Marketing Plan
Santosh_2102
2018-macromarketing-proceedings.pdf
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Copyright Statement
The Macromarketing Seminar and the University of Leipzig do not take copyright for papers
appearing in the proceedings. The copyright of all papers included in this proceedings remains
the authors’. Published by the Macromarketing Society Inc. and the Chair of Business
Administration esp. Marketing, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany in 2018.
ISBN 978-3-00-060623-6
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Content
Content ...................................................................................................................................... ii
Conference Chair and Conference Committee ..................................................................... x
Conference Track responsibles ............................................................................................... x
Conference Participants ........................................................................................................ xii
Conference Chairs Thanks ................................................................................................... xix
Technological Advances & Marketing Futures I ............................................ 1
Managing brands in the blockchain era .................................................................................. 2
From Simplicity to Complexity: an exploration of emerging lifestyles, consumer
perceptions and response to Location Based Services ........................................................... 5
Sustainable & Ethical Consumption I ............................................................ 14
Mindful Consumption and Generation Y: Comprehension, Conceptualization and
Communication .................................................................................................................... 15
Closing the Sustainable Consumption-Production Gap: Life Cycle Thinking in Consumer
Research ................................................................................................................................ 36
Ethical Consumer Behavior in (Un-)fair Markets: Fair Market Ideology as Moderator of
the Effect of Ethical Cues on Ethical Consumer Behavior .................................................. 57
Consumers as Change Agents I ....................................................................... 61
Consumer Movements: A framework for descriptive analysis in consumer culture research
.............................................................................................................................................. 62
Young people, social media and healthy eating – a systematic review of a consumer power
shift ....................................................................................................................................... 92
The Impact of Motivational Differences on Co-Production Relationships and Subsequent
Retaliation Characteristics .................................................................................................. 100
Globalisation, (Neo)Colonialism, and Marketing........................................ 107
Globalisation and the Future............................................................................................... 108
How a Displaced Majority Reframed National Identity through Mundane Brands: Kiwiana
and New Zealand ................................................................................................................ 109
Food Marketing I ........................................................................................... 110
Why Consumers Remain Ignorant of Nutrition Information: The Roles of Subjective and
Objective Nutrition Knowledge.......................................................................................... 111
Agricultural Land Loss in Turkey: Macro Causes and Possible Solutions ........................ 115
Out of step? Food Marketing, Wellbeing and the Concept of Time .................................. 119
Technological Advances & Marketing Futures II ....................................... 122
Panel Session: Autonomous Vehicles: Portending Impacts on Regulations, Markets and
Lifeworlds ........................................................................................................................... 123
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Social Justice Research: Linking emergent concepts to Macromarketing
perspectives and approaches ............................................................................................... 127
Round Table: Social Justice Research: Linking emergent concepts to Macromarketing
perspectives and approaches ............................................................................................... 128
Consumers as Change Agents II ................................................................... 129
Consumers have to want to change: Approach versus avoidance strategies in social
marketing to counter alcohol consumption in young people .............................................. 130
Power and the Role of Consumers to Shape the Macro Environment – An Ecosystems
Perspective .......................................................................................................................... 141
Engaging dissensus: A reflexive and collective approach to alcohol social change .......... 170
Globalisation, (Neo) Colonialism, and Marketing II ....................................... 172
The Middle Class and the Market: Imagery Rhetoric from Colonial to Nehruvian India .. 173
The dynamism of global-local cultural interaction: A multi-sited ethnographic study on
global music consumption of Vietnamese young consumers ............................................. 174
Technology, Globalization, and the Future ........................................................................ 175
Food Marketing II .......................................................................................... 176
Perceptions of Food Availability: An Examination of Low Income Consumers ............... 177
Complex Change and The Older Household’s Food Consumption Practices .................... 182
Perspectives on Ireland’s Origin Green Programme: Balancing Growth and Sustainability
............................................................................................................................................ 186
Social marketing practice and macromarketing reflections I .................... 190
Systemic Behaviour Change: Irish Farm Deaths and Injuries ............................................ 191
What role does dynamic complexity play in social marketing for sustainability change, if
any? ..................................................................................................................................... 213
Resilience and Social Marketing: A Socio-Ecological Approach to Wicked Problems .... 222
Sustainable & Ethical Consumption III ....................................................... 229
The consumer as (political) agent of change: possibilities and boundaries for true
environmental impact in clothing consumption ................................................................. 230
“Knowing better doesn´t change a thing” - (Why) do PEB-experts fail to overcome the
barriers to sustainable behavior? ........................................................................................ 238
Consumers as Change Agents III ................................................................. 243
Emergence of sustainable fashion and the institutional actors of change .......................... 244
The emergence of communal entrepreneurship: the case of passionate retrogamers ......... 245
Discursive (re)legitimation of meat consumption: a historical critical discourse analysis of
the normalization of the consumption of animal flesh (Work-in-progress) ....................... 279
Perspectives on justice and value creation I ................................................ 284
Panel Session: Marketing in a High-Speed, Post-Fact World ............................................ 285
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Food Marketing III ........................................................................................ 291
Consumers’ Literacy of Front of Pack Labels: Opportunities for Improving Food Well-
Being ................................................................................................................................... 292
Low Food Prices Culture: A Systematic Review of the Literature from the Quality of Life
Marketing Perspective ........................................................................................................ 296
Promoting Food for the Bin? A Literature Review and Coupled Survey and Waste Sorting
to Holistically Explore the Relation between Price Promotions and Consumer-Level Food
Waste .................................................................................................................................. 300
Gender, Intersectionalities, and Macromarketing I ................................... 305
Intersectionality between gene and gender: biopolitics and the control of risky female
bodies .................................................................................................................................. 306
Constructing ‘white beauty’ in Indonesia ........................................................................... 311
Between the sheets: Gendered neoliberalism, intimacy, and women’s sexual (consumption)
practices .............................................................................................................................. 316
Sustainable & Ethical Consumption IV ....................................................... 404
The Deviance between Religious Tenets and its Culturally Influences Public Practices- Are
We Willing to Bridge the Gap in the Quest of being Sustainable? .................................... 405
Bridging Paradigms for Sustainability: Propositions for a Relational Paradigm based on
Indigenous Belief Systems ................................................................................................. 410
Exploring traditional Chinese cultural values and pro-environmental self-identity as drivers
of Chinese sustainable consumption ................................................................................... 418
Consumers as Change Agents IV .................................................................. 424
Consumer responses towards cosmeceutical claims .......................................................... 425
Consumers drive fairness for farmers: a social enterprise perspective .............................. 434
Marketing and economic responsibility: historical roots and contemporary
interpretations ...................................................................................................................... 442
Panel Session Marketing and economic responsibility: historical roots and contemporary
interpretations ..................................................................................................................... 443
Responsibility of Marketing Knowledge and Practice: Misdirected Teleology and Crisis of
Ontology ............................................................................................................................. 445
Marketing and economic responsibility: historical roots and contemporary interpretations
............................................................................................................................................ 457
The Enduring Legacy of Economic Responsibility for Macromarketing .......................... 458
Responsibility - problems based on a misleading concept? ............................................... 464
A Return to Responsible Marketing ................................................................................... 472
Food Marketing IV ......................................................................................... 475
The Food Risk Society in China ......................................................................................... 476
The Application of Protection Motivation Theory in the Context of Genetically Modified
Foods .................................................................................................................................. 478
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Critical Sustainable Marketing: For What It’s Worth ........................................................ 482
Gender, Intersectionalities, and Macromarketing II .................................. 502
Gender, Illness, Age and Productivity: Addressing the Intersectionalities of Young Women
with Advanced Cancer ........................................................................................................ 503
Body modification, consumer culture, and gender identity: An Examination of Hourglass
Feature Enhancement ......................................................................................................... 508
Sustainable & Ethical Consumption V......................................................... 525
Brand extension decisions for organic products ................................................................. 526
Informal university linkages with government scientific research: facilitating market
adoption of household solar technology ............................................................................. 530
Market, Marketing Systems, and Elements of Culture I ............................ 534
How to Address Culture in Marketing Studies: An Analysis Using the Example of the
Marketing-Systems Approach ............................................................................................ 535
Marijuana, Pit Bulls, Plastic Bags: When Products Face Conflicting Laws ...................... 564
Marketing & Developmen I ........................................................................... 570
Creative Marketing at the Bottom of the Pyramid ............................................................. 571
The Societal Implications of An Inclusive Distribution Network In A Subsistence
Marketing............................................................................................................................ 575
Nicaragua: A Case in Marketing and Development toward Sustainable Well-being ........ 578
Macromarketing & Health I ......................................................................... 583
How I feel about my new hip: An emotion and sentiment analysis of online patient reviews
of total hip replacement surgery ......................................................................................... 584
Vulnerability in expectant-mothers in a North-Indian rural context .................................. 600
Examining the Reciprocity Mechanism of Sport-Based Social Initiative: The mediating
Role of Gratitude ................................................................................................................ 604
Extending the Big Thinking of Bob Lusch ......................................................................... 631
Gender, Intersectionalities, and Macromarketing III ................................ 634
Male Compensatory Consumption in American History ................................................... 635
Discrimination Against Women and Girls – Prevention Through Education? .................. 638
Exploring Gender Stereotypes and Gender Role Expectations in Clothing Consumption: A
Sustainability Marketing Perspective ................................................................................. 642
Sustainable & Ethical Consumption VI ....................................................... 644
The Two Faces of ‘ethical labels’ ....................................................................................... 645
A (re)Structuration of Sustainable Consumption Values to the Macro Level: Consumers of
the Tiny House Movement ................................................................................................. 666
Sustainable consumption among the new middle class in an emerging market: A social
cognitive perspective .......................................................................................................... 689
Markets, Marketing Systems, and Elements of Culture II ........................ 693
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How institutional actors shape exchange systems in a food sharing context: an Indo-US
perspective .......................................................................................................................... 694
The Impact of Cultural Values on Students’ Preferences for Slogans of Higher-Education
Institutions .......................................................................................................................... 698
Architectural Culture in Financial Marketing Systems ...................................................... 705
Marketing & Development II ........................................................................ 709
A Study of Brand Loyalty in e-retail industry .................................................................... 710
Digitization & globalization for the little players: the view from Thai SMEs ................... 712
Foreign Exchange Control in Venezuela: Antecedents, evolution and impact on the market
............................................................................................................................................ 732
Macromarketing and Health ......................................................................... 737
Sports-supplement consumption in young adults: Addressing consumer-vulnerability .... 738
Good Faith as the Demand for Sincerity in Marketing Systems: The Case of Surrogacy
Markets in India .................................................................................................................. 741
Supporting WHO Global Action Plan for Seasonal Influenza Vaccinations: The
Development of a Social Marketing Systems Methodology .............................................. 743
Gender, Intersectionalities, and Macromarketing IV ................................. 751
Here is a Place for You/Know Your Place: Understanding Neoliberal “Biopedagogy”
Embedded in Images of the Female Body in Fitness Advertising ..................................... 752
Structures and Bodies that Matter: Casting an Intersectionality Perspective on Climate
Change and Women Subsistence Farmers .......................................................................... 781
What flavour is your feminism? ‘Brand activism’ and the corporate enterprise of women’s
empowerment ..................................................................................................................... 783
Market In/Equalities – Forms & Practices I ............................................... 786
Persuasion: an Engine of Inequality? ................................................................................. 787
Exploring market inequalities through the biography of surplus food ............................... 794
The care-less marketplace: exclusion as affective inequality ............................................. 798
Negotiating (in)equalities around intercultural relationships ............................................. 804
Ethical Consumption in emerging economies I ........................................... 834
Oblivious Consumption—Concealed Production: Viewing Modern Slavery Through
Consumer’s Eyes ................................................................................................................ 835
Closing the intention-behavior gap to facilitate green consumption .................................. 836
Environment or Economy? Difference in perception of sustainable tourism between
environmental friendly tourists and mass tourists. ............................................................. 865
Sharing Economy as complementary Economy? The relation between
providers and consumers I .................................................................................................. 869
Zone of Optimal Distinctiveness: The Effect of Provider’s Asset Personalization on
Customer’s Psychological Ownership of Shared Lodging ................................................. 870
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Sharing Economy: Power, Trust, and Cooperation ............................................................ 874
Environmental crises; value in collaborative governance .................................................. 878
Macromarketing Measurement and Methodology I ................................... 883
Historical Marketing Systems Research: Applying Layton’s (2015) MAS Framework to
the Emergence and Growth of Denver Begging Systems .................................................. 884
Challenges in Assessing Effectiveness of Cultural Appeals in Marketing for Higher
Education ............................................................................................................................ 921
Looking at Complex Issues: Alternative Research Methodologies for Macromarketing . 926
Ethics, Equity and Social Justice I ................................................................ 935
Ethics in Marketing Practices in Different Countries: The Case of Data Privacy in using
Digital Marketing ............................................................................................................... 936
“Sharing” and “Values” as Foundations for a Balanced View of the Business-Government
Partnership .......................................................................................................................... 940
Challenges and opportunities in the sharing economy I ............................. 944
Tourism Sharing Economy and Well-being ....................................................................... 945
Examining Public Value Creation in the Sharing Economy .............................................. 952
Ethical consumption in emerging economies II ........................................... 961
Drivers of Green Product Purchase Intention: An Empirical Study on Consumers in an
Emerging Economy ............................................................................................................ 962
Markets and Marketing Activity as Indicators for Sustainable Policy and Practice –
Perspectives from Vietnam ................................................................................................. 982
Factors Influencing Green Apparel Purchase Intention: A Study of Young Consumers in
Vietnam .............................................................................................................................. 985
Marketing & Development III .................................................................... 1005
The Integrative Justice Model and Strategic Value Co-Creation: The case of Jesuit
Worldwide Learning (JWL) and Higher Education at the Margins ................................. 1006
Paradise Lost: Selling Community Well-Being for Outsider Profit ................................. 1011
Markets, Conflict, and Fear of (Non)-Development: A Discourse Analysis of the
Production & Consumption of Cyprus Peace Talks ......................................................... 1013
Macromarketing Measurement and Methodology II ............................... 1017
Defective Sorts and the loss of value: The case of farming in New Zealand ................... 1018
Customer Value within a Broader Perspective: Development and Validation of a Public
Value Scale ....................................................................................................................... 1025
Towards a Grounded Theory of Social Enterprise Places: Building Legitimacy and Markets
for Social Enterprise ......................................................................................................... 1030
Ethics, Equity and Social Justice II ............................................................ 1036
Equilibrium of marketing systems concept and reflection on animal-based industries ... 1037
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Distributive Justice and Dignity Dimensions- Integrative Justice Model and Commercial
Surrogates in India ............................................................................................................ 1057
The German Tafel System’s Missions and Conflicts: Approaching a Context-Sensitive and
Discursive Understanding................................................................................................. 1063
Challenges and opportunities in the sharing economy II ......................... 1067
Changing roles – consumers’ transition from user to service provider in the sharing
economy............................................................................................................................ 1068
Consume Less, and Share Better: A Convivial Approach to the Sharing Economy ........ 1078
Quality of Life, Well-being I ........................................................................ 1082
Macromarketing Implications of Quality of Work Life ................................................... 1083
The relationship between fashion and style orientation and well-being .......................... 1089
Marketing & Development IV .................................................................... 1115
The Peril and Promise of Peace Marketing: Perspectives from Lebanon ........................ 1116
The Negative Sentiment towards Syrian Refugees in the Workplace and the Use of
Marketing as a Facilitator for their Acceptance ............................................................... 1122
A Stocktaking Report about Corruption in Lebanon and Ethical Marketing to fight
Corruption ......................................................................................................................... 1126
Macromarketing Measurement and Methodology III .............................. 1130
Visual Data Sources for Marketing and Consumption History ........................................ 1131
Macromarketing Insights Ninety Minutes at a Time: A Season with Forest Green Rovers,
the World’s Greenest Football Club ................................................................................. 1153
The Power of Marketplace Mythologies in Transforming Energy Marketing Systems ... 1177
Ethics, Equity and Social Justice III........................................................... 1187
Ethical Social Marketing: An Integrative Justice Approach ............................................ 1188
Solving the Financial Problems of Consumers: The Social Market Economy through
Sustainable Finance .......................................................................................................... 1189
Challenges and opportunities in the sharing economy III ....................... 1202
Two sides of one coin: customer misbehavior and identification – A multilevel study in the
context of carsharing ........................................................................................................ 1203
The sharing economy: Providers and stakeholders ......................................................... 1210
Quality of Life, Well-being II ...................................................................... 1216
Growing compassion: the case of CEOs sleeping rough for a night ................................ 1217
Hedonic Consumption Practices Of The Disadvantaged And Their Influence On Their
Psychosocial Well-Being:A Qualitative Study in the Context of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
.......................................................................................................................................... 1248
Reconnecting Consumers with Producers to Improve Life Satisfaction .......................... 1253
Marketing & Development V ...................................................................... 1258
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Lebanon: Preliminary Explorations of a Complex and Conflicted Political Economy and
Marketing System ............................................................................................................. 1259
The Experiential Perception of a Tourist Destination in Foreign Visitors’ Minds: The Case
of Byblos, Lebanon........................................................................................................... 1262
The Middleman Myth: Understanding the Role of Small-Scale Intermediaries in System
Resilience in Impoverished Contexts ............................................................................... 1266
Macromarketing Measurement and Methodology IV .............................. 1270
Towards a Bhaskarian Metatheory for Marketing Systems in Crisis ............................... 1271
Applying the STIRPAT for Macromarketing ................................................................... 1295
Social Tagging Networks: A new Method for #Hashtag Clustering and Networking on
Instagram .......................................................................................................................... 1299
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Conference Chair and
Conference Committee
Conference Chair: Helge Löbler
Conference committee:
Helge Löbler
Janine Mörstedt
Michelle Wloka
Pablo Barriga
Sebastian Stieler
Conference Track responsibles
Track Name Chair Responsible Co-Chair(s)
Marketing & Development Andrés Barrios Cliff Shultz
Markets, Marketing Systems,
and Elements of Culture Ingrid Becker Michaela Haase
Food Marketing Claudia Dumitrescu Renée Shaw Hughner
Quality of Life, Well-being Alexandra Ganglmair-
Wooliscroft Ahmet Ekici
Consumers as Change Agents Mahsa Ghaffari
Cristina Longo
Lin Su
Andrew Parsons
Perspectives on justice and
value creation Michaela Haase
Technological Advances and
Marketing Futures Tracy Harwood
Tony Garry
Russ Belk
Alladi Venkatesh
Gender, Intersectionalities, and
Macromarketing Wendy Hein
Josephine Previte
Laurel Steinfield
Sustainable & Ethical
Consumption Sabrina V. Helm
Market In/Equalities – Forms
& Practices Martina Hutton Maria Piacentini
xi
Track Name Chair Responsible Co-Chair(s)
Ethics, Equity and Social
Justice Ann-Marie Kennedy Nicky Santos
Challenges and opportunities
in the sharing economy Nicole Koenig-Lewis
Sabine Benoit
Kristina Wittkowski
Carmela Bosangit
Globalisation,
(Neo)Colonialism, and
Marketing
Olga Kravets Cagri Yalkin
Macromarketing and Health Jayne Krisjanous Djavlonbek Kadirov
Ethical consumption in
emerging economies Thi Tuyet Mai Nguyen
Vu Hung Nguyen
Thi Hoang Yen Nguyen
Sharing Economy as
Complementary Economy?
The relation between providers
and consumers
Elfriede Penz Barbara Hartl
Eva Hofmann
Social marketing practice and
Macromarketing reflections Josephine Previte
Christine Domegan
Ann-Marie Kennedy
Macromarketing Measurement
and Methodology Ben Wooliscroft Francisco Conejo
xii
Conference Participants
Family name Given
name Country Affiliation Email
Abou-Khalil Walid Lebanon University Saint-
Joseph of Beirut [email protected]
Aktan Damla Turkey Izmir University
of Economics [email protected]
Aoun Barakat Karine Lebanon St Joseph
University [email protected]
Araque-Padilla Rafael Ángel Spain Universidad
Loyola Andalucía [email protected]
Asaad Yousra United
Kingdom
Newcastle
University [email protected]
Aschemann-
Witzel Jessica Denmark
MAPP Centre,
Aarhus University [email protected]
Baktır Zeynep Turkey Bilkent University [email protected]
Bargenda Angela France
ESCE
International
Business School
Paris
Bäro Anne Germany
HHL Leipzig
Graduate School
of Management
Barriga Ortiz Pablo Germany Leipzig University [email protected]
Barrios Andrés Colombia Universidad de
Los Andes [email protected]
Becker Ingrid Germany
Friedrich-
Alexander-
Universität
Erlangen-
Nürnberg (FAU)
Belk Russell Canada York University [email protected]
Beninger Stefanie Netherlands Simon Fraser
University [email protected]
Berg Petra Finland Univeristy of
Vaasa [email protected]
Beverland Michael United
Kingdom
University of
Sussex [email protected]
Bosangit Carmela United
Kingdom Cardiff University [email protected]
Boyaval Marine France University of Lille [email protected]
Brennan Linda Australia RMIT University [email protected]
Carrington Michal Australia The University of
Melbourne [email protected]
Chatzidakis Andreas United
Kingdom
Royal Holloway
University of
London
xiii
Family name Given
name Country Affiliation Email
Chaudhuri Himadri Roy India
Indian Institute of
Management
Tiruchirappalli
Cheded Mohammed United
Kingdom
De Montfort
University [email protected]
Cheung Lilliemay Australia The University of
Queensland [email protected]
Cummins Shannon United
States UW-Whitewater [email protected]
DeFraites Lindsey New
Zealand
Victoria
University of
Wellington
(VUW)
Deie Kenji Japan Kumamoto
Gakuen University [email protected]
DeLong Deborah United
States
Chatham
University [email protected]
Demirbag
Kaplan Melike Turkey Yasar University [email protected]
Dermody Janine United
Kingdom
Oxford Brookes
University [email protected]
Dholakia Nikhilesh United
States
University of
Rhode Island [email protected]
Diekmann Larissa Germany University of
Bayreuth [email protected]
Domegan Christine Ireland NUI Galway [email protected]
Doueiry Verne Carole Lebanon
Université Saint-
Joseph de
Beyrouth
Drake Carly Canada University of
Calgary [email protected]
Dumitrescu Claudia United
States
Central
Washington
University
Duque-Estrada Ana Brazil
ESPM - Escola
Superior de
Propaganda e
Marketing
Ekici Ahmet Turkey Bilkent University [email protected]
Emile Renu India O.P. Jindal Global
University [email protected]
Enqvist Bo Sweden
Karlstad
University -
Sweden
Ertekin Zeynep Turkey Izmir University
of Economics [email protected]
Facca Miess Tina United
States
John Carroll
University [email protected]
Firat A Fuat United
States
University of
Texas Rio Grande
Valley
xiv
Family name Given
name Country Affiliation Email
Fowler Jie United
States
Valdosta State
University [email protected]
Fritze Martin Paul Germany University of
Cologne [email protected]
Fry Marie-Louise Australia Griffith University [email protected]
Fujimoto Hisao Japan Osaka university
of Economics [email protected]
Ganglmair-
Wooliscroft Alexandra
New
Zealand
University of
Otago [email protected]
Gazley Aaron
United
Arab
Emirates
American
University of
Sharjah
Ghafafri Mahsa United
Kingdom
University of
Portsmouth [email protected]
Giwa Shelton United
Kingdom
De Montfort
University [email protected]
Grace Sarah United
States
University of
Arkansas [email protected]
Gwozdz Wencke Denmark Copenhagen
Business School [email protected]
Haase Michaela Germany FU Berlin [email protected]
Halliday Sue United
Kingdom
Anglia Ruskin
University [email protected]
Hartl Barbara Austria
WU, Vienna
University of
Economics and
Business
Harwood Tracy United
Kingdom
De Montfort
University [email protected]
Heath Teresa United
Kingdom
University of
Nottingham [email protected]
Hein Wendy United
Kingdom
Birkbeck College,
University of
London
Helm Sabrina United
States
University of
Arizona [email protected]
Hill Beverley United
Kingdom
Swansea
University [email protected]
Hofmann Eva Austria
WU, Vienna
University of
Economics and
Business
Hogg Johannes Germany
Hochschule
Fresenius für
Management,
Wirtschaft und
Medien GmbH
Hopkinson Gillian United
Kingdom
Lancaster
University
Management
School
xv
Family name Given
name Country Affiliation Email
Hutton Martina United
Kingdom
University of
Winchester [email protected]
Ingene Charles United
States
University of
Oklahoma [email protected]
James W.
