I had tried to do a lecture on the hoof this semester to try and get us thinking about why Primark causes so much disgust in the media from an organisational sociology point of view #SSC09118

The gist of the lecture was that it is of course reflective of class disgust and cultural taste - e.g., our tutorial on fashion retailers targeting their consumers to become workers - but there is a number of organisational choices that go into these processes.

We can think of the marketing mixes and the generic strategies retailers choose and how these create 'space' in organisations - the cheaper the retailer, the less organisational space is available, the more your retail offering is targeted at lower-income groups.

This makes retailers like Primark less able to provide as much space in store, their generic strategy targets selling to lots of people cheaply - so you end up with lots of people queuing outside for access to a shop with less free space. Which generates headlines and disgust..

Likewise, you don't see the middle class retailers queuing out the door - partly because they have a smaller target market and arguably more space to hide them instore!

The actual lecture was 6GBs of film for around 30-40 minutes of content and my computer decided that it had had enough for one semester. But maybe next year I'll do it in person!