Mailē was a sustainable redevelopment project that was located on the slopes of an extinct volcanic mountain. In the middle of 500 acres of land that extended into the Kula region, Hawaiian Lands Company, Inc. (hereafter “Hawaiian Lands”) proposed to develop a new Mailē town that consisted of 150 single-family, affordable homes and integrated spatial planning (e.g., walkways, parks), energy-efficient site systems (e.g., energy, water systems, wastewater streams), and culturally sensitive built forms. The existing Mailē was a sleepy plantation town removed from the tourist areas and mostly populated by long-time island residents. A redeveloped Mailē, Hawaiian Lands ambitiously announced, would “upscale” the old by integrating “the true essence” and “the agricultural roots” of Kula and the “innovative” principles of sustainable architecture. Hawaiian Lands was a landholding corporation that was a parent to two subsidiaries: a pineapple company and a resort-operating company. Between 2005 and 2006, when I conducted fieldwork, the corporation was on a mission to expand its business in a “socially responsible” and “sustainable” manner.Footnote 1 For the corporate executives, the redevelopment of Mailē was an opportunity to bring in new investments and new sales and leases, which would make up for capital losses that were accrued by the pineapple subsidiary. It was also viewed as an opportunity to practice corporate social responsibility and to publicly carry out its role in helping to “bring about a sustainable island future.” The question was: how to achieve this dual goal of profit making and corporate image making through redevelopment?
In this article, I examine how Hawaiian Lands planned and designed for a new Mailē by using a participatory approach to urban design and how it semiotically reconfigures itself as a “quasi-person” relative to locals in that process. In using the words “person” and “personhood” with respect to corporations, with Reyes, I am not interested in invoking or “reaffirm[ing] US legislative action beginning in the nineteenth century, which has increasingly granted rights of natural persons to corporations as ‘legal persons’” (Reyes Reference Reyes2013, 163). Rather, my purpose here is to try to explicate how individual corporate actors who have internalized the discourse of corporate social responsibility, in effect (and without explicit awareness) shift the semiotic representation of the corporation to being a single entity that is capable of expressing and performing “responsibility” (Hill and Irvine Reference Hill, Irvine, Hill and Irvine1992)—in relation to societies in which it operates—as if the organization is a social person and not simply a legal fiction (Koh 2010).Footnote 2
The discourse of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), which dramatically increased in volume in the early twenty-first century and gave rise to a wide range of metadiscourses of which sustainability is an example (Koh 2013), has been integrated into the everyday business practices of many US companies. In this article I show how, under what has been referred to as the CSR “regime” (Dolan and Rajak Reference Dolan and Rajak2011, 6), “the corporation” becomes reinvented through signs that stand for who the corporation is and what it consists of (i.e., through semiotic inscriptions of who the “social” is in corporate “social” responsibility). By focusing on a single town development project, I examine (1) how the corporation encourages locals (i.e., current and potential future consumers) to participate as collaborators of the commodity design, (2) how the elements of urban design are dialectically upheld as the loci of semiotic mediation between the corporation and their surrounding communities, and (3) how a design of what, from a distance, may be described as a corporate brand community is created through a process of design inference regarding what the collectively imagined image of “the community” (including the corporation) may look like in terms of architectural design and inscription.
There has been a growing interest in the anthropological study of corporations (Urban and Koh Reference Urban and Koh2013). However, studies that are grounded in in-depth and sustained ethnographic research inside corporations are rare. This corporation’s proposal for commodity design and development relates to the interests of two sets of literatures that remain largely separate from one another in terms of their approaches and subject matters:Footnote 3 first, cultural anthropological analyses of CSR and, second, semiotic anthropological analyses of branding. Studies on CSR have noted that CSR operates as a moral mechanism (Rajak Reference Rajak2011): around the world, corporations utilize CSR—here viewed as a discourse—to authorize corporate-internal organizational restructuring (Smith 2014; Sturchio and Galambos Reference Sturchio, Galambos and Urban2014),Footnote 4 legitimize claims to citizenship (Koh Reference Koh2014; Urban Reference Urban2014), establish “new ethical regimes of accountability and sustainability” (Dolan and Rajak Reference Dolan and Rajak2011, 3), and reframe various corporate social relationships with workers (Smith and Helfgott Reference Smith and Helfgott2010; De Neve Reference De Neve2014), supply chains (Partridge Reference Partridge2011), governmental institutions (Ecks Reference Ecks2008; Benson and Kirsch Reference Benson and Kirsch2010; Cattelino Reference Cattelino2011), and the surrounding communities (Welker Reference Welker2009; Coumans Reference Coumans2011; Rajak Reference Rajak2011; Schwittay Reference Schwittay2011).
