Flexibly Specialized Agencies? Reflexivity, Identity, and the Advertising Industry

In this paper I examine the process of restructuring in advertising, an image-oriented industry, in the context of debates over flexible specialization and reflexive modernization. There have been far-reaching changes in the US advertising industry in the 1980s and 1990s, including the recent expansion of small, flexible, and more creatively based agencies or ‘boutiques’. The growth of creative agencies reveals a desire on the part of advertisers to reroute rising consumer skepticism of advertising by producing more reflexive, innovative work and signals a heightened apparatus of control. The case of advertising raises questions about the limits to reflexive consumer subjectivities.