ABOUT THIS BOOK
We see it all the time: organizations strive to persuade the public to change beliefs or behavior through expensive, expansive media campaigns. Designers painstakingly craft clear, resonant, and culturally sensitive messaging that will motivate people to buy a product, support a cause, vote for a candidate, or take active steps to improve their health. But once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate, the public interprets and distorts the campaigns in ways their designers never intended or dreamed. In Best Laid Plans, Terence E. McDonnell explains why these attempts at mass persuasion often fail so badly.
McDonnell argues that these well-designed campaigns are undergoing “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. Using AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana, as its central case study, the book walks readers through best-practice, evidence-based media campaigns that fall totally flat. Female condoms are turned into bracelets, AIDS posters become home decorations, red ribbons fade into pink under the sun—to name a few failures. These damaging cultural misfires are not random. Rather, McDonnell makes the case that these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable—indicative of a broader process of cultural entropy.
REVIEWS
“Best Laid Plans compels us to question how nonprofits, governments, and corporations manipulate meaning. Whether it is the public health campaigns in Ghana promoting HIV prevention or the promotion of political candidates or branded commodities, we find conflicts between the meanings marketers want to convey and the understandings the target audiences privilege. This book offers a biography of public relations campaigns that have largely missed their mark and asks why. How do meanings, practices, and audiences interact to promote behavior change? And why do audiences use products and services in ways that the marketers did not intend? The answers are surprising and the explanations strong.”
— Frederick F. Wherry, Yale University
“Best Laid Plans makes a significant contribution to sociological scholarship about AIDS, combining global, cultural, and organizational sociology. McDonnell’s main theory of cultural entropy is useful beyond the case of AIDS campaigns in Ghana. Scholars of culture will find it a helpful concept for understanding how culture is received, taken up, and used in innovative and sometimes subversive ways. This is a smart, innovative, and compelling book.”
— Claire Decoteau, author of Ancestors and Antiretrovirals
“Materiality has moved squarely to the center of sociological inquiry thanks to McDonnell’s pathbreaking work. ‘Cultural entropy’ and ‘taking cultural objects as objects’ extends our theoretical understanding of socio-communicative processes, while McDonnell’s acute readings of urban landscapes and mediascapes offer an entirely fresh view of cities in all their semiotic multiplicity. This book changes the way we see the world.”
— Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University
“Best Laid Plans is well written with smart analysis and presents a useful theoretical lens that will surely find wide application. Highly recommended.”
— Choice
“McDonnell provides powerful insights into cultural entropy that systematically undermined the effectiveness of AIDS campaigns in Ghana. . . . The verbatim quotes, many pictures and posters, vignettes, and personal experiences make Best LaidPlans a well-written book. It is appropriate for graduate students in public health, sociology, psychology, communication, and media studies. It is also an important read for health educators and health workers across the globe who work for health promotion and interventions. This book also provides much important information for entrepreneurs who use advertisements or campaigns to persuade clients.”
— Social Forces
“An eye-opening read for anyone engaged in health communication and public health.”
— Medical Anthropology Quarterly
“McDonnell opens an important and necessary door in this book. It is one that culture scholars (even the most ardent nonmaterialists among them) should consider following him through.”
