ABSTRACT

Bringing together research from consumption, materiality, and economic sociology, I explain how real estate stagers attempt to construct persuasive spaces. I conceptualize real estate staging as a judgment device that influences economic decision-making in a market of singularities. Using data from the content analysis of nearly 200 staging documents, as well as from interviews and observations with real estate stagers, I describe how stagers mobilize the material environment of houses to construct persuasive spatial rhetorics, and offer prospective homebuyers oriented knowledge about the quality of houses. Specifically, I examine how stagers convey a home’s livability to buyers by using material objects to influence their senses, imaginations, and processes of evaluation. In so doing, I highlight the role of materiality and embodied experience in home selling, and reveal how home staging constructs the context of the most consequential consumption decision most people ever make.

摘要

我将消费、物质性和经济社会学的研究结合起来，解释了房地产经纪人如何试图构建有说服力的空间。我将房地产分期概念化为影响奇点市场中经济决策的判断工具。通过对近200份分期文件的内容分析，以及对房地产经纪人的采访和观察，我描述了经纪人如何调动房屋的物质环境来构建有说服力的空间修辞，并提供面向潜在购房者的知识关于房子的质量。具体来说，我研究了舞台设计师如何通过使用实物来影响他们的感官、想象力和评估过程，从而向买家传达房屋的宜居性。在此过程中，我强调了物质性和具体体验在房屋销售中的作用，并揭示了房屋分期如何构建大多数人做出的最重要的消费决策的背景。