Meanwhile, studies on the semiotics of brands have noted that corporate actors treat a brand as “the dominant means by which the producers—corporate entities, usually—extend themselves (in the ordinary as well as the philosophic sense) into the world inhabited by their erstwhile (or sought after) consumers” (Moore Reference Moore2003, 335; see also Foster Reference Foster2007). To make their “extension into the world” via brands/signs successful, it has been argued that corporate actors systematically (Moore Reference Moore2003) or ritualistically (Koh, Reference Kohforthcoming) engage in semi-qualitative investigations on how brands may be interpreted by their imagined future consumers.Footnote 5 That is, contemporary practices of branding are intricately bound up with brand makers’ attention to and attempted management of, as well as brand consumers’ inhabitable participant roles in, social semiosis (Moore Reference Moore2003; Manning and Uplisashvili Reference Manning and Uplisashvili2007; Silverstein Reference Silverstein2013; Agha Reference Agha2015, in this issue; Koh, Reference Kohforthcoming).
My analysis of the ethnographic data that are examined here challenges how these observations may come together in the case of commodities that are produced by corporations that seek to somehow integrate business and CSR, or profit making and “giving back to the community.” From a business perspective, Mailē is a commodity development project. However, it is also a project that aims to express the corporation’s social responsibility and dedication to the goal of sustainability. Within the corporation, employees approved of it because the CEO proposed Mailē as a sustainable development and affordable housing project.
As a product, however, Mailē is not a typical one, such as their pineapple product; that is, it is not something produced with the expectations that it would be sold to nonindividuated buyers, consumed largely at once or in its entirety, and in which the relationships between the corporation and the buyers would, for the most part, end at the moment of exchange, when products are handed over in exchange for money. Being an existing town and a neighborhood that is inhabited by natural persons, Mailē is rather one in which many future customers are already a part of the product, as members of “the community.” That is, it is one whereby people inhabited the thing that is to be formulated as a commodity (and particularly, a sustainability-inspired commodity; Agha Reference Agha2011); and therefore, from the perspective of profit making, hopefully, continually inhabited in order for the corporation to eventually yield profit from continuous sales and leases. This characteristic of Mailē as an actual town/community also suggests, from the perspective of profit sharing or redistribution, that it is the current residents who are arguably the first and foremost “society” to whom the corporation is to express “social responsibility.”
Therefore, the question for Hawaiian Lands as the corporate developer is how to create the town as something that locals would want to continue to “lease” (Foster Reference Foster2007, 719) over time in either the commodity form or the product brand form or both.Footnote 6 The two “ontologies” (Kockelman Reference Kockelman2006, 2011) of Mailē as a commodity and a community converge in the planning and designing stage, and inform the shaping of the semiotic form of the town. In the following sections, I use data that are gathered from three public events that were hosted by the corporation during the first six months of 2006 and discuss the development of the design of the new town of Mailē as a kind of a corporate brand community. To do this, I first examine how the corporation calls upon locals to engage in the planning procedures by enrolling them into a participation framework and by assigning them participant roles inhabitable (Goffman Reference Goffman1981) during the designing procedures. I then analyze how various views and beliefs that are expressed by locals regarding “what Mailē is or means” and the corporation’s expectations of it to be an architectural representation of “environmental sustainability” and thereby its “social responsibility” are synthesized by contracted designers to graphically draw out semiotic components comprising the design renderings of the new town. Finally, I argue that the result of the new town design is a heteroglossic inscription of “indexical signs” pointing to both this specific corporation and these specific local residents (as “responsible local residents”), signs that also function to “iconically” represent a collectively imagined ideal town (Reference PeirceEP 2:291). Together these signs allow the corporate entity to “symbolically” (Reference PeirceEP 2:292) represent itself as a kind of a ‘super-’person who embodies the cultural history of Kula.
“Join Us”: Giving a Stake and Framing the Participant Interactions
A postcard mailed to every one of the residents of Kula featured photographs of pineapple fields (owned by Hawaiian Lands) and pineapples that grew in the middle of thorny leaves, with the texts: “The voice of Mailē is within you.” “You are invited to share your story and heart.” “Let’s work together to create a community that works in harmony with one another.” It was an invitation for the third and last segment of a series of what was called the “Residential Community Meeting.”