— American Journal of Sociology
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0001
[modern interventions;unintended consequences;instrumental rationality;limited media effects;HIV;media campaigns;cultural entropy;AIDS;epidemic]
To achieve their goals, organizations need to communicate to the public and persuade them to align their beliefs and behaviors with the organizations’ interests. Organizations are taking an increasingly instrumental approach to this work. Like other modern interventions, communication campaigns have become increasingly routinized, based on standardized procedures based on success cases. These best practices of design have their history in attempts to control populations through propaganda. These attempts usually engender limited media effects. The chapter introduces the case of HIV/AIDS media campaigns in Ghana that likewise attempt to shape behavior. It suggests AIDS campaigns haven’t been successful, often disrupted by the misinterpretation and misuse of campaign objects because the instrumental views of culture organizations rely on can’t account for the dynamics of everyday life. Seen this way, cultural entropy also offers a new explanation for the failure of AIDS campaigns specifically and modern interventions broadly. This explanation accounts for why campaigns fail even when there isn’t active resistance from the population. (pages 1 - 16)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Cultural Entropy - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0002
[cultural entropy;cultural objects;materiality;instability;actor-network theory;interpretive arrangements;polyvocality;pragmatism;reception theory;intentionality]
As cultural objects move from interaction to interaction—crafted by designers, vetted by opinion leaders and the community, circulated through public space, interpreted by the public—somewhere along the way they stop doing what they were intended to do. The energy invested in an object sometimes flows along the intended path, moving people to change their beliefs and behavior in ways aligned with organizational goals (i.e. encouraging condom use or abstinence). Often, though, an object’s energy diffuses or diverts along unintended trajectories. Polyvocality is always possible, as these alternative paths are built into the interpretive arrangements of people, objects, and settings. This potential instability is due to the shared symbolic and material qualities of arrangements. Organizations can mitigate entropy to some degree, but they can never entirely eliminate the possibility of entropy because interpretive arrangements never perfectly stabilize. Cultural entropy suggests that culture is far more complex than designers’ instrumental view. In addition, the concept helps us move past the audience-based explanations for polyvocality that have dominated cultural sociology for two decades. Both designers and reception theorists view audiences as too static and as the central source of alternative interpretations. The chapter borrows heavily from actor-network theory, Pragmatism, and theories of materiality. (pages 17 - 46)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. The Cultural Topography of Accra - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0003
[sociology of knowledge;cultural topography;authority;visual culture;stigma;traditional medicine;news media;faith healing;herbalists;AIDS]
Chapter two maps the cultural topography of Accra by accounting for the complex field of objects, meanings, and practice that establish an ambiguous environment through which Ghanaians make meanings and choices about AIDS. In particular, I highlight the competing sources of authority that enable contradictory interpretations of AIDS and the ways the streetscape provides a scaffolding for these ambiguities. AIDS campaigns negotiate local structures and sources of meaning and power, from rumor and myth, spirited church pastors, herbalists and faith healers, to medical science, government interests, and the news media. Not only are these understandings of AIDS supported by various cultural authorities, the streetscape supports these systems of knowledge through the visual culture of billboards and advertising by herbalists and traditional healers. This chapter makes clear the difficulties health organizations have navigating these varied sources of meaning and authority. This rocky terrain creates a foundation for cultural entropy that undermines efforts to order meanings of AIDS by media campaigns. (pages 47 - 62)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. “Best” Practices - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0004
[best practices;institutional isomorphism;accountability;legitimacy;evidence-based design;measurement;cultural stakeholders]
AIDS organizations do not have good measures of the outcomes they want to engender. Without compelling evidence that campaigns are working, organizations invested procedures that purport to make effective campaigns. These procedures, circulated by “best practice reports,” give designers tools to impose order on this complex cultural environment. Through a process of institutional isomorphism, AIDS organizations globally have converged around these best practices, which give organizations a measure of accountability and legitimacy to international donors. Designers on the ground appreciate this move to best practices like making evidence-based campaigns and securing the support of cultural stakeholders. Following best practices gives them confidence that they can to make the best possible campaign and faith that they can predictably shape how citizens understand and act in response to HIV. The global convergence around these best practices has negative consequences as they increase cultural entropy. Investing so heavily in the design process, with a commitment to making one perfect campaign, has left AIDS organizations open to blind spots. For instance, they mostly forego evaluation and miss the ways their campaigns are misinterpreted. By putting their eggs all in one basket, one widespread and unforeseen disruption undermines years of work. (pages 63 - 82)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Imagined Audiences and Cultural Ombudsmen - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0005
