536829
research-article2014
DAS0010.1177/0957926514536829Discourse & SocietyCallier
Article
Repackaging the voice of the
‘worker’ in the production of
celebrity
Discourse & Society
1 ­–19
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0957926514536829
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Patrick Callier
Stanford University, USA
Abstract
This article critically examines the mass-mediated portrayal of social class and commodity
formulation in a corpus of US television advertisements for the Ford F-150 pickup truck, aired
in 2007. The use of stereotypical diacritics of white-collar and blue-collar social identities in
the ads circulates a representation of class identities as consumer categories, even as the ads’
portrayals of class difference reproduce hegemonic relationships of markedness between ‘middleclass’ consumers and other social categories. Examining representations of different phases of
commodity formulation and social voices loosely associated with these phases, I show how various
social identities are subjugated to the commercial ends of the advertising encounter, and how the
advertisements both induce consumer behavior as well as reshape hegemonic understandings of
social difference and inequality.
Keywords
advertising, commodity, critical discourse analysis, heteroglossia, indexicality, mass media, social
change, social class, temporality
Introduction
In a society where consumption is a defining facet of economic life, advertising discourse
can have deep and wide-ranging effects on social arrangements – especially inasmuch as
it offers up ideologically tinted ways of relating social identities to the production and
consumption of the commodities they depict. This article is an analysis of selected advertising texts that contain portrayals of classed social types, showing how these portrayals
Corresponding author:
Patrick Callier, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, Stanford,
CA 94305, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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Discourse & Society 
discursively reproduce relationships of social inequality, relate to the consumerist ends of
advertising discourse, and promulgate certain economically and politically interested
understandings of social class and social difference.
The first part of the article is a critical reading of the portrayal of ‘classed’ actors in
advertising. In two ads from a 2007 corpus of four television spots for the Ford F-150
pickup truck, I analyze the deployment of stereotypical indexes of classed identity, ranging across modalities from dress and apparent occupation to speech register. Furthermore,
I explain how numerous representational strategies position the ads’ blue-collar subjects
as marked and their ostensibly middle-class counterpart as unmarked.
Positioning this analysis within the rhetorical and pragmatic context of advertising the
F-150, and the project of formulating it as a consumer commodity, I go on to ask: what
place do these socially meaningful portrayals have in the activity of selling the truck to a
viewing public? In part, representations of class are typifications of potential users, proffered to the viewing audience to invite alignment with ‘role-fractions’ or bundles of
meaningful behaviors (Agha, 2007). But adding other F-150 ads from the same year to
the corpus uncovers something more. A metrical contrast between voices of ‘technical
precision’ and ‘practicality’ recurs across the campaign and activates the social meanings
that the ads seek to assign to the F-150. While blue-collar bodies may be particularly
suited to activating some of these indexicalities, such social meanings can be just as
easily produced in their absence.
This article, a study in critical semiotics as well as contemporary discourse analysis,
brings together several valuable strands of insight. Social class, long out of fashion in the
critically informed discourse analysis of US society, reappears, but in a different form
from most macrosociological models of social stratification. Here, class (or something
like it) is a semiotic resource, subordinated to various performative ends, not least
attempts to model and influence ‘consumer behavior’. Thus, in addition to uncovering
how representations of socioeconomically marginal actors and relations of production
and consumption are systematically distorted, this article argues that these distortions are
instrumental in the activity of ‘communication’ with consumers and in the construction
of consumer populations.
Background
Baudrillard’s bold statement that ‘if we consume the product as product, we consume its
meaning through advertising’ (1988 [1968]: 10) was a prelude to decades of critical
study devoted to advertising discourse, which is a key site for ideological activity in the
consumer economies of late capitalism. Empirically grounded critiques of mass-mediated
advertising find early antecedents in Baudrillard’s (1988 [1968]) analysis of the ‘display’
of consumer objects and Barthes’ (1972) wry takedowns of margarine and ornamental
cookery. All such scholarship has taken as its starting point the proposition that the
communicative activity of advertising is socially and politically laden.
In particular, advertising’s ability to model and perhaps mold social relations in the
‘real world’ has received an impressive amount of scholarly attention. As in all mediated
discourse, the tactics deployed by advertising discourse to represent social relationships
and social actors are diverse and multimodal (Van Leeuwen, 1996). In the symbolic
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interactionist tradition, Goffman (1987) analyzes how visual print advertising depicting
women uses stylized cues to allow viewers to easily decode the social relationships portrayed in the photos. The cues used, such as relative size, difference in posture, or gaze
arrangements, signal unequal relationships in which a man, if present, is almost always
depicted as more authoritative or powerful.
Interestingly, men in Goffman’s corpus were almost always taller or higher than
women, except when a class differential could also be identified. When, for example, a
middle-class woman was depicted alongside a male food service worker or a driver, she
was likely to be taller, or positioned above him. Such images testify to the significance
of representations of social class in American advertising, an area that has not been
thoroughly explored.
Writing from the UK context, Rampton (2006) reviews the ‘breakdown’ of class
over the twentieth century, noting that ‘the analytic utility and the cultural salience of
social class appears to be diminishing’ (2006: 216), at least as it relates to macrosocial
processes of change and patterns of explicit self-identification. This breakdown,
spurred by economic reorganization and political and cultural changes, has made it all
but impossible to address the ‘working class’ as a coherent population (Eley and
Nield, 2000).
Rampton, however, recuperates class as a source of social meaning in language, with
help from Williams’ (1978) elucidation of ‘hegemony’ and ‘practical consciousness’.
Hegemony is the expression of power as ‘a whole body of practices and expectations,
over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions
of ourselves and our world’ (Williams, 1978: 110). Using hegemony allows Rampton to
approach social class with a focus on the subjective experience of domination and the
meanings and discursive practices associated with that domination.