The stated purpose of these preliminary meetings that are held prior to the public design workshops (discussed in the next section) was informational: locals would be informed of the corporate agenda and given opportunities to provide their questions and concerns to the corporate land developer. On the other hand, from the corporation’s point of view, these meetings were opportunities for it (as a single entity) to develop rapport with locals and obtain consent.
Andy So, before we begin, I’d like to just introduce the staff. [omitted] How many of you came to prior meetings? Okay. Sorry if some of what I’m gonna say is a little repetitive. … As you know, this community started off as a plantation community and it evolved into employee housing, and it has become a more, standard subdivision. But we’re trying to get back to it. Get back to our roots. And we want to make Mailē the best place to live. … We’re here for pineapple for the long-term and our success as a company depends on having uh good people and good communities to be a part of. So the whole purpose for tonight is for [us] to come here and tell you what we’re doing. … Just keep your heads up and what’s coming in your future. And we just want to hear from you all. Wanna know what’s good things … what’s the current issues or problems. Most personal things that we think need to be looked at. (January 31, 2006)
Here, I focus on how the corporate staff develops a participant framework for locals and sets the stage for corporate-community interactions in the future design workshops. Andy, a local himself and in his early forties, is the vice president of development and the chair. When opening the event, he narrates a history of Mailē by using a timeline that has a past, a present, and a future, saying that as a town Mailē “started off as a plantation community,” “evolved into employee housing,” and now has “become a more, standard subdivision.” It is the story of the past and present Mailē from the corporate landowner and developer’s point of view.
The fact that Hawaiian Lands began as a pineapple company that owns and runs the plantation in Kula since the 1930s is shared knowledge. It is also a widely known fact among locals that US pineapples are no longer globally competitive (cost-wise) but that the agricultural subsidiary of Hawaiian Lands is still running (despite rumors and anxieties that it would be shut down). By invoking the town’s beginning and presupposing understandings of corporate history, Andy manages to do two things. First, he establishes a “chronotope” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981, 84; see also Parmentier Reference Parmentier2007) for the town, that is, he situates it in a fusion of time and space, anthropomorphically placing the corporation itself as a quasi-resident of the town—that is, as “one” that has been, and is, “here for pineapple,” and “for the long-term.” This denotation of the “corporation sole” (Maitland Reference Maitland1900)—that is, a corporation with only one individual person (e.g., the Archbishop of Canterbury) that continues to live after the death of that individual through a new individual—reinforces the notion of the corporation as a person and the conception of the corporation as a sole that “never dies” (Maine Reference Maine1986 [1864], 182). Interactionally, this allows Andy to position the corporation as a kind of an entity who is just like the local people and as an entity whose interests align with them in wanting to “make Mailē the best place to live.” The private interest of the corporation as the quasi-resident is also plainly spoken of as well: “success as a company depends on having uh good people and good communities to be a part of,” which can also imply that it is the corporate person that is the person “in” the community whose unique responsibility is over and above the average person.Footnote 7
Second, by employing a timeline, Andy is able to construct a concrete image of what the future “best place to live” may look like and is able to fashion that future/place as a place in which this corporate quasi-resident can have private interests. Mailē has become a “standard subdivision,” a nondistinctive place, unlike what it was in past. Hence, he states, “We’re trying to get back to it. Get back to our roots,” he says, to a future/place that is iconic to the past, and thus, locals as “real” residents also may have memories, interests, and/or “stakes” (i.e., to use the language of CSR discourse that emphasizes “stakeholders” over “shareholders”). The corporation’s proposal to redevelop Mailē is here self-legitimized as a proposal to satisfy the collective interests of the local “residents,” including the corporation itself.
Andy closes his speech by asking residents to “keep your heads up” and by expressing his hope to hear the “most personal” stories of Mailē. He ends the speech there in order to move onto presentations by other staff members dealing with some technical aspects concerning the development. The theme of trying to enlist the residents as coparticipants (and not merely as a category of corporate stakeholder) is revisited at the end of these staff presentations. In the meantime, other employees of Hawaiian Lands occasionally reinforce Andy’s other theme of asserting the corporation’s social role and responsibility in the community: “There were people who were trespassing, and living on the site, and creating an unsafe or unhealthy situation. It was a wake-up call for us to be more involved. . . . We want to reassure everybody that [we] have clear titles to all surrounding lands. We can show the original title, all the working deeds, which show that you have proper and good title.” They also express corporate vested interests in the area: “We’ve looked for the best lands possible, and pineapple, it really likes warmer climate. Mailē is the heart of our farm. This is where we wanna be.”