[production of culture;categories;narrative;best practices;cultural ombudsmen;qualitative measures;formative research;evidence-based design;quantitative measures]
The convergence around best practice also opens up opportunities for divergence and conflict within and among the enactment of those best practices. Using a production of culture approach, this chapter traces how AIDS organizations in Accra put best practices into practice, and identifies moments of entropy that emerge when designers produce campaigns. In a field that has converged around the value of incorporating formative research into the design process, organizations make themselves distinct by doing formative research differently. These divergences, namely whether organizations collect categorical or narrative data from audiences, lead them to produce campaigns with what I call “categorical” and “narrative” styles. Different styles produce more or less effective campaigns, undermining the intended goals of AIDS organizations. Organizations incorporate “cultural ombudsmen” into the design process who draw moral and cultural symbolic boundaries around the appropriateness of campaign ideas. Obmudsmen, with their veto power, can squash campaign ideas that designers like best and that have the support of communities, putting the practices of formative research and securing buy-in in conflict. This opens campaigns up to entropy, as organizations put out “lowest common denominator” campaigns that may have less resonance and lack organizational support. (pages 83 - 119)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Displacement and Decay: Materiality, Space, and Interpretation - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0006
[materiality;cultural objects;perceptibility;legibility;reception theory;meaning;diffusion;circulation;sociology of knowledge;cultural entropy]
AIDS media lead unexpected lives once diffused through urban space: billboards fade, posters go missing, bumper stickers travel to other cities. In this chapter I argue that the material qualities of AIDS campaign objects and the urban settings in which they are displayed structures how the public interprets their messages. Interview data and ethnographic observation of AIDS media in situ reveal how the materiality and circulation of objects and their sites of reception shape the availability of AIDS knowledge in Accra, Ghana. I find that the decay and displacement of these advertisements enable new meanings (e.g. when red ribbons fade to pink) and give audiences the opportunity to use these posters creatively (e.g. as interior decoration). Material qualities disrupt campaigns by undermining their perceptibility and legibility. Significantly for AIDS organizations, these material conditions often systematically obstruct access to AIDS knowledge for particular groups. In this sense, cultural entropy is as much a material condition as a symbolic one. (pages 120 - 144)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Scare Tactics: Interpreting Images of Death, Illness, and Life - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0007
[cultural entropy;reception theory;focus groups;resonance;field theory;cultural power]
AIDS campaigns designers are confident that their campaigns can change people’s understandings of AIDS. Using a reception theory approach, I assess whether the newer, life-affirming campaigns have replaced older imagery introduced by campaigns from the 1990s’ scare tactics. HIV/AIDS campaigns in Ghana, like campaigns around the world, have shifted from associating AIDS with death and illness to producing campaigns with hopeful slogans and images that promote the idea that people live with HIV/AIDS. When I asked community members in my focus groups to design mock campaigns or discuss images, they drew skeletons and images of dying AIDS patients that they found more resonant than the language of the new life-affirming campaigns. This is surprising considering that the new life-affirming campaigns are better funded, more rigorously designed, and produced in an era when anti-retrovirals are increasingly available. These findings suggest another mechanism of cultural entropy: exposure to the field of earlier symbols constrains the cultural power of later messages. (pages 145 - 188)
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https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion - Terence E. McDonnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226382296.003.0008
[cultural entropy;branding;social movements;failure;materiality;cultural power;field theory;advertising]
The book concludes by explaining how cultural entropy systematically undermines the effectiveness of these AIDS campaigns and other modern interventions. It place the various mechanisms of entropy demonstrated throughout the book into conversation with each other, showing how they interact to amplify these disruptive effects. I discuss a success case of condom advertising but demonstrate how powerful campaigns can also lead to cultural entropy in the broader field. I then extend these insights beyond health communication to consider how cultural entropy explains other failures to use culture instrumentally by organizations in the developed world, specifically nation branding and media coverage of social movement activism. The chapter suggests how health communication could work with rather than against cultural entropy. Ultimately, cultural entropy offers new ways of thinking about culture and communication that emphasizes materiality, interaction, contingency, dynamism and flow. (pages 189 - 206)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
