Forty years of IKEA kitchens and the rise of a neoliberal control of domestic space

Abstract

This article uses a social semiotic approach to look at the representations and designs of kitchens in the IKEA catalogue from 1975 until 2016. The authors find a shift from function to lifestyle of the order observed by scholars of advertising. But using Fairclough’s concepts of ‘technologization’ in Discourse and Social Change (1992) and Van Leeuwen’s New Writing (2006) concept, they are able to dig deeper to show that there are four stages of kitchen that become, they argue, more and more codified, with increasing prescription over the meaning of space and also regarding what takes place there. Such coding aligns with the ideas, values and identities of neoliberalism: ‘flexible’, ‘dynamic’, ‘creative’, ‘solutions’ and ‘self-management’. The authors show how the features of New Writing allow a suppression of actual causalities and context, and permit symbolic and indexical meanings to take over. Domestic life itself becomes technologized, coded and stripped down to a number of symbols and indexical meanings which assemble easily into the requirements of the neoliberal order.

Neoliberalizing news discourse: A semio-discursive reading of news gamification

“…Significantly, the hybrid discourses, Pirate encompasses, mark a transformation from the informative functionality of news discourse to the aesthetic experience of affective immersion and interactive engagement. From a linguistic lens, Ledin and Machin (2018) attribute what they call the 'affective functionality' of social discourses to the medium of technologized social events in a process of the indexical coding of various semiotic elements. From a journalistic perspective, the ludic design of the Gamified Pirate can be described in the words of Papacharissi (2015) as a 'hybrid production' of 'affective news' since it supports the subjective experience and emotional immersion of the news user.…”

“…New Writing is a type of communication that relies mainly on visual resources and multimodal interaction, rather than on verbal resources alone. Ledin and Machin (2018) argue that the concept of New Writing 'goes hand in hand with technologization and the drive to increase control over communication ' (p. 4). They provide an example with newspaper design which deploys the semiotics of fonts, colours, images and layout to codify specific attitudes and identities to readers.…”

“…Most of the social and institutional sectors undergo a transformation of their activities to fit the neoliberal metaphor (Oleksenko et al, 2018: 114). In this regard, post-modern neoliberal rationality instantiates a reconfiguration of various social disciplines such as the sectors of education (Bamberger et al, 2019; Gray et al, 2018; Ng, 2014), medicine (Defibaugh, 2019), architecture (Spencer, 2016), interior design (Ledin and Machin, 2018; Roderick, 2016), video games (Baerg, 2014; Oliva et al, 2016) and media (Phelan, 2014). That is to say, neoliberalism becomes a ‘hegemonic paradigm’ (Bello, 2009) that extends to reach all social sectors.…”

Alphabet city: orthographic differentiation and branding in late capitalist cities

“…I conclude this section by teasing out the connections between letter-based city logos and what Theo Van Leeuwen (2008) has referred to as "new writing" (also Ledin and Machin 2019). Van Leeuwen (2008) identifies the emergence of new forms of writing in online media technologies, computer software, and digitalization.…”

Design incorporated: IKEA as personal experience

“…The third wave was in providing convenience of buying all what customer needs for his/her home under one roof, where you are free to try, chose and combine; the fourth wave has been a convenience of changing your domestic environment according to your taste, mood and fashion trend you follow (Dahlvig et al 2003, Hambrick et al 2005. Technologization, dynamics and a concept of home as a place for experimentation is what has been dominating the brand discourse in recent years (Ledin & Machin, 2018). Generally speaking, accessible (convenient) pricing has been the only element of the mix that IKEA always had as a strict policy, but it is in a 'natural'…”