The theme of setting the stage for future corporate-community interactions is revisited at the end and prior to the Q&A session by Mayumi, the development manager and also a local herself. While Andy separates the past and the present (i.e., time) in order to draw an iconism between the past and the future (i.e., space) and, thereby, to position the corporation as being aligned with the locals, Mayumi employs the dichotomy between old and new (i.e., time-space) so as to invoke the corporation’s social responsibility and to propose inhabitable participant roles in the “socially responsible” collaborative corporate development process.
Mayumi Okay, the last is, upcoming workshops. Basically in the old way, developers would spend a lot of time and money with architects, planners, engineers, and set up a plan to draw houses, lot plans, and the roads. And then they unveil to the community. “Here, this is what’s going to happen, you can take it or leave it,” basically. But the new way to do it is community-based. So essentially, we invite the community to come out to the planning meetings.
Actually, we’re going to start with the little cards that were handed out at the front. … Now the question is, “what does the community mean to you”? Again, it’s all personal, right? And you guys live in this community. You know the land. You know the neighbors. You know the people. You know how life is here, and you guys are the experts. And you can be part of the future on how it will be developed or planned. What type of amenities could be included for your children, your grandchildren and, you know, the people of the area? … you don’t have to put your names on it or anything. We’d like to see, record some of your ideas, and see how that gets incorporated into the design process that we’re going to undertake in, um, a few weeks. …
As a company, we want to work together to enhance your community and to build upon what you already have. So it’s not to take away or change necessarily, but to improve and to enhance. And so we want you to take an active role in this future or this enhancement of your area. In the mail in the next few days you should be getting a card, and it’s called “Join Us.” And it’ll tell you to mark your calendars for certain dates. (January 31, 2006, emphasis added)
Similar to Andy, Mayumi frames her speech as representing the intention of the corporation as a single social person. But additionally and unlike Andy, she tries to anticipate the possible suspicions the general Kula community might hold about redevelopment, while also enlisting the locals as voluntary participants. Indeed, my Kula informants said there was a “lack of trust” on their part of the corporate agenda and that they were “kinda scared [about the development] and are pushed into it.”
One should note that Mayumi states, “the question is, ‘what does the community mean to you?’” From here, she interactionally positions the locals as knowers, that is, holders of answers regarding what may be the ideal plan and design for the future town of Mailē: “It’s all personal, right? And you guys live in this community, you know the land … the neighbors … the people … how life is here, and you guys are the experts.” In the “old way,” this question was asked of the developer, which resulted in a situation of “take it or leave it” for the residents. In this new approach, however, she says that this question is addressed to the locals. She emphasizes that the corporate interest is aligned with that of the community: “As a company, we want to work together to enhance your community and to build upon what you already have. So it’s not to take away or change necessarily, but to improve and to enhance.” But she also notes that there are different roles the corporation versus the locals can occupy in realizing the supposedly shared interest in creating a new town that harkens back to the past (and therefore “the best”). In this way, she ends her scripted presentation by encouraging locals to not merely occupy their participant statuses but perform their roles of the “author” (Goffman Reference Goffman1981, 144): “we want you to take an active role.”Footnote 8
What this employee is in effect doing is setting the stage for future corporate-community interaction through the designation of participant roles: the role that the corporation inhabits is that of the facilitator of the interactions between the urban design firm and the residents (which was also suggested in Andy’s and other employees’ speeches, as well); the role of the locals is that of author, that is, the person who selects specific signs that are used in the town’s plan: “What type of amenities could be included for your children, your grandchildren and, you know, the people of the area?” “We’d like to see, record some of your ideas, and see how that gets incorporated into the design process.” Meanwhile, what is “new” about this new versus old approach to urban planning is that those expected to be residents of the developed area are given inhabitable roles, relative to the corporate developer/person.