Gentry JIM
United
States
University of
Nebraska-Lincoln [email protected]
Jasinenko Anna Germany HHL [email protected]
Jayashankar Priyanka United
States
Iowa State
University [email protected]
Kadirov Djavlonbek New
Zealand
Victoria
University of
Wellington
Kemper Joya New
Zealand
The University of
Auckland [email protected]
Kennedy Ann-Marie New
Zealand
University of
Canterbury [email protected]
Kleinalten-
kamp Michael Germany FU Berlin
Michael.Kleinaltenkamp@fu-
berlin.de
Koenig-Lewis Nicole United
Kingdom Cardiff University [email protected]
Kovalenko Andriy New
Zealand
Toi Ohomai
Institute of
Technology
Laczniak Gene United
States
Marquette
University [email protected]
Lang Bodo New
Zealand
University of
Auckland
Business School
Lascu Dana-
Nicoleta
United
States
University of
Richmond [email protected]
Lee MinHye United
Kingdom
University of
Winchester [email protected]
Lee Seung Pil Republic of
Korea
Hankuk
University of
Foreign Studies,
Korea
Leek Sheena United
Kingdom
University of
Birmingham [email protected]
Liebrenz-Himes Marilyn United
States
George
Washington
University
Löbler Helge Germany Leipzig University [email protected]
Longo Cristina France
Université de Lille
– SKEMA
Business School,
MERCUR
Research Centre
Lord Ferguson Sarah Canada Simon Fraser
University [email protected]
Lunde Matthew United
States
University of
Wyoming [email protected]
xvi
Family name Given
name Country Affiliation Email
Magrizos Solon United
Kingdom
University of
Birmingham [email protected]
Manrique Luisa Germany Leipzig University [email protected]
McGouran Cathy United
Kingdom
University of
Liverpool
Management
School
Mehta Ritu India
Indian Institute of
Management
Calcutta
Montero-Simó María José Spain Universidad
Loyola Andalucía [email protected]
Montgomery Jacki Australia Western Sydney
University [email protected]
Mueller Tina Denmark Copenhagen
Business School [email protected]
Mughal Sobia New
Zealand
The University of
Auckland [email protected]
Murphy Maurice Ireland Cork Institute of
Technology [email protected]
Nguyen Hung Vu Viet Nam
National
Economics
University, Hanoi
Nguyen Mai Viet Nam
National
Economics
University
Nguyen Nhat Nguyen France
Université de Lille
– SKEMA
Business School,
MERCUR
Research Centre
Nguyen Thi Hoang
Yen Viet Nam
Posts and
Telecomunications
Institut of
Technology
Nguyen Hoang Linh France SKEMA Business
School [email protected]
Niehuis Elena Germany
University of
Applied Sciences
Bochum /
Leuphana
University
Lueneburg
Oneto Stephanie United
States
University of
Wyoming [email protected]
Ottlewski Lydia Switzerland Universität St.
Gallen [email protected]
Park Heejung United
States
University of
Wyoming [email protected]
Pavia Teresa United
States Univ. of Utah [email protected]
xvii
Family name Given
name Country Affiliation Email
Penz Elfriede Austria WU Vienna [email protected]
Peterson Mark United
States UW [email protected]
Pieper Nadine Germany
Technische
Universität
Braunschweig /
Institute of
Automotive
Management and
Industrial
Production
Pitt Leyland Canada Simon Fraser
University [email protected]
Polsa Pia Finland Hanken School of
Economics [email protected]
Previte Josephine Australia The University of
Queensland [email protected]
Rahtz Don United
States
College of
William & Mary [email protected]
Reppel Alex United
Kingdom
Royal Holloway,
University of
London
Rogan Donal Ireland
Institute of
Technology,
Tallaght, Dublin
Rome Alexandra Germany ICN Business
School [email protected]
Saman Zehra United
States
University of
Wyoming [email protected]
Samuel Anthony United
Kingdom Cardiff University [email protected]
Santos Marcos Brazil Multivix Faculty [email protected]
Santos Nicholas United
States
Marquette
University [email protected]
Shaw Deirdre United
Kingdom
University of
Glasgow [email protected]
Shultz Clifford United
States
Loyola University
Chicago [email protected]
Simmonds Hamish New
Zealand
Victoria
University of
Wellington
(VUW)
Speece Mark Kuwait
American
University of
Kuwait
Steinfield Laurel United
States Bentley University [email protected]
Stieler Sebastian Germany Leipzig University [email protected]
xviii
Family name Given
name Country Affiliation Email
Strehlau Vivian Brazil
ESPM - Escola
Superior de
Propaganda e
Marketing
Tewari Veena Oman Majan College [email protected]
Thyroff Anastasia United
States
Clemson
University [email protected]
Torma Gabriele Denmark Aarhus University [email protected]
van Dam Ynte Netherlands Wageningen
University [email protected]
Veeck Ann United
States
Western Michigan
University [email protected]
Wallaschkowski Stephan Germany Hochschule
Bochum
stephan.wallaschkowski@hs-
bochum.de
Wiart Lucie France
Université de Lille
– SKEMA
Business School,
MERCUR
Research Centre
Witkowski Terrence United
States
California State
University, Long
Beach
Wloka Michelle Germany Leipzig University [email protected]
Wood Matthew United
Kingdom
Brighton Business
School [email protected]
Wooliscroft Ben New
Zealand
University of
Otago [email protected]
Yip Jeaney Australia University of
Sydney [email protected]
Zhao Anita Lifen United
Kingdom
Swansea
University [email protected]
xix
Conference Chairs Thanks
The Macromarketing Conference 2018 chair and committee would like to thank
the track chairs, the reviewers and those who have supported the conference by
submitting papers, found throughout these proceedings.
It would not have been possible without so many people. To all of them we want
to express our gratitude.
1
Technological
Advances
& Marketing Futures I
Track Chair: Tracy Harwood
Co-Chair(s): Tony Garry
Russ Belk
Alladi Venkatesh
2
Managing brands in the
blockchain era
Achilleas Boukis1 University of Sussex, UK
Solon Magrizos2 University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
The role of branding in a competitive global market arena has been predominantly established
from contemporary marketers. Traditionally, branding activities had an important role in
delivering the firm’s promise to consumers, reassuring them for the quality of the products
purchased (Veloutsou and Moutinho 2009). The evolution of the marketing discipline
eventually allowed firms to cultivate brands in consumers’ minds through a long period of
dedicated effort, where brand managers used mass marketing communications to pass their
brand messages on to consumers (Grace and O'cass 2005). The rise of the internet shifted the
emphasis of marketers on user-generated content and consumer-to-consumer interactions,
disrupting the channels of traditional brand communication (e.g. advertising) (Kohli, Suri and
Kapoor 2015). Following this period, the proliferation of social media and smart applications
have changed again the focus and scope of branding communication in the online
environment. Consumers are now empowered to share their brand experiences through social
networks and reach other consumers real-time and quickly, making their voice more
impactful than stories spread through firm-generated marketing efforts (Hennig-Thurau et al.
2010).
In this constantly changing landscape, the role of branding as a key ingredient of
successful marketing campaigns is increasingly reinforced (John and Park 2016); consumers’
brand loyalty is increasingly affected from their online presence. At the same time, social
media provide unique opportunity for brands to foster their relationships with customers
1 [email protected] 2 [email protected]
3
(Laroche et al. 2013) but also create new challenges for brands (Christodoulides 2009); an
inconsistency in the brand’s “walk and talk” might result inevitably in wide repercussions,
disappointing customers and shacking their trust in the brand (e.g. United Airlines). Hence,
there is an utter need for brands to encourage a constant conversation with the target audience
and enable communication in a direct and authentic way, overcoming surface-level
engagement and establishing high brand transparency in the digitalized environment (Kohli,
Suri and Kapoor 2015).
This challenge becomes even greater in the forthcoming era, where major
technological advancements might change again the way consumers and brands interact. One
such advancement is the introduction of blockchain technology, which is expected to have
some serious ramifications for brand management and their relationship with consumers
(Mattila 2016). The term ‘blockchain technology’ refers to the use of a shared distributed
database (ledger), which processes any digital transaction over the business network and
tracks the tangible or intangible assets involved that facilitates the process of recording
transactions and tracking assets in a business network (Iansiti and Lakhani 2017). Assets can
be virtually anything of value such as tangible (e.g. products) or intangible (e.g. information)
and they can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network, reducing risk and cutting costs
for all parties involved (Seebacher and Schüritz 2017). The adoption of this peer-to-peer
technology is anticipated to change existing brand communication models and the design and
nature of branding strategies, to shape the nature of brand-customer relationships, redefining
this way the scope, nature and application of consumer branding in the following years
(Tapscott and Tapscott 2017).
Echoing this new reality, this conceptual paper advances a preliminary critical
discussion around the nature of blockchain technology and its potentially disruptive
implications for contemporary brand management and consumer-brand relationships. First, an
analytical review of the features of blockchain technology is presented and its underlying
features are briefly discussed so to introduce readers to the main functions of blockchain. The
following section critically discusses the challenges emerging from the application of
blockchain technology for brands as well as their impact on existing brand management
strategies, offering some insights for researchers and practitioners. In specific, the adoption of
blockchain technology is expected to create some important challenges for some key areas of
brand management: the way brands reach their audience, the design of loyalty programs, the
importance of brand authenticity and transparency, their ability to engage with consumers and
the risk from brand accountability. The implications on these areas might have a strong
4
impact on the way strategic brand management is designed and executed and are extensively
discussed. Last, the impact of blockchain on consumer-brand relationships is examined and a
discussion takes place around the changes in consumers’ role in this forthcoming era on the
following topics; how brand loyalty will belong to consumers, how consumers will have
greater ability to tailor their needs, brands do not own consumer data, neither consumers do
and authentication of certified brand consumption.
References
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141-144.
Grace, Debra and Aron O'cass (2005), “Examining the effects of service brand
communications on brand evaluation,” Journal of Product and Brand Management, 14(2),
106-116.
Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten, Edward C. Malthouse, Christian Friege, Sonja Gensler, Lara
Lobschat, Arvind Rangaswamy, and Bernd Skiera (2010), “The impact of new media on
customer relationships,” Journal of service research, 13(3), 311-330.
Iansiti, Marco, and Karim R. Lakhani (2017), “The truth about blockchain,” Harvard Business
Review, 95(1), 118-127.
John, Deborah Roedder and Ji Kyung Park (2016), “Mindsets matter: Implications for
branding research and practice,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(1), 153-160.
Kohli, Chiranjeev, Rajneesh Suri, and Anuj Kapoor (2015), “Will social media kill
branding?,” Business Horizons, 58(1), 35-44.
Laroche, Michel, Mohammad Reza Habibi, and Marie-Odile Richard (2013), “To be or not to
be in social media: How brand loyalty is affected by social media”, International Journal of
Information Management, 33(1), 76-82.
Mattila, Juri (2016), “The Blockchain Phenomenon–The Disruptive Potential of Distributed
Consensus Architectures”, (38). The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
Seebacher, Stefan, and Ronny Schüritz (2017), “Blockchain technology as an enabler of
service systems: A structured literature review,” In International Conference on Exploring
Services Science (12-23). Springer, Cham.
Tapscott, Don, and Alex Tapscott (2017), “How blockchain will change organizations,” MIT
Sloan Management Review, 58(2), 10.
Veloutsou, Cleopatra, and Luiz Moutinho (2009), “Brand relationships through brand
reputation and brand tribalism,” Journal of Business Research, 62(3), 314-322.
5
From Simplicity to Complexity:
an exploration of emerging
lifestyles, consumer perceptions
and response to Location Based
Services
Shelton Giwa, De Montfort University, UK
Dr. Anne Broderick, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Dr. Suha Omar, De Montfort University, UK
Extended Abstract
Background
Location Based Services (LBS) and electronic lifestyles (e-lifestyles) represent emergent new
areas with approaches (e.g. applications [apps] and electronic activities [e-activities]) billed to
change customer experiences and responses (Zhou 2012). This comes at a time when the UK
is leader in mobile adoption and mobile phone advertising (75% smartphone penetration by
2016 - E-Marketer 2015). In addition, UK mobile advertisement spending was predicted to rise
by 35 % in 2016 to reach just over £ 91 billion (E-Marketer 2016). However, a challenge for
marketers lies in understanding how consumers are engaging in mobile shopping behaviours so
that strategies and services can be tailored accordingly to exploit the shifting market trends
(Donovan 2013 e.g. lifestyles and LBS). Kim et al. (2010) refer to (trends) emerging lifestyles
(e.g. e-lifestyles), patterns of living congruent with technological trends (Hassan et al., 2015):
e-lifestyles are patterns of living resulting from technological advancement. LBS is one of the
ways allowing marketers to reach micro segments with tailored content based on location
(Stewart and Pavlov 2002 cited in c). Nonetheless, capabilities of LBS (e.g. Wi-Fi) often
highlight concerns over intrusion (Brown 2011; Zhou 2012 and Anderson 2013).
6
Thus, despite projected growth figures, (PRNewswire 2015); there is an ethical dimension to
LBS use where location information is collected silently without user knowledge (Michael et
al., 2008; Dhar and Varshney 2011). Nonetheless, other authors (Lin and Louis 1998; Wang
and Loui 2009) argue how one-time information collection is not unethical per se but the
centralization and aggregation thereof, which banishes the context provided by privacy.
Therefore, future development of LBS depends on whether value perceptions for consumers
outweigh risks such as fear of intrusion. In addition, offering opt-in and opt out options as well
as personalisation (Anuar and Gretzel 2013; Yun et al., 2013). Currently, there are limited
predictions of the effect of mobile lifestyles on specific individual search and response
behaviour (Abele et al., 2014) and scholars (e.g. Yu et al., 2010; Zhou 2012) see how
implementation of marketing strategies based on LBS is still in infancy. In addition, there is
need for synchronous LBS and e-lifestyle research (Weiss, 2013). Furthermore, little research
has identified suitable measurement scales for these emerging lifestyles (Lee et al., 2009):
extant studies rely on either lifestyle measures or technology acceptance theories (see Yu 2011
and Yu et al., 2015). Nevertheless, our study seeks specific understanding of consumer
perceptions (e.g. value and perceived risk) and the role of emerging lifestyles on consumer
response. For example, Perusco and Michael (2007) highlighted a need for future research
addressing social implications of LBS (privacy risk). This study is informed by the adapted
lifestyle framework (Yu 2011), attitude construct from the UTAUT (Venkatesh et al., 2003)
and Model of new Media Behaviour (Zhang et al., 2012). The study seeks to uncover consumer
attitudes, experience and response in typical LBS encounters. In this research, Macromarketing
perspectives such as risk, ethics (i.e. privacy) and trust issues serve as useful tools in evaluating
consumer perceptions of LBS impacted by emerging lifestyles.
Purpose:
This paper explores consumer LBS perceptions (e.g. privacy concerns) exploring how
emerging lifestyles influence individual consumer response and considers implications for
marketers. Therefore, the research seeks a better understanding of attitudinal challenges in
typical LBS encounters. For example, looking at LBS as a Macromarketing issue where
delivery of messages based on location may potentially affect user privacy and trust.
7
Design/Methodology/Approach:
Most LBS and e-lifestyle studies use positivist measures (Bruns and Jacob, 2014). Such
measures may not adequately capture consumers’ ‘unique’ hidden motives, beliefs and
behavioural response patterns (Koenigstorfer et al. 2008, p. 218). A sequential multi-method
approach is used instead to address this challenge. First, non-participant online observations
(Phase 1- four websites observed over six weeks). Second, Phase 2 specialist interviews
(projective techniques3 -Cartoon Tests with twenty-one respondents) each lasting on average
twenty-five minutes. Third, focus group interviews (Phase 3- with young students, young
professionals and older established professionals) each lasting forty to sixty minutes to explore
consumer familiarity, attitudes and experiences with LBS. Adult respondents for all research
phases were aged 18 years and above and a non-probability convenience sampling approach
was used (Bryman and Bell, 2015). In Phase 1, convenience and judgemental sampling methods
(readily available websites and participants as well as relevant threads from knowledgeable
participants) were employed (Creswell 2014). In the last phase, snowball sampling was
adopted: respondents from Phase 2 recommended friends or colleagues to participate in focus
groups. A qualitative approach to data analysis (content analysis- inductive) was adopted to
establish relationships between theory and research (Kozinets 2010; Creswell 2014) and
illustrate emerging observation and interview themes. Ethical guidelines (e.g. honesty,
confidentiality) were observed throughout the entire research process as recommended by
Denscombe (2014) and Kozinets (2015).
Research Findings
Varying levels of involvement and experience emerged across all phases of this study. Findings
point to attitudinal challenges where unwanted messages are received: trade- offs between
maintaining e-lifestyles and providing privileged access. Situational context and e-lifestyles
influence response to LBS: where, when and with whom contextualised messages are received.
Respondent narratives demonstrated how e- activities, e-interests, e-sociability and e-
entertainment4 had a link to their response (Caddy 2016-transumers). Nevertheless, some of the
3 According to Catterall et al., (2000) this is a completion technique where research participants are presented with a scenario to complete thereby expressing their own thoughts. 4 Distinct from traditional lifestyles (e.g. routine engagement in offline activities such as offline shopping, sports; AIO) to e-lifestyles (e.g. online shopping, socializing and entertainment in transit/between places; adapted e-lifestyle [e-Activities, e-Interests, e-Opinions).
8
narratives highlighted trust and privacy issues (Johnson and Spitzmuller 2008). Interestingly,
trust issues are highlighted regarding young users (indifference to LBS); parallel to existing
literature (Assael, 2005). Surprisingly, privacy/trust concerns were echoed where non-monetary
offers (e.g. Carnival and Leicester City celebrity event) and relatively low discounts (e.g. 10%-
25% offers) are offered as well as aggregation of information. Lastly, various response
pathways emerged where younger consumers readily embraced relevant (trusted) LBS stimuli
than their older counterparts. Regarding the role of personal factors (e.g. life stage), results are
contrary to literature (see, Persaud and Arzhar 2012; Perks 2012; King 2016).
Conclusion
This exploratory study contributes to the body of literature by articulating the role of e-lifestyle
and individual attributes that influence response: beyond LBS and e-lifestyle theories (e.g.
UTAUT- Venkatesh et al., 2003; Yu 2011; Zhou 2012) mapping consumer response to agile
technologies (Gartner, 2014). In addition, future trends point to growth of internet of things
(IOT e.g. cyborgs - Harwood and Garry 2017) and consumer response to mobile health LBS
(e.g. fitness apps, Grundy et al., 2017) where micromarketing issues (e.g. privacy) may arise.
Social implications (e.g. privacy risk) are also highlighted (Perusco and Michael 2007).
9
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Information Systems Engineering (6:6), pp. 349-359.
Bryman, A., Bell, E (2015). Business Research Methods. 4th ed. London: Oxford
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British Educational Research Journal, 26(2), 245-256.
Chan, J. K. C., & Leung, L. (2005). Lifestyles, reliance on traditional news media and
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Creswell, J (2014). Research Design Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods
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10
Denscombe, M (2014). The Good Research Guide for small-scale social research projects.
5th ed. England: Open University Press.
Dhar, S., & Varshney, U. (2011). Challenges and business models for mobile location-
based services and advertising. Communications of the ACM, 54(5), 121-128.
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13
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14
Sustainable & Ethical
Consumption I
Track Chair: Sabrina V. Helm
15
Mindful Consumption and
Generation Y: Comprehension,
Conceptualization and
Communication
Damla AKTAN5, İzmir University of Economics, Turkey
Melike Demirbağ KAPLAN6, Yaşar University, Turkey
Abstract
The recent decade witnessed the highest degree of unsustainable world conditions including
climate change, global warming and pollution, and economic scarcity, which is mainly caused
by excessive consumption promoted by the institution of marketing. At the same time,
marketing literature offered a myriad of studies focusing on sustainability as a solution to the
problem of overconsumption and degradation of world resources. However, looking at the
facts and figures of UN, OECD, European Environment Agency, and relevant institutions
working on sustainability, it becomes clear that these attempts are not enough to save the
planet.
Marketing academia very recently proposed the concept of mindful consumption as a solution
to the problem. Although mindfulness is not a new concept in the literature, it’s application in
marketing had been limited due to the fact that it lacks clarification in terms of how it differs
from other related concepts, and how it is perceived by consumers. In this context, Gen Y
appears to be the catalysts of change in this decade, and therefore their perception of
mindfulness becomes critical. Most of the literature about this generation focuses on their
16
values and behaviors on a managerial and marketing oriented context, while the literature
lacks deeper investigation into their perception of mindfulness and mindful consumption.
Throughout the literature, the concept of “mindfulness” has been discussed in terms of either
behavioral dimensions such as mindset versus behavior or as individual or psychological
means. The definitions of the concept explain the dynamics of the concept through the limits
of its definition which excludes the potential wider understanding or classification of the
concept through different generations under different life circumstances. The definitions
presented until now in the literature focuses only on literature based conceptual definitions
limited to the research areas of the related field of study. Yet, they do not make classifications
based upon a broader level focusing on different dimensions of life or generational attitudes
and perspectives. They lack a higher level of understanding about how Gen Y perceive the
definitions of mindfulness from both an individual level and a more societal level, which in
return also ignores how this perception and logic of mind affects their consumption behaviors.
The research framework presented in this article intends to explore how the concept of
mindful consumption is perceived by Gen Yers -who were born between 1980 and 2000-, in
order to question if they have a mindful mindset, and if they do not have, are they ready to
form one. The study thus provides theoretical contribution to the literature through presenting
a new structure of mindful consumption definitions within the perspectives of Gen Y,
pointing out the barriers against mindful behavior, and clarifying underlying motivations for
this generation to transform their potential mindset to behavior.
Qualitative methodology was used in this research to gain deep insights about Y Generation
currently living in Izmir, Turkey, their perception about consumption, their consumption
habits and behaviors, and their attitudes towards any potential mindful consumption behavior.
A total of 40 in-depth interviews were conducted with youth selected from Generation Y
segment to get their worldview about “mindful consumption”. The sample is selected based
upon their birth years, and then was divided into three segments according to the date of birth.
The first segment was chosen to include the years of 1980-1987; those who graduated a
couple of years ago and already actively started working, with a regular amount of income
received monthly. The second segment was chosen between the years of 1988-1994; those
who are either graduating or in the last years of their university education. The last segment
was chosen from the years between 1994-2000; those who are currently in high school, living
17
with their parents, and in the very beginnings of their career orientations. Data analysis was
conducted according to the guidelines provided by experienced scholars such as Spiggle
(1994) and Kvale (1996). The interviews were first systematically coded to discover key
emergent themes (Coffey and Atkinson 1996); and open coding, axial coding and selective
coding (Carson et al. 2001) are respectively used for the analysis.
The findings indicate that our sample of Gen Y perceives and defines mindfulness on two
levels of individual versus collective –in other terms, me versus we- orientation, and then on
four different dimensions of “self”, “life”, “others” and “environment”. Whereas two of these
dimensions –self and life- falls into more the individual level descriptions and perceptions of
the concept, the other two dimensions -others and environment- fall within the collective
level. Our findings suggest that Gen Y in the modern world are more individual while talking
about their core values and self-discovery ideals as well as their consumption habits.
Overall, the findings and analysis summarize the concept of mindfulness in two dimensions
as “individual mindfulness” versus “collective mindfulness, which also appear to be the
factors simultaneously hindering and motivating to mindful action for Gen Yers.
Keywords: Mindful consumption, Generation Y, sustainability, consumption, marketing
tools
18
Table 1. Informant Statistics
Name Gender Birth Year Occupation
Nazlı F 1986 Graduate student/not working
Cansu F 1989 Graduate student/working
İpek F 1991 Graduate student/not working
Nükte F 1988 Graduate student/working
Cihan F 1992 University Student
Birsen F 1984 Graduate student/not working
Ali M 1991 University Student
Funda F 1987 Graduate student/working
Burcu F 1992 University Student
Seçil F 1992 University Student
Barış Can M 1991 University Student
Egemen M 1993 University Student
Esra İdil F 1989 University Student
Gizem F 1991 University Student
Pelin F 1981 Working
Derya M 1991 University Student
Hande F 1982 Working
Mert M 1991 University Student
Güliz F 1993 University Student
Metin M 1989 University Student
Yıldız F 1989 Working
Seden F 1985 Working
Yasemin F 1983 Not working
Cansu F 1986 Graduate Student/Working
Sinem F 1983 Graduate Student/Working
Gizem F 1984 Working
Hasan M 1981 Working
Burak M 1994 High School Student
Ayfer F 1984 High School Student
Ahmet M 1997 High School Student
19
Table 2: Summary of Mindful Consumption Definitions of Gen Y Sample in İzmir
Mindful Consumption Emotional/Affective Rational/Cognitive
Individual Happiness
Self-discovery
Spiritual evolution
Power
Need recognition
Process of logical thinking
Collective Nature Orientation
Balance
Balance
Table 3: Sample distribution of themes according to the age groups
1980-1986 1987-1993 1994-2000
Happiness
Self-discovery
Spiritual evolution
Power
Nature Orientation
Balance
Process of logical thinking
Sense of wonder
Peace of mind
Feeling of wholeness
Joy
Living in present movement
Sense
Happiness
Self-discovery
Spiritual evolution
Power
Nature Orientation
Balance
Process of logical thinking
Sense of wonder
Peace of mind
Feeling of wholeness
Joy
Living in present movement
Sense
Happiness
Need recognition
Nature Orientation
Feeling of wholeness
Joy
Sense
Caring for self
Caring for nature
20
1980-1986 1987-1993 1994-2000
Being accepted within the
universe
Openness to novelty
Awareness
Active information
processing
Caring for self
Caring for nature
Caring for community
Being accepted within the
universe
Openness to novelty
Awareness
Active information
processing
Caring for self
Caring for nature
Caring for community
Individualism + Collectivism Individualism + Collectivism Collectivism
Emotional+Rational
discourses
Emotional+Rational
discourses
More emotional discourses
Less rational discourses
21
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36
Closing the Sustainable
Consumption-Production Gap:
Life Cycle Thinking in Consumer
Research
Sarah C. Grace, University of Arkansas, USA
Abstract:
The 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals establish 'sustainable consumption and
production patterns’ as a priority on the global sustainability agenda. Unsustainable
consumption and production patterns result in negative externalities throughout society, and
the UN Environment Program supports "life cycle thinking" to better manage these
externalities. Life cycle thinking traces a product or service throughout the entirety of its life
cycle, including raw material extraction, production, transportation, consumption, and end-of-
life disposition. While life cycle thinking has been broadly applied to the pursuit of
sustainable production, its applications to sustainable consumption are widely unexplored. As
a result, a consumption-production gap exists in both the sustainability literature and the
practice of sustainability in the marketplace. This paper demonstrates how life cycle thinking
can help marketers and policy makers break down the complex phenomenon of sustainable
consumption into more simple, actionable insights to better meet consumer demand and
influence sustainable consumer behavior.