The London teenagers in Rampton’s study had access to and made extensive use of
class-linked social meanings in speech and interaction, despite the lack of typical class
structuring in their immediate social milieu. Coupland (2009a, 2010) brings Rampton’s
ideas on board in thinking specifically about the relationship between changing meanings of social class and mediatized communication. He points out that discourse analysis
should be able to zero in on not just the interactional moments at which domination happens, but also those at which resistance to domination is endeavored, making moments
of social transformation in discourse visible.
Coupland’s observation resonates with work on social class in media studies, which
has emphasized transformation and contestation. Tracy’s (2001) history of the mediatization of a labor dispute in 1930s Iowa thematizes both symbolic domination (through
‘myth’ in Barthes’ 1972 sense) and working-class resistance. Tracy theorizes controversy
over mass-mediated representations of labor as contested signs (Voloshinov, 1986: 23–
24). For Voloshinov, symbolic domination is dialectical, and all signs are ideological and
potential sites of contestation. This contention applies even to nominally ‘apolitical’
texts, such as the documentary ‘Hands on a Hard Body’. ‘Hands’, analyzed in Gallagher
(2003), is a ‘gawkumentary’ – a vehicle for downward-gazing class voyeurism; nevertheless, he also reads its portrayal of solidarity between people from various social backgrounds competing for a pickup truck as covertly critical of commodity culture and
consumer capitalism.
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Of course, ideological contestation is not always directed from ‘the bottom’ against
‘the top’, as demonstrated in Cowie and Boehm’s (2006) analysis of how Bruce
Springsteen and his song ‘Born in the USA’ were transformed from symbols of white
working-class alienation in the post-Vietnam era into jingoistic signifiers of white masculine rage, ready to be co-opted by conservative cultural forces, including Ronald
Reagan and the 1980s Republican Party.
Semiotically mediated contestation has received ample attention in the sociolinguistic
literature as well. Queen (2012) notes that the US soap opera Days of Our Lives portrays
poverty as temporary and incidental rather than lasting and structural. This portrayal
helps promulgate ‘normative models of affluence’ (2012: 159), in keeping with the consumerist posture of soap operas as a genre. Coupland (2009a) examines ideological
conflict in the emergence of classed voices (using a ‘posh’ mock Received Pronunciation
(RP) and working-class ‘Valleys’ Welsh register) in a traditional British pantomime performance. Likewise, there is a pronounced dialectic tension in the political speech of
Welsh left-wing politician Aneurin Bevan (Coupland, 2007), between the voices of wry
critique (incorporating phonological elements of Valleys Welsh) and slavish assent
(using RP phonology). A particularly dramatic example of different voices mixing in a
single text is a narrative delivered by Mexican peasant Don Gabriel (Hill, 1995), wherein
intermingling of the quoted voices of others, ‘laminated’ voices associated with the person of the narrator, indexically meaningful ‘intonational shadows’ and codeswitching
between Spanish and Mexicano all help Gabriel narrate confrontations between, among
other forces, the peasant way of life and creeping hegemonic capitalism.
This co-presence and dialectic tension between different voices in a text has been
called ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin, 1982). Heteroglossia has been a profitable theoretical
construct for linguists and linguistic anthropologists interested in mass-mediated discourse. Agha (2005) reworks and further specifies the idea of the voice implicit in heteroglossia, integrating it with contemporary approaches to indexicality and his own
theories of register. In Agha’s approach, the analyst identifies ‘metrical contrast’ (patterned variance in indexical sign configurations), allowing empirical identification of
when one voice has (potentially) stopped and another begun. Metrical contrast of this
sort is a necessary condition for heteroglossia.
Various linguistic resources (changes in tense, person deixis, or phonological register)
can signal a voicing contrast, but once it has been identified, the relative metapragmatic
‘transparency’ of the contrast (Agha, 2005: 43) can also be diagnosed – based, for
instance, on whether there are co-occurring utterance or phrase boundaries, shifts of
indexical origo, or person-referring terms. High-transparency contrasts include instances
of directly reported constructed dialogue, attributed to a named, individuated speaker (as
in John promised Alice ‘I’ll go to the bank for you’ (Agha, 2005: 42)). In this article,
conversely, I am primarily interested in ‘low-transparency’ contrasts, without any accompanying signs of participant shift.
Voicing contrasts on this level are intimately associated with the performative indexical effects of the text. As Coupland’s analysis of Bevan – as well as of the stylization of
a chatty ‘gossiping over the garden fence’ Welsh conversational style in a radio program
(Coupland, 2001: 367) – demonstrates, the co-presence of different voices in a text often
gives rise to emergent, ‘non-detachable’ indexical meanings (Agha, 2007), indexicalities
which only obtain because of the co-presence of two or more distinct meaningful
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elements. For instance, the effects of ‘chatty’ versus ‘fiery’ are not achieved by the mere
presence of Welsh phonology itself (versions of which are used in performances by the
radio presenters and by Bevan, respectively), but rather by the co-presence of other contextualization cues, for instance in the ideational content of the talk itself, or perhaps in
paralinguistic features such as intonation or voice quality.
As interesting as the text-level patterning of signs is, such signs come under the lens
of history when we consider the mediated circulation of stereotypical indexical associations between forms and meanings. Such historical processes of indexical meaning formation have been captioned with the label ‘enregisterment’ (Agha, 2005, 2007), and are
intimately tied up with (indeed, are) processes of social change in their own right.
