La manipulation des documents publicitaires. Contribution à une sociologie du travail marchand

This article proposes to study merchant work by taking into account the advertising documents it involves, that happen to be used both by retailers ?to address and influence their customers? and by customers ?to make well informed purchases. In order to do so, we conducted an ethnography of merchant work in various French stores of a same telecom operator. This made it possible to identify various modes in which advertising documents contributed to a variety of ordinary transactional situations. In this perspective, advertisements stops appearing as disembodied and external agents that would ?alone and from the outside? make the matching of supply and demand possible. Because they act as cognitive artefacts, as the vehicles of stabilized product or service descriptions, and even as instruments of civility, these documents are crucial to the animation and robustness of markets. They indeed play a leading part in the constant resizing of markets and commercial discourses, which necessitates the association of numerous actors and tools. This process doesn?t only participate in constructing customer trajectories that are inherently social; it also feeds current preoccupations about the actual substance empirical market spaces should be said to be made of.