Keywords:
LIFE CYCLE THINKING; SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION; SOCIAL PROBLEMS;
EXTERNALITIES; ECOLOGICAL IMPACT
37
Environmental sustainability is an issue of human welfare which cannot be ignored. Global
leaders have the task of assessing how the health of the environment can be preserved for
future generations. Foresight on behalf of policy makers and business leaders has prompted
numerous studies, innovations, and interventions in the marketplace to solve for the global
issue of environmental sustainability.
Sustainability and global development are intertwined in that as global populations continue
to rise, longevity of our planet’s resources becomes increasingly important. Sustainable
development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Kloepffer, 2008). In 2015, the United
Nations published 17 Sustainable Development Goals for the purpose of increasing human
welfare, both present and future. Within this charter, Goal 12 aims for ensuring ‘sustainable
consumption and production patterns' (UN Sustainable Development Goals 2015).
Sustainable consumption and production patterns have been a global topic of conversation for
over 20 years. The UN first defined ‘sustainable consumption and production’ (SCP) at the
Oslo Symposium in 1994, and officially identified SCP as a major contributing factor to
global development as a part of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation in 2002 (UN
Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform 2018). The UN’s continued focus on SCP
emphasizes the importance of the relationship between sustainable production and sustainable
consumption, and the continued need for improving the relationship between the two. The
fields of industrial ecology, manufacturing, and product design have made great strides
towards more sustainable production practices; however, response from consumers lags
behind. Macromarketing, as a holistic and interdisciplinary body of thought, is well
positioned to address the social-economic issue of sustainable consumption and to address the
gap that exists between sustainable consumption and production patterns.
Actions in the consumer marketplace have a great impact on the environment. Furthermore, a
growing global population leads to increased consumption levels, and increased
environmental impact. As global development continues, the challenge of managing
externalities which result from unsustainable behaviors is ever-important. The Global
Footprint Network estimates that by 2050, barring any significant change, three planets' worth
of resources will be required to support projected consumption levels (Global Footprint
Network 2017). The pursuit of sustainable consumption requires interdisciplinary,
comprehensive, and systematic approaches (Prothero et al. 2011). To simplify efforts,
marketers can borrow the theory of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), often used in the analysis
of sustainable production, and apply the structured framework of Life Cycle Thinking (LCT)
38
to consumer research. Ultimately, these learnings can help bridge the gap between
sustainable consumption and sustainable production, resulting in both a healthier marketplace
and a healthier environment.
ENVIRONMENTAL EXTERNALITIES, SOCIETY, AND THE ROLE OF
MARKETING
The question of environmental externalities examines current societal preferences versus long
term priorities. Externalities are inherently intergenerational, passed on from one point in
time (now) to another point in time (the future). "Sustainability raises the question [of]
whether this generation can leave future generations with the same or a larger basket of
resources than we have now. It would be easy for this generation to use up more of our
resource endowments and leave future generations with less, and this would be
unconscionable" (Kotler 2011, p. 132). Because externalities are a social problem, social
theories explaining the complexities of social dilemmas and dominant social paradigms are
helpful for understanding the factors that drive consumer behavior in the context of
environmental sustainability.
A social dilemma is a situation where the collective good can be achieved if almost all
community members sacrifice (Weiner and Doescher 1991). Social dilemmas are complex
structures that can have various outcomes dependent on the actions and strategies of
individuals. For example, a dominating strategy on behalf of an individual results in high
personal payoffs but a deficient equilibrium for society (Dawes 1980). However, even when
individual consumers are willing to make sustainable choices, barriers still exist to
overcoming social dilemmas (Sanne 2002; Weiner and Doescher 1991).
One of the most prevalent barriers to sustainable consumption is the dominant social
paradigm (DSP). The DSP represents the primary standpoint of a society and reinforces
existing cultural norms. As environmental externalities are a social problem, the way that
modern society collectively views nature or "deals with" the environmental crisis in the
everyday can be a large part of the ecological problem (Spaargaren and Mol 1992). Dominant
social paradigms are difficult for individual consumers to act in opposition to. When a
dominant social paradigm is not in support of sustainable consumption, consumers wishing to
make sustainable choices can find themselves locked into unsustainable infrastructures (Sanne
2002). In this case, individual agency gives way to the momentum of society (Kaiser 2006).
Forty years ago, the dominant social paradigm surrounding environmental dispositions could
have been described as "a belief in limitless resources, continuous progress and growth, faith
39
in problem solving abilities of science and technology, belief in private property rights and
laissez-faire economy over all other concern" (Albrecht et al. 1982). However, as public
opinion towards environmental issues and sustainability has shifted in more recent years
(Gallup 2017), a new dominant social paradigm has begun to emerge. Proof of this new
social paradigm can be seen in some industries more than others. For example, in the food
industry, modern consumers increasingly demand a new fleet of 'quality' dimensions for their
food, including several sustainability measures (Saitone and Sexton 2017).
In light of such binding structures as social dilemmas and dominant social paradigms,
exchange theory can be a useful tool for understanding how consumers may negotiate their
desires in the context of sustainable consumption. An exchange approach provides a useful
framework for understanding consumer behavior (Becker 2013). Becker asserts that “all
human behavior can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility from a
stable set of preferences and accumulate an optimal amount of information and other inputs in
a variety of markets” (p. 14). Complicating this assumption, however, is that the relationship
between social conditions of exchange and individual actions is dialectical (Blau 1960).
Continuous research has most recently shown that outcomes which are good for the whole of
society ultimately occur because of participants' particular expectations and in-the-moment
experiences (Ostrom 2014). Therefore, appealing to the felt needs of consumers is crucial in
the pursuit of sustainable consumption.
According to Akenji and Chen, "Everyone has a responsibility to deliver a better human
society and a better planet to future generations. This responsibility is operationalized through
our preferences and the choices we make. As individuals and households, how we live – how
we exercise our pursuit of well-being and happiness – affects others and has an impact on the
environment" (2016, p. 2). Environmental sustainability is ultimately a social issue that relies
upon the sum of the actions of individuals. In the case of environmental externalities,
marketers and policy makers are faced with "tradeoffs between the free choice rights of
individuals and the rights of others not to have resulting externalities thrust on them"
(Rothschild 1999, p. 24). Marketing activities can be a great mediator in this exchange.
40
The Role of Marketing
As both an intellectual field and as a discipline, marketing is adequately positioned to address
issues of externalities and exchange. Marketing can address externalities and market failures
by appealing to the values held by consumers and citizens antecedent to marketing activity
(Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne, and Mittelstaedt 2006). Marketing can also deliver desirable,
sustainable products to the marketplace and provide consumers with the information needed
to promote sustainable consumption patterns.
Marketing has a long history of social action. Kotler and Zaltman first positioned marketing
as a societal function in 1971 when they suggested that marketing concepts and techniques be
applied to the promotion of social objectives (Kotler and Zaltman 1971). This sentiment
continues today as marketing remains an important influence in society. There is a continued
call for marketing to play a role of constructive engagement: "a societal function and a
systemic set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and
for managing customer and societal relationships in ways that benefit local and global
stakeholders of these processes" (Shultz 2007, p. 293). Forty years after his original
publication on social marketing, Kotler asserts that we should continue to reinvent marketing
to manage the environmental imperative (Kotler 2011).
CLOSING THE GAP: LIFE CYCLE THINKING FOR SUSTAINABLE
CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION PATTERNS
Marketing facilitates an exchange market driven by consumer choices and self-interest
(Rothschild 1999). However, there is evidence that the exchange market for sustainability is
in need of rebalancing. Traditional systems of supply and demand will not absolve society's
externalities, especially within growing populations in developed societies (Ayres and Kneese
1969). Sustainable consumption and production patterns must work together simultaneously.
Tukker et al. (2010, p. 15) propose five strategies for the achievement of such patterns:
"Greening production by reducing the impact intensity of mining and manufacturing activities
through the implementation of end-of-pipe measures or structural technical changes in
production methods,
Greening products and services by decreasing material and energy use per functional unit,
Intensifying use by encouraging more efficient deployment of products and services (e.g., by
promoting activities such as carpooling),
41
Greening consumption patterns by shifting expenditures to lower impact product and service
alternatives, and
Reducing consumption volumes while maintaining quality of life."
This prescriptive list reinforces the idea that sustainability is a shared responsibility between
producers and consumers. If the responsibility is shared, should it not also follow that the
processes used to achieve sustainable ends be shared as well? Managing externalities
throughout the production and consumption mechanisms currently in place is a complex task;
however, breakthroughs have been made in the pursuit of more sustainable production by
breaking the mechanisms down into more manageable phases, or life cycle stages. This
systematic, comprehensive process is a result of Life Cycle Thinking.
Sustainable Supply Side: Life Cycle Thinking in Production
Sustainable production can be defined as “the creation of goods and services using processes
and systems that are non-polluting; conserve energy and natural resources; are economically
viable; are safe and healthy for workers, communities, and consumers; and are socially and
creatively rewarding for all working people” (Lowell Center for Sustainable Production
1998). There is a strong charge for producers of consumer goods to take charge of the
sustainability crisis. Some scholars place the burden of responsibility squarely on the
shoulders of producers, claiming that in order for sustainability to be achieved, companies
need to take initiative in changing their research and development, production, financial, and
marketing practices (Kotler 2011). Others state their case more directly, claiming that
sustainability should be the ultimate aim of product development (Kloepffer 2008).
Life cycle thinking
Innovators in sustainable production have maximized production techniques for sustainability
by employing a logic of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is the only internationally
standardized environmental assessment method. According to the International Organization
for Standardization, Life Cycle Assessment is the "compilation and evaluation of the inputs,
outputs, and potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout its life cycle"
(International Organization for Standardization 2006).
The key feature of Life Cycle Assessment is its cradle-to-grave analysis, tracing a product
through the entirety of its lifecycle and analyzing impacts at each point. LCA takes into
account a product's raw material extraction, production, transportation, consumption, and end-
of-life disposition. LCA provides a broader view of a product than does the 'marketing life
cycle', which only extends from product development, introduction to the market,
performance in the market, and sale to the consumer (Kloepffer 2008). Instead, LCA
42
examines the product's life both before product development (in the consideration of raw
material extraction) and beyond the product's purchase by a consumer (in the consideration of
both the product's use and disposition).
The United Nations Environment Program recommends utilizing "life cycle thinking" to solve
global sustainability problems. Life cycle thinking is a qualitative variation on the
quantitative-driven Life Cycle Assessment, in which critical discussion allows for the
identification of potential environmental impacts by examining the stages in a product life
cycle (Christiansen et al. 1997). Life cycle thinking can reframe the complex pursuit for
sustainable consumption and production patterns into more manageable areas of study.
On the production side of the market, the standardization and widespread use of LCA and life
cycle thinking has reached a mature stage in the academic literature and remains a thriving
field of research (Kloepffer 2008). In practice, life cycle thinking has spurred innovation
which has brought creative, closed-loop life cycle solutions to the marketplace. Indeed,
sustainability can be built into a product during its design stage by diligently thinking through
the entire life cycle of a product in terms of sustainability measures before production begins
(de Silva, Jawahir, and Dillon 2009).
While sustainable production has made great strides in recent years, and there are more
sustainable products available in the marketplace than ever before, a gap persists between
sustainable consumption and sustainable production. The mere existence of innovative and
sustainable products in the marketplace does not guarantee their purchase, or that consumers
will choose sustainable options to meet their needs. Consumers' preferences must match the
sustainable products that are available. Differing expectations between product designers and
consumers (de Silva, Jawahir, and Dillon 2009) or even a lack of consumer confidence in
sustainable products (Luchs et al. 2010) can contribute to such a gap. Ultimately, the gap
between sustainable consumption and sustainable production represents a market failure
which can be attenuated by applying life cycle thinking to consumer research.
Sustainable Demand Side: Applying Life Cycle Thinking to Consumption
Sustainable consumption can be defined as "the use of goods and related products which
respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life, while minimizing the use of natural
resources and toxic materials as well as the emissions of waste and pollutants over the life
cycle, so as not to jeopardize the needs of future" (UN Environment Programme 2010). The
marketing literature on sustainable consumption takes several different angles. Considerable
attention has been given to understanding and influencing sustainable lifestyles within
complex cultural contexts (Akenji and Chen 2016; Kharas 2011; Tukker et al. 2010; UN
43
Environment Programme 2016) and topics of de-marketing, anti-consumption, and voluntary
simplicity have also held researchers' attention (Barr, Gilg, and Shaw 2011; Black and
Cherrier 2010; Cooper 2005; Eckhardt, Belk, and Devinney 2010; Leonard-Barton 1981;
McDonald et al. 2006). This paper proposes a new way of analyzing sustainable
consumption: through life cycle thinking.
Applying life cycle thinking to better understand consumers' attitudes and awareness of
environmental externalities at various points in the product life cycle can bring us one step
closer to more efficient and more sustainable marketing systems. On a broader scale, life
cycle thinking in consumer research can illuminate new insights, leading to creative solutions
to problems in the environmental domain. Typically in sustainability-oriented consumer
research, consumers' attitudes towards a specific product or service are measured as a whole
or only at a specific stage of the product life cycle. However, with life cycle thinking,
researchers can better pinpoint varying consumer attitudes throughout the life cycle of a
single product context. Each stage of the product life cycle has a significant impact on overall
sustainability (Pieters 1991), and so it follows that uniquely significant insights may exist for
each of the product life cycle stages. While past research has explored the juncture of
consumption and product life cycle before (Mont and Bleischwitz 2007; Pieters 1991;
Prothero et al. 2011), life cycle thinking has not yet been endorsed by consumer researchers
as a guiding framework for studying sustainable consumption.
Many areas within the existing literature on sustainable consumption may benefit from the
application of life cycle thinking. Specific areas of interest include the knowledge-action gap
in sustainable consumption behavior, consumer agency and citizenship, perceived consumer
effectiveness, ability to act, information provision, and willingness-to-pay for, or internalize,
externalities.
Unsustainable consumption and the knowledge-action gap
Despite efforts to address unsustainable consumption, total consumption of resources and
aggregate environmental impacts continue to rise, making the issue of sustainable
consumption ever-pressing. Consumers have many reasons for not consuming sustainably.
Many consumption practices are habitual and this inertia prevents new decision-making
(Bray, Johns, and Kilburn 2011). Consumers are also able to rationalize unsustainable
behavior (Eckhardt, Belk, and Devinney 2010). Information appeals, while termed the next
wave of sustainability (Tietenberg and Wheeler 2001), may fail to promote sustainable
consumption (Costanzo et al. 1986). Even as sustainability becomes an oft-talked about
cultural issue and consumer attitudes indicate growing levels of concern towards
44
environmental issues, consumers are slow to change their consumption behavior based on
their knowledge, beliefs, or intentions alone. This is referred to as the knowledge-action gap,
or the intention-behavior gap. This gap has puzzled researchers for decades, and the
prominent factors contributing to such a gap are not widely agreed upon, but may include
demographic factors, external factors such as policy and culture, and internal factors such as
awareness, attitude, emotion, and locus of control (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002). It is
important to note that even the most well-intentioned "green consumers" succumb to this
knowledge-action gap.
"The so-called knowledge-action or intention-behavior gap suggests that awareness cannot
easily be acted upon if there is a lack of sustainable options and access to them" (Barth et al.
2012). Life cycle thinking may provide invaluable information in closing the knowledge-
action gap. For example, if consumers demonstrate awareness towards an externality caused
at a certain point in the product life cycle, marketing managers should seek to make available
options that reduce externalities at the specific point in the product life cycle that resonates
with consumers, as it will allow them to act on their awareness. In understanding which part
of the product life cycle (raw material extraction, production, transportation, consumption, or
end-of-life disposition) consumers are most concerned with in terms of environmental
sustainability, firms can align their supply with consumers' demand, providing access to
sustainable options. This satisfies Rothschild's 1999 assertion that "marketing can be used to
assess the individual's self-interest and make behavior opportunities available that satisfy that
self-interest."
The citizen consumer in a social context
While some researchers place the entire burden of sustainability on producers (Kotler 2011;
Kloepffer 2008), other researchers argue that the burden of sustainability should fall strictly
upon the shoulders of consumers (Fisk 1973; Ingenbleek et al. 2015; Luchs, Phipps, and Hill
2015). Recently, there have been calls to broaden the research agenda as it pertains to
marketing, public policy, and sustainability to further explore the role of individual citizens in
society (Prothero et al. 2011). Consumers indeed have agency; they constantly negotiate
norms in society and their options in the marketplace (Lockie 2009). In a social issue such as
the creation and management of environmental externalities, empowering the consumer-
citizen may be a viable path in efforts to bridge the gap between increasingly sustainable
attitudes and unsustainable behavior (Thøgersen 2005). In fact, there is significant tradition
in civil society of making the consumer an agent of change (Glickman 2009). In the
literature, consumers who share personal commitments to sustainability and take actions in
45
their daily lives to reduce their impacts on others and on the environment are coined
'ecological citizens' (Dobson 2003).
The well-informed and well-equipped citizen consumer may be the most potent force against
social dilemmas and the dominant social paradigm surrounding sustainability. In social
dilemmas, appeals to moral obligations, rather than to rational considerations, may prove
more effective (Kaiser 2006). Life cycle thinking may be utilized to understand if there are
stages of the product life cycle that consumers feel higher levels of moral obligation towards
(i.e. are there specific environmental externalities that concern consumers more so than
others?) By targeting improvement in the life stages that resonate most with consumers,
consumer citizens are well-equipped to act upon moral obligations. In this case, consumer
knowledge becomes a powerful tool for consumer researchers, who can use new information
from research based on life cycle thinking to appeal to consumers’ moral compass.
Life cycle thinking may also aid in shifting the current dominant social paradigm, which can
either promote or gridlock progress on sustainable consumption. By identifying points in the
product life cycle that consumers may not be aware are causing environmental harm,
marketers and policy makers can create appropriate consumer education campaigns which in
turn encourage consumers to challenge the dominant social paradigm on particular aspects of
production and consumption patterns.
Information provision, perceived consumer effectiveness, and ability to act
Awareness of environmental externalities must precede consumers' perceptions of
effectiveness, attitudes, or actions (Dos Santos 2012). Thus, information provision and other
awareness-building techniques are crucial for the provision of sustainable consumption.
Labeling is one effective way to communicate information about a particular product.
Research suggests that information provision of externalities will influence consumers' ability
to act sustainably (Guenther, Saunders, and Tait 2012; Yakobovitch and Grinstein 2016); yet,
information must not be general or ambiguous so that consumers can clearly interpret cause-
and-effect relationships (Upham, Dendler, and Bleda 2010). Information provision informed
by life cycle thinking can provide clear, actionable calls for consumers to respond to. By
breaking the complex mechanism of sustainable consumption into a more tangible cause-and-
effect demonstration of a particular life cycle stage, consumers may be more willing to adjust
their behavior.
However, even when consumers have the best of intentions to consume sustainably, they
often doubt the impact that their individual actions can make (Bray, Johns, and Kilburn 2011).
Understanding how consumers view the impacts of their individual decisions on the resulting
46
outcomes in society is important for deconstructing individual decision making in a social
sustainability context. Perceived consumer effectiveness has been shown to affect both
attitudes (Cho et al. 2013) and actions (Ellen, Weiner, and Cobb-Walgren 1991) toward
environmental issues.
Life cycle thinking may be utilized to better understand consumers' current levels of
perceived effectiveness in minimizing externalities throughout the product life cycle. For
example, consumers may feel that can have more impact on minimizing product packaging
waste than they have on minimizing externalities that result from raw material extraction.
This insight can be used to encourage consumers to act where they already feel they can make
a difference. Where consumers feel low levels of consumer effectiveness, educational
campaigns can encourage consumers that their actions do indeed matter.
Internalization of externalities through willingness-to-pay
One way for consumers to internalize external costs to society is through their willingness-to-
pay a higher price for an item (Lagerkvist, Johan, and Hess 2011; Longo, Markandya, and
Petrucci 2008). However, willingness-to-pay is fairly inelastic, usually limited to a price
differential of 5% to 10% (Tukker et al. 2010) and dependent on socio-economic variables
(Lagerkvist, Johan, and Hess 2011). Social dilemmas require some level of consumer
sacrifice or negotiation for equilibrium to be met in society and marketing provides a platform
for exchange and the internalization of externalities. Life cycle thinking can provide
consumer researchers with guiding information about what part of the product life cycle
consumers may be willing to pay more for in order to internalize externalities.
DISCUSSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
This paper proposes that life cycle thinking in consumer research can increase sustainable
consumption practices and minimize environmental externalities in society. Sustainable
consumption and production patterns must work together and are conjointly crucial for
achieving sustainable development worldwide (UN Sustainable Development Goals 2015).
Despite efforts to address sustainability in society, total consumption and environmental
impact continues to rise, partially due to market failures between sustainable supply and
consumer demand. While this is indeed a very complex phenomenon which rests in the
broader context of social structures and marketing systems, simple solutions may exist for
analyzing sustainable consumption in a systematic way which mirrors the recent progress
made in the realm of sustainable production. Life cycle thinking can help marketers and
policymakers respond to and influence consumers' current awareness and attitudes towards
47
environmental externalities created by their consumption patterns, with the ultimate goal of
bridging the gap between sustainable consumption and sustainable production.
Sustainable consumption requires the attention of both marketing managers and public policy
makers. Both entities can benefit from applying life cycle thinking to consumer research.
While environmental externalities are ideally minimized throughout the entirety of a product's
life cycle (as seen in the utilization of life cycle thinking to make production processes more
sustainable), marketers and policy makers should place special emphasis on the points of the
life cycle that resonate most with consumers. Specific examples are given in the following
sections.
Product Management
Consumers are increasingly aware of how products are made, used, and disposed of, and
environmental concerns are increasingly affecting consumers' purchase decisions (Mont and
Bleischwitz 2007). Managers who see this increasing consumer knowledge as an opportunity
can leverage their use of life cycle thinking in their offerings to and communication with
consumers. There is a positive trend in the numbers of people who purchase from companies
who care about the environment, and it is imperative that companies add a meaningful
environmental dimension to their overall profile (Kotler 2011).
Within marketing, enhanced focus on the managerial area of product marketing management
is a strategic way to tackle the larger issue of sustainability, as product management touches
all aspects of a product's creation and final delivery to the consumer. Product managers
bridge the actions of production to the actions of consumption; acting as both business
advocates and consumer advocates, and in this case, environmental advocates. Product
managers also make decisions regarding information provision, whether through packaging or
multichannel advertising.
Tradeoffs and business constraints
Managers aiming to overhaul a product's overall sustainability face many restraints.
Minimizing externalities in every step of the life cycle process can be a daunting and
sometimes impossible task, especially at the beginning of an organization's sustainability
journey when choices and tradeoffs must occur. Instead of putting pressure on industry
suppliers to deliver all-or-nothing when it comes to sustainability, breaking down the product
life cycle in terms of consumer awareness and attitudes can break the task into more
manageable phases, helping firms invest their resources in the stages of the product life cycle
that have the most environmental and consumer impact.
48
However, this pursuit is not always straight forward. Even when consumers express concern
at a specific product life cycle stage, there are tradeoffs from a product quality perspective
that must be considered. For instance, Patagonia, a leader in sustainably sourced and
produced outdoor clothing and gear, received consumer comments on the perceived
wastefulness of the plastic packaging that online orders were shipped in. Patagonia wrote
about the discovery experience of this phenomenon in their blog:
"In order to evaluate how Patagonia can reduce plastic in our supply chain we conducted
several tests at our Distribution Center (DC) and surveyed our customers. Through this study,
we determined that polybags are critical to insuring that garments stay clean from the finished
goods factory through the DC. If we eliminated the use of polybags, garments would be
damaged, resulting in both financial and environmental costs. Energy, water and resources are
used to make each product and we want them to be worn. A damaged product that is
unwearable has a far greater environmental cost than manufacturing a polybag ... Despite the
functionality of polybags, they are perceived as waste by many customers and employees."
(Patagonia 2014)
Similar tradeoffs have been studied with the same results in an academic context (Williams
and Wikstrom 2011). While companies must make several difficult decisions in balancing
sustainability and consumer satisfaction, life cycle thinking can help guide these decisions.