In advertising, resources that have enregistered associations with identifiable social
groups, stances, and behaviors are often deployed in order to exploit these social meanings. Pennock-Speck and del Saz Rubio (2009) associate particular gendered paralinguistic voice qualities with the categories of commodity advertised. Representations of
Newfoundland vernacular English were deployed in a Nissan SUV ad – much criticized
by Newfoundland audiences for its lack of accuracy and overall inauthenticity (Coupland,
2009b; King and Wicks, 2009) – presumably in a (failed) attempt to generate an authentic connection with local Newfoundland audiences. Budweiser’s well-known ‘Whassup’
campaign appropriates a linguistic resource (wassup) linked to African American
vernacular for ‘effervescence, energy and “oomph”’ (Agha, 2011: 45).
As the failure of the Newfoundland pickup ads and the appropriative crossing of the
Budweiser campaign prove, the ways in which voices and indexical resources are woven
into ads at the discourse level deserves attention. Kelly-Holmes (2004), using the case of
Irish language in various forms of advertising in Ireland, calls attention to how advertising discourse often puts such resources on display, rather than more fully incorporating
them and the voices they index. She labels this tendency ‘fetishization’, and shows how
it discursively erases social relations. More generally, Agha (2011) has explored how
commodity advertising uses conventional (enregistered) and emergent indexical
resources to stitch consumption together with other behaviors into lifestyle packages that
formulate vivid, socially rich pictures of the ‘use phase’ (as opposed to the ‘production
phase’) of a commodity’s existence – something akin to the ‘meaning’ of the product that
Baudrillard speaks of. The main social actors in portrayals of a commodity’s use phase
are, naturally, consumers; conversely, depictions of the ‘production phase’ of a commodity (the time before it is offered for sale to consumers) implicate a portrayal of the
commodity’s producers.
The ways in which a text relates identities to each other, temporalizes them, and
invests them with power and reality is important because, inasmuch as they are taken up
as-is, portrayals of social actors and relationships like those in the Ford truck ads analyzed below have the potential to transform viewers’ understandings of their social realities. The study of advertising can thus shed light on projects to invest social categories
such as social class with new meanings.
Data
The data for this study are drawn from a series of four television advertisements for
the Ford F-150, a line of medium-size pickup trucks. They are the first television
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appearances for Ford by spokesperson Mike Rowe, who had garnered attention as
host of the Discovery Channel’s gross-out/social voyeurism reality show Dirty
Jobs.1 The ads borrow from Dirty Jobs, especially in terms of the participation
framework and typical stances of the on-screen interactants with regard to each
other. But as advertising discourse, their rhetorical focus is considerably different
from that of the show.
The place of the pickup truck in the North American automotive consumer landscape
is a unique one. Its use value compared to other motor vehicles lies mostly in increased
hauling capacity, while still being small enough to serve as a personal conveyance. They
are stereotypically associated with rural, Western, working-class masculinity (Thomas,
1995), and have been found to be used mostly by middle-aged men with less than a fouryear college education, for towing, hauling, and work-related needs (Anderson et al.,
1999: 69).
Reading class in depictions of truck users
The first two ads of Rowe’s tenure as spokesperson, ‘Leaf Spring’ and ‘Boxed’,2 debuted
on 1 March 2007 (Abuelsamid, 2007). Both depict the truck in the ‘use phase’ of commodity formulation and put us in contact with its supposed users (Agha, 2011). Multiple
semiotic cues serve to ‘locate’ these users in terms of social class – the working class in
‘Leaf Spring’ and the middle class in ‘Boxed’. I will focus first on the mostly non-linguistic
semiotic means by which these users are typified, which will have consequences for the
discourse analysis to follow in the next section.
In ‘Leaf Spring’, Rowe comes on screen touting the F-150’s carrying capacity (see
lines 1–3 below). As the camera pans to follow him, Rowe and the audience come upon
four dusty white men in work clothes carrying a cage apparently filled with rocks.
When the camera cuts to a closer shot, a sign on the cage reads ‘890 LBS’, precisely the
putative difference between the F-150’s carrying capacity and that of its ‘nearest
competitor’.
Spring 2007: ‘Leaf Spring’
1Rowe: [walking from stage L alongside a black pickup truck, camera panning to follow]
The Ford F-150 is the only pickup in its class that can carry three thousand fifty pounds.
2 that’s eight hundred and ninety pounds more,
3 than the nearest competitor.
4(stops at open truck bed, four men at the corners of a cage, filled with rocks, come into
view behind him)
5 And that’s,
6 really heavy.=
7 (to workers, turning head) how do they do it, guys?=
8 [cut to sweating men struggling to lift cage]
9 Worker: (strained) big honkin leaf springs =
10 [cut back to full view]
11 Rowe: (lifting long metal object then planting it in ground; strained) this.
12 Is the leaf spring.
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13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
[cut to Mike’s head and shoulders]
honkin is a …
technical term, …
you’re not waiting on me are you?
[cut back to full view]
Workers: (grunting and lifting onto truck)
Rowe: sorry,
(walks off frame)
[cut to new angle]
Hauling – as in carrying heavy loads in the bed of the truck – is the distinctive use for
pickups compared to other small vehicles, particularly when it comes to dirty, heavy, and
awkwardly shaped or sized loads. The nameless men grunting and puffing as they load
their rocks onto the truck thus offer a tableau for viewers which is instructive in several
capacities. First, and most relevant to the purely commercial ends of the ad, it shows
what the truck can do when you use it. We also see that a certain kind of people use a
pickup in this way. There are numerous diacritics of these men’s social location: their
bodies are strong but not lean, their hair is short, sometimes graying. They have facial
hair, wear plaid and overalls, and baseball caps. They engage in heavy lifting, for some
unspecified project (though besides rocks the truck also carries sod and wood – maybe
they are doing landscaping). In short, these are working men, if not ‘working class’
outright.