In the subsequent Q&A session, several attendees (approximately fifteen) raise comments that I will discuss only briefly here. A question that was asked by a man approximately in his seventies is notable not so much for the narrative that he offers but for the answer that he is given. He says that he “bought [his house] here in 1968 because it’s a nice, quiet, small community,” with only “one restaurant and a mom and pop store.” He said, “I understand that if you try and step in the way of growth, you’re just going to get run over. But … where is our community headed? Are we ending up with a strip mall out here? What kind of a master plan do you have?” The question reflects the widespread ambivalence and resistance that contemporary Hawaiians hold regarding “development” and “growth,” which are two highly negative words to contemporary locals in the State of Hawai‘i (Koh Reference Koh2015). To this concern, Andy replies, “No, we don’t have a master plan,” which reinforces the idea that the corporation holds contemporary locals as authors of the town design. “So the bottom line is, actually, to encourage the talking about a plan.”
“Give Us Your Ideas”: Heteroglossic Inscriptions of the Old and the Hybridized New
The job of an actual town design was contracted out to a firm specializing in sustainable urban planning (hereafter “designers”). In this section, I discuss how the designers, with the facilitation of the corporate staff, interact with the locals of Kula in a series of “Community Planning Workshops” (hereafter “charrette,” as it was referred to at the event). In particular, I analyze how the semiotic elements comprising the town’s overall architectural design are motivated—procedurally and design-logically—as the loci of mediation between the corporation and the community, and how the final town renderings are produced by the designers, which is likely to be interpreted (“interpretant”) as indexing various participants’ ideas expressed of the past and future Mailē (Reference PeirceEP 2:273).
Figure 1 provides an overview of the kinds of interactions that occurred at the charrette. There are three kinds of sessions: closed, semi-open, and open. In closed sessions, the designers work by themselves or hold talks with the employees of Hawaiian Lands. In semi-open sessions, they work with both the staff and the selected local experts (e.g., government officials and managers of public utility companies). Open sessions are public events that are open to all of the Kula residents during which the designers give formal presentations or engage in face-to-face conversation with the locals, freely, as they work at their drawing tables with visual maps and graphic drawings on display. The timing of the three different session types indicates that the corporate employees did assume the role of the facilitator who facilitates interactions between the designers and locals and that the closed and semi-open sessions are events that gradually build up to the publicly open sessions.
Figure 1. The corporation as facilitator of community design
One should recall that Mayumi said to the locals in one of the preliminary meetings, “Now the question is, ‘what does the community mean to you’?” Throughout the charrette, the staff of the corporation mainly focused on collecting and gathering the ideas and beliefs that were expressed verbally or in print by the locals in response to this question, to relay them to the designers (see fig. 2). In this way, the corporation worked as the facilitator. But why or how is this job of gathering locals’ ideas important for the production of the town design?
Figure 2. Research on the relationship between the object and the interpretant. “Give Us Your Ideas,” the title of this section, is quoted from a sheet posted on a wall in the left picture. In the image at right, a designer presents ideas that locals expressed in surveys. The title of the PowerPoint slide projected reads "what you told us." Clarity reduced to prevent identification. Photographs by the author.
The quotation below is from a designer during a semi-open session that had Hawaiian Lands employees and members of a few of the Kula’s civic organizations as participants. According to Joel, the “public realm,” which he introduced as urban planning jargon, refers to “the relationship of buildings to streets.” While explaining his firm’s philosophy, which embraces the community-based approach to design, he argues that the way the public realms of “small towns, historic designs” are organically developed is the “programming of experience and togetherness.”
Joel Towns are organic, just like a human being. Small towns, historic designs are like this. Denser smaller landscaping design is what makes likeable feeling possible. Why? Narrower streets, denser spaces, no bisections, these are the programming of experience and togetherness. It’s encouraging participation through orientation. Through facing the public realm. Listening to a place is a technique to creating such a design. (March 1, 2006)
What Joel is saying is that in order to “reverse engineer” a public realm that “encourage[s] participation through orientation”—that is, which embodies the “likeable feeling” of “small towns, historic designs”—the designers are employing the “technique” of “listening to a place.” For the designers, listening to personal stories and subjective experiences is a critical step (and strategy) in the process of design inquiry, one that strives to derive conclusions about how various semiotic components of the town and its public realm can be proleptically drawn out and organized in order to produce feelings iconic of those felt in those organically developed small historic towns referred to by Joel.Footnote 9 In this public charrette, the designers’ task is thus to gather a sufficient amount of personal views, which would allow them to infer “the best” or the closest approximation as to which design elements as signs can, indeed, replicate the positive subjective orientations that people have with the built environment “here” (i.e., narrated past of Mailē) in the to-be-created “there” (i.e., future redeveloped Mailē).
Let us look further into how the local views expressed of Mailē informed the production of the design, which are the designer’s “deliverables” (business jargon) to the corporation.
