as contributing more positively than their big business counterparts to the health of a community because they find it easier to establish themselves as members of the community, not least because of the kind of community relationship that they can engage in.

At this point, it is worth noting the following. One, as the discussion in the preceding section shows, the particularity of details involved in small stories means that organizational anecdotes are one very useful means by which an organization (big or small) can attempt to form more localized relationships with communities. By highlighting specific individuals or specific locales, these anecdotes help organizations to legitimize their claims that they are interested in the welfare of those communities that the featured individuals come from or where the locales are sited.

Two, we have seen that porosity is a relevant dimension in how the semiotic boundaries of organizations are regulated, with a small business like Aquatic being much more porous than a big business like Walgreens. Porosity is one important way in which an organization is able to engage in a more “intimate dialogue that co-creates community tastes,” and this is perhaps why small businesses are therefore perceived as being more sensitive than big businesses to the needs and wants of a community. That said, it is important to bear in mind that big businesses are constrained by a general expectation of consistency and uniformity in their organizational styling, and it is this very expectation that in turn makes it difficult for a large organization to be as porous as a small one.

This leads to the third point. It is clear that businesses, big or small, are faced with societal expectations that they should be interested in more than just their profit margins. Organizations also have to demonstrate that they are sensitive to ethical regimes such as environmental sustainability, respect for diverse identities and concern for disabled individuals. And here, it seems clear that big businesses can contribute in ways that small businesses might find more difficult to do. For example, Walgreens’ ability to provide free health screening to over 3,000 communities is simply beyond the ability of a small and struggling startup like Aquatic to match. We saw that a small business like Aquatic instead invoked a relationship of reciprocity, that is, for Aquatic to continue operating (and thus continue with its “green initiatives”), it is reliant on the continued patronage of members of the local neighborhood even as it hopes to contribute in return to the success of other surrounding businesses. In contrast, the much larger scale of Walgreens required that it invoke a relationship of support to multiple communities, so that its provision of health screening to a particular community is not necessarily dependent in return on patronage from that community. This relationship of support is the organizational equivalent of noblesse oblige. At the same time, however, this broader scope of community engagement inevitably serves to maintain a more distant relationship between Walgreens and the many communities it supports. The result is also a less intimate relationship with a specific community, which might explain why big business is often seen as antithetical to, as Joseph (above) puts it, the “particularity of identity.”

Finally, it is useful to remind ourselves, as Joseph (Reference Joseph2002) has tried to do, not to over-romanticize the notion of community, since enterprise culture has also affected the ways in which members of a community view “their” community. Thus, in a rather disturbing example of how commodification can change the perception and attitudes of residents in a neighborhood, Rushkoff (Reference Rushkoff2009: xi−xii, italics in original) describes what happened after he was mugged in front of his Brooklyn apartment:

Rushkoff’s experience speaks (albeit indirectly) to one of the key themes of this book. A house is not just a place where one lives. It also has fluctuating market values, which can be affected by how outsiders (i.e. potential buyers) view the community. And as in Rushkoff’s experience, sometimes the desire to maximize market values can take priority over protecting the lived experiences of current residents, and this desire for market maximization can on occasion be traced to the residents themselves. This should actually not be too surprising. Even though community is often portrayed as something that has to be protected from the encroachment of business, especially big business, the actual conduct of community life itself might well be converging towards business-related concerns given the reach and hegemonic status of enterprise culture where everyone is enjoined to be enterprising (chapter 3). The notion of community, it has to be acknowledged, has been essentialized as a construct imbued with attributes of purity and nostalgia, both understood as the desire for and the invented remembrance of a time when life was untainted by the effects of commerce. It is this essentialization that allows small businesses, almost to the point of a default, to assume the ideological role of “victim” vis-à-vis big businesses.

Independents and chains: tales of different cafés

The goal in this chapter is to understand the styling constraints and affordances that accrue to small and big businesses. The first part of this chapter, with its focus on Aquatic and Walgreens, is just one part of this goal. It serves to bring into relief two properties − semiotic porosity and the scale of community relationship − that we now explore further in this second part of the discussion.

Though the comparison between Aquatic and Walgreens has been useful because of their differences in size, they are also “two different kinds of businesses…because one sells mainly services and the other mainly goods [and] they probably serve different types of consumers.”¹² The goal of this second part, then, is to keep the kind of business constant. In this regard, I now focus on cafés to control for the kind of business involved, with the variable then being size. As we now see, the observations about semiotic porosity and type of community relationship made in the context of comparing Aquatic with Walgreens are still borne out when we look at cafés.

Semiotic porosity: Café String and Starbucks

Consider Café String,¹³ a small independent café located in Sodermalm, a somewhat bohemian district in Stockholm. Café String displays a relatively high degree of semiotic porosity in that it has a refrigerator standing next to the restroom. The front of the refrigerator is plastered with posters advertising local performances, workshops and the sale of various items. According to the barista, “Anyone” can put up a poster there. In contrast, Wayne’s Coffee is a popular Swedish franchise,¹⁴ with outlets all over Stockholm, including Sodermalm. As might be expected, there is greater regulatory control to ensure a consistency of styling across the different stores, and porosity is much less evident.