The other ad from the initial pair, ‘Boxed’, has a highly parallel interactional arrangement to that of ‘Leaf Spring’. Rowe reprises his spokesperson role, and has an interlocutor: ‘Joe’, introduced in line 24. Like the rock haulers in ‘Leaf Spring’, Joe is represented
as a user of the truck.
Spring 2007: ‘Boxed’
22[From shot of Rowe walking away from two white pickup trucks hooked up to a single
trailer, camera follows to shot of one white pickup truck hooked up to a trailer]
23 Rowe: if you need to tow eleven thousand pounds you’re going to need two trucks.
24 Unless of course you’re Joe
25 Joe drives the Ford F-150
26 the only half ton pickup in America
27 that can tow eleven thousand pounds3 all by itself
28 (puts trail backpack in back of truck)
29Joe,
30 how is that possible. =
31 [cut to Joe’s head and shoulders]
32 Joe: (opening truck door) fully boxed frame, Mike. =
33 (gets in truck, driver side)=
34 [cut to Rowe’s head and shoulders]
35 Rowe: (holding up small, rectangular metal object) fully boxed frame.
36OR,
37 (looks back toward white trucks, holds up a different metal object) not
38 fully boxed,
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39 the choice is yours but …
40 how do you drive two trucks at once?
41 (gets into truck, shuts door)
In contrast to the stereotypical diacritics of working-class masculinity exhibited by
the unnamed laborers, Joe has a more middle-class presentation, wearing leisure clothes
and sporting a clean-shaven face. The ad finds him with a vacation trailer hitched to his
truck, suggesting he might be off on a trip in the outdoors. This indexes Joe’s participation in leisure activity, further determining him as middle-class. Interestingly, towing, as
opposed to hauling, does not sharply differentiate pickup trucks from other similarly
sized vehicles such as SUVs, and it thus reveals less of the truck’s affordance for doing
work. Put another way, a truck used for towing is not as good an emblem of work-related
identities as is a truck used for hauling.
Visual semiotics are more than sufficient to support a reading of the truck users in the
two ads as socially different from each other. Linguistic and interactional features of the
ads, however, indicate that Joe and the workers are more than just distinct. The following
analysis of discourse will show how the workers are more socially ‘marked’ than Joe,
positioning middle-class Joe as an exponent of the default normative class category.
Rowe’s interactants in ‘Leaf Spring’ and ‘Boxed’ each have only one line of dialogue,
but there are substantial interactional and linguistic differences between these contributions and how they are integrated into the discourse. Lines 42–51 from ‘Leaf Spring’,
next, have Mike asking the workers ‘how do they do it . . .?’ – that is, how does the F-150
have such impressive hauling capacity?
‘Leaf Spring’: How do they do it?
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Rowe: (to workers, turning head)
how do they do it, guys?=
[cut to sweating men struggling to lift cage]
Worker: (strained) big honkin leaf springs =
[cut back to full view]
Rowe: (lifting long metal object then planting it in ground; strained) this.
Is the leaf spring.
[cut to Rowe’s head and shoulders]
honkin is a …
technical term, …
The explanation for the F-150’s hauling capacity, given by the unnamed worker in
line 45, is the truck’s ‘big honkin leaf springs’. In lines 46–48, spokesperson Rowe then
turns to the camera and shows us a large metal object, purportedly the leaf spring itself.
Then, in lines 50–51, Rowe jokes that honkin, as used by the speaker in line 45, is a
‘technical term’.
The use of big honkin in the only line delivered by Rowe’s interlocutor is telling. Like
the at-a-glance cues to social relationships in Goffman’s (1987) Gender Advertisements,
big honkin – strongly enregistered as vernacular and non-standard – provides viewers
with even more easy-to-digest signals of the workers’ social position, on top of the visual
cues already discussed.
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Joe from ‘Boxed’, like Rowe’s unnamed interlocutor in ‘Leaf Spring’, delivers only
one line (55), also in response to a question from Rowe:
‘Boxed’: How is that possible?
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
Rowe: Joe,
how is that possible. =
[cut to Joe’s head and shoulders]
Joe: (opening truck door) fully boxed frame, Mike. =
(gets in truck, driver side)=
[cut to Rowe’s head and shoulders]
Rowe: (holding up small, rectangular metal object) fully boxed frame.
In lines 52–53, Rowe asks Joe how the 11,000-pound towing capacity of the F-150 is
possible, a parallel to Rowe’s question ‘How do they do it, guys?’ in ‘Leaf Spring’ (line
43). Joe’s response in line 55, ‘Fully boxed frame’, refers to a particular technical detail
of the truck’s construction – also a parallel to ‘Leaf Spring’, where Rowe’s interlocutor
responds with the name of a truck part. Unlike the interlocutor’s contribution in ‘Leaf
Spring’, however, Joe’s speech does not contain forms enregistered as vernacular or nonstandard, and the form of his talk does not serve to locate him in a particular social
position.
Outside of the form of their speech, other discursive and interactional cues – the use
of humor, Rowe’s interactional behavior, and peripheral visual signs in the video, all
detailed later – typify the social position of Joe and the unnamed workers. As we will see,
these cues, in addition to the distinctions in speech register already detailed, offer up a
portrayal of the workers as deviant and other, reproducing broader ideologies of the
markedness of non-middle-class and especially working-class identities.
In this vein, the two ads’ deployments of humor are tellingly different. Rowe cracks a
few jokes in ‘Leaf Spring’ – notably at lines 50–51 (‘honkin is a … technical term’) and
lines 16–20 (reproduced below), where a gag makes light of Rowe’s getting in the way
of the workers:
‘Leaf Spring’: You’re not waiting on me, are you?
59
60
61
62
63
Rowe: you’re not waiting on me are you?