Brian We got a lot of interesting input. Here’s [inaudible] for example. “Put the pedestrian first.” [Pointing to design drafts] It’s basically saying to us that cars are okay, the cars are allowed, let’s accommodate them, but pedestrians first. Or look at this one. Someone said “build a community that will produce more energy than it consumes.” She got excited about the idea of buildings that have solar and other forms of renewable energy, high, resource intensive buildings. Amazing thought, incredible concept. Another one said, “long pathways [that] you can walk or bicycle.” Why not? Another said “community gardens.” It [Community Hands-On Design Session] was full of information. They gave dozens of things that we will incorporate. (March 7, 2006)
As indicated in this report by Brian, one of the designers, some ideas that locals provided can be more or less transparently drawn out as town design elements (e.g., “resource intensive buildings,” “long pathways,” “community gardens”). A few of the locals offered more general comments (“Put the pedestrian first”), which are still also relatively easy to visually and architecturally stylize. For convenience purposes, I will refer to such local comments that are exemplified in Brian’s remark as “Raw Data.”
On the other hand, other locals communicated to the designers comments containing more abstract ideas, such as “We’re a two-lane road kind of town,” “It’s always been a slow agricultural town,” “We’re a part of nature,” or “It’s true ‘ohana [Hawaiian for ‘family’, ‘extended kin group’].” I will label these abstract ideas, “Meanings 2” (cf. Meaning 1, next paragraph). These folk Meanings 2, images of Mailē imagined or remembered by the locals and which they provided as answers to “what does the community mean to you” (cf. Mayumi’s speech) are, note, the kind of feedback that seemed to stick with the designers and the corporate staff. They are repeated over and over again as if catchy slogans that verbally guide the shaping of the town elements—the placements, sizes, and shapes of the buildings, streets, landscaping, as well as public facilities of the public realm.Footnote 10
However, these Meanings 2 did not alone guide the process of inferring the contextually ideal method of drawing the town’s specific elements. They work in intimate relation with what I label “Meaning 1,” namely, the corporation’s expectation that the new town would be an “instance” (a Peircean “replica”) of the general concept of environmental sustainability, which would then index the corporation as an entity “rhematically” iconic with its product (Reference PeirceEP 2:295). From the perspective of Hawaiian Lands, as mentioned earlier, the to-be-Mailē was a concrete architectural sign embodying the general concept of environmental sustainability, the development of which would, in turn, enable the corporation to be itself conceived of as expressing the even more general concept of corporate social responsibility. The design firm had, of course, been made fully well aware of this expectation when they were recruited as contractors to mediate this complex semiotic process.
Figure 3, a sheet titled “Mailē’s Guiding Principles” posted on a wall in the design studio, consists of handwritten comments that were gathered during the charrette so that the designers could refer to it as they worked on their computers and drawing sheets. In small print just underneath the title is the note that the comments are listed “in no particular order.” However, horizontal lines divide the comments into categories, starting with “mālama ‘āina” (literally, “care for the land”), which is clearly Meaning 1 taken directly from the language of Hawaiian Lands Company’s mission statement (the misspelling on the sheet—the omission of the kahakō (macron) in “mālama”—also noted with a small note that says “sp?”).Footnote 11
Figure 3. Deriving the method of presenting cultural meanings in design (town/product name masked to prevent identification).
In the second row, locals’ abstract ideas and beliefs (Meanings 2) that were expressed regarding the town are listed (“the town is a part of nature,” “a healing, restorative [place]”). Finally, what I refer to as “Meaning 3,” the educated guess of the designers as to how to draw this new Mailē that invokes Meaning 1 and Meanings 2, is written out as “small, slow streets” and “compact, complete, connected neighborhoods.” These are examples of the design firm’s design conclusions as to how best to graphically, architecturally, and nonlinguistically represent Meanings 1 and 2. They are answers as to how the architectural design would synthesize the corporation and the local resident’s subjective and/or cultural imageries held of both the future and past Mailē. At the bottom of the list, what I called Raw Data is written in smaller print, with arrows that point toward and support the derived conclusions.
It was through a sort of synthesizing of the corporation’s (Meaning 1) and the locals’ ideas (Meanings 2) that the designers were able to arrive at their conclusion, which is still an educated guess, as to how to draw the town and its specific elements in a way that allows them to be construed by participating local residents as “meaningful.” For this task, to summarize, Meaning 1 given by the corporation served as a kind of a baseline premise; Meanings 2 were then gathered as empirical data from the current local residents, which offers more precise cues regarding how the environmental sustainability concept may take design form and in a way that is iconic to the past Mailē (which the corporation and the locals are “trying to get back to”); and thereupon, Meaning 3 was inferred creatively as to how to make the design a representation of both Meanings 1 and 2 (see fig. 4).