Public Policy
Managerial actions can give consumers more desirable choices to act upon in the marketplace.
When people experience choice, they are more likely to internalize behavior change; giving
consumers the freedom to choose among a set of options is important for satisfying the basic
need for autonomy and promoting psychological well-being (Moller, Ryan, and Deci 2006).
However, even as more attractive options become available to consumers, policy makers can
promote sustainable consumption by designing supportive instruments such as educational
campaigns, labeling, and nudges. The information gleaned from applying life cycle thinking
to consumer research can be used to both diagnose areas of improvement and project positive
representations of sustainable consumption. Life cycle thinking gives policy makers a clear
understanding of consumers' current knowledge of externalities throughout the product life
cycle when designing such instruments, allowing policy measures a higher probability of
success.
Future Research Utilizing Life Cycle Thinking
The framework of this paper provides many starting points for future consumer research
projects utilizing life cycle thinking. Of primary importance would be utilizing life cycle
49
thinking to measure consumers’ awareness of and attitude towards externalities at various
points in the product life cycle. Next, measuring consumers’ perceived consumer
effectiveness is crucial for identifying which product life cycle stages consumers believe they
can have the most impact on, given the strength of social contexts and constraints. Relatedly,
the study of information provision by product life cycle stage, including labeling practices
and nudge tactics, is a substantial body of research that might benefit from life cycle thinking.
Consumers' willingness-to-pay, or internalize, externalities at specific points in the product
life cycle would be of further interest; future research can even specify how elastic this
measure is. Additionally, it would be interesting to measure consumer willingness to accept
various regulation measures based on the product life stage in which the externalities are
created.
This paper discusses life cycle thinking in terms of a "product", however life cycle thinking
can also be applied creatively to other domains of consumption which have significant
environmental consequences. In fact, most environmental impacts can be addressed by
targeting the key domains of food, mobility, housing, consumer goods, and leisure (Akenji
and Chen 2016). Future research should apply life cycling thinking to each of these
categories to have a significant impact on sustainable consumption overall.
CONCLUSION
Environmental externalities exist in society and this is a social dilemma that marketing can
help attenuate. There is currently a gap between sustainable consumption and sustainable
production, in both the academic literature and in practice. This gap needs to be closed for the
health of consumers, market efficiencies, and the environment. Life cycle thinking is a
process used by producers to assess and minimize environmental externalities by breaking
down a product life cycle into manageable stages (raw material extraction, manufacturing,
transportation, consumption, and disposition). Studying the full product life cycle is crucial as
each of the life cycle stages have a significant impact on the sustainability of consumption.
By applying life cycle thinking to consumer research within the context of sustainable
consumption, marketers and policymakers can better understand environmental externalities
as perceived by consumers. This information can be used to help close the gap between
sustainable consumption and production by delivering products that meet consumer
expectations, informing consumers of
50
their availability, and constructing effective policy which promotes sustainable consumption.
Ultimately, sustainable consumption is a complex topic which requires comprehensive and
systematic approaches and life cycle thinking can provide this type of framework, analyzing
sustainable consumption in simple terms.
51
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57
Ethical Consumer Behavior in
(Un-)fair Markets: Fair Market
Ideology as Moderator of the
Effect of Ethical Cues on Ethical
Consumer Behavior
Anna Jasinenko, HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management,
Germany
Fabian Christandl, Fresenius University of Applied Sciences Cologne,
Germany
Timo Meynhardt, HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management,
Germany
Can consumers act responsibly in a market system that they consider unfair and unjust?
Ghoshal (2005) analyzed how a “gloomy vision” of our economic system self-fulfillingly
results in irresponsible and amoral management practices. He stated that managers, who
“claim that competition or capital markets are relentless in their demands, and that individual
companies and managers have no scope for choices, […] free themselves from any sense of
moral or ethical responsibility for their actions” (Ghoshal 2005, p.79). The present paper
examines whether consumers’ ethical responsibility and actions also depend on market
perception. Ethical consumer behavior has a major influence on ethical behavior of
organizations. With their buying decisions, consumers can reward ethical or penalize
unethical business practices of companies. However, many consumers neglect this regulating
58
ethical responsibility. Prior studies found that consumers often willfully ignore ethical cues in
their decisions, e.g., in order to prevent negative feelings resulting from a violation of strong
ethical values (Ehrich and Irwin 2005). We expected that the neglect of ethical cues for
consumer behavior can also be explained by the perception of unfairness in market systems.
This proposition is addressed in two studies, which test whether the perception of market
fairness, as operationalized by fair market ideology (Jost et al. 2003), has a moderating
influence on the integration of ethical cues (e.g., perceived public value or corporate social
responsibility of a company) in consumer behavior. Both studies corroborate our central
hypothesis that consumers with a higher fair market ideology acted (and intended to act) more
in line with perceived ethical cues than consumers with a lower fair market ideology. These
findings imply that perception of market fairness may indeed provide a major driver of ethical
consumer behavior.
Study 1
To test the hypothesized moderation effect of the fair market ideology, the first study used the
perceived public value of a company as ethical cue and willingness to pay more (in
comparison with products/services from competitors) for and past frequency of consumption
of products or services of the company as dependent variables. The data was obtained in an
online survey with a representative sample of 915 Swiss consumers (18-90 years old, M =
49.64; SD = 18.40; 50.8% female, 49.2% male). First, participants evaluated the perceived
public value (Meynhardt 2009; 4 items, α = .83) of one of four companies. Second,
participants indicated their willingness to pay more and the consumption frequency in the last
year. Finally, participants completed the Fair Market Ideology Short Scale (Jost et al., 2003; 6
items, α = .64) and answered demographic questions.
In line with our general hypothesis, the analysis showed a significant interaction of ethical cue
(perceived public value) and fair market ideology on willingness to pay more (b = .20, t(914)
= 3.36, p < .001), as well as consumption frequency (b = .15, t(914) = 2.51, p =.012). The
more participants endorsed a fair market ideology, the stronger was the willingness to pay
more and consumption frequency influenced by the perceived public value contribution of the
company. These results corroborate the hypothesis that consumers with a higher fair market
ideology acted and intended to act more in line with provided ethical cues.
Study 2
We conducted a second study to replicate the pattern of results from Study 1 with a German
sample and to look into the effect more deeply and precisely. As Study 1 was correlational,
Study 2 included an experimental manipulation of ethical cues (high versus low public
59
value/CSR). Based on a Public Value Ranking of organizations (Gomez and Meynhardt
2015), we formed a high public value condition with two companies that were ranked high in
the ranking and a low public value condition with two companies that were ranked low in the
ranking. In order to test whether the proposed moderation effect of fair market ideology also
extends to other ethical cues we included an additional measure of perceived CSR. As the
concepts of public value and CSR are conceptually highly intertwined, we expected the
experimental manipulation of high versus low public value to work for CSR, as well. The
sample consisted of 115 German consumers (18-53 years old, M = 27.3, SD = 5.76; 57.9%
female, 40.9% male, 1.7% other). After being randomly assigned to a condition (57
participants in the high public value/CSR condition), participants indicated the perceived
public value (4 items, α = .86) and CSR (Currás-Pérez, Bigné-Alcañiz, and Alvarado-Herrera
2009; 6 items, α = .95), as well as their past consumption frequency (3 items, α = .73), and
intention to buy (3 items, α = .75) in randomized order (no significant order effect). The
questionnaire concluded with the full Fair Market Ideology Scale (25 items, α = .85).
First, a manipulation check indicates that perceived public value was in fact higher for high
(M = 3.60, SD = 0.86) versus low public value companies (M = 3.10, SD = 0.85; t(113)= 3.36,
p = .001 ). Likewise, perceived CSR was higher for high (M = 3.25, SD = 0.77) versus low
public value companies (M = 2.62, SD = 0.95; t(113)= 3.95, p < .001). As in Study 1, we
found a significant interaction effect of individually perceived public value and fair market
ideology on consumption frequency (b = .27, t(114) = 2.05, p = 0.042). The significant
interaction effect was also found for perceived CSR and fair market ideology on consumption
frequency (b = .28, t(114) = 2.32, p = 0.021). This implies that the moderation effect of fair
market ideology may also extend to other ethical cues, such as CSR. A similar pattern of
results was found for the impact of perceived ethical cues on the intention to consume. The
interaction of public value and fair market ideology was marginally significant (b = .24,
t(114) = 1.85, p = 0.067), which also holds for the interaction of perceived CSR and fair
market ideology (b = .23, t(114) = 1.93, p = 0.056).
References
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role of self-definitional principles in consumer identification with a socially responsible
company." Journal of business ethics, 89 (4), 547.
Ehrich, Kristine R., and Julie R. Irwin (2005) "Willful ignorance in the request for product
attribute information." Journal of Marketing Research, 42 (3), 266-277.
60
Ghoshal, Sumantra (2005) "Bad management theories are destroying good management
practices." Academy of Management learning & education, 4(1), 75-91.
Gomez, Peter and Timo Meynhardt (2015). Public Value Atlas. Retrieved from:
http://www.gemeinwohlatlas.de/en/atlas#/
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of Public Administration, 32 (3-4), 192-219.
61
Consumers as Change
Agents I
Track Chair: Mahsa Ghaffari
Co-Chair(s): Cristina Longo
Lin Su
Andrew Parsons
62
Consumer Movements: A
framework for descriptive
analysis in consumer culture
research
Anna Cristina Duque-Erstada, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Vivian Iara Strehlau, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Thelma Valéria Rocha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
ABSTRACT
This work aims to establish a framework for future descriptive analysis of diverse and
complex contemporary consumer movements. Starting from five dimensions already
described in previous frameworks, it is proposed that there are three to be added, since they
feature relevance in the literature review and, therefore, justify to be organized within an
analytical framework. As contributions: (1) ensure the search for information that
improve systemic analyses of consumer movements, culminating in the depth that the
subject requires; (2) a more precise categorization of the theoretical movements
concepts, which are diffused. Finally, the applicability of the tool proposal will be
demonstrated by means of the analysis of an activist movement in global
context: Jamie's Food Revolution.
KEYWORDS: consumer movements, activism, anticonsumerism, consumer resistance,
consumer choice, globalization, consumer culture.
63
INTRODUCTION
The impacts of consumption as a social practice are unquestionable, modifying the Western
understanding of time, space, society and individual, family, and State (Arnould, and
Thompson 2005). Even with no consensus regarding to its appearance, the historic
community recognized that the great transformation of the West included, as well as an
industrial revolution, a revolution of consumption, whose contribution of assets is precisely in
its expressive capacity, creative and inventive of a sphere of cultural significance; something
much more comprehensive than representing only a change in tastes, preferences, and buying
habits (McCracken 2003).
In the context of the discussions presented in this research, the focus will be given to
that symbolic aspect of consumption, as cultural practice and constitutive element of both
social relations and the senses produced by individuals; it being understood that when
studying consumption, we also study the culture of a society:
"Merely consumption does not arise in response to human needs critical values or use
(utility); it is social activity that integrates consumers into a specific social system and
commits them to a particular social vision. In other words, consumption does not stem from
the realm of nature (...) but from the realm of culture" (Ozanne and Murray 1995, p.7)
It was adopted, also, an alignment to theoretical postmodernist thinking, for which : (1) daily
practices, discontinuities, pluralities, chaos, instability, constant changes, fluidity and
paradoxes are important; (2) no object has function or value apart from its symbolic
charge; (3) consumers and producers are constituted by cultural processes - aesthetics,
language, speeches and practices; (4) the dichotomous production-consumption view no
longer fits the contemporary reality. Consumers also produce symbols and meanings that are
incorporated into the symbolic system in which they are inserted (Firat and Venkatesh 1995).
Therefore, it being understood that in their daily practices, consumers make choices among
current signs to build and express values, producing own meanings and truths. It can be said
that some have already found a new freedom: that of transforming and
resisting. Consumption has also become an instrument and strategy for political action, which
incorporates values such as solidarity and socio-environmental responsibility. It's the study of
those who resisted or challenged the practices of the consumer society – their motives and
64
differences of focus – that forms a domain yet to be explored (Handelman and Fischer
2018; Kozinets, Handelman, and Lee 2010; Luedicke and Giesler 2008), even considering
that researchers have accumulated knowledge about their motivations, ideological agenda and
practices since the early 1970s. This work tries to contribute with the future investigations.
As a structure, theory will be initially recovered for situating consumer movements as a form
of social movement, resulting from the importance assumed by consumption in contemporary
culture. Next, an organization will be presented, by themes, of some of the main theoretical
and empirical works on consumer movements, carried out by researchers interested in
consumer culture. As a result, a proposed framework for descriptive analysis and its
implications.
CONSUMPTION AS SOCIAL MOVEMENT
Social movements are collective initiatives which produce values and objectives around
which the legitimacy of institutions is questioned, creating new forms of organization of
social life (Castells 2015). Some theorists prefer to use the term new social movements
(NSM) for those whose scopes are beyond the class struggle, emphasized by the Marxist
economic view - though preoccupied with the growing scope of global corporate power,
interfering from democratic freedom to the environment. According to NSM theorists,
movements such as pacifists, feminists, environmentalists, civil rights or against nuclear
proliferation, among others - emerged at the end of the 20th century as a consequence of
globalization – have politics, ideology and culture as possible roots, and also attach
importance to social identities, such as ethnicity, gender or sexuality. These new activists,
self-determined, fight for human and environmental rights, as well as individual
freedom; their organization and their roles can be temporary, submerged, latent and
decentralized, compatible with the characteristics of post-industrial society (Buechler 1995,
Machado 2007).
Consumers movements are one type of social movement – or new social movement. They
emerge along with the growing importance of consumption in post-industrial society, and
their ideological discourse recognizes that (1) the dominant class is formed by the owners of
capital and the consumers represent the oppressed class; (2) social conflict occurs in culture,
in identity and not in industrial production; (3) consumption and consumer are fundamental
points for changes in the social order. Consumer activists organize themselves for
transformation or resistance to the principles, practices, policies of a particular company or
65
industry, as well as the prevailing ideology and culture in the market - anti -globalization,
voluntary simplicity, sustainability, transparency, ethics in the production chain, among other
(Kozinets and Handelman 2004; Kozinets,Handelman, and Lee 2010). There is also the
situation in which consumers seek to modify the logic of the market to be allowed to
participate in it, as the case of plus size fashion consumers in the United States, researched
by Scaraboto and Fischer (2012).
Regarding to mechanisms for transformation and resistance, they differ in the intensity of the
action - being soft or militant - and in the form: defense, propagation and public manifestation
of ideas ; verification and contestation of labels; communication of dissatisfaction or
criticism; creation and publication of hotlists; production and dissemination of images
that make critics tangible; to stop consuming (boycott); patrolling and critique of peer choices
regarding behavior and ideology; the holding of organized public demonstrations (protests,
rallies, marches, sympathizers recruitment); door-to-door prospecting; promotion of different
types of campaigns to bring visions of local. and/or global civil society to international
political spheres. Balsiger (2014) divides them into denunciatory tactics
(contention; defamatory) or supportive ones (non-contentious, such as exchange for
trademarks with ethical principles, for example). Besides the mechanisms, also varying in
intensity, different resources are mobilized - more or less tangible - for the transformation of
the current social order: money, specific skills, strategic partners and ideologies (Handelman
and Fischer 2018; Kozinets and Handelman 1998; Luiedicke and Giesler 2008;
Peñaloza and Price 1993)
Yet, there is a risk of not perceiving in individual initiatives the potential for transformation
or resistance, which is often reduced to simple complaints or negative word of
mouth. As a result of the focus given to the collectively organized activities it is that
it lacks to realize the importance of the influence of daily practices; those
actors "unorganized" and diffusely politicized which are between anonymity and willingness
to play a political role, among the concerns of the private sphere and of participating in a
more wide range. The individual actors also transform, even if the original intent was
not to resist against the mass market consumer culture meanings and Marketing (Dolbec and
Fischer, 2015; Hirschman 1970; Kozinets and Handelman 1998; Luedicke and Giesler 2008;
Peñaloza and Price 1993; Ulver-Sneistrup et al. 2011).
66
CONSUMER MOVEMENTS IN CONSUMER CULTURE RESEARCH
In order to perform a comprehensive search, but not exhaustive of the whole body of
knowledge about the subject or about the authors analyzed, as Fonseca ( 2008 ) and Izberk-
Bilgin (2010) have done, the articles on consumer movements, resistance, anti-consumerism
and activism within consumer culture studies were selected. Among the thirty-eight analyzed,
it had considered both seminals and some more recent publications (TABLE 1)
The discussions were organized through seven major topics:
Theme 1: stakeholders
Handelman and Fischer (2018) point to an almost always dichotomous view in activism
research. According to them, the majority are concerned with activists - the moral
protagonists who push for a change in the social order - and the other powerful social
actors, corporations, struggling to protect their positions - the antagonists. Marketers are
described as belonging to the antagonistic side and of selfish, economic, and instrumental
behavior. The authors also note that although antagonists are recognized, few analyses are
devoted to them. An exception would be Humphreys and Thompson (2014), whose work
addresses the role of the media in covering environmental disasters, and contribute to contain
reflections on systemic problems in an entire industry. Among the social actors that have been
sparsely described are: activists who lead the movements, the media, corporate employees,
small businesses, social entrepreneurs and non-governmental organizations.
Carter Schneider and Kozinets (2011) and Peñaloza and Price (1993) also call attention to the
relationships outside of the "hero-adversary" dyad, established with partners or friends who
"stand by the hero in the struggle with their enemy," who may be important for achieving
goals and for a longer-term outcome. They therefore suggest a socially more dynamic view
than the linear models normally used. According to them, although there is a clash between
production and consumption, the dyadic discussions about movements do not consider the
complexity of the relationships that support resistance activities.
Theme 2: individual interests versus collective interests
Going in a direction to address both individual and collective interests of consumer activists is
the view of Kozinets and Handelman (1998). The authors resumed some studies on boycott
and understood that there was a theoretical gap, since it was only addressed as an effort of
collective interests. In a netnographic study, interpreting posts of boycotters, the authors
67
identified two other motivations for behavior: (1) boycotters perceive their involvement not
only as part of a collective effort, but as a complex emotional expression of their
individuality; (2) the boycott serves as a vehicle for moral self-realization. That is, it fulfills
roles with individual consequences both external and internal, as well as the search for a
strategic change of a particular company or a structural change throughout the marketing
system. Tumbat and Belk (2010) also emphasized the importance of understanding aspects
inherent to collectivities, without forgetting the characteristics inherent to individuals
(competitiveness, contradiction, power disproportion), always trying to understand what are
the structural and non-structural elements present in the context.
Portwood-Stacer (2012) proposed a typology of motivations for anti-
consumption movements. Among them, social and personal motivations were also
described. The first one is about being part of a group that shares values and goals, as well as
differentiating from those who do not share the same worldview; the second, the search for
immediate personal benefits in alternative consumer experiences.
For Hollenbeck and Zinkhan (2010), understanding the process of negotiating brand
meanings requires not only the concept of the individual as a negotiator and constructor of
knowledge but also the understanding of the importance of the community's vision as a
leverage for action. Cronin, McCarthy and Collins (2014) also discuss
the relationship between consumption and resistance community, emphasizing that the space
for sharing practices within communities favors also the emergence
of collective manifestations of resistance. The research of these authors was directed towards
the subversion of rules and norms dictated by the market, by means of products
whose consumption it was not conspicuous. They even point out that the recognition of
consumer communities is growing as an opportunity to anticipate deviant aspects
of consumer behavior .
Theme 3: agency
Izberk-Bilgin (2010) has identified that within the Social Sciences and Humanities, visions on
whether the consumer can possess agency or not are divide between two paradigms. Each
offers a historical and discursive perspective on the markets, the goal of consumption and the
role of the individual, their potentialities and the possibility of resistance. The first paradigm
brings a critical perspective on consumer culture and was, according to author, built on the
68
works of Marx; Horkheimer and Adorno; Ewen and Baudrillard. Here, resistance to market
dominance is not possible; the consumer is seen as someone who is incapable of thinking
passively and systematically deceived by the owners of capital through the cultural industry
and the ideology of consumerism. The second offers a more positive view, with new
theoretical lenses to examine the phenomenon of consumer resistance. Consumption is seen
as a practice that assists in understanding the world as well as marking and communicating
social distinctions; is the arena in which social order is challenged, negotiated, and
transformed. For Izberk-Bilgin (2010), Douglas and Isherwood, Bourdieu and de Certeau,
among others, support this paradigm.
Peñaloza and Price (1993) emphasize the existence of a reciprocal and recursive action
between the agents involved and the market structures. The authors therefore do not agree
with the poststructuralist view that portrays consumers as passive receptacles to the
ideas conveyed by dominant institutions. Thus, they encourage researchers to think more
broadly, emphasizing that there are many forms of resistance being practiced and not
receiving proper attention.
Thompson and Haytko (1997) explored the ways in which consumers use fashionable
discourses to include their consumption practices in an existing ideological system, that is,
these discourses provide consumers with a range of possibilities to be appropriated, with the
aim of dealing with the tensions and paradoxes between their sense of autonomy (agency) and
their sensitivity to the norms dictated by the market (structure). According to them,
circulating discourses help in the construction of personal identities and narratives, while
providing an opportunity for the interpretation of the relations established in the culture of
consumption and, often, for the challenge of the agreed social categories. The authors'
analysis demonstrated that fashion discourses are used by consumers in their daily practices in
creative and proactive ways and that they do not simply reproduce a hegemonic view, as
critics of the cultural industry claim. Murray (2002, p.428) findings, in a different context, has
confirmed their “general point about consumers combine, adapt, and personalize fashion
discourses as a way of negotiating key existential tensions”.
Thompson (2004) calls for a co-evolutionary process in which activists play a similar role to
innovators in the fashion and technology sectors, while corporations that are wise will turn
critics into profitable opportunities. In this sense, corporate power and activists are
antagonistic forces in a dynamic system alternating the roles of power and resistance. The
69
theory proposed by Giesler (2008) also argues that the evolution of the market is a symbiotic
process of cultural performance, with movements and counter movements of the protagonists
and other institutional forces.
For Kozinets et al. (2004), even in ostensibly consumer-oriented environments, it is
negotiated dialectically; the interests of consumers and producers are within each other, in an
"interagency" process. Consumers and producers negotiate and co-brand identities and
practices; the interests of both intersect and serve simultaneously; nobody is dominated. The
wants of the two sides are superimposed, mutual and interdependent. The producer-consumer
relationship is not diabolical but dialectical. The consumer is sovereign and manipulated,
subject and object, passive and active, exploited and emancipated, hero and fool. Instead of
a two-part dichotomous view of agency - consumers and producers - the research illustrated
another model: that of consumers and producers embedded in each other.
Karababa and Ger (2010) dedicated themselves to the understanding of the consumers who
struggle not to be manipulated by the market. Instead of accepting them as the construction of
a specific ethical, examined the role they play in cultural institutional and practices; were
interested in their relationship with the formal structures. According to them, the literature
does not properly explain the consumer-subject formation during the development of
consumer culture, assuming a passive subject and shaped by structural transformations. Thus,
they argue that more research needs to be done to conceptualize the consumer and the context
in which the subject is formed. Their findings show that producers and consumers are not
always on opposite sides. In the survey, both joined together for other actors to be faced (state
and church); the transgression can be constitutive of the consumer and his desires, as well as
being vital to his subjectivity, and consumption serves as a path to transgression.
According to Arnould (2007), the actions will always be authorized institutionally by the
market. Agency refers to an institutional authority to act and therefore derives from roles
within society - it can hardly exist detached from the cultural models that authorize and guide
it. Thus, for the success of activist or citizenship practices, these must occur within market-
mediated forms because these are the models of action and understanding available to most
people. His vision is shared by Ulver-Sneistrup et al. (2011), who argue that there is no “in”
or "out" of the market.
Theme 4: results
According to Handelman and Fischer (2018), most of the publications are not
explicit regarding the results achieved by the efforts of activists.
70
In the analyzed publications, it was noticed that, to a great extent, the discussion took place
with respect of the possibility of liberating the logic of the market. In this sense, the analysis
of Izberk-Bilgin (2010) proposed that the works carried out in Marketing, starting from the
paradigms described in the previous item, make use of two perspectives: one assumes a
liberating character and believes in the existence of space for resistance outside the market
system, even recognizing its power; the other conceptualizes the individual and subtle
resistance of daily choices and practices, without the consumer leaving the market or getting
rid of their codes. The concern is in the lived experience and in how it turns consumers
into and other agents.
For Peñaloza and Price (1993), it is necessary to recognize that there is no complete escape, a
place completely out of the market in which only positive social changes, effective resistances
and freedom from its domination will emanate. The statement is in line with the results
obtained by Kozinets (2002) who, through an ethnographic study in the anti-market
event Burning Man, concluded that an escape from market logic, if possible, should be
considered as local and temporary (although it does inspire and transform its participants).
Based on two case studies, Holt (2002) argues that in postmodernity what is called resistance
is a form sanctioned by the cultural market experimentation. Consumers participate in a
counterculture movement that, in turn, ends up working for innovative companies as a way
for them to constantly rejuvenate themselves. The market quickly incorporates revolutionary
practices making them highly productive for their own system.