[cut back to full view]
Workers: (grunting and lifting onto truck)
Rowe: sorry,
(walks off frame)
In this extract, Rowe questions (line 59) why the workers, who had been busy loading
their rocks onto the truck, have stopped. When in line 60 the camera cuts to a full view
of the scene, we discover along with Rowe that he is standing in the path of one of the
workers holding the cage of rocks. Recognizing his mistake, Rowe apologizes in line 62
and walks away, allowing them to load the truck unimpeded. This mishap formulates
Rowe as ‘getting in the way’, in particular impeding the functional relationship between
the workers and the truck.
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Rowe’s translation of the unnamed worker’s use of honkin – ‘Honkin … is a technical term’ (lines 14–15) – employs a metalinguistic ‘denotational trope’ (a denotationally
explicit metalinguistic formulation that points to at least two contrasting indexical –
possibly register-mediated – meanings), describing the [technical register] lexical item
honkin as a technical term (Agha, 2007). Rowe’s pause before ‘technical’, as well as a
‘squinty’ facial expression, formulates this characterization as somehow tentative or
troublesome.
While these jokes are not necessarily ‘making fun of’ the haulers, their speech or
physical presence are integrated into both. The joke in lines 59–63 depends on Rowe’s
aloof detachment from the men’s workerly endeavor, and the varidirectional double
voicing (Bakhtin, 1984: 194) in the ‘translation’ of honkin in lines 50–51 similarly inserts
distance between the men and the viewer.
Arguably, Rowe’s only joke in ‘Boxed’ is set up in line 22 with ‘If you need to tow
eleven thousand pounds you’re going to need two trucks’ and reaches the punch line in
lines 36–40 with ‘but how do you drive two trucks at once?’. Rather than poke fun at the
co-present Joe (much less at participation in work, or use of stereotypical speech registers), the joke merely points out the absurdity of trying to tow one load with two trucks
at once. Joe is only a marginal part of the joke itself, so it does not serve to distance the
viewer from him.
Other discourse and interactional features, including the use of names, tactics of individuation, and the placement of bodies in on-screen space also contribute to the marking
of the workers in ‘Leaf Spring’, as well as to the construction of Joe as an ‘authentic’
individual and truck user.
Unlike the workers in ‘Leaf Spring’, Joe has a name, referenced in lines 24 and 25,
and used as a term of address in line 29 (compare guys in line 7). Joe also addresses
Rowe by name, in line 32. Reciprocity of address terms invites readings of social similarity. Interestingly, in contrast to Rowe’s walking away from the haulers in ‘Leaf Spring’,
in ‘Boxed’ he joins Joe in the truck as the ad comes to a close – a further sign of social
closeness. Joe’s name itself has strong indexical valences, perhaps best captioned by the
collocation ‘average Joe’, as in an ordinary, mostly unremarkable person.
As further evidence that the workers in ‘Leaf Spring’ are more marked socially, we
can also bring in evidence from the modalities in which they are typified. The portrayal
of the haulers makes heavy use of visual modality. Information about them – their activity and identity – is portrayed on-screen rather than given linguistically. While the visual modality in ‘Boxed’ provides some information about Joe (as detailed above), its
lack of markedness forces it closer to the ‘ground’, in a figure-ground relationship (Van
Leeuwen, 1999). Moreover, where as the workers are first encountered in visual modality and their identity is never exposed in propositionally explicit terms, Joe’s appearance on-screen is anticipated by linguistically mediated, propositionally explicit talk in
line 25 (‘Joe drives the F-150’) and being hailed by name in lines 29–30 (‘Joe, how is
that possible’). The level of individuation with which Joe and the workers are depicted
is also of note – the workers are multiple, huddled together, whereas Joe is singular. At
the point where the workers are hailed by Rowe (in line 7 with guys), one of them
responds, with no apparent principle for deciding who, as if any of them could have
delivered the same line.
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So, multiple resources point to the inequality between the workers in ‘Leaf Spring’
and Joe from ‘Boxed’. Whereas visual cues and enregistered indexical properties of
speech are used to typify the haulers in ‘Leaf Spring’, Joe is described in propositionally
explicit terms: as someone named ‘Joe’, and as a Ford truck user. The social location of
the haulers is more determined, and more importantly their social location is ‘marked’ as
a deviation from an implicit norm, the content of which is clear when Joe is used as a
point of comparison. Joe really is ‘average’ Joe, with no use of socially marked speech
registers, and more use of tactics to adequate (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004) him with Rowe
and align him with the viewing audience. Although he comes festooned with diacritics of
a middle-class identity, Joe’s portrayal is far more unremarkable overall than that of the
haulers. Lack of markedness conceals considerable power (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004:
372), in the form of the ability to surface as the invisible and incontestable default.
Practicality and technical precision
‘Boxed’ and ‘Leaf Spring’ represent different categories of social actors, and do so in
ways that reproduce hegemonic relationships of markedness. How, though, do these representations relate to the rhetorical goals of these ads as advertising discourse? Agha
(2007) theorizes that the mediatization of indexically meaningful voices invites viewers
to participate in alignment with the ‘role fractions’ (2007: 50) which the voices represent,
bringing their lived practice into accord with what they see in order to actuate some part
of the indexical values on display. We might read ‘Boxed’ and ‘Leaf Spring’ as doing just
this – allowing the viewer to read off some social meaning for the truck. In this way,
the viewer might, for example, be swayed to purchase the truck and use it as a way to
instantiate the social meanings conveyed in advertising (or elsewhere).
How then is this opportunity for fractional role alignment generated? How is it related
to the representation of classed bodies as in ‘Boxed’ and ‘Leaf Spring’? An analysis of
subsequent commercials in the 2007 campaign will help bring out the observation that
the indexicalities of the truck as formulated across the ads under study are those of technical precision and practicality, which themselves have links to representations of ‘commodity formulation’ (Agha, 2011) at different points in time. The various links between
these meanings, the formulations of pickup-as-commodity at the time of its production
and the time of its use, and the identity formations which these representations participate in will be illuminated afterward.