Figure 4. Inscribing corporate-community relationship in design
“Citizen Involvement Is a Brilliant Idea”: Branding the Commodity as ‘of the Community’
After a few months, the corporation flew the designers back to Hawai‘i and hosted what was called the “Community Update Meeting.” The purpose of this public gathering was to present the updated design renderings to the corporation and the Kula residents. In the presentation, Vicky, an urban planner in her mid-fifties, recapitulates how the maps and site renderings projected on the screen and displayed around the walls are created (see fig. 5).
Vicky Through the process came a vision. [Shows PowerPoint slides of the town renderings.] The new takes its genetic structure from the old material. Existing town will be preserved. Connect is the keyword for how we plan it to be, within the town, and with nature. The goal for the community to be affordable is to have it powered by the sun, buildings to optimize energy flow, to use materials that can be endlessly recycled. [But] our proposal is to take the genetic material of the town and copy what works. [So] more walkable designs. But optimize water systems and have wastewater treatment plant, reuse it. (June 18, 2006)
Figure 5. The spectacle of heteroglossia (clarity reduced to prevent identification and infringement of rights. Photographs by the author)
In sum, she states, “the new takes its genetic structure from the old material” but that simultaneously—Mailē being a sustainable development project—the buildings and infrastructures will use modern advanced sustainable technologies. She also says that “connect” was the keyword (see fig. 4) they used to design the town’s public realm (“within the town”) and the town’s relationship with the natural environment (“with nature”).
Vicky’s speech here is simultaneously voicing the views of both the corporation and the individual community members. The designers’ role in this commodity design is that of an expert “animator” (Goffman Reference Goffman1981, 144) who skillfully and design-semiotically reproduces the locals’ (i.e., authors’) particular requests for specific town elements and all of the participants’ (i.e., both the locals and the corporation) imagined imageries of Mailē.
The actual design renderings, which I can only present here as pictures taken from a distance (as they are properties of the corporation; see fig. 5), are also double-voicing. They are renderings that pieced together a variety of visual signs that indexed the corporation’s (e.g., “buildings optimize energy flow,” “endlessly recycled,” “wastewater treatment”) and the individual Kula residents’ (e.g., “walkable designs”) specific ideas and requests. Further, they are also renderings that resemble the corporation, the community, or the images that they collectively imagined and envisioned of the town (e.g., the early “plantation town,” which Andy had referred to in his speech).
There was probably not much ‘room’ for people to not interpret the renderings as “carrying over, or ‘transduction’” (Urban Reference Urban, Silverstein and Urban1996, 21) of their own images of the town. In general, the locals seemed impressed, and a few even seemed excited, at least among those with whom I spoke or whom I observed. The only question that was raised by the audience, which led to several responses and comments, was “what is the viability of seeing the project materialize?” To which, a corporate staff replies (then, in 2006, the only obstacle that was known to the corporation regarding the realization of the plan was the lengthy county and state approval process) by once again encouraging locals to work with the corporation as collaborators, except, from this point on, not as authors of the design but as members of the “performance team” (Goffman Reference Goffman1959, 79) working to secure necessary bureaucratic approvals together.Footnote 12 “Everybody who’s here can just bring one more person, and it’ll be a community movement, not a corporate movement,” said the staff member. “Citizen involvement is a brilliant idea [because] elected officials will be watching very closely and asking ‘Is this just your idea as a corporation, or is it the citizens’ idea?’”
The new town of Mailē has not been redeveloped as of 2014. Initially, the project was estimated to take nine to ten years for completion, with planning, design, and county and state approval taking five to seven years. However, with the 2008 financial crisis, development came to a halt (or should I say is delayed) because the corporation could no longer secure loans from the investment bank that had agreed to lend and thus was unable to continue to perform its facilitator role. It is, hence, not possible now to ask whether or not the configuration of the planned town, the commodity form, as a semiotic “hybrid” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981) is felicitously interpreted or entailing any desired effects in terms of actual sales and leases (for a discussion of interpretations of “dominant symbols,” see Urban [Reference Urban2015], in this issue).Footnote 13 For the purpose of this discussion, however, what matters is that the town/commodity is formulated—that is, taken shape and form at the level of design semiotics—as a composite of indexical icons with the potential of entailing such effects and also prefigured as a sign susceptible to corporate conventionalization of it (i.e., the town rather than the specific town elements) as a symbol of corporate-community relationship.