Two other examples that can be understood as cooptation are : the use of the veil in Turkey,
initially a deviant and stigmatized behavior, which became a practice of ordinary and
everyday consumption when market perceived the opportunity to present it with
characteristics of fashion accessory, a phenomenon analyzed by Sandikci and Ger (2010); and
the meanings of "outlaw" – co-created by marginalized groups, the press and the film
industry - which were expropriated by the Harley-Davidson brand for the development
of products, campaigns, among other initiatives and, consequently, redefined to be palatable
to a larger group of consumers (Schouten and McAlexander 1995).
Thompson (2004) goes further, shifting the real importance out of this discussion. For him,
there is a dynamic relationship and a continuous process of co-evolution between the forces of
organizations and resistance movements. Thus, the objective must be to understand the new in
the: configurations of power relations, generated identities, ideological agendas and
opportunities for resistance.
71
Theme 5: ideology
The battle between consumers and business managers occurs through ideology and the one
present in the social movements is consisted of: (1) self-image of activists and collective
identity; (2) common understanding of who the opponent is; (3) common understanding of
what the goal is to be pursued. Besides, there is an interdependence among these elements and
ideology legitimizes movement participants interests and attributed negative aspects to their
adversaries (Kozinets and Handelman 2004).
Over time, a more radical type of movement has emerged and Kozinets and Handelman
(2004) sought to understand its ideological elements (self-image and understanding of who is
the adversary). In research conducted with American activists, a religious and evangelical
basis was found in their identity, in which activists perceive themselves as an up-to-date type
of puritan who seeks to change the consumer culture by reforming what is wrong with
mainstream consumers; they are noble citizens of society, who know how to differentiate
right from wrong, whose mission is to convert others. Once religion and spirituality constitute
identity, a connection was found among religion, morality, and social movements. In
addition, their research suggests that the movements have added a new opponent, the selfish
and greedy consumer. Although cheated and manipulated by market forces, some ordinary
consumers have become the main target (reversing the view of customers and beneficiaries of
benevolent work).
Ulver-Sneistrup, Askegaard, and Kristensen (2011) address the complexity of the
construction of morality within the market, offering new insights regarding the morality
attributed to consumption and brands. The authors explore what they called "moralizing
resistance" which separates the " good " from the "bad" brands, due to their state of poisoning
by the capitalist economic system.
Thompson and Arsel (2007) argue that there is a social construction that supports self-
sustainable communities created to combat the co-opting of organic agriculture by the
marketplace. They suggest ideological recruitment by appealing to the feeling of participation
in a more human market structure, the results and benefits of which are achieved without
risking responsibility for unintended social and environmental consequences.
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Theme 6: framework analysis
Understanding and organizing the various aspects of consumer movements is a complex
task. In order to present the scope of its nature and its forms, some authors have constructed
frameworks representing the aspects they would like to highlight.
Peñaloza and Price (1993) use four dimensions distributed on axes. The first axis represents
the organizational dimension, which varies from individual to collective. The second
represents the dimension of objectives, which varies between reformist and radical. The third
represents the resistance tactics and varies between actions directed to change the
marketing mix and directed actions to change the meaning of the products. Finally,
they illustrate the importance of the relationship of the consumer with the institutions and
agents of Marketing, as well as of the "non-marketing" institutions.
Kozinets, Handelman, and Lee (2010) used two dimensions. On one axis, what they have
termed a "situational specificity" ranging from a specific goal (eg. brand practice) to a broader
cause (eg. sustainability); on the other axis, the " motivational frame", the variation between
collective and individual motivation. Four categories were identified and named as: activism
(collective motivation with specific purpose), utopian (collective motivation with a broad
cause), expressive (personal motivation with specific objective) and transformative (personal
motivation with a comprehensive cause).
Another representation of the two-axis movements is that of Carter Schneider,
and Kozinets (2011). In the first, the orientation of the objectives varying between activism
(resistance within the market to modify it) and emancipation (exit from the market and
creation of new systems). In the second, the understanding of who is the adversary varying
from a micro level (a specific company) to a macro level (the system as a whole).
Theme 7: recommendations for future research agenda
The recommendations for future research can be summarized in what has been suggested in
the following works:
Peñaloza and Price (1993) stated that in order to understand the movements of consumers, it
is necessary to map out the other agents present - whether market institutions or not - and to
understand how the dynamics between them occur, dynamic, as roles played, strategies,
practices, convergences, divergences, identities, self-image and image of the other actors.
Izberk-Bilkin (2010) also pointed out that the existing literature assumes predominantly a
consumer-oriented perspective and points out that it would be particularly interesting to
73
explore the Marketing manager - how they respond to and manage consumer tactics. Among
other research opportunities, it suggested (1) the consequences of the globalization of
production and consumption, especially in developing countries - topics extensively explored
in Sociology and Political Sciences, but still little in the Marketing literature; (2) the
relationship between nationalist ideology and consumer resistance, as well as between
religious ideologies and resistance; (3) other types of community for opposition, other than
those related to brands or consumption, where social solidarity is more durable and
participation can not be bought; or (4) how opposition communities to brands become tools
for construction of the myths found in the market.
Twenty-five years after Peñaloza's and Price (1993) suggestions, Handelman and Fischer
(2018) have reviewed recent empirical work (published since 2000) and pointed out that a
new wave of research on activism could still explore themes very much in line with those
previously related:
New actors - human and entities - influential in the results of the analyzed movements (media,
government, interest groups, entrepreneurs, politicians) ;
Heterogeneity within the same category of social actors, as well as possible homogeneities
between different categories;
Process perspective - social processes which made room for movement or what stopped them;
Triggers and the trajectories of movements over time, within a given context;
Systemic changes and not planned initially.
Discussion
Starting from the literature review presented, it is understood that one framework for
descriptive analyzes of complex and diverse contemporary movements of consumers can
collaborate with the new wave of work proposed for researchers of consumer culture. It is
believed that the tool will organize the search for fundamental information for systemic
analyses so necessary for the evolution of the understanding of this phenomenon.
Therefore, it is suggested that before a more complex approach, movements to be described
according to eight dimensions. Therefore, it was summed up the contents of the three
former frameworks and assigned a common name to each of the five resulting dimensions
(organization, opponent, goal, tactics and other actors). As a complement, three new
dimensions whose importance has already been pointed out in theoretical review, but not
considered within an analytical framework yet (protagonist, resources and space). It is
understood that this organization will contribute to the understanding of concepts and
74
typologies already proposed, since these were found scattered in the literature, and there is
some overlap between them (Ulver-Sneistrup et al. 2011) .
a. Protagonist (Handelman and Fischer 2018): a definition of who is (are) the one who want to
change something of the social order in which it owns - or get rid of it. They may be members
of an alternative community; opponents the particular brand; feminists; religious; any leader
in particular whose actions stand in its context; small business entrepreneurs; challenging
consumer; consumer activist.
Thompson (2004) describes the difference between a challenging consumer and a consumer
activist. He said the activist has a devout commitment, seeks to participate with other
movements tireless like him to diligent monitoring and rapid response to initiatives of the
opponents. While a challenging consumer writes a letter or changes his consumption pattern
due to a cause, it is the responsibility of the activist to keep the issue, investing time and
energy to it.
b. Organization (Carter Schneider and Kozinets 2011; Kozinets, Handelman, and Lee 2010;
Peñaloza and Price 1993): identification of the existence of a collective organization or single
individuals trying to reach certain goal.
The English chef Jamie Oliver envisioned the Food Revolution to spread consumer awareness
of food and enlists the collaboration of other people around the world. The Brazilian chef
Bela Gil also promotes awareness on food choices, however, not collectively organized.
c. Adversary (Carter Schneider, and Kozinets 2011; Kozinets and Handelman 2004):
definition of who needs to have ideas and practices or transformed or eliminated from the
point of view of the participants in the movement.
The target may be a particular brand (Hollenbeck and Zinkhan 2010; Thompson and Arsel
2004; Varman and Belk 2009) or everyone involved in its production chain ; may be
the category of processed foods (Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007a; 2007b ), or
its governamental regulator.
d. Objective (Carter Schneider and Kozinets 2011; Kozinets, Handelman, and Lee 2010;
Peñaloza and Price 1993): clarify the scope of intentions.
These can range from alternatives to leave the market logic (such as formation of self-
sustaining communities) to reform, change some aspect of Marketing practices (pricing
policies and commitment to truth in communication) or culture, ideologies present in
society (Moraes, Szmigin, and Carrigan 2010);
e. Tactics (Peñaloza and Price 1993): mechanisms used to achieve the goals.
75
A well - known example is the boycott when consumers stop buying specific brand or
product. Among other tactics can be cited: appropriation of goods and brands in a ways not
provided by the manufacturers, changing even the meanings involved (Cronin,
McCarthy and Collins 2014; Izberk-Bilgin 2012; Thompson and Haytko 1997); the use of
images with aggressive mood to attack particular brand (Kucuk 2015) or even selfies (Murray
2015) and parodies (Mikkonen and Bajde 2013 );
f. Other social actors (Handelman and Fischer 2018; Peñaloza and Price 1993): definition of
who else participates in the movement, in addition to the protagonists and their opponents.
They may be NGOs, industry associations, media, small entrepreneurs, certain kind of
professionals, experts, journalists, digital influencers or other movements (Holt 2012;
Humphreys and Thompson 2014; Scaraboto and Fischer 2012);
g. Resources (Handelman and Fischer 2018): the resources mobilized for the transformation
of the existing order.
May be tangible (money, specific skills, strategic alliances) and less tangible, such as
collective identity, particular view about how the world should be or ideology (Izberk-
Bilgin 2012; Varman and Belk 2009).
Among the intangible, one can also consider the feelings mobilized, such as anger by
corporations, care for every living being and future generations, anxiety risk function, among
others (Gopaldas 2014);
h. Spaces (Castells 2015): description of the physical and virtual spaces - public or private -
occupied by the movement in the local or global context. Usually begin with the social
internet networks, but strengthen when they occupy physical or urban spaces.
The physical space delimitation was considered essential for the participants of
Burning Man understanding of the community size and differences when compared to others
contemporary brand communities (Kozinets 2002). The same importance has been described
by Moraes, Szmigin and Carrigan (2010). In their analysis of new communities, the physical
space facilitated understanding of them as "ethical places" for consumption.
TABLE 3 brings the eight dimensions applied to Jamie's Food Revolution, proposed by the
English chef Jamie Oliver, which aims to revolutionize the ways people consume food as a
mean for a life more healthy and happy.
76
Conclusion
Given the relevance of the new dimensions proposed here, which are: protagonists, resources
and space, it is essential to be incorporated into the studies related to the topic, considering
the complexity required for further discussion in subject matter.
When one approaches the protagonist, there must be an accurate and dense description of it. It
must include information about belonging to a community; if it is the protagonist of a specific
theme or activist who militates against any industry or brand; and, besides this, the potential
impact on the marketplace.
Regarding the resources used for the possible transformation, it is necessary careful
classification, since they can be easy to perceive and describe, but also include many other
less tangible, such as feelings that give subjectivity to this dimension, and should not be
underestimated or ignored.
Finally, when we think of space, we can define a border inevitably elastic between internet
and physical spaces that enable us to understand more clearly new emergencies (which
usually occur in networks) and their empowerment (which usually occur when you give
occupations of public spaces).
While the information contained in this article, per se, are not new, and to extend them is
beyond the scope of this paper, the objective here was to compile, categorize, organize, make
them accessible and easy to understand to those interested in the subject, since today, the
information available is fragmented and dispersed.
This study may contribute also to a better understanding of the globalization of some
consumer movements. Comparison of descriptive analyzes can generate insights, for example,
about the success in a country of origin and failure when transposed to another.
77
TABLE 1 - 37 CCT Articles on Consumer Movements Analyzed by the Authors
Title Authors Publication Year quotes *
Notes to self: The visual culture of selfies in the age of
social media.
Murray Consumption , market
s andculture
2015 63
Refashiong the field? Connected consumer and
institutional dynamics in markets
Dolbec and Fischer Journal of Consumer
Research
2015 56
A semiotic analysis of consumer-
generated antibranding .
Kucuk T Marketing heory 2015 13
Covert distinction: How hipsters driving food-based
resistance strategies in the production of identity
Cronin, McCarthy
and Collins
Consumption, arkets a
nd c ulture
2014 46
Marketplace sentiments Gopaldas Journal of Consumer
Research
2014 36
Branding disaster: reestablishing trust through the
ideological containment of systemic risk anxieties
Humphreys
and Thompson
Journal of Consumer
Research
2014 31
78
Between shaming corporations and alternatives
Promoting: The politics of an "ethical shopping map"
Balsiger Journal of Consumer
Culture
2014 16
Happy Festivus! Parody the consumer resistance
playful
Mikkonen and Bajde Consumption, markets
and c ulture
2013 10
Frustrated fashionistas: An institutional theory
perspective on consumer quests for greater choice in
mainstream markets
Scaraboto and Fischer Journal of Consumer
Research
2012 203
Infidel brands: alternative meanings of Unveiling
global brands at the nexus of globalization, consumer
culture, and Islamism
Izberk-Bilgin Consultant mption,
markets and c ulture
2012 119
Anti-consumption of tactical resistance: Anarchists,
subculture, and activist strategy
Portwood-Stacer Journal of Consumer
Culture
2012 75
Early Modern Ottoman Coffeehouse Culture and the
Formation of the Consumer Subject
Karababa and Ger Journal of Consumer
Research
2011 137
The new work ethics of consumption and the paradox
of resistance brand mundane
Ulver-Sneistrup et al. Journal of Consumer
Culture
2011
34
79
Beyond Enemy Lines: sociality in Consumer Activism Carter Schneider
and Kozinets
NA - Advances in
Consumer Research
2011 1
Veiling in style: How does a stigmatized practice
Become fashionable?
Sandikci and Ger Journal of
Consumer researc
2010 296
An interdisciplinary review of resistance to
consumption, some interpretations marketing, and
future research suggestions
Izberk - Bilgin Consumption, markets
and c ulture
2010 89
Anti-brand communities, negotiation of brand
meaning, and the learning process: The case of Wal-
Mart
Hollenbeck and Zinkhan Consumption, markets
and c ulture
2010 81
Marketplace tensions in extraordinary experiences. Tumbat and Belk Journal of Consumer
Research
2010 135
Do not read this; or, who cares what the hell
anti - consumption is, anyways?
Kozinets , Handelman, a
nd Lee
Consumption, markets
and c ulture
2010
53
Living-engaged production alternatives: An
examination of new consumption communities
Moraes , Szmigin and C
arrigan
Consumption, markets
and c ulture
2010 50
80
Nationalism and ideology in
an anticonsumption movement
Varman and Belk Journal of Consumer
Research
2009 144
Contested Consumption in Everyday Life Luedicke and Giesler NA - Advances in
Consumer Research
2008 17
Conflict and compromise: Drama in marketplace
evolution
Giesler Journal of Consumer
Research
2008 232
Countervailing Market Responses to Corporate Co-
optation and the Ideologiacal Recruitment of
consumption Communities
Thompson and Coskune
r-Balli
Journal of Consumer
Research
2007 316
Should citizens escape the consumer market? Arnould The Annals of the
American Academy of
Political and Social
Science
2007 143
Adversaries of Consumption: Consumer Movements,
Activism, and Ideology
Kozinets and Handelma
n
Journal of Consumer
Research
2004 798
81
The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers'
( Anticorporate ) Experiences of Glocalization
Thompson and Arsel Journal of Consumer
Research
2004 674
Ludic Agency and Retail Spectacle Kozinets et al. Journal of Consumer
Research
2004 359
Marketplace mythology and Discourses of Power Thompson Journal of Consumer
Research
2004 452
Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory
of Consumer Culture and Branding
Holt Journal of Consumer
Research
2002 2024
Can Consumers escape the market? Emancipatory
illuminations from Burning Man
Kozinets Journal of Consumer
Research
2002 1217
The politics of consumption: The re-inquiry on
Thompson and Haytko's (1997) "speaking of fashion"
Murray Journal of Consumer
Research
2002 266
Ensouling Consumption: the Netnographic Exploration
of the Meaning of Boycotting Behavior
Kozinets and Handelma
n
NA - Advances in
Consumer Research
1998 341
82
Speaking of Fashion: Consumers' Uses of Fashion
Discourses and the Appropriation of Cultural Meanings
Countervailing
Thompson and Haytko Journal of Consumer
Research
1997
693
Subcultures of consumption: An ethnography of the
new bikers
Schouten
and McAlexander's
Journal of Consumer
Research
1995 2412
Liberatory postmodernism and the reenchantment of
consumption
Firat and Venkatesh Journal of Consumer
Research
1995 1902
Uniting critical theory and public policy to create the
consumer reflexively defiant
Ozanne and Murray American Behavioral
Scientist
1995 165
Consumer resistance: a conceptual overview Peñaloza and Price N A - Advances in
Consumer Research
1993 415
Source : the Authors (*) Citations source: scholar.google.com.br, access on 25/01/2018
83
TABLE 2 - Consumer Movements Descriptive Analyzes Framework : 8 dimensions
Dimension description example Supported Authors
PROTAGONIST identification of the one will ing to
modify the social order
members of a specific
community
oppenents of a specific brand
feminists
religious activist leader
small business entrepreneurs
Handelman and Fischer (2018)
Thompson (2004)
ORGANIZATION Identification if the movement is
performed individually or networked
network of constestadores built
by chef Jamie Oliver
communities of consumption
Carter Schneider and Kozinets (2011)
Kozinets , Handelman and Lee (2010)
Peñaloza and Price ( 1993)
ADVERSARY definition of who need to have ideas
and / or transformed or eliminated
practices from the point of view of
activists
brand specific
company specific
category of products
body regulating government
Carter Schneider, and Kozinets (2011)
Kozinets and Handelman (2004)
Hollenbeck and Zinkhan (2010)
Thompson and Arsel (2004)
84
Varman and Belk ( 2009 )
GOAL clarify the scope of intentions formation of self-sustaining
communities
political price or commitment to
truth in communication
Carter Schneider, and Kozinets (2011)
Kozinets , Handelman , and Lee
(2010)
Peñaloza and Price (1993)
Moraes , Szmigin and Carrigan (2010)
TACTICS mechanisms used to achieve the
objectives
boycott
ownership of products and
brands in ways not provided for
by manufacturers
parodies
Peñaloza and Price (1993)
Cronin, McCarthy and Collins (2014)
Izberk-Bilgin (2012)
Thompson and Haytko ( 1997 )
Kucuk (2015)
Murray (2015)
Mikkonen and Bajde ( 2013)
SOCIAL
ACTORS
definition of who else participates in
the movement, in addition to the
protagonists and their opponents
NGOs
Media
small entrepreneurs
Handelman and Fischer
(2018) Peñaloza and Price (1993)
85
other movements Humphreys and Thompson
(2014) Scaraboto and Fischer (2012)
USED
RESOURCES
resources mobilized to transform the
existing order
tangible : money, skills specific
alliances strategic
intangible : identity collective
Handelman and Fischer (2018)
Izberk-Bilgin (2012)
Varman and Belk ( 2009 )
Gopaldas ( 2014 )
SPACE description of the physical and
virtual spaces occupied by the
movement
Social networks on the Internet
demonstrations
Castells ( 2015 )
Kozinets 2002
Moraes , Szmigin and Carrigan (2010)
Source : the authors
86
TABLE 3 - Consumer Movements Descriptive Analyzes Framework: aplication on the Jamie 's Food Revolution .
Jamie's Food Revolution
Protagonist Jamie Oliver (James Trevor Oliver): English chef de cuisine, TV presenter, and is owner of several restaurants and
have launched a series of books. It can be considered a celebrity in various locations, including, United Kingdom and
United States.
Organization Collective movement: Jamie Oliver recruits what he calls his "revolutionaries", whose participation in the revolution
can take place through the adoption of new habits in daily routines or becoming an ambassador of the revolution in
the community.
Adversary Governments and organizations in the food industry
Goal Combating obesity; reforming the understanding of consumers on the importance of the decisions taken are in
relation to food; companies practices; the laws governing the market.
Tactics Jamie's six -point plan :
Sugary Drinks Tax : higher taxes on sugary drinks and revenue investment in health and nutrition education.
Sugar reformulation : laws to reduce sugar and penalties for failure to comply.
Fair Marketing : ban advertising for children, as well as promoting sugary products.
87
Clearer Labeling : clarity in the packaging information; reducing the size of portions.
School Food : access to healthy food for all children in schools, and nutrition education.
Education : promoting consistency between the classroom and home.
Other social actors Parents, teachers, educators, doctors, specialists and food activists in general.
Resources Programs for education and campaigns to influence regulation :
Ministry of food : cooking practical classes in communities for people of all ages.
Kitchen Garden Project: enables teachers to integrate knowledge about the food - origin, preparation, how they affect
organisms - with the school routine.
Fifteen aprentice program : training new chefs.
Jamie's childhood obesity strategy : lobbying with government agencies to introduce a strategy multi-sectoral against
childhood obesity.
To promote the ideology associated with "real food": prioritization of natural foods instead of processed
and ultraprocessed .
Feeling of happiness to good food.
Space With British origin, it has become global; present in schools, the internet, on TV and in various public events.
SOURCE: the authors based on http://www.jamiesfoodrevolution.org - access on 01/24/2018
88
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Young people, social media and
healthy eating – a systematic
review of a consumer power shift
Linda Brennan7, RMIT University, Australia
Dang Nguyen8, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Lukas Parker9, RMIT University, Australia
Keywords: consumer creativity, co-creation, value generation, prosumption
Track: Consumer as Change Agents
Type of submission: Abstract (Extended)
Introduction
Young people are increasingly creating their own global micro-social structures that supersede
macro-level national or governmental dynamics (Geels 2004). As a consequence, the power
structure for change is shifting away from patriarchal government interventions to individually
empowered post-consumers (Fırat and Dholakia 2006) engaging with each other to fulfil their
own needs (Willis et al. 2017; Yonker et al. 2015). This paper describes a shift in health seeking
behaviours for young adults, particularly with regards to food and nutrition. Young adults are
notoriously challenging to recruit into research studies and to engage in health promotion
interventions. However, many are engaging with food industry and other lifestyle “gurus” on
7 [email protected] 8 [email protected] 9 [email protected]
93
social media, whose online presence requires active co-creation of value from their consumer
base.
Using a systematic review approach, this paper ties together disparate literatures in order to
understand how young adults are engaging and connecting on social media, particularly with
regard to health and healthy eating. We propose that co-creation, a bottom-up approach involving
young adults in creating health messages, is likely to be a more effective strategy to engage
young adults in health promotion campaigns. We conceptualise co-creation as consisting of: co-
production (active participation in the production of health messages); engagement
(psychological state of cognitive and emotional immersion) and personalisation (tailoring of the
message to meet individual needs) (Minkiewicz et al. 2014).
Approach
We conducted a search of the databases indexed by Google Scholar between 2000 and 2018. The
purpose of the study is to provide an overview and synthesis of literatures pertaining to young
adults’ social media engagement in health promotion campaigns. The keywords used to structure
the search were “health”, “nutrition”, “intervention”, “social media”, “young adults”. Studies
were included if (1) the primary components of the intervention were delivered via the Internet,
(2) participants were randomly assigned to conditions, and (3) a measure of behaviour related to
health was taken after the intervention. Included were both peer-reviewed and practitioner
literatures. 34 studies were included in the final analysis.
Who are young people and how do they use social media
Globally, 3.8 billion people (50%) use the Internet and 2.8 billion (37%) are active social media
users, which has increased 21% from 2016 to 2017 (Hootsuite Media Inc. and We Are Social Ltd.
2017). In Australia, 90% of young adults (defined as 18-29 years old) access the Internet daily
and 90% use social networking sites. Young people (16-24yo) may have multiple avatars
(identities) that they are experimenting with as they grow new social networks and determine
who they want to be (Framroze 2017). Technology facilitates playing with and trying on
constructed identities to try to fit with both the ideal and aspirational ‘self’ (Molouki and Bartels,
2017) including aspirational and avoidance groups (Dwivedi, McDonald, and Johnson 2014).
Many young adults have multiple social media accounts with multiple personas in the same
94
social network; thus, different groups see different personas (Crozier 2016; Duncan 2016; Won
2016).
When using social media, young people commonly want status or kudos or fame rather than
‘things’ or money (Crozier 2016). Thus, the pursuit of social currency is important to young
adults (Forrester 2017) and social media may foster a drive to live for the approval of others and
not for themselves (Won 2016). For example, 40% of young people admit to feeling pressure to
post only content that makes them look good, 39% post content in order to gather likes and
comments and 60% report feeling inadequate in comparison to their peers’ social media personas
(Won 2016). As a consequence, what is co-created may be representative of the avatar(s) and not
the person – a carefully constructed other self – designed for public consumption (Ahern,
Bennett, and Hetherington 2008; Mehdizadeh 2010; Ridout and Campbell 2014). While they are
cognisant of peer pressure, young people are often motivated to fit in and to conform to real and
illusory social expectations (Blanton, Köblitz, and McCaul 2008; Solomon, 2017).
