The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market

2000/12/01 by Brigittine M. French · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Labor Movements and Unions #Multilingual Education and Policy

paper · doi:10.1525/jlin.2000.10.2.155

openalex publication_date 2000/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25

Abstract

This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particular type of discourse, the genre of bargaining. It also investigates marketers' uses of that discourse as facilitating a process of negotiating their identities as social actors. The article examines, first, how the invocation of the genre of bargaining orders marketers' speech into a stable and coherent discourse; second, how the genre's connections with social, ideological, and political‐economic relations invest marketers' speech with pre‐established associations; and third, how marketers may manipulate social and ideological associations established by past conventions in order to negotiate the social value of their identities at present.

Cited by

• The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies

Related

• From “Good day” to “Sign here”: Norms Shaping Negotiations Within a Face Culture
• Place-Based (In)formalization: A Bolivian Marketplace for Consumer Electronics and Global Brands
• The value added of solidarity economies: Bureaucratic constructions of value for alternative economic policy in Ecuador
• Bargaining and market behavior in Jerusalem, Ljubljana, Pittsburgh, and Tokyo: An experimental study (by Alvin E. Roth, Vesna Prasnikar, Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara, and Shmuel Zamir)
• Marketing as a Means to Transformative Social Conflict Resolution: Lessons from Transitioning War Economies and the Colombian Coffee Marketing System