This greater regulatory control and consequent lessening of semiotic porosity is also observable in the case of Starbucks. Unlike Wayne’s Coffee, Starbucks does allow and encourage its patrons to post notices. However, Starbucks outlets have a carefully crafted noticeboard made of cork (rather than a makeshift refrigerator surface) specifically created for patrons to post community-related activities, including photos showing them and the Starbucks staff having a good time. The noticeboards in the Starbucks cafés, such as those in Singapore, contain a printed statement from the management reminding patrons that they are only intended for “sharing information, not selling stuff” (observed January 4, 2012). Thus, Starbucks exhibits greater regulatory control to ensure semiotic consistency and uniformity across its various stores (Scollon and Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2003: 122, see also above), with the consequence that it is less semiotically porous than Café String – certainly at least with regard to the posting of notices by patrons.

The scale of community relationships: Caffe Greco and Peets

Caffe Greco is an independent San Franciscan café. According to Caffe Greco’s website:¹⁵

Consider now the following, which is a description of how Hanna Suleiman, the owner of Caffe Greco, played a key role in making outdoor seating more commonly available in the neighborhood:¹⁶

The above extract demonstrates Caffe Greco’s status as an active member of the local community, in this case, the neighborhood of North Beach. Hanna Suleiman, the owner of Greco, was a prime mover in getting the city of San Francisco to license outdoor seating, getting a petition signed by customers as well as other merchants. The scale of Caffe Greco’s immediate concern is the neighborhood rather than anything larger, though in this case, the city itself was ultimately drawn into the issue leading to a citywide change that allowed outdoor seating to be more easily provided by various merchants.

Yet another indicator of Caffe Greco’s smaller (and hence, more ostensibly “local”) scale of community involvement comes from the fact that, especially during the warm summer days, it places a water dish on the sidewalk where the outdoor seating is located. This water dish is for dogs, and it is a gesture much appreciated by passers-by who walk their (occasionally thirsty) dogs. From a styling perspective, it is worth noting that the water dish also has written on it “Greco *HEART* Dogs.” The purpose of this highly reflexive statement is of course to leave no doubt in anyone’s minds as to which establishment deserves credit for providing water for the local dogs.

At this point, it is worth making a brief comparison with Starbucks and its provision of a noticeboard for community postings (although “selling stuff” is not allowed – see above). The Starbucks noticeboard was presented as an example of lessened semiotic porosity (especially when compared with Café String). But there is in fact a connection between semiotic porosity and the scale of community relationship. This emerges quite clearly if we compare Caffe Greco’s provision of a water dish or Café String’s refrigerator, on the one hand, with Starbucks’ noticeboard, on the other. For both Caffe Greco and Café String, the provision of the water dish and the refrigerator are, respectively, oriented towards the scale of the local neighborhood. The semiotic porosity is indicated by the improvised and somewhat ad hoc nature of these provisions. That is, both the water dish and the refrigerator are present as part of the material dimensions of their respective café’s stylings, but there is a potential temporariness to their presence precisely because of their improvised nature. For example, Café String may well decide at some point to remove the refrigerator (with or without replacing it with something functionally equivalent to serve as a noticeboard). And more concretely, there appears to be no strict schedule to Caffe Greco’s provision of a water dish. If the staff is too busy or happens to forget, there may not be a water dish on that particular day.

In contrast, Starbucks’ use of a dedicated noticeboard that was specially constructed indexes both less improvisation and the management’s long-term commitment to the noticeboard’s continued presence and availability. And together with the accompanying statement from the management that the noticeboard should not be used to advertise items for selling, this also indexes regular surveillance on the part of Starbucks to monitor for proper usage. Thus, while the noticeboard is certainly Starbucks’ attempt to engage with the local community, its less improvised nature and the statement from the management also point towards a higher scale than the immediate neighborhood. This is because these attributes suggest a semiotic uniformity that pervades Starbucks outlets in general rather than a styling that is particular to a specific neighborhood (unlike Caffe Greco’s water dish or Café String’s refrigerator). In this way, the lessened semiotic porosity of Starbucks’ noticeboard cannot help but mitigate its attempt to be seen as fully engaged in the local neighborhood.