The first two ads we examined depicted spokesperson Rowe interacting with users of
the truck, providing representations of the F-150 during its use phase. The next two ads
for the F-Series truck – ‘Talking Bolts with Paul’ and ‘Crash Test’ – began airing in May
2007, two months after the first ones (Shunk, 2007). Again, they feature Rowe interacting with others and talking about the F-150. This time, however, the ads depict the truck
not in its use phase but in its production phase, as an object of engineering.
The first of the spots – both of which are set in Ford laboratories – ‘Talking Bolts with
Paul’,4 has Rowe speaking with ‘Ford’s resident expert’, Paul. Rowe’s ‘he knows everything’ in lines 67–68 positions Paul as an expert, though the prosodic delivery in line 68,
with everything given its own inflectional phrase (IP) and a strong falling contour, suggests there might also be something odd about Paul.
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Summer 2007: ‘Talking Bolts with Paul’
64 Rowe: Today we’re talkin bolts with Ford’s
65 resident expert
66Paul
67 He knows
68everything.
Shoring up this reading of Paul’s knowing everything as somehow marked, Paul
speaks in lines 69–72, spouting a list of technical noun phrases in an awkward staccato.
This otherwise incoherent list is formulated as indexical of his expert knowledge of bolts
by Rowe’s self-conscious play on words (he’s nuts about bolts) in lines 73–75.
69 Paul: Tensile strength.
70 Root diameter.
71 Proof load.
72Kilo/???/.
73 Rowe: You might say he’s
74nuts
75 about bolts?
In the following lines, Rowe invites Paul to differentiate Ford’s bolts from those of the
competition. This request is structurally as well as pragmatically similar to earlier ads,
using a WH-question in 80 (compare line 7, ‘how do they do it’ and line 30, ‘how is that
possible’).
76 Rowe: Paul,
77These
78 mounting bolts hold the leaf springs in place.
79Technically,
80What’s the difference.
The answer, which Rowe has asked to be framed in ‘technical’ terms, is delivered in
a single breath group in line 81, and in language that is not identifiable as belonging to a
technical register. Unlike the expert responses in ‘Boxed’ (line 9) and ‘Leaf Spring’ (line
32), the response in line 81 is a full clause rather than just a noun phrase (NP). In lines
82–84, Rowe repeats material from Paul’s answer (in parallel to ‘Leaf Spring’ in lines
11–12 and ‘Boxed’ in line 35).
81 Paul: The Ford bolt’s bigger and stronger Mike.
82 Rowe: Well there it is.
83Bigger
84 stronger bolts.
Paul takes two turns in this interaction. His abstruse, technical language in lines 69–
72, which occasions an instance of metapragmatic ‘translation’ from Rowe in lines 73–
75, stands in contrast to the spare, transparent the Ford bolt’s bigger and stronger in line
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81. While the production in line 81 is produced as a coherent response to Rowe’s question in line 80, lines 69–72 are produced a propos of nothing. This has the effect of giving
lines 69–72 a relatively monologic air, compared to the more transparent dialogicality of
lines 80–81. The metrical contrast between Paul’s technical expert language and the
intersubjectively constructed frankness and simplicity that comes after it is evidence of
what I argue is a voicing contrast across the whole campaign – between voices of ‘technical precision’ on one hand and earthy ‘practicality’ on the other. Preoccupation with
technical precision is characterized by referentially specific jargon, lack of metapragmatic transparency, and distance from practical concerns. The voice of practicality is
characterized by pragmatism (especially as regards the truck), frankness, vernacularity,
and sociability.
If we look back at the first two ads, this voicing contrast also surfaces. The technical
precision of the truck is indexed through the naming of specific parts of its anatomy:
‘leaf springs’ in lines 9 and 12 and ‘fully boxed frame’ in lines 32 and 35. The named
parts are also put on visual display by Rowe in line 11 (of ‘Leaf Spring’) and line 35 (of
‘Boxed’). The specific capacities the respective parts confer on the truck (for hauling and
towing) are numerically quantified (see lines 1, 2, 4, 23 and 27). Meanwhile, ‘practicality’ is produced in ‘Leaf Spring’ by the depiction of ‘men at work’ (whose labors Rowe
unwittingly interrupts at lines 16–20), as well as by the deployment of vernacular speech
register in line 9; in ‘Boxed’ it emerges counterfactually through the evocation of an
impossible/impractical scenario – driving two trucks at once (lines 23 and 40), as well as
depicting Joe’s use of the truck for leisurely pursuits (especially in line 28, where he puts
his bag in the back, and later, when he gets in the driver side).
The practical/technical contrast is also instantiated in the final ad, ‘Crash Test’, which,
like ‘Talking Bolts’, aired in May 2007. ‘Crash Test’,5 also set in Ford’s production
facilities, is, judging by YouTube view counts at least, one of the most successful ads
Rowe filmed in 2007. In terms of dramatic cinematography, it is significantly more
involved than any of the three pieces considered above. As the ad begins, we see a slow
motion shot of a pickup truck colliding with a wall, resulting in a shower of glass and
debris. Rowe then interjects, in line 86, and in line 88 introduces his interlocutor Bill:
Summer 2007: ‘Crash Test’
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
[Truck in crash test chamber collides with wall]
Rowe: (harsh voice) Wow!
[cut to Mike and Bill standing next to (a new) truck]
Rowe: This is Bill,
he works for Ford,
and he’s wrecked more cars than Hollywood.
