When You Care Enough to Pay Someone Else to Send the Very Best: The Outsourcing of Greeting Card Inscriptions
Key Words: Outsourcing, Everyday Life, Marketization
Abstract: Services have developed that allow individuals to outsource the writing of greeting card inscriptions. However, this kind of outsourcing is performed in such a way so as to conceal the fact that a card’s inscription was in fact outsourced (i.e. inscriptions are made to appear as if the client, not a business, was the actual source of a card’s inscription). This kind of service represents an extension of the market into an area of activity that is seen as being highly symbolic and saturated with meaning. As such, these services represent a particularly advantageous point from which to explore questions regarding morality and meaning in the market context.
In an attempt to address some of these questions, this paper offers a theoretical account of the nature and consequence of outsourced greeting card inscriptions. To make sense of this development, I argue that we must draw from Goffman’s idea regarding the presentation of self. Based on a content analysis of the websites and advertisements of those that offer outsourced inscriptions, I show that while these services may offer a variety of instrumental and symbolic benefits to their clients, these benefits are only possible because of the false presentational claims made in the inscriptions (i.e. how givers are falsely presented as being the authors of outsourced inscriptions when this was actually something they outsourced). In other words, in order to gain the moral status of being seen as the kind of person who would inscribe a card for another, these services must make false presentational claims about their clients (i.e. that they were the author of an inscription). Thus I show that even if providers are able to offer credible outsourced inscriptions, this practice is problematic because of how it violates, exploits, and/or undermines some of the basic moral principles that underlie social interaction.