Engagement means ‘look at us’ not look at me
Engagement is an antecedent to outcomes such as usage, affect or responses to communications
and advertising. Social media pro-engagement consists of: co-creation, positive contribution and
consumption. Social media anti-engagement consists of: dormancy (not participating in social
media), detachment (un-following or terminating a subscription), negative contributions and co-
destruction (writing a public complaint) (Dolan et al. 2016; Hollebeek, Conduit, and Brodie
2016). Social media engagement is participatory and reciprocal; it is a multi-way interaction
between and among an organization and digital communities (Heldman, Schindelar, and Weaver
III 2013), is dialogic and conversational (Powell, Groves, and Dimos 2011), dynamic and
iterative (Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie 2014). It is not monologic (Kent and Taylor 1998) where
health professionals are the ‘experts’ providing information or teaching the less-informed.
Young adults are resistant to messaging about the need to change unless it comes from their peers
(Bentz et al. 2005). The message has to be empowering, pressuring and mobilising, not warning
and informing i.e. it is not an information gap, it is a power gap (Bentz et al. 2005). Veracity
checking is virtually impossible in a post-truth world (Fletcher, Schifferes, and Thurman 2017).
Hence, young people turn to people they can trust – each other (Christofides, Muise, and
Desmarais 2009; Koch-Weser et al. 2010). Unfortunately, this also means that ‘authoritative’
sources might also be based on popularity, not accuracy (Hargittai et al. 2010).
95
Co-creation is the key to engagement
Connecting with young adults using social media can be problematic if you are not part of their
social circle (Lenhart 2015) and it is difficult to become part of these social circle to facilitate
conversation (Perski et al. 2017). Connecting through creativity is therefore critical (Crozier
2016; Smith 2013). Moreover, young people like creating their own content (Castronovo and
Huang 2012) using various objects, i.e. ‘bricolage’ (Takahashi 2016). Co-creation increases
engagement (Orazi, Bove, and Lei 2016). Co-creation triggers a process of identification which
positively influences evaluations (Orazi et al. 2016). Co-created communications generate higher
levels of engagement even with an unaffiliated audience (Orazi et al. 2016). Hence, attempts to
engage need an element of co-design and co-creation attached to them (Crozier 2016; Heldman et
al. 2013; Smith, 2013).
Co-creation, empowering and enabling participation is the key to successful engagement of
young people with social media and health messaging. Initiatives need to be designed to ensure
that the right people are participating in the co-creation process. Health promotion programs need
to be targeted to increase engagement (Orazi et al. 2016). Wherever the target is located, we need
to take the message to where young people are most engaged. We can’t afford to have the
message broadcast through our formal, direct channels when these channels don’t reach our
target audience. However, further research is needed to isolate the appropriate attributes of young
people to participate in the co-creation of health messages.
Beyond identifying and engaging the right people, we need to ensure that we understand how the
message can be conveyed in the channels. Creating a variety of artefacts that meet the audience’s
communication needs is an important part of the social media and digital communication
strategy.
Most importantly, the content has to be relevant to the audience and in a format that they find
acceptable. Finding a methodology to ensure that young people are engaged in co-creating
meaning is a challenging task for social media social marketers. However, we do know that
young people respond well to calls for participation and take their responsibilities for others quite
seriously. Social media in this context is therefore an ideal mechanism by which to generate
participation and engagement.
96
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The Impact of Motivational
Differences on Co-Production
Relationships and Subsequent
Retaliation Characteristics
Shannon Cummins10, University of Nebraska-Omaha, USA
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Co-production and co-consumption is a “paradigm” in marketing. It is the recognition that
businesses no longer create products autonomously and then provide them to consumers.
Similarly, consumers do not consume in isolation. The phenomenon has been described across
industries and populations. Simply, there is a desire by consumers to be engaged in the creation
(design, production, dissemination) of products and services and to share the consumption of
these goods and services with others (both other consumers and the firm). The importance of this
concept to both academia and practitioners is clear based on the publications devoted to the
topic in premier journals and the increasing investor interest in sites like Etsy. Impressively,
there is little research into the potential negatives of co-production and creation. This research
will outline the motivations for consumers engaging in co-production and creation through
application of an established relational framework. It will also present proposed outcomes when
producers (firms) and consumers are operating with different motivations (different quadrants of
the framework). Specifically, I outline the consumer relation behaviors that are likely to emerge
if a consumer feels the relational “metaphor” has been violated by the firm. This information
should allow firms to better plan for co-production and co-consumption. It should allow firms to
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1) promote products/services such that consumer motivations are guided and more predictable;
2) anticipate and plan for negative reactions and determine if co-production offerings in certain
product/service categories are worthwhile or dangerous to brand equity; 3) improve customer
satisfaction and word of mouth among growing segments of engaged consumers likely to co-
produce and consume within the marketplace.
Co-production is understood to be the participation of customers in the production of a good or
service for their own consumption. While researchers have explored various components of this
process, often focusing on what the firm can do in order to encourage or control the experience
(Dellaert and Stremersch 2005; Simonson 2005), little attention has been given to customers and
their overarching approach to the organization of interaction. This paper proposes that it is the
customer’s motivation for the co-produced object, service, or activity and the relational approach
toward co-production that will determine both the response to a firm’s co-production engagement
options and the characteristics of retaliation in case of a negative outcome.
Researchers cite many customer tendencies and attributes as moderating the outcome of
satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment after co-production. Consumer personality traits are
broadly proposed to moderate co-production participation (Lan 2007; Solomon 1986).
Acceptance of responsibility for the outcome, coupled with the self-serving bias, is cited as a
moderator for co-production satisfaction in co-production evaluations by Bendapudi and Leone
(2003). Placing less importance on the impact of self-serving attribution, Lengnick-Hall,
Claycomb, and Inks (2000) propose that within service encounters, satisfaction increases as co-
production increases.
While attractive to explain many positive outcomes, this research stream has not yet dealt with
how the relationship enacted during co-production guides the experience in terms of the choices
of what, when, and how to co-produce. This paper proposes that the relationship enacted during
co-production will not only guide the overall experience, but will also help to determine how the
outcome is evaluated as well as the characteristics of retaliation, should the experience be
negative.
While many attempts are made by firms to influence the choices of consumers and encourage a
specific type of co-production relationship, it is the assertion of this paper that individuals
approach the object, service, or activity to be co-produced with intrinsic motivations and with
expectations of a specific co-production relationship. While the firm is a component of co-
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production and the co-production relationship enacted, it is the consumer who chooses to co-
produce and enters production with expectations of a specific relationship schema. A firm that
recognizes and engages in co-production consistent with the desired schema will be more
successful in enticing and satisfying co-producing consumers.
A four-part relational schemata, which details the perceived appropriateness, organization,
evaluation, and coordination of social interaction was developed by Fiske (1992) and applied to
consumer behavior fungibility by McGraw, Tetlock, and Kristel (2003). However, how an
individual or group of individuals determines which of the relational schemata will be enacted
during a co-production encounter is not well-studied. This research proposes that consumers’
self-motivational components correspond to the relational schema chosen by each group of
consumers and will result in differing components of co-production inaction, evaluation, and
retaliation. This paper’s linkage of motivation, relationship schema, and co-production can aid in
the effort to understand better the existence and types of consumer co-production, the possible
results to firms and consumers, and the means by which these outcomes can be augmented or
mitigated.
Co-production is a topic of much recent discussion and study in the marketing field. However,
the linkage between consumer co-production and relational schema has not been explored. I
propose that in instances of co-production, the traditionally dominating relational norms of
individually and proportionality-based value judgments found in the market pricing schema can
be pushed aside in favor of alternate schema. I also propose that the reasons behind a schematic
choice lie at the motivational intersection of the competing dimensions of self. Just as relational
schemata organize, evaluate, and coordinate social behavior, motivation is a precursor to schema
development and enactment.
Deci and Ryan (1990, 238) describe the self not as the result of social interactions and
requirements but as the “very process through which a person contacts the social environment
and works toward integration with respect to it.” The self, like all natural things, does not exist in
a static state but struggles to evolve and integrate both external and internal forces. The search for
integration with the social world extends to not only relationships with family members and
valued others but to the marketplace and interactions contained within the scope of consumer
behavior. Thus, understanding the development and integration of the components of self into
the marketplace is central to any successful attempt to align consumer and firm motivations,
goals, and outcomes.
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At a more macro level, the differences in a consumer’s motivation attempt to balance intrinsic
desires, passions, likes, and dislikes with the need to survive in a sometimes caustic world of
socially-formed, firm-driven criteria for want. The intersection of these two competing
evaluative motivations is increasingly co-production in the consumer sphere. The procurement of
goods and services requires the integration of the intrinsic passion an individual has for a
particular product or category with the necessary concern for and deference to societal structure,
organization, and control. In what proportion each of these motivational sources are able to
prevail impacts how the consumer engages with and asserts him or herself in the marketplace. In
an attempt to organize and delineate the differing balances of intrinsic and control motivation
present in consumers, the following model of motivation where intrinsic motivation and external
motivation vary at levels relative to the each other is proposed. The combined amounts of each
type of motivation total the self-involvement balance a consumer exhibits in a marketplace
encounter. It is important to note that this balance is not static across consumer product, service,
or activity types (henceforth referred to as the co-production category). The same consumer is
capable of multiple self-involvement mixes for a single product or within a single day.
However, based upon the motivational balance prior to co-production, different relational
schemata will be modeled resulting in divergent co-production choices and behaviors across the
motivational framework.
The implications of co-production to firms are still unfolding in the marketing literature, but its
vastness is not in doubt. Thus far implications have mainly been viewed as positive—from the
efficiencies available when labor is outsourced to customers to the inflow of ideas from
interested, but unpaid, third-parties (Bowen 1986; Kelley, Donnelly Jr, and Skinner 1990; Mills
and Morris 1986; Wikström 1996). However, negative consequences of co-production are
beginning to be explored. From delayed replacement born through co-production attachment
(Jimenez 2008) to decreased employee morale (Chase and Tansik 1983; Kelley et al. 1990), there
are many possible detriments emerging from customer co-production. This project provides a
listing of retaliation characteristics, their relation to one another, and their likelihood due to the
relational schema enacted that provide another key consequence firms should consider before
encouraging co-production.
Additionally, and perhaps of more immediate use to those firms who have or are in the
processes of offering co-production opportunities, is the application of specifically targeted
production involvement options based upon the consumers the firm or category is apt to appeal
104
to. Some specialty categories may appeal nearly universally to those with high intrinsic
motivation for whom the option of co-production is enticement enough. However, other products
may be more readily viewed as staples of social life where the drive to co-produce must be
planted and encouraged. In such a case, the outline of the motivations and coordinating schema
of co-production can provide invaluable tools for firms in the design and marketing stages of co-
production opportunities.
The extension of Fiske’s (1992) relational schemata framework to the marketplace endeavor of
co-production offers the opportunity to explore how individual consumers migrate between
schema based upon their intrinsic motivation for the product, service, or activity category and
their corresponding extrinsically-driven motivation for social structure and control. Future
investigations of which product, service, and activity categories within marketplaces are likely to
elicit certain relational approaches could provide additional insight to firms designing co-
production offerings. The Fiske (1992) framework not only allows for an understanding of
relational approaches and the degree to which inclusion/exclusion and adherence/retaliation is
deemed appropriate, but allows a categorization of consumers based upon tendencies toward or
away from the viewpoint that market-based activities can diverge from a strictly market-pricing
orientation. While intuitively, and from much research into consumer behavior, it is understood
that consumers do not act rationally and with singular importance placed upon monetary ratios of
exchange, the application of Fiske’s (1992) framework allows a systematic categorization of such
non-rational behavior based upon motivational propensities within co-production categories.
At its most basic, this project provides a moderating link between co-production motivation and
co-production results—the variable of the relationship. While crafted over time with input from
both parties, it is not the firm, but the customer who determines the eventual character of the
relationship. The customer’s expectation for this relationship guides co-production in the form of
process, activity, and outcome. Research has shown that expectations guide much of product
purchasing decisions and eventual satisfaction, and marketers spend vast sums to create brands
and instill through their logos the promise of fulfilled expectations. Yet, our understanding of the
creation of expectations and their fundamental components and outcomes is lacking. This project
fulfills a portion of this expectation gap between the motivation of the self, relational
expectations for co-production, and the resulting retaliation towards the firm that can emerge
after a negative outcome.
105
REFERENCES
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(2), 343-54.
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Examining Customer Roles and Experienced Outcomes," European Journal of Marketing, 34 (3),
359-83.
McGraw, A. P., P. E. Tetlock, and O. V. Kristel (2003), "The Limits of Fungibility: Relational
Schemata and the Value of Things," Journal of Consumer Research, 30 (2), 219-29.
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Role Development in Client Participation," Academy of Management Review, 11 (4), 726-35.
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Journal of Marketing, 50 (4), 208–18.
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Globalisation,
(Neo)Colonialism, and
Marketing
Track Chair: Olga Kravets
Co-Chair(s): Cagri Yalkin
108
Globalisation and the Future
Fuat Firat11, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA
This paper explores a brief history of globalisation and the advent of modernity from a cultural
perspective to identify the consequences of modernity and the possible futures of human
organization of life and of globalisation. The expected impacts of marketization as the
contemporary form of globalisation and the characteristics of the contemporary global market are
briefly discussed to begin to imagine possible futures for humanity.
109
How a Displaced Majority
Reframed National Identity
through Mundane Brands:
Kiwiana and New Zealand
Michael Beverland12, University of Sussex, UK
Giana Eckhardt, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Avi Shankar, University of Bath, UK
Sean Sands, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Although links between nationalism and brands are known (Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling 2006),
the literature emphasises how culture impacts brands (Askegaard 2006; Eckhardt 2015), and
treats national culture as a pre-existing set of resources (Brunk, Giesler, and Hartmann 2017;
Cayla and Eckhardt 2008; Dong and Tian 2009; Holt 2004; Luedicke 2015; Varman and Belk
2009). We ask how brands give rise to national culture in the absence of pre-existing collective
identity resources. We draw on Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism to identify how
marketplace actors helped New Zealanders create a collective sense of WE-ness that was brand-
driven. Drawing on a longitudinal dataset, we identify four practices (anointing, mashing up,
ritualization, and tribalization) that generated everyday expressions of WE-ness. In highlighting
the power of the banal, we enhance our understanding of everyday experiences of nationalism
and the role of everyday brands in enabling consumers to create a collective sense of self.
110
Food Marketing I
Track Chair: Claudia Dumitrescu
Co-Chair(s): Renée Shaw Hughner
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Why Consumers Remain Ignorant
of Nutrition Information: The
Roles of Subjective and Objective
Nutrition Knowledge
Larissa Diekmann13, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Claas Christian Germelmann, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Stefanie Jendsch, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Introduction Diet-related illnesses are a major cost factor in healthcare systems (Meier et al. 2015). In order to
cope with this and enable and encourage consumers to adopt a healthier diet, informational
marketing systems attempt to educate consumers by providing objective nutrition information.
Seiders and Petty (2004) argue that market failures with regard to information transfer and food
choices, may explain why some consumers nevertheless remain unable to make healthy food
choices. In addition, studies show that people often misjudge their knowledge (Alba and
Hutchinson 2000), which can influence information searching (Radecki and Jaccard 1995).
Therefore, we propose that another form of market failure should be taken into account when
discussing enabling consumers to adopt a healthier diet and cutting the costs of diet-related
illnesses, namely the failure of informational marketing systems to address consumers’ subjective
nutrition knowledge.
112
Theory
Because of differing behavioral relevance, a clear differentiation between objective and
subjective knowledge is suggested. Objective knowledge describes what someone actually
knows, whereas subjective knowledge describes what someone perceives knowing (Brucks
1985). Subjective knowledge is of particular importance in the information search process
(Moorman et al. 2004). It has been shown that the higher the level of subjective knowledge, the
lower the search for information and the researchers assumed that when consumers perceive
having sufficient knowledge for decision making, further information searching is less likely
(Radecki and Jaccard 1995). In comparison, consumers with a higher level of objective
knowledge process information more efficiently (Rudell 1979). It can be concluded that
subjective knowledge primarily influences the extent of information searching and thus the
quantity of information obtained, whereas objective knowledge primarily influences the nature of
information searching and thus the quality of information. Therefore, we hypothesize the
following relationships:
H1: Objective nutrition knowledge and subjective nutrition knowledge are positively
correlated.
H2: Subjective nutrition knowledge is a better predictor of search intensity for nutrition
information than objective nutrition knowledge.
Methodology
We tested our hypotheses with student sample data from an online study (N = 249, 42.6%
women, Mage = 22.4 years). Participants were first asked to evaluate their subjective nutrition
knowledge based on the subjective knowledge scale of Flynn and Goldsmith (1999), which was
adapted to the nutritional context (five items; anchored 1 = “strongly disagree” and 7 = “strongly
agree”). The objective nutrition knowledge was then measured with 16 objective nutrition
knowledge questions (anchored “true” or “false”; Dickson-Spillmann, Siegrist, and Keller 2011,
Dickson‐Spillmann and Siegrist 2011). The behavioral variable of search intensity for nutrition
information was measured by the number of clicks on a button next to each question providing
background nutrition information relating to this question. Consequently, search intensity for
nutrition information ranges between 0 (no background information required) and 16
(background information for each question required).
Results
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A Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was computed to examine the correlation in
H1. Based on the results of the study, a positive but small correlation was found between
subjective nutrition knowledge (M = 4.91; SD = 1.24) and objective nutrition knowledge
(M = 86.25; SD = 10.77), r(247) = .18, p = .004, confirming H1. Simple linear regression analysis
yields preliminary support for H2. A single Pearson product-moment correlation confirmed the
negative relationship between subjective nutrition knowledge (M = 4.91; SD = 1.24) and search
intensity for nutrition information (M = 2.02; SD = 2.99), r(247) = -.13, p = .035, whereas no
correlation was found between objective nutrition knowledge (M = 86.25; SD = 10.77) and search
intensity for nutrition information (M = 2.02; SD = 2.99), r(247) = -.02, p = .733. The results
support the general notion that it is not the objective knowledge (β = .003, p = .967), but the
subjective knowledge (β = -.134, p = .038) that is the key to understanding information search
intensity.
Conclusion and Further Research
The failure of informational marketing systems to address consumers’ subjective nutrition
knowledge may explain why nutrition information has so often fallen on deaf consumer ears. If
consumers believe that they already know enough, they surely will not seek further information.
This is particularly problematic when these consumers base their decisions on incorrect objective
knowledge, because only consumers who are aware of their knowledge levels and their deficits
can judge what other information they need to make informed decisions. It is therefore important
for nutrition information transfer to focus not only on the objective level of nutrition knowledge,
but also to address critical questioning of the subjective nutrition knowledge.
References
Alba, Joseph W. and J. Wesley Hutchinson (2000), “Knowledge Calibration: What Consumers
Know and What They Think They Know,” Journal of Consumer Research, 27 (2), 123–56.
Brucks, Merrie (1985), “The Effects of Product Class Knowledge on Information Search
Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research, 12 (1), 1–16.
Dickson-Spillmann, Maria, Michael Siegrist and Carmen Keller (2011), “Development and
validation of a short, consumer-oriented nutrition knowledge questionnaire,” Appetite, 56 (3),
617–20.
Dickson‐Spillmann, Maria and Michael Siegrist (2011), “Consumers’ knowledge of healthy diets
and its correlation with dietary behaviour,” Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, 24 (1), 54–
60.
114
Flynn, Leisa R. and Ronald E. Goldsmith (1999), “A Short, Reliable Measure of Subjective
Knowledge,” Journal of Business Research, 46 (1), 57–66.
Meier, Toni, Karolin Senftleben, Peter Deumelandt, Olaf Christen, Katja Riedel and Martin
Langer (2015), “Healthcare Costs Associated with an Adequate Intake of Sugars, Salt and
Saturated Fat in Germany. A Health Econometrical Analysis,” PloS one, 10 (9), 1-21.
Moorman, Christine, Kristin Diehl, David Brinberg and Blair Kidwell (2004), “Subjective
Knowledge, Search Locations, and Consumer Choice,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (3),
673–80.
Radecki, Carmen M. and James Jaccard (1995), “Perceptions of Knowledge, Actual Knowledge,
and Information Search Behavior,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 31 (2), 107–38.
Rudell, Fredrica (1979), Consumer Food Selection and Nutrition Information, New York:
Praeger.
Seiders, Kathleen, and Ross D. Petty (2004), “Obesity and the Role of Food Marketing: A Policy
Analysis of Issues and Remedies,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 23 (2), 153-169.
115
Agricultural Land Loss in Turkey:
Macro Causes and Possible
Solutions
Ahmet Ekici14, Bilkent University, Turkey
Isik Ozge Huseyinoglu, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey
Sule Onsel Ekici, Dogus University, Turkey
Forrest Watson, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Food sufficiency, food availability, and food prices are among the major indicators of food well-
being (Block et al. 2011). Previously one of the few self-sufficient food countries in the world,
Turkey has become increasingly dependent on imports to feed its growing population which is
expected to swell to 100 million by 2050 (Hurriyet 2013). The self-sufficiency problem, among
others, has resulted in high food prices. According to Food Price Index data published by the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), over the last decade global food
prices increased by 92 percent, but in Turkey by a staggering 172 percent (FAO 2015).
Weather conditions that reduce agricultural output, high production costs that make farming
uneconomical, and ongoing construction craze atop the country’s fertile agricultural land have
undermined Turkey’s food self-sufficiency. Over the last few decades, an increasing number of
especially small farmers in Turkey have abandoned farming because of it being increasingly
unprofitable. The increased cost of input (seed, fertilizers, and energy), unplanned planting
decisions that creates supply-demand imbalances in markets, and high dependency on market
intermediaries have suppressed profits. Experts have noted that increased demand for housing as
116
well as unfavorable farming conditions have motivated farmers to sell off their agricultural land
to developers (Cinar 2014). Indeed, most of the industrial developments (including new mining
areas) and road projects have taken place in and around prime agricultural land. Such
industrialization therefore affects not only the immediate land used but also their surroundings:
factories and mines have created pollution and hence degraded air, water, and soil quality.
In an attempt to curb the problem of farmland loss, the Turkish government has initiated a series
of interventions to create a positive social engineering. Despite these multi-faceted efforts, the
farmland lost in Turkey has almost doubled from the preceding decade to about 28 billion square
meters (Cinar 2014). Altough the agricultural land loss in Turkey is quite complex and enduring
macro problem. However, the research that dealt with the drivers of farmland loss to date has
largely taken a so-called piecemeal approach (i.e. one factor at a time such as population growth
(Evrendilek and Ertekin 2002), vegetation patterns (Curebal et al. 2015), and urbanization (Say et
al. 2017)) and attempted to understand the phenomenon from the perspective of one or two
narrowly defined stakeholders. In addition, the existing research has generally failed to
demonstrate the causal linkages and interdependencies among various factors that contribute to
the complex problem of agricultural land loss in Turkey. The aim of this study is to take a more
comprehensive look at the problem, identify factors of agricultural land loss from the perspective
of multiple stakeholders, and through the use of fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) methodology,
illustrate causal linkages and interdependencies among these factors.
Cognitive maps are especially useful in providing a qualitative interpretation of the concepts in a
decision domain. Although cognitive maps are well known problem structuring methods used in
a variety of domain such as psychology, management, business, and politics; determining the
causal relations between variables is a hard task. In order to address the complexity problem of
conventional cognitive maps, Kosko created FCM methodology in 1986 based on fuzzy logic and
neural network methodologies (Papakostas et al. 2008). In a FCM, the causal relations can be
expressed by the use of phrases like little, weak, partially, usually, a lot and strong, which makes
FCM appropriate for decision analysts in summarizing the judgments of experts. After a FCM is
structured, it can be used to perform scenario analysis providing insights about the effects of the
change on the value of a variable.
In this study, initially a number of semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders
at national, provincial, and local levels in Turkey. These in depth interviews were then coded
according to the document coding method proposed by Axelrod (1976). Next, the concepts and
117
the causal relations were revised by the stakeholders to produce the final FCM. After constructing
the FCM, structural analysis of the map was done and a number of scenario analyses were
conducted with possible policy suggestions for both the local and national level. Our analysis
provides macromarketers a more comprehensive picture (i.e. a causal model) of the problem as
well as possible solutions which would eventually contribute to the efforts of improving food
well-being in Turkey.
References:
Axelrod, R. (1976), Structure of Decision: the Cognitive Maps of Political Elites. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Block, L. G., Grier, S. A., Childers, T. L., Davis, B., Ebert, J. E., Kumanyika, S., Laczniak, R. N.,
Machin, J. E., Motley, C. M., Peracchio, M. L., Pettigrew, S., Scott, M., and van Ginkel Bieshaar,
M. N. G. (2011), “From Nutrients to Nurturance: A Conceptual Introduction to Food Well-Being.
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 30(1), 5-13.
Cinar, Mehmet (2014), “10 Yilda 2.5 Milyon Futbol Sahasi Buyuklugunde Tarim Arazisi Yok
Oldu,” Hurriyet, (November 21st), (accessed March 1, 2016), [available at:
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/10-yilda-2-5-milyon-futbol-sahasi-buyuklugunde-tarim-arazisi-yok-
oldu-27623166].
Curebal, Isa, Recep Efe, Abdullah Soykan, and Suleyman Sonmez (2015), “Impacts of
Anthropogenic Factors on Land Degradation During the Anthropocene in Turkey,” Journal of
Environmental Biology, 36, 51-58.