Bill: Eh, you oughta see my insurance rates.=
Rowe: (nods) I’ll take care of the jokes Bill=
In line 91, Bill attempts to riff off a joke Rowe makes in line 90. Rowe characterizes
this as inappropriate by saying ‘I’ll take care of the jokes’ in line 92. To ‘take care of the
jokes’ sketches a picture of Rowe’s characteristic moves in interaction. His metapragmatic translation gags in other ads (lines 14–15 – ‘honkin is a technical term’; lines
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Discourse & Society 
73–75 – ‘You might say he’s nuts about bolts?’) are addressed to the viewing audience;
so that ‘taking care of the jokes’ places Rowe between the audience and his interlocutor,
cutting Bill off from connection with the audience and recontextualizing his joke in line
91 as illegitimate (cf. Bucholtz and Hall, 2004).
In the subsequent exchange in lines 93–108, Bill and Rowe’s interaction takes on a
lighter, more conversational tone, marked by frequent speaker changes, tight latching,
and the use of response tokens like yep, oof, and oh yeah.
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
did the Ford F one fifty get a five star crash rating?=
[cut to tight shot of Bill’s face]
Bill: (nods) yep.
Five stars.=
For both driver AND front passenger.=
[cut to shot of Mike’s face]
Rowe: What about the other guys?
[cut to Mike and Bill]
Bill: Uh,
some of the others didn’t do as well=
Rowe: Oof.
[cut to Mike’s face]
So I guess sometimes it’s …
better to [cut to shot of Mike and Bill] play it safe?=
Bill: Oh yeah.
Rowe: (opens mouth and turns gaze to camera, waits a beat) Oh yeah.
This stylization of a conversational tone mixes generic expectations. At one moment,
the interaction is cued as an interview (Bill is introduced with his credentials in lines
88–89, and lines 93 and 99 both have Rowe making information requests of Bill on the
topic of the truck); while at the same time, the conversation takes on the character of a
freer, more sociable conversation starting as early as line 90 with Rowe’s joke, ‘he’s
wrecked more cars than Hollywood’. The effect of this mixing is similar to that achieved
by the Welsh radio DJs stylizing a Welsh Valleys ‘over-the-fence’ gossipy manner of
speaking back and forth about historical events (Coupland, 2001).
The text denotationally highlights the safety of the F-150 and the scientism of Ford’s
industrial testing methods (through signs like Bill’s Ford labcoat), and puts the metaland-glass innards of the truck on prominent visual display – all cues of the technical
precision with which the truck is constructed. Laminated over this, though, Bill and
Rowe’s stylized chatty, vernacular voice indexes the earthy functionality of the Ford
brand and also gives a nod to the viewing audience, effecting a ‘synthetic personalization’ (Fairclough, 1989) at the level of interactional register, much like the ‘direct’ voice
Paul assumes in line 81. In this way, the contrast between ‘technical precision’ and
‘practicality’ is played out again.
Nested dialectics
The picture which the above analyses sketch out is one where the advertising encounter
and the advertised encounter are simultaneously mediatized. The former is the encounter
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between the advertiser/producer (Ford) and the viewing audience, prototypically on television during the original run of the ads. The latter involves the social identities, persons, and figures in the advertising text itself: those of Rowe, the Ford scientists (Paul
and Bill), and the truck users (Joe and the unnamed workers).
At the same time, these advertising texts deploy representations of the F-150-ascommodity at different temporalities – both during its ‘production’ and its ‘use’.
Depictions at both phases – that of use for ‘Leaf Spring’ and ‘Boxed’, and that of production for ‘Talking Bolts with Paul’ and ‘Crash Test’ – are highly fictionalized, even stylized. But the two temporalities are also implicated in the major voicing contrast that
surfaces in the F-150 ads: marks of the production phase are legible in the voice of
technical precision, while formulations of the use phase are intimately linked with the
voice of the truck’s immanent practicality.
A number of indexical resources, both enregistered and emergent, help constitute
these contrasts. Indices of ‘technical precision’ include the denotational exactitude of
lexical items referring to truck construction: for example, leaf spring, fully-boxed
frame, mounting bolts, and proof load, as well as the intersubjectively constructed
opacity of those terms, indexed by Rowe’s role as presenter (holding the parts up to the
camera), explainer (line 78, ‘mounting bolts hold the leaf springs in place’) and translator. The deployment of the formal ‘interview’ genre may also contribute to the overall production-phase flavor of text segments where these signs are at work (since it is
that genre that helps deliver the referential detail that contributes to the effect of technical precision); if we consider Rowe’s role in ‘drawing out’ information on behalf of
the advertiser, then genre may also be a site for exposing the presence of Ford as principal and sponsor of the advertised interaction.
One of the main ‘practical’ or user- and audience-oriented aspects of the advertisements, with which the ‘technical’, producer-oriented aspects contrast, are stereotypical
instances of vernacular phono-lexical registers – honkin, talkin (line 45), and the reduced
oughta (line 91). Added to this are the metalinguistic and metapragmatic ‘translations’
offered to the audience, which construct prior talk as opaque by making present talk
transparent. Finally, the use of interactional humor and the framing of certain phases of
interaction as lighter, more direct, or ‘chattier’ via diverse means also increases the audience orientation of the texts, further inducing viewers to interpellate themselves into the
role of the ‘F-150 user’.
The disposition of stereotypical diacritics of social class in relation to phases of production and consumption is worth noting: both ‘blue-collar’ and ‘white-collar’ actors are
depicted as users (consumers) of the truck-as-commodity. The blue-collar workers in
‘Boxed’ are (somewhat cartoonishly) positioned as the site for various indices of ‘workerness’: hauling, flannel, honkin, etc. Meanwhile, depictions of laborers purportedly
involved in the production of the truck are pointedly delegitimated as vernacular speakers (witness Paul’s opaque and telegraphic jargon, Rowe’s joke at his expense in lines
73–75, and Bill’s unaccepted bid at making a joke in lines 91 and 92).
