Discourse, Displacement, and Retail Practice: Some Pointers from the Charity Retail Project

We develop a particular approach to the analysis of retailing, one in which the importance of retailers' talk/practice and the connections between talk/practice and its displacement within retail organisations is emphasised. Displacement means that executive talk is not necessarily powerful, but must be reworked, forged anew, in the specifics of particular stores. Retail (executive) talk/practices have to be translated, and this is the source of their potential instability. We use a particular example to illustrate this argument: that of charity retailing. The authors examine how charity retailing has been reimagined and reworked in head offices, and how this is displaced through charity retail chains. We show the instabilities of charity retailers' (head office) talk, particularly with respect to implementation, and argue that charity retailers' ability to effect the changes they seek to make are limited by the copresence in charity shops of multiple understandings of charity which, themselves, map into particular in-store zones: back rooms, front sales areas, and shop windows. These are: charity as gift; acting charitably (towards other deserving cases or causes); and charity as fundrasing. We also reflect on the likely implications of these findings for the charity retail project; the significance of these findings with respect to future analyses of conventional retailing, its talk and practice; and on the complex intersections between talk/practice, discourse, and space.