Evrendilek, F. and C. Ertekin (2002), “Agricultural Sustainability in Turkey: Integrating Food,
Environment and Energy Securities,” Land Degradation and Development, 13, 61-67.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (2015), “Country Profiles:
Turkey” (accessed March 4, 2016), [available at
http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/index/en/?iso3=TUR /]
Hurriyet (2015), http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-to-get-older-with-93-million- people-
in-2050-41156
Kosko, B. (1986), “Fuzzy Cognitive Maps,” Int. J. Man-Machine Stud. 24 (1), 65–75.
Papakostas, G.A., Boutalis, Y.S., Koulouriotis, D.E., Mertzios, B.G., (2008), “Fuzzy Cognitive
Maps for Pattern Recognition Applications”. Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell. 22, 1461–1486.
118
Say, Nuriye., Sinem Ozyurt Okten, Asuman Aysu, and Nermin Merve Yalcinkaya (2017),
“Transformation of Land Use/Land Cover Under Rapid Urbanization in Adana, Turkey,”
Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, 26, 1-14.
119
Out of step? Food Marketing,
Wellbeing and the Concept of Time
Beverley Hill15, Swansea University, UK
Sarah Maddock, Royal Agricultural University, UK
As a dimension of food well-being, marketing potentially contributes towards creating positive
relationships with food at both the individual and the social level (Goldberg and Gunasti 2007).
However, the assumption that marketing can function as a ‘mechanism for social good’
(Mittelstaedt et al. 2015, p. 2514) has been criticised in the area of public health where the
marketing of fast, highly processed foods is profitable, but unhealthy (Wymer 2010). Since the
1950’s marketers have drawn on the concept of time (speed/convenience) as a means of
promoting convenience foods. We are interested in further exploring marketing’s adoption of the
concept of time, assumptions about which are embedded in much of contemporary food
marketing practice. Using the concept of time as our lens, and building on Brewis and Jack’s
(2005) exploration of food marketing and Western constructions of time, we examine current
trends in food marketing practice in relation to wellbeing. Drawing on alternative theories of time
we argue that it is in this temporal respect that food marketing is most out of step with efforts to
improve individual and social wellbeing.
Wellbeing can be understood as a social process, emerging in the interaction between material,
relational and subjective dimensions and “realised through the ‘work’ that people put into making
meaning out of their lives” (White 2010 p. 165). Wellbeing as a dynamic process comprises two
additional dimensions - time and space. Time provides animation to wellbeing, which depends on
context, a sense of space and place (White 2010, p. 166). These dimensions exist together in what
Schattzki (2002) refers to as ‘timespace’. Multiple conceptions of time exist; a finite resource for
120
which different practices compete, an objective, measurable entity, a social expectation and
repeated social rhythm (Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012, p. 127). The distinction can be seen in
the concepts of cyclical and linear time. Cyclical time scales originate in nature and are
connected to ‘vital rhythms’ (Lefebvre 1981/2014, p.525) (such as the changing of the seasons).
Linear time scales are related to knowledge, reason and techniques and correlate not with nature
but with the “processes of economic and technological growth” (Lefebvre 1981/2014, p. 526). To
Lefebvre (1981/2014), the human body comprises a “bundle of cyclical rhythms” which, in daily
life, may be “overwhelmed” or “suppressed” by the linear (p.687).
In bringing this theoretical understanding of time to bear on our examination of food marketing
practices we find three framings of time. Firstly, time is often framed as a scarce resource for
which different practices compete (Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012). This is evident in the
marketing of convenience foods (e.g. frozen pizza) and gourmet food boxes of pre-measured
ingredients which encourage consumers to believe they are short of time and that time spent on
food provisioning could be better used elsewhere. Secondly, we see time as a series of relations
which becomes fixed through repetition. For example, we habitually consume breakfast before
leaving the house in the morning, evidence of “societal patterns in the timing of meals” (Warde
2016 p.128). The introduction of cereal bars, however, enables consumers to breakfast after
leaving the home, on their way to work or in the office. Such product innovations change the
temporal sequencing of the day, disrupting the usual social conventions by which we order
everyday life. Thirdly, many food marketing practices contradict the expectation that the
availability of fresh produce corresponds with the natural ‘vital rhythms’ (Lefebvre 1981/2014,
p.525) of cyclical time scales. The availability of ‘seasonal’ produce at a specific time and place
is confounded both by the global import of soft fruits and by technological advancements such as
LED lighting which enables strawberries to be grown in mid-winter. The manipulation of cyclical
time, while offering some wellbeing results (such as year-round availability of fresh produce),
nevertheless works in opposition to the natural rhythms of local geography (time and place) and
further weakens the link between individuals and nature.
The evidence for linking food to wellbeing is strong, necessitating a greater research focus on
how food marketing practices influence wellbeing. In this discussion we introduce time as a
dimension of food wellbeing and, recognising the human body as a “bundle of cyclical rhythms”
(Lefebvre (1981/2014, p.687), we suggest that food marketing practices which interrupt cyclical
rhythms have implications for wellbeing. We argue that in this temporal respect food marketing
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is out of step with efforts to improve individual and social wellbeing. Indeed we go further to
suggest that, at times, food marketers’ manipulation of time militates against wellbeing. So far,
attempts to defend natural food traditions and practices (including The Slow Food Movement)
have struggled to compete with the global food industry. In order for the ideals of food well-
being to become more strongly embedded in social life a re-thinking of the relationship between
food, markets and the consumer is required, necessitating major change in the practice of food
marketing.
References
Brewis, J. and Jack, G. (2005), “Pushing speed? The marketing of fast and convenience food,”
Consumption Markets & Culture, 8 (1), 49-67
Goldberg, M. E. and Gunasti, K. (2007), “Creating an Environment in Which Youths Are
Encouraged to Eat a Healthier Diet,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 26 (Fall), 162–81.
Lefebvre, H. (1981/2014), Critique of Everyday Life. London and New York: Verso.
Mittelstaedt, J.D., Kilbourne, W.E., and Shultz, C.J. (2015), “Macro-marketing approaches to
thought development in positive marketing: Two perspectives on a research agenda for positive
marketing scholars,” Journal of Business Research, 68(12), 2513-16.
Schattzki, T. (2002), Timespace and Human Activity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012), The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life
and How it Changes. Los Angeles: Sage.
Ward, A. (2016), The Practice of Eating. Cambridge: Polity Press.
White, S. (2010), “Analysing wellbeing: a framework for development practice,” Development in
Practice, 20 (2), 158-172
Wymer, W. (2010), “Rethinking the boundaries of social marketing: Activism or advertising?”
Journal of Business Research, 63, 99–103
122
Technological Advances
& Marketing Futures II
Track Chair: Tracy Harwood
Co-Chair(s): Tony Garry
Russ Belk
Alladi Venkatesh
123
Panel Session: Autonomous
Vehicles: Portending Impacts on
Regulations, Markets and
Lifeworlds
Nikhilesh Dholakia16, University of Rhode Island, USA
Russell W. Belk, York University, Canada
Tracy Harwood, De Montfort University, UK
Tony Garry, University of Otago, New Zealand
Keywords: Autonomous Vehicles, Driverless Cars, Automobiles, Robotics, Automation, IoT,
Markets, Lifeworld, Competition, Consumers, Regulation, Trust, Risk, Robotic morality
Anticipatory Views of an Unfolding Future
By the end of the second decade of this century, autonomous vehicles (also popularly referred to
as “driverless cars”) are poised to move from the realm of fantasy and amusing experimentation
to commercial arenas (Wadhwa and Salkever 2017). Very dramatic reshaping of competition,
markets, regulations, and lifeworlds could happen as autonomous vehicles – driverless cars and
trucks – become commercially embedded in personal and business lives; reshaping our
comfortably familiar lifeworlds. This change may perhaps exceed the dramatic reshaping of
telecommunications, media, computers, software and electronics industries that happened during
the last quarter of the 20th century (see, e.g., Castells 2011, Manovich 2001).
124
After the autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been around for some years, we would of course see
analytical treatments of this new revolution. Our intent in this session is to provide an analytical
and interpretive view before this revolution has begun. Of course, this is a challenging task. This
session and similar works, however, could help in shaping the trajectory of AVs as they
influence, reshape and perhaps even alter radically the marketscapes, consumptionscapes and
regulatory frames of several major industries. On a broader plane, AVs could reshape the very
lifeworlds that we have become so comfortably accustomed to since about 1920.
Significant macromarketing writings have often attempted to anticipate the challenges of the
future and to offer conceptual ways to tackle such challenges (see, e.g., Fisk 1973, in terms of
presaging the eco-challenges of today). We hope that this session will initiate such future-
oriented conceptual peering into the imminent and distant future relating to AVs.
Challenges of Analyzing and Interpreting the Future
The analytical and interpretive challenge is gigantic. Among the industries that would be
reshaped by the AV revolution are the obvious ones – automobiles, insurance, trucking and
similar – but also pervasive impacts are anticipated in logistics, travel, tourism, healthcare, eco-
sustainability, education and other very significant sectors of the economy. This session of course
would be able to tackle only small parts of this enormous challenge. The introductory and stage-
setting presentation of this session outlines the emerging psychological, cultural and moral
ground-shifts that are likely to happen. It offers also very brief views of the history of car
automation, competitive and market scenarios, lifeworld transformations, and regulatory
challenges.
Multidisciplinary angles are possible for each aspect of this special session (see, e.g., Belk 2018).
In the interest of parsimony, the introductory paper of this session will offer brief analytical slices
from economic, sociocultural, psychological and philosophical-moral perspectives that could
provide material for session-end discussions. Also, as a whole, this session would strive to
generate further discourse based on the main conceptual insights from the ongoing work of the
presenters in this session, and identify some future research directions.
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Overall Session Plan
The session is structured to include four concise presentations, 12-14 minutes each, followed by
30 minutes of discussion. All the presenters listed below have indicated a willingness to come to
the Leipzig conference.
Proposed Presenters and Topics
The following four topics are proposed for this special session. The presenting researchers have
been working on and will continue to work with these topics. Hence, the presentations bring forth
state-of-the-art but also emergent and moldable ideas.
Nikhilesh Dholakia, University of Rhode Island, USA: Framing the Autonomous Vehicles
Discourse: Psychologically, Culturally and Morally
The prevalent auto-oriented lifeworld, formed in the 20th century and continuing in the early
decades of the 21st century, has been shaped by the lore of cars as symbols of freedom, aggressive
masculine control, and hedonic consumption. As autonomous vehicles (AVs) proliferate, the very
language and cultural substrate about cars will begin to shift. This presentation will offer succinct
frames for comparing past and future in terms of psychological, cultural and moral dimensions of
vehicles; and offer initial frames for understanding competition, markets and consumptionscapes.
Russel W. Belk, York University, Canada: When Autonomous Vehicles Take Over the Global
Economy
Through a combination of autonomous vehicle technology, Blockchain technology, and
distributed autonomous corporations (DACs), there is a scenario under which vehicles become
not only self-driving, but also self-owning. Once such vehicles start operating ride sharing
services like Uber, Lyft, and Didi – using Blockchain-based payment systems like Bitcoin and
Etherium that cut out banks and credit card intermediaries – their 24-7 hours and efficiency
should quickly drive out human-operated alternatives. And once they have saturated the market
for rides, they could well branch into other services like computer farms, free banking, and
anything other corporations could offer. In 2016-2017, an Etherium-based venture of this kind
called The DAO was attempted. This presentation assesses just how feasible this scenario is and
its potential consequences.
Tracy Harwood, De Montfort University, UK; and Tony Garry, University of Otago, New
Zealand: Trust, Risk, Privacy & Security in an Era of Driverless Cars
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One way that citizens are likely to engage with future AVs is as part of an integrated travel
management system that provides an end-to-end journey planning as a service. This presentation
reflects on findings of empirical research into consumer perceptions of trust, risk, security and
privacy issues within such a context and usage scenario. We outline a conceptual model that may
aid practitioners in developing a user-trust system-based approach in this rapidly evolving
context of an Internet of Things application.
References
Belk, Russell W. (2018), “Robots, cyborgs, and consumption”, in Alan Lewis, ed., Handbook of
Psychology and Economic Behaviour, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Castells, Manuel (2011), The rise of the network society: The information age: Economy, society,
and culture. Vol. 1. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Fisk, George (1973), “Criteria for a theory of responsible consumption”, The Journal of
Marketing, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 24-31.
Harwood, Tracy and Tony Garry (2017), “Internet of Things: understanding trust in techno-
service systems” Journal of Service Management, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp.442.
Manovich, Lev (2001), The language of new media, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Wadhwa, Vivek and Alex Salkever (2017), The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our
Technology Choices Will Create the Future, Oakland CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
127
Social Justice Research:
Linking emergent concepts to
Macromarketing perspectives
and approaches
128
Round Table: Social Justice
Research: Linking emergent
concepts to Macromarketing
perspectives and approaches
Roundtable participants:
Laurel Steinfield, Josephine Previtte, Ingrid Becker, Martina Hutton
The recognition of gender issues have grown immensely amongst macromarketing scholars since
the initial introduction of a gender track at the 2014 Macromarketing conference, with contributions
growing substantially year by year. Alongside the “Gender, Intersectionalities and
Macromarketing” track, this year’s Macromarketing conference debuts two distinctive, but closely
related tracks that address inequalities and cultural ideologies: i) Market In/Equalities – Forms &
Practices and ii) Markets, Marketing Systems, and Elements of Culture. In various ways these three
tracks consider how the patterns that continuously (re)produce naturalized injustices relate to the
marketplace and how they can be challenged. Through combining our perspectives, this roundtable
seeks to discuss critical issues that concern the self-understanding of market subjects, their
heterogenous relations, and complex representations that underlie the injustices experienced in the
marketplace.
We use this roundtable as a way of discussing and answering questions related to: what i) topics;
ii) conceptual/theoretical links; and iii) research gaps can we identity? regarding the
naturalization and challenges of injustices. As part of this roundtable, participants will have an
opportunity to develop connections for future collaborative work. We look forward to using this
session of constructive conversations and relationship building to explore how these and related
areas can come together, and how we can bolster these important and growing streams of
Macromarketing research.
129
Consumers as Change
Agents II
Track Chair: Mahsa Ghaffari
Co-Chair(s): Cristina Longo
Lin Su
Andrew Parsons
130
Consumers have to want to
change: Approach versus
avoidance strategies in social
marketing to counter alcohol
consumption in young people
Linda Brennan17-18, RMIT University, Australia
Marie-Louise Fry19, Griffith University, Australia
Josephine Previte20, University of Queensland, Australia
Shinyi Chin21, RMIT University, Australia
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Ms Dang Nguyen for her editorial support.
Funding Information
This work was supported by RMIT University, University of Queensland, and Griffith
University, with in-kind support provided by Drinkwise Australia.
Professor Linda Brennan is a Chief Investigator on the Communicating Health Project which is
funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (Grant number: GNT1115496)
18 Corresponding author
131
with additional investigators Catherine Lombard, Helen Truby, Tracy McCaffrey, Karen Klassen,
Megan Lim, Claire Palermo and Mike Reid.
Consumers have to want to change: Approach versus avoidance strategies in social marketing to
counter alcohol consumption in young people
Keywords: fear, guilt and shame appeals, social marketing, counter-advertising, self-
determination theory, behaviour change
Abstract
This paper presents the results from a controversial social marketing campaign aimed at changing
young people’s drinking behaviours. Extant social marketing campaigns use fear, guilt and shame
(i.e. negative emotions) to motivate young people away from drinking to excess. However, such
campaigns miss the mark when it comes to establishing long-term self-determined responsible
drinking behaviours - i.e. moving towards sustained and integrated responsible drinking. In order
to establish self-determined and self-motivated behaviours, consumers must be their own agents
of change and approach the problem behaviour for their own intrinsic motivational purposes.
Extrinsic motivations are unlikely to be sustained over time and require continued renewal of
marketing efforts. This research reports findings from a multi-level case study into a social
marketing campaign that used social media channels and emotional ambiguity to communicate
with young people about the consequences of excessive drinking. The results show that a
combination of negative and positive appeals may be useful in engaging young adults in
responsible drinking behaviours.
132
Background
Sustainable behaviour change is the holy grail of social marketing. However, much social
marketing is premised on the idea that awareness of the problem will lead to change (Glanz,
Rimer, and Viswanath 2008; Sharma 2016). As such, majority of efforts to combat alcohol
(ab)use have been directed at using public service advertising and marketing to educate people
about the harms of alcohol consumption behaviours such as binge drinking (Courtney and Polich
2009; Morgenstern et al. 2014), drunkenness (Jayne, Valentine, and Holloway 2008; Pennay et
al. 2014), violence and public disturbance or nuisance (Heung et al. 2010). As a result, we have a
bifurcation between promotions of alcohol consumption as pleasure seeking (Fry 2011) (i.e.
positive messaging) and alcohol counter-advertising that is almost universally negative in terms
of message content.
In social advertising and counter-advertising, the principal focus of the message is to counter
physical and social desires with a rational and emotionally charged message. Thus, the message
content is often antithetical to the desires that motivate the purchase or use of alcohol. The
predominant appeal used is fear (France et al. 2014) although there is a growing trend to use
other negative emotional responses such as guilt (Antonetti 2012), shame (Amonini, Pettigrew,
and Clayforth 2015) or disgust (Collymore and McDermott 2015). Furthermore, (negatively
framed) government advertising can induce reactance and transgressive behaviours (Hackley et
al. 2015), thereby defeating the social purpose of the advertising. Humour has only recently
begun to be used and the social marketing efforts using positive emotion appeals are as yet under
researched in terms of effect.
Nonetheless, Soscia, Turrini, and Tanzi (2012) found that humour was not as effective at gaining
attention as fear and shock. This is not surprising because fear is biologically determined (Kelley
and Schmeichel 2014; Mobbs et al. 2015) whereas humour is socially and culturally determined
(Spielmann 2014; Yoon 2015). Additionally, the message has to be intellectually engaged with
for the humour to be effective. In other words, humour requires a reasoning process and is
therefore cognitively engaging. Conversely, fear can be unconsciously processed rapidly as
survival depends on this outcome (Hunt and Shehryar 2011). As a result, recall and recognition
are not good proxies for behaviour in contexts where the behavioural ecosystem facilitates Being
and Feeling instead of Thinking (Brennan, Previte, and Fry 2016). For sustainable and maintained
behaviour, reasoned and engaged cognitive processing must be invoked once the fear motivation
133
has depleted. As such, while fear appeals in alcohol counter-advertising may be effective in
initiating behaviour change, they may not be effective in achieving long-term sustained behaviour
change.
The circumplex model provides an insight into the structure of emotions. The model posits that
opposing emotions are mutually exclusive (Russell and Carroll 1999). This means people’s
emotional state can only be at a single discrete point within the circumplex, and not at varying
positions, meaning that if someone feels two emotions simultaneously, each emotion has to
belong to only one category of the circumplex (Eisman, López, and Castro 2009). However,
mixed emotions exist and may be felt concurrently (Pochun, Brennan, and Sorenson 2014). When
it comes to advertising, emotions motivate people differentially; dependent on whether they are
positive or negative (Sun 2015). For example, humour in advertising can be used to move people
from one emotional quadrant to another (refer to the Circumplex Model). If people are moved
from positive to negative by advertising they will find ways to get back to being in a positive
position. This is called dissonance-reduction behaviour (Keller and Block 1999). Additionally,
fear is an excellent motivator BUT it works on the amygdala and is not cognitively processed.
Furthermore, counter-advertising has to counteract existing ecosystem elements to be successful.
Any existing alcohol marketing activities, social or contextual factors that arise in the
environment, as well as micro-system factors such as desires, value of alcohol, rewards and
pleasures need to be overcome by alcohol counter-advertising. The economic power between
macro-social interests and commercial ones is unequal. Unless consumers are brought into the
balance as empowered agents of their own actions, the balance will remain unequal. The question
remains: can advertising shift someone away from something inherently pleasurable and towards
something less fun and more ‘responsible’? An effective ad can make someone think about who
and what they are and perhaps establish positive attitudes towards the idea. However, thinking is
not doing, feeling or being; one does not automatically lead to the other. The base line
assumption that there is a cause-effect relationship between advertising and outcome is
problematic (Vakratsas and Ambler 1999). Hence, we need more research into how advertising
works, especially in situations where the consumer will most probably dislike the message
(Cramphorn 2014).
134
The Self-Determination Continuum (SDT) posits five classifications of motivated behaviour
ranging from amotivation to different levels of extrinsic motivation and lastly intrinsic motivation
(Ryan and Deci 2000). A more autonomous and self-determined form of extrinsic motivation,
such as identified regulation or integration regulation, encourages people to take ownership of the
activity thus stimulating engagement, commitment and increased effort put into the activity at
hand. Self-determined behaviours are sustained over time. Results from various studies in
education and healthcare contexts also supported this notion (Ryan and Deci 2000). In the
process of internalising meaning, people become intrinsically regulated and motivated; the need
for external stimuli to motivate behaviours is decreased (Ryan and Deci 2000). The relevant
regulatory processes for self-determination and motivation are: interest, enjoyment and inherent
satisfaction, including the achievement of goals, or indeed, just having fun. Personal goals are
established as part of peoples’ identities and advertising can be designed to encourage these
outcomes. This thoughtful consideration of behaviours in relation to personal goals (i.e. cognitive
appraisal and elaboration of messages) shifts the locus of motivation for behaviour from other-
directed to self-directed. Consequently, allowing for greater cognitive processing and thus
proactive engagement in longer-term positive behaviours that ultimately leads to healthy
outcomes.
This paper aims to shift the lens currently applied to counter advertising by presenting the results
of a case study that used non-fear based appeals to persuade young drinkers (18-24) to drink
moderately. To examine the effects of positive and negative emotional appeals in a social
marketing setting, this study examines the use of imagery to generate complex emotions in an
alcohol counter-advertising campaign. The goal of this campaign was to build a connection with
young drinkers in order to decrease the frequency and volume of drinking (i.e. drinking
moderately). Bearing in mind the possible responses of transgressive drinkers to government
messaging about alcohol (Hackley et al. 2015), and the weight of advertising to this target group ,
this campaign attempted to work with young people in their own space and in their own
language. To this end, the campaign used social media as the principal form of connection.
Online conversations were monitored to establish whether or not the campaign resulted in any
changes to reported behaviour as a result of engaging with the ad.
135
Approach and methods
In order to explore the use of social issue advertising in action, this study undertook a multi-level
single case study approach (Woodside 2010). Data were collected across multiple sources by way
of 1) internal document analysis of the HTDP strategy and baseline formative market research, 2)
semiotic analysis of advertising artefacts, as well as 3) analysis of online market research and
social media data as available at the time. The online surveys were undertaken at three points in
time: before the initiation of the campaign (Benchmark), after the initial activation (Wave 1) and
after about 12 months of campaign activations (Wave 2). The campaign was refreshed during that
time, however the key messages and imagery were sustained throughout.
All forms of data were analysed according to principles relevant to type: internal documents were
analysed using documentary analysis (Thorne 2014). Advertising artefacts were analysed using
semiotic analysis (Manning and Cullum-Swan 1994). Market research and social media data were
analysed using a combination of documentary analysis and thematic analysis (Riger and
Sigurvinsdottir 2015; Woodside 2010).
Results & Discussion
The campaign objective was to prompt behavioural change amongst 18-24 year olds to moderate
the frequency and intensity of irresponsible drinking behaviour. The formative research (Study
1), conducted in four discrete stages, provided an overview of the social dynamics of the cohort
in relation to moderate drinking. It also provided a deep insight into the cohort’s psyche including
their style of communication, use of social media and the social drinking setting. The online
panel survey allowed for quantification and aggregation of responses in relation to moderation of
drinking. Study 1 provided formative insights into Study 2 and assisted with instrument design
for Study 3. Study 2 provided insight into the creative artefacts and assessed their potential for
emotional impact. Study 3 quantified the cohort’s perceptions of the campaign and selected
artefacts at two stages during the campaign (Wave 1 and Wave 2).
Overall, the results show that humorous framing of messaging can result in engaged processing
of an otherwise serious message within this cohort of drinkers. While this is a descriptive case
study, practice can be used to inform theoretical development. This cohort uses an array of
136
strategies to moderate their drinking and therefore decrease the social aspects of (over)
consumption; thus shifting the locus of motivation for behaviour from other to self. The increases
illustrated throughout the campaign also suggest that adaptive behaviours are being sustained
over time. Core campaign messages are being elaborated upon throughout the campaign and
therefore cognitive appraisal is taking place.
What the results show for this cohort overall is that there are moderate drinkers who are aware of
their drinking behaviours and what to do about them. They are self-determined and empowered
drinkers; drinking responsibly. Moderate drinking is a new consumption entity and one that this
cohort is able to engage with and find acceptable. The results also allow us to shift the lens of
counter-advertising campaigns from fear, guilt and shame towards something that will facilitate
self-motivated, active engagement with the message and issues and therefore move towards an
approach goal orientation. A more in-depth look at the results will be discussed during the
conference.