One effect of this is to encourage a knowledge of class differentiation as meaningful
social difference that is basically devoid of political content or connection to relations of
production. Instead, class identities are skin-deep consumer categories or market segments, superficially linked to different typical use patterns (e.g. ‘working-class’ hauling
vs. ‘middle-class’ towing). Of course, we would hardly expect any less from a large
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Discourse & Society 
corporate advertiser like Ford, which presumably has little interest in producing or reproducing oppositional, politicized notions of class, and every interest in publicizing their
products’ uses and affordances and investing them with consumable indexicalities. But
Ford’s power to effect wide circulation of these representations is considerable.
And despite the ‘flatness’ of class as it surfaces in these advertisements, a regime of
markedness contrasting between middle-class consumer and ‘other’ identities is still legible in it. This reproduces the defaultness of the ‘middle class’ and the otherness of the
working class.
Finally, the embedding of these representations of class and commodity temporality
in the advertising interaction motivates adequations (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004) of the
participants in the advertised interaction with the participants in the advertising interaction
– the advertiser (Ford) with fictionalized Ford employees and the viewing audience with
users of the truck. The latter adequation invites the viewer to consider plopping down a
considerable amount of money to become an F-150 driver; the former nods toward
Ford’s own identity projects for itself – its branding. By appearing in the body of aloof,
labcoat-wearing scientists, ensconced in the dusty earth-steel-and-concrete tones of the
laboratory, Ford styles itself as technical, masculine, and industrial. The nesting of dialectics between advertiser and consumer, mediated portrayals of production phases and
use phases and the social identities of producers and consumers, and finally between the
voices of technical precision and practicality, is what allows these complex alignments
to take place.
The identifiable indexical aggregates which recur across ads in the series and formulate the production of the truck as being of high technical quality, and the use of the truck
as readily amenable to the needs of its owners (what I have called voices of technical
precision and practicality), are ‘close’ to the commercial ends of an advertising encounter, foregrounding the role of an advertisement in inducing viewers to engage in consumer behavior. Not stably associated with any one social identity like ‘working class’,
these voices instead appear in proximity to myriad speaking bodies, are distributed
across talkers, or are mediated visually or textually, while the specific resources used to
enact the contrast between them are different in each advertisement. Social identity and
inequality are, in this way, appropriated as semiotic means to commercial ends.
Conclusion
It is not surprising that consumer advertising would subordinate various identity categories and indexically loaded uses of language to consumerist logics. What is of note is
how certain forms of domination entailed in these relationships are hidden from view,
while other forms of domination are enacted in the discourse itself but require exegesis
to become more visible. Much like the high schoolers in Rampton’s work, most US TV
viewers do not live in a society that exhibits exactly the forms of class differentiation
displayed to us in the first two ads – while everyone in the ads was white and male, any
account of actually existing socioeconomic stratification in the US that did not take race
and gender into consideration would not withstand even preliminary consideration. Yet
the meaningful resources associated with classed identities – categories like ‘blue collar’
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as well as classed characterological figures like ‘obtuse scientist’ and ‘weekend warrior’
– are readily and widely available to US viewing publics.
Meanwhile, the actual conditions of production for the truck are hidden, or fetishized,
with the embodied representatives of the production phase (Paul, Bill) distanced from the
audience and deauthenticated as vernacular speakers. In this way, traditional productionoriented forms of class domination are readily exploited for consumer commodity formulation, at the same time as actual conditions of domination in production are
discursively erased. Class identity becomes a consumer category, achievable through
consumption patterns that fit a certain stereotype.
Of course, all of these performativities are best seen as projects. Their success depends
entirely on uptake and recirculation which occur after the moment of mediation. But as
part of a well-demonstrated trend towards the assimilation of all kinds of social identities
to consumerist logic, this ad campaign endeavors to transform hegemonic ‘social class’
as we experience it in the contemporary USA, potentially in ideology as well as in
practice.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Heidi Hamilton, Anastasia Nylund, Anna Trester, and the anonymous reviewers, who among many others have helped see this article through its many lives. Any remaining
weaknesses are my own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1.
Dirty Jobs, which depicted Rowe apprenticing in a number of ‘dirty’ or ‘gross’ occupations,
quickly became the Discovery Channel’s most popular offering after first airing in 2005
(Gross, 2009), and in 2007 Rowe began to appear in many other televised venues, including
Ford’s F-150 advertisements.
2. At the time of writing, both ads could be viewed at http://youtu.be/mDQpo23vfLw
3. This refers to the truck’s towing capacity, as distinct from its cargo-carrying (hauling) capacity, which is thematized in ‘Leaf Spring’.
4. Available to view, at the time of writing, at http://youtu.be/DGgeFY7LeeY
5. See http://youtu.be/BaAB9RhoyJ8
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Appendix: Transcription conventions
One breath group per line
[xxx]
Transcriber comments and onscreen action between square
brackets
(comment)Metalinguistic information and nonverbal behaviors between
parentheses
/guess???/Uncertain transcription or unclear audio between slashes
peak^
Exaggerated high pitch accents marked w/ carat
A: latching=Latching (speaker transition w/o pause) marked with equals
B: on
sign
falling.
Falling intonation marked with period
rising?
Rising intonation marked with question mark
continuing,Flat, “continuing” or “list” intonation with comma
pause . more pause … Pause marked with period (shorter) and ellipsis (longer)
stopped short –
Intonation phrase cut short with two dashes
Author biography
Patrick Callier is a postdoctoral researcher in the Interactional Sociophonetics Lab at Stanford
University. His research touches on the social meaning of linguistic variation, language variation
in mass mediated communication, and processes of enregisterment and social change. He received
his PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2013.
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