Paradoxes of ethically branded bottled water: constituting the solution to the world water crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper draws attention to the growing role of corporate marketing in the cultural production of crisis narratives. We examine ethically branded bottled water products that encourage the purchase of bottled water as one means of solving the global water crisis. The brands make a donation to a development organization addressing water issues each time a bottle of water is purchased. Through this process consumers are encouraged to ‘save lives’ and ‘engage’ in ‘alleviating the world water crisis’ through buying one brand of bottled water over another. These brands are somewhat paradoxical because they portray the consumption of products that many consider environmentally, economically and socially harmful as an ethical practice. We undertake a discourse analysis of the marketing materials for Ethos Water (one such ethically branded water product) in order to examine how a version of the world water crisis is constituted by the brand. Using the concept of problem closure, we argue that the cultural production of the world water crisis as natural and apolitical; as dislocated from specific places and environments; and as an opportunity for ethical awakening among consumers, results in the consumption of Ethos Water being constituted as a viable solution to such a crisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".