The town has been, is, and will be a commodity as well as an actual neighborhood. It was and will always be a thing that is built on land and subject to sales and leases, as well as an actual residence. The community-participatory redevelopment planning that is examined here does not and was not intended to alter the nature of the town. A change is, however, suggested at another level: the level of metasemiotics or the representation of the corporation’s semiotic relationship to the town.
Since the present town of Mailē took shape over time largely without corporate interventions—as a “standard subdivision” (cf. Andy’s speech)—there are no signs currently in Mailē that permanently inscribe the corporation’s historical and social relations to the town and its people. Other than the pineapple fields it owns and runs, Hawaiian Lands does not have a semiotic presence. The corporation’s relationship to the town/people is simply expressed in legal documents (e.g., titles, deeds) via legally meaningful signs (e.g., names, signatures), which reinforce the interpretation of the corporation as a legal person (e.g., “landowner,” “property seller”) with legal responsibilities.
Now, what the corporation suggested to locals, what the locals engaged in (whether enthusiastically or not) through customer feedback, and what both parties together accomplished in this so-called community-based approach to urban design is a rebranding of the town as a commodity that is semiotically (i.e., design-wise) “inhabited” by the locals, as well as by the corporation. It was not recognized or spoken of as a branding project, but as I have attempted to demonstrate, what resulted is a design that heteroglosses, inscribes, and hybridizes the corporation’s and the locals’ cultural views. If and when the town is developed, the town as a commodity may function to symbolically represent the corporation’s historical and cultural ties to the town and its people, with the corporation metasemiotically reconfigured as a legitimate social person. Through it, the corporation may reconfigure itself as “one” that is similar to local residents who can enact the notion of responsibility but ‘super-’ to them in that its presence and activities in time and space go beyond and encompass that of the real natural person.
Conclusion
In this article, I examined how a corporation may represent itself as a legitimate social actor that is similar but not identical and ‘super-’ to a natural person in terms of its lifespan and scope of activities. The empirical case discussed was a proposal to redevelop an existing town. I first explored how the corporation discursively positions itself as a corporate participant and a legitimate quasi-resident in a framework of corporate-community interaction. Specifically, in the “Join Us” section, I examined how the corporation aligns with the locals as a single unified entity that has interests in creating a better town and calls upon locals to participate in the town planning and designing process in the capacity of authors. Then, I closely analyzed how the corporation mediating the work of design, at the denotational text level, reconfigures itself as “one” that is “in” the town just like the actual residents of Kula. When determining what is represented in the town design and how, as discussed in the “Give Us Your Ideas” section, local residents’ stories and experiences served as empirical information in which the corporation’s conception of the town as a token instance of its mission of “environmental sustainability” was given concrete modes of expression. As a result, the overall town design became a composite sign, which consists of numerous indexical icons of the corporation and the participating residents and which inscribes the corporate quasi-resident’s historical, social, and cultural relationship to the town (which is the commodity). The overall town form (versus the specific town design elements) thus is a hybrid of “the corporate-community” which makes possible the metasemiotic reconfiguration of the corporation as a ‘super-’person whose existence and activities across time and space go beyond that of the natural person.
When I asked the president of development of Hawaiian Lands why the engagement of local residents is important for the redevelopment process, he said that the “community-based approach is meaningful to them, so that’s why it’s important for us.” The engagement of locals is important for two reasons: namely, for profit making and corporate image making purposes. Profit making and corporate image making are the two major interests governing modern business corporations and their activities, and they are often inseparable from one another, as this case of CSR-inspired practice of commodity design exemplifies. I have suggested that configured or branded as a sign of “the corporate community,” the design of the new future Mailē is one that provides the ground by which the corporation can make claims to social responsibility in the capacity of ‘super-’person. However, such a formulation of the commodity as “of the community” is one that may also guarantee a certain tendency of interpretation on the part of targeted customers. Because the commodity form is now one that materially embodies the ideas and beliefs of the town held by targeted customer population, locals may likely interpret the form as “of them.” Then, a participatory approach to design is one that manages to shape the commodity as one that is likely to yield a return, in both the metaphorical (i.e., brand mediation) and actual (i.e., leases and sales) sense.