All this is not too surprising because scales are ultimately discursive constructs, which means that organizations may try to influence the scale of particular interactions by “upscaling” or “downscaling” (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2006: 9). However, scaling is not just a spatial notion, it is a semiotic phenomenon that involves both space as well as time, so that a lower scale carries suggestions of the “local/situated” as well as the “momentary” while a higher scales suggests the “translocal/widespread” as well as the “timeless” (ibid.: 5). What this means is that the shift from one scale to another cannot merely be understood in spatial terms; it also carries temporal implications. Ibid. (4–5) describes the spatial and temporal dimensions of scaling as follows:

Starbucks’ provision of a noticeboard can be seen as an attempt at “downscaling,” but its need to ensure semiotic uniformity also points beyond the immediate/momentary towards something that is more widespread/timeless. Koller (Reference Koller2007) makes a similar observation in her analysis of the HSBC banking group’s presentation of itself as a “glocal” brand. While its slogan “The world’s local bank” aims to position the bank “as a provider of both global amenities and local ‘authenticity’” (ibid.: 115), its various discourses are largely skewed towards the global rather than the local (ibid.: 125). Semiotic uniformity across organizational chains and franchises is therefore not merely a spatial issue but also a temporal one. Such uniformity does not preclude the possibility of change, of course. But it indexes an organizational styling that – if there were any changes to be made – is motivated by the consideration of factors emanating from “elsewhere” or the non-local. This in turn indexes an organization that, certainly by comparison with small local ones, is seen to be less receptive or responsive to more immediate concerns.

Blommaert’s (Reference Blommaert2006: 8) remarks about “bureaucratic encounters” also suggest an explanation as to why downscaling strategies are unable to escape the semiotics of the higher scale:

The directionality of Blommaert’s remarks is from the local or individual cases to a more general category where general rules of bureaucracy apply. Given our own observations about reduced semiotic porosity as organizations become more established, we can reverse this directionality. Locally oriented organizational stylings are extracted from the more general stylings already imposed to ensure semiotic uniformity and minimally adapted to be inserted into local contexts. Such adaptations inevitably still index their primarily non-local semiotic origins and emphasis.

Conclusion: Ya Kun − A Virtual Longitudinal Study

We have seen that, as an organization grows, we might expect it to become semiotically less porous, with concomitant implications for the scale of any community relationship that it might attempt to construct.¹⁷ While the discussion in this chapter has considered a number of examples, it has to be admitted that an ideal demonstration would involve a longitudinal study tracking the expansion of an organization. Unfortunately, not every small business necessarily grows or even survives.

But in lieu of such a longitudinal study, we can consider the styling of Ya Kun, a Singaporean coffee chain that started off under extremely humble circumstances. According to the company’s website, Ya Kun traces its beginnings to the 1940s, when its founder, Ah Koon, would scribble his customers’ orders on the same countertop that had also served as his bed.¹⁸ This means that Ah Koon essentially worked and slept in the same space; his use of the countertop as a writing surface as well as a bed is a clear testament to his industry, his lack of material resources and thus his willingness to improvise. The following extract from Ya Kun’s website, unsurprisingly, emphasizes this modest beginning and frames it within enterprise culture:

It is therefore more than reasonable to suggest that in those early days, any manifestation of organizational styling during that time would therefore have been extremely semiotically porous, mainly because Ah Koon was working hard just to keep the business going and devoting attention to regulating his business’s identity would have probably not been a priority, if at all.

However, when the business became more established about fifteen years later, the stall was then officially named “Ya Kun Coffeestall.” “Ya Kun” is the hanyu pinyin equivalent of “Ah Koon.” Here, already, the use of pinyin indicates an attempt to more carefully regulate styling by paying attention to language use. In the late 1990s, the stall became known as “Ya Kun Kaya Toast Coffeestall,” a company managed by Ah Koon’s children and today it is a successful franchise with outlets all over Singapore as well as Taiwan, the Philippines, Dubai and India. The company’s website uses mainly English and Mandarin. There are Vision and Mission statements that espouse a commitment to establishing Ya Kun as a “household name in Singapore and Asia” and also to “excellence in its customer service.” The company logo has white letters against a burgundy background, and this color scheme is followed in the actual outlets, which uses white tables, and burgundy chairs set against burgundy walls. The goal of this greater control over styling (and hence, the lessened semiotic porosity) is to present the various manifestations of Ya Kun as a coherent and semiotically unified entity.

Ya Kun has obviously come a long way since the coffee stall was first founded by Ah Koon. A cup of coffee from Ya Kun costs about SGD1.70, compared with SGD0.80 for something similar available from the local coffeeshops or hawker centers, which would be the contemporary equivalent of Ah Koon’s earlier setup.

Ya Kun is now a “big business” and as such, it presents a contrast to “small businesses.” While Ya Kun still tries to maintain a strong association with the “early days of Singapore when coolies and hardworking immigrants from China toiled away at the ports and trading houses” (Koh Reference Koh2010: 1–2), the doughnut effect is evidenced by the fact that Ya Kun’s presence in a local neighborhood would probably be seen as part of a gentrification process, with its prices clearly higher than what some Singaporeans, especially the older folk, might be prepared to pay. Thus, a retiree (quoted in Wee, C. F. Reference Wee2013) expresses his preference for the “80 cents-a-cup coffee from the market.”