Conclusion
This paper adds evidence that supports the increasing chorus of voices calling for change in
countering the harms of alcohol abuse (Previte, Russell‐Bennett, and Parkinson 2015). Young
people are increasingly difficult to reach with anti-alcohol messages and have indeed started
maladaptive counter movements (Hackley et al. 2015) to overcome what they see as limits to
personal freedoms. To counter harms from alcohol, a new way forward must be found, one that
engages young people on their own terms. This research shows that counter-advertising can be
effective when it comes to increasing elaboration of the message and therefore cognitive
appraisal. Furthermore, the use of humour in conjunction with other emotions may increase self-
motivated moderation of drinking. Self-motivation is a necessary precursor to sustained
behaviour change. From a macro-social perspective, designing interventions that shift the locus
of motivation from others to the individual may prompt individuals to accept responsibility for
their actions and become self-regulating within the norms of their micro-social group.
Governments may consider reforms of the environment to support consumers as agents of their
own self-determined behaviours, rather than contest them using negative appeals designed to
instigate flight (or fight).
137
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Power and the Role of Consumers
to Shape the Macro Environment –
An Ecosystems Perspective
Johannes Hogg22, Hochschule Fresenius, University of Applied Science,
Germany
Abstract
The purpose of this conceptual paper is to find out if consumers are able to form or reform the
structure and the macro environment they are living in. This question is relevant as marketing
science theorized and evolved about concepts of consumer agency (Arnould and Thompson
2005), co-creation of value between firm and customer and the perspective of consumers as
actors and resource integrators (Vargo and Lusch 2008). These concepts are implicitly suggestive
to the role of consumers as change agents.
The methodological approach to the topic is a literature review to understand the market as an
ecosystem (Moore 1996; Iansiti and Levien 2004) by introducing the perspective of Service-
Dominant logic (Akaka, Vargo and Lusch 2012; Lusch and Vargo 2014; Vargo and Lusch 2008,
2012). S-D Logic offers a broad and generic view of social and economic exchange by (1)
exchanging service for service between actors (2) integrating resources from various sources, and
(3) co-creating value (Werner, Griese and Hogg 2017). The actor-to-actor perspective leads to an
evolved value concept of value-in-context (Chandler and Vargo 2011; Vargo 2011). This
perspective is considered helpful as it includes private, market or public resources on micro,
meso- or macro-level. The axiom that value co-creation is coordinated through actor-generated
institutions and institutional arrangements was recently integrated in S-D logic (Vargo and Lusch
2016). The concept goes back on Giddens´ (1984) structuration theory and the duality of
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interplay between actors and the structures. What is conceptually still missed in the actor-to-actor
perspective is an answer to the question, what make an actor powerful (Koskela-Huotari 2018)?
Therefore, sociological theories about power and exchange are reviewed. Aim is to create a
differentiated understanding of roles of actors and their power.
The intent of this paper is to contribute to understand the sources of power in dyad and networks
as much as the transformative capacity of power to shape structure and macro-environment.
Strategies to handle imbalanced reciprocity are typecast. The axiomatic consumer´s position of
power is compared to other actors in the ecosystem. The findings point to structural limitations
but also capabilities of the actor consumer to form the ecosystem and macro-environment.
Keywords: dominator, keystone, focal actors, Service-dominant logic
1. Introduction
This conceptual paper theorizes about two different approaches in marketing. The first is, shortly,
that macro structures and forces play a central role in shaping marketing practices (Porter 1979;
Kotler and Keller 2006) and thus on the exchange between frim and consumer on the micro-level.
The second approach is opposed to the first one, proposing that consumers are market partners
(Peppers and Rogers 2005; Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000) with a proper agency to resist the
meanings that institutions or companies try to force upon them (Fiske 1989). Therefor an
understanding of the role of actors within an ecosystem in general and the role of consumers
particularly as actor and potential change agent is fundamental.
It is not only about power as competitive advantage in an economic exchange. It is about a
general understanding of power including social and economic exchange. Therefore, a concept of
the market as an ecosystem with actors integrating private, market and public resources provides
a framework as starting point (Lusch and Vargo 2014). The actor-to-actor notation may offer a
more revealing and transcendent view on an ecosystem. However, reviewing literature make
obvious that not all actors within an ecosystem have the same relevance for and power within the
ecosystem. This leads to the need of differentiating distinct types of actors, following their power
and domination within the ecosystem. In literature terms like central actor (Wasserman and Faust
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1994) focal actor (Dewick and Foster 2018; Lusch and Vargo 2014) dominator (Iansiti and
Levien 2004) or keystone actor (Vargo and Lusch 2017) are used, proposing that these actors
have more ties to other actors or power within the network by definition. The questions of what
makes an actor powerful (Koskela-Huotari 2018) or how to become a keystone within the
ecosystem (Vargo and Lusch 2017) come to the fore. The author proposes an interdisciplinary
excursion to sociology to find a methodology perspective on power. The sociological inspired
theory of empowerment may represent a more sophisticated understanding of the fluidity of
power relationships. Subsequently, a concept of power is proposed that includes a typology of
actors arranged in their role within an ecosystem. The role of the consumers as change agent will
be discussed. Consumers´ capabilities and structural limitations compared to other actors in the
ecosystem become obvious.
The market as a service ecosystem: A S-D logic perspective
“Markets are not created by God, nature or economic forces, but by businessmen”
(Drucker 1954 p. 31). This statement provokes some thoughts about how to understand and
conceptualize markets (Peñaloza and Venkatesh 2006). A theoretical framework is needed to
understand the complexity that influences and is influenced by social and economic exchange
(Chandler and Vargo, 2011). Service-dominant logic provides a framework for exploring the role
of exchange, structure and value creation from a few central constructs– service exchange,
integration of resources, value co-creation and value in context (Akaka, Schau and Vargo 2013)
within a service ecosystems approach (Wieland et al. 2012). The aim is to focus on the
understanding of a service ecosystem, rather than on challenges or apparent complications of
particular contexts (Akaka, Schau and Vargo 2013). Furthermore, S-D logic offers four
interesting aspects: (1) a perspective of a dynamic co-creation of value-in-context. (2) the
recognition of institutional arrangements as the foundational facilitators of value co-creation, (3)
a micro, meso, and macro level structure of a dynamic system (Werner, Griese and Hogg 2017),
and (4) a service ecosystems approach that potentially simplifies the interaction in exchange
system by focusing on a balanced, actor-to-actor perspective (Vargo and Lusch 2011). The scope
of S- D Logic was recently amplified by considering the duality of interplay (Giddens 1984)
between actors and the structures, comprising rules and resources, which make up the context
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within which they act as structuration (Hogg 2017). On the one hand human actors act within the
social rules, institutions, and collective meanings, as it is part of the structure within they live. On
the other hand, the same actors form and reform the structures. Doing so by enacting practices
those actors enhance and modify the structures in the process of creating value for themselves
and others. Thus, structures constrain and enable actors and actors both act within and create
structures (Vargo and Lusch 2012). However, the S-D Logic view on actors and the actor-to-
actor with respect on power is still very generic (Lusch and Vargo 2014). Accordingly, business
networks and ecosystems are still poorly understood and most often poorly managed (Iansiti and
Levin 2004).
A methodological approach to the concept of power
This study does not build on empirical data collected through fieldwork but problematizes and
reconciles tensions in the academic literature of actor roles in service ecosystems. Furthermore, it
makes a conceptual, transdisciplinary contribution by connecting insights from sociological
literature about the concept of power and the different roles of actors of a service ecosystems
perspective. Service ecosystem is the general concept of the market in this paper. What is next is
to review literature to lay out a concept of power for actors within an ecosystem.
Sources of power
Modern sociological theories offer beside others different major perspectives for the concept of
power. For the scope of this paper, (modern) functionalism, social exchange theory, Foucault´s
discourse analysis and Giddens´ structuration theory are taken in consideration as sources of a
better understanding of power. The selected perspectives are review by exploring and describing
briefly their respective concepts of power.
(1) (Modern) Functionalism. Humans exchange because resources are unequally
distributed in the population. Humans specialize because they have limited but often
advantageous and individual abilities (Lusch and Vargo 2014). The ability to leverage
resources from their ecosystems allows actors to avoid having to create the resource
by themselves. This positive dependence enables actors to save energy and frees the
actor to focus on other things and to specialize and do things they otherwise would not
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be able to do (Iansiti and Levien 2004). Durkheim, a follower of the functionalism´s
perspective emphasized the integration and a term he gives distinction to - organic
solidarity. Organic solidarity means that specialization leads to the interdependency of
roles and the lack of self-sufficiency (Wallace and Wolf 1986). Power emerges in case
of the interdependence between actors becomes asymmetrical. Thus, asymmetrical
interdepends is a source of power (Keohane and Nye 1987). The analogy of the
interdependence of an organism´s parts can be linked to the idea of an ecosystem.
Modern functionalism recognizes another source of power: Socialization as a
powerful integrative force in maintaining control over society. A society´s member
internalizes through the socialization societal values. Thus, macro structures
determine behavior on the micro-level. (Wallace and Wolf 1986).
Considerations about (modern) functionalism. The key findings of the consideration
about functionalism for the progress of this article are that (1) specialization leads to
the interdependency of roles and the lack of self-sufficiency, (2) the concept of
asymmetrical interdependence is a power source and (3) the idea of the society as an
ecosystem. (4) Macro perspective is what determines behavior on the micro-level
through socialization.
(2) Exchange theory. Social exchange theory takes as its starting points the commonplace
that there is a price for everything and everything has its price. Corollary, all contacts
among actors rest on the schema of giving and returning the equivalence. Actors
choose which exchanges to participate in after having examined the rewards and costs
of alternative courses of action. They then chose the most attractive one. The provided
perspective of the actors on their interaction with each other is very rational.
When it comes to the concept of power, social exchange theorizer understand power
as the ability to provide valuable rewards in an analysis that explains someone´s
potential power in the way an economist explains something´s price (Wallace and
Wolf 1986). The price for the service-for-service nature of exchange may be paid by
money as a common medium of exchange (Lusch and Vargo 2014). In a more
generalized form, the price may be paid as obedience to orders (Wallace and Wolf
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1986). Merely having resources does not necessarily give someone power over any
other actor. To get power there has to be some imbalance: one actor B needs
something another actor A has to offer, but B has nothing A needs to reciprocate.
Unreciprocated exchange leads to the differentiation of power (Blau 1964). Fig. 1
shows strategies to handle imbalanced reciprocity within a dyad or a triad/network.
The five alternative strategies demonstrated in Fig.1 are explained consecutively. First
alternative is the case in which the expression of gratitude is sufficiently reward for
actor A. Actor A can hardly be expected to spend regularly effort and tome to provide
support without receiving anything in return to compensate him. Second alternative is
to force actor A to give help by actor B. Third alternative for actor B is to leave the
dyad with A, looking for other actors in the ecosystem to obtain the help B needs. In
the later part “Different types of actors within an ecosystem”, implications of this
strategy concerning awareness, access, adaption and integration of actors and
resources are considered. Fourth strategy for actor B is to find ways to pass on help
and get along without such help. Fifth alternative is subordinate himself to actor A and
comply with A´s wishes. Thereby B rewards the other with power over himself as an
incentive for providing the needed help (Blau 1964). Homans (1961) additionally
associates status with the situation of unbalanced exchange. However, Homans does
not treat status as a direct reflection of power. Instead, he argues that status is
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determined by how people perceive others´ position in social exchange. Therefor the
total of someone´s exchange relationship is considered – whether people believe
someone to be giving or receiving esteem, obedience, assistance, monetary tribute,
and the like. Furthermore, there is a considerable number of social characteristics (e.g.
ethic group, holding a title) which bestow status on people without having anything
obvious to do with underlying processes of exchange. E.g., age is not important in and
of itself but may become a status characteristic to the process of status determination
(Wallace and Wolf 1986).
Associations have their roots in psychological processes, such as those underlying the
feelings of attraction (Fig. 1) between humans and their desires for various kinds of
rewards (Blau 1964). Actor B who is attracted to A is interested in providing himself
attractive to B. For his ability to associate with A and reap the benefits expected from
the association is contingent on B ´s finding A an attractive associate and thus wanting
to interact with him. Impressive qualities make an actor attractive and promise that
associating with him will be rewarding.
Blau (1964) additionally highlights fundamental differences between the dynamics of
power in a dyad and power in an ecosystem. The power of an individual actor over
another actor depends entirely on the alternatives or lack of alternatives. This
circumstance makes it mandatory to examine power relations in a wider context.
Power beyond a dyad can be strengthened by dividing the opposition (divide et
impera). Another strategy to reinforce power is to form coalitions. In case of conflict,
optionally third parties mediate power.
Generally, the collective approval of subordinates concerning their agreement of the
superior has far-reaching implications for developments in the social structure.
Fundamental is that collective approval of power legitimates the power of the
superior. Thus, legitimate authority is the basis of organization and institutions (Blau
1964).
Exchange theory treats also about emergent properties of social structure. Blau states
“social relations unite not only individuals in groups but also groups in communities
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and societies” (1964, p. 13). Although complex social systems are based on simpler
ones, they have their own dynamics (Blau 1964). However, social relations are
different to characteristics of individuals. Emergent properties are characteristics that
belong only to social institutions or communities but not to individuals. The analysis
of the structure of social relations in collectivities makes these emergent properties
apparent. The network may become much more than the sum of its parts (Iansiti and
Levien 2004). Thus, emergent properties consider the whole system to understand the
system´s behavior.
Considerations about Exchange theory with concern to power and ecosystems:
Exchange theory has an impact on sociology almost entirely because of the work of
Georg Homans and Peter Blau. Whereas Homans focuses almost exclusively on small
groups, Blau is more concerned with social institutions and the formal aspects of
social organizations. Exchange theory´s stress on people´s rationality bears a strong
resemblance to the outlook of many nineteenth-century thinkers. A time, when both,
economists and philosophers, emphasized individual activity and choice (Wallace and
Wolf 1986). Alike neo-liberal political economics rely on the axiom of freedom
through choice. Since philosophers like Plato, self-determination and autonomy of
actors are manifested thought choice and the ability to exercise freewill (Schwartz
2004). Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford´s (2006) critical reflection to the manifest of
choice detects three issues: First, to be empowered and hence liberated from any
dependency is linked to a person’s ability to exercise choice in the marketplace by
becoming or being a consumer. Second, more choice often makes decisions harder for
consumers, not easier (Iyengar and Lepper 2000; Schwartz 2004). Third, what matters
is not, that certain decisions are not made. What outweighs non-decision-making is
that some options are not even considered as a choice. Non-decision-making is to be
seen as the influencing of circumstances in which certain courses of action are open to
choice in any way at all (Giddens 1984). Therefor an example in consumer behavior is
the evoked set as the subset of brands that a consumer considers buying out of a set of
brands the consumer is aware of in a given category (Howard 1977).
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The view of consumers constructed as rational utility maximizers is certainly not one
that many progressive consumer behavior nor marketing theorizer would agree with
anymore (Elliott 1998; Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Willmott 1999). Exchange
theory users are generally not concerned with explaining the origins of people´s
beliefs, values and tastes but take them as given and address themselves to the
behavior that follows. Beside the critics, there are some useful takeaways for further
consideration on the concept of power. The findings of the consideration about
exchange theory for the progress of this article are. (1) Unreciprocated exchange leads
to the differentiation of power (Blau 1964). (2) A typecast of strategies to handle
imbalanced reciprocity. (3) Differences between the dynamics of power in a dyad and
power in an ecosystem (4) collective approval of power legitimates the authority and
power that is the basis of organization and institutions, (5) emergent properties, and
(6) a tendency perspective from micro to macro. 23
(3) Foucault´s discourse analysis. For Foucault, a philosopher, historian, and social
theorist, power is inscribed in discourses, operating through all social practices,
producing subjects. Power is considered not only as what presses on the subject from
outside but as forming the subject as well (Foucault 1981). This is because power is
not only what humans oppose but also what they depend on for their existence. Actors
create power within discourses of knowledge through which power circulates. The
role of power in creating practices and forms of discourses rests upon the use of
technologies with transformative functions. Individuals are rendered disciplined,
obedient, or normal in societies through constant observation, measurement, and threat
of exclusion or punishment (Foucault 1977). In his later work, Foucault (1988)
distinguishes the need for a theory that recognizes the creative power of the subject as
actor. Foucault begins to consider technologies of domination to be joined by
technologies of self. This is understood as a theoretical shift from the ways individuals
are transformed by others to the way in which they transform themselves (Best and
Kellner 1991).
23 The late Blau (2008) changed his theoretical view related to (6). He recogmized that he was more successful in the micro-sociological analysis of exchange, than in making the transition to a macro-sociological theory. This hindsight leads to a shift to adopt contrasting perspectives in micro- and macro-sociological theory.
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Considerations about Foucault´s discourse analysis with concern to power
Foucault offers next to disciplinary power, key constructs of governmentality and
technologies of self. These constructs have in common the idea that consumers can be
empowered or liberated through exercising choice. The same choice is disciplining
and paralyzing. Freedom through choice is only to those available, who can
participate in the market, due to disposable income. External threats or constraints are
not anymore the ones that enforce disciplinary power. “The mind becomes a surface
of inscription for power,” (Foucault 1977, p. 102). Foucault (1977) traces the gradual
progression from external control, to control and discipline exercised by individuals
upon themselves. The primary agents of socialization used to be institutions like
family, school, church, but now consumption is a prime socialization agent whereby
people are taught how and learn to be consumers (Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford
2006). Individuals increasingly experiences their lives as an exercise in which their
own actions dictate success or failure. This is due to similar knowledge systems. The
process represents a theoretical attempt to join macro-level placements to the micro-
level of the individual (Foucault 1984). The notion of normality in terms of the
behavior, attitude, or disposition becomes more apparent as all practices inscribes
power. The ones who do not fit in this notion of normality are easier to identify. The
individuals who not fit are pushed to the margins and become the target for more
control and discipline (Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford 2006).
The key findings of the consideration about exchange theory for the progress of this
article are: (1) Power is inscribed in discourses, operating through all social practices,
producing subjects. (2) Power is created between actors within discourses of
knowledge. What is fundamental for the approach of change is the (3) transformative
functions of power, and (4) a theoretical attempt to join macro-level placements to the
micro-level of the individual.
(4) Giddens´s Structuration Theory. Giddens (1985) considers power, along with agency
and structure, as an elementary concept in social science. ” To be a human being is to
be an agent – although not all agents are human beings – and to be an agent is to have
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power” (Giddens 1985 p.7). Power in this highly generalized sense means
transformative capacity. This meaning implies the capability to intervene on a given
set of events and in some way change it. Power is the capacity to achieve results but is
not necessarily linked with conflict (Giddens 1984). Here, resources are media
through which power is exercised. Two types of resources can be distinguished – the
allocative and the authoritative ones. Allocative resources represent dominion over
material facilities meanwhile authoritative resources represent dominion over the
activities of human being themselves. Giddens´ distinction appears similar to the one
Vargo and Lusch (2004) apply for S-D logic: Operand resources (e.g. physical
resources natural resources, goods, machines) and operant (skills, competencies,
technology). Power is closely shaped by knowledge an authoritative aka operant
resource (Foucault 1980). But Giddens (1984) emphasis a more dynamic
understanding shaped by space and time (Figure 2). Resources do not automatically
enter into the reproduction of social systems. In so far resources only operate as drawn
on by contextually located actors in the conduct of their day-to-day life. Resources
that actors employ in the course of their activities in order to accomplish whatever
they do are related to power. Sources of power thus depend in large degree upon the
management of time-space relations. The paragraph about different types of actors
within an ecosystem will treat resource integration in context and link this to Giddens´
(1985) concept of power. So far, it can be asserted that all social systems are power
systems, or exhibit forms of domination. Power systems are comprised of relations of
autonomy and dependence between actors or collectivities of actors. Social systems of
any duration involve an institutional mediation of power. Domination is expressed as
modes of control, in and through the institutions that represent the most deeply
embedded continuities of social life. Stable forms of control (e.g. types of rule)
sustained by the routine practice that those in superordinate positions employ to
influence the activities of others. Giddens (1985) distinguishes scope of rule from its
intensity. Scope refers to how far actors in superordinate positions are able to control
large areas of activities of those subject to their dominance. By the intensity of
control, Giddens refers to the sanctions that can be invoked to secure obedience.
Strategies of control naturally always depend in substantial degree upon the form of
domination within which they are applied. The other side of the coin is that all
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strategies of control employed by superordinate actors or groups call forth
dialectically counter strategies on the part of subordinates.
Considerations about Giddens´ Structuration Theory with concern to power:
Giddens´ concept of power in the highly generalized sense of transformative capacity
is fundamental to answer the initial question of this paper if the customers form or
reform the structure and the macro environment they are living in. Action logically
involves power. There are two faces of power. On the one hand, the capability of
actors to enact decisions which they favor, and on the other hand the mobilization of
bias that is built into institutions. Giddens (1984) expresses their relation as a feature
of the duality of structure. The key findings of the consideration about structuration
theory for the progress of this article are: (1) transformative capacity of power, (2) the
sources of power operate time-space or contextual related. (3) In relation to macro-
micro perspective, it can be summarized, that there is an interplay of power. On the
one hand, power is created and exercised by actors and on the other side, power
influences or even limits those (Giddens 1984). (4) The distinction of scope of
dominance from its intensity. (5) Strategies of control always call forth counter
strategies.
Different types of actors within an ecosystem
The sociological theories we just have considered are familiar with the idea of actors
that are embedded in an ecosystem. Business ecosystems are characterized as a large
number of loosely interconnected actors who depend on each other for their mutual
effectiveness and survival (Orton and Weick 1990). Beside the axiom that all actors
are resource integrators (Lusch and Vargo 2006), all actors as network members share
a common fate (Iansiti and Levien 2004). Common fate in the sense that all actors
may both, rise or fall together. The interdependence is the foundation of the stability,
value-creation and innovation of the business ecosystems. Even if each actor may
have different interests, all actors are bound together in a collective whole.
Simultaneously there is obviously a competition between actors and resources to be
relevant and part of the co-creation process. What is more, there is a constant
competition of the business ecosystems for members due to the freedom of each actor
153
to move from one ecosystem to another (Iansiti and Levien 2004). Actors in the
ecosystem are influenced at once by their internal capabilities and by their complex
interactions with the rest of the ecosystem. Interactions at one level of the system are
often crucially relevant for shaping the interactions at other levels. The many
dependencies among the actors in a network can lead to subtle but strong correlations
among the results they experience, even if the actors appear unrelated at a glance.
As mentioned S-D Logic view on actors and the actor-to-actor with respect on power
is still very generic (Lusch and Vargo 2014). This lack has also a practical implication
as business networks are still poorly understood and most often poorly managed
(Iansiti and Levien 2004). A more sophisticated view on these networks of actors and
their power relations is required. As such, insights about the network´s structure, the
relationships among the actors, the kind of connections among them, and the different
roles played by its actors are necessary to understand the ecosystems. The study of
networks has been identified as a complementary view for conceptualizing and
measuring properties of service ecosystems (Iacobucci 1996). Structure can be
conceptualized as a space of positions at a given time among which actors are
distributed in a network and between which a certain rate of social relations are
established (Blau 2008). Fig. 2 serves to visualize a simple example of an actor´s
constellation in a network.
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At a given time and space, actor D could propose operant and operand resources
which appear attractive for actor A to interact with. The perceived accessibility of a
resource depends on how, where, and when a service can be rendered and the
relationships that enable service provision at the most appropriate place and time.
Access to resources is becoming more important than ownership of resources
(Storbacka et al. 2012). At the same time, business leaders face a fundamental
challenge by the management of resources that are not directly owned and under
control by their own firms (Iansiti and Levien 2004). The potential resource
integration also requires, first, awareness of available resources and an understanding
of how particular resources can be accessed (Akaka, Vargo and Lusch 2012). Second,
the actors need to adapt a particular resource, he chose to integrate. This means the
resource must fit with other resources at a particular place and time. Interfaces,
protocols or design rules help to define a standard way that different resources are
able to connect with each other to support and extend the underlying infrastructure
and guarantee compatibility (Iansiti and Levien 2004). Controlling a standard appears
a powerful way to allow or deny other actor to access the resources in the ecosystem.
Third, the resource must be integrated with other resources and be applied in a
particular context. One key feature of ecosystems is that they allow the transfer as
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well as the generation of knowledge. If a given actor does not have the necessary
information or knowledge to integrate and apply a particular resource, value cannot be
created (Akaka, Vargo and Lusch 2012). The challenge with context is the struggle to
perceive accurately the meaningful and relevant relationship with other resources
within an ecosystem (Hinton 2014).
Fig. 2 shows that actor A and B choose to interact in a specific context. Actor D is in
this example part of this context as actor D influences actor B with a recommendation.
A distinction between situation and context appears helpful (Hogg 2017). Context is
where the co-creation of value happens. The resource-integration process of actors
constitutes temporarily the surrounding and influencing resources that are relevant. In
other words, context represents only what is significant at a given moment (Bazire and
Brezillon 2005). Beyond this context, there is a situation defined by factors and
resources, which neither influence the process of resource integration nor are factors
integrated in the process itself (Löbler and Hahn 2013). In Fig. 2, these situational but
not context relevant actors are C, D, F, and N.
Typology of actors. Next step is to characterize and differentiate types of actors
following their power and domination within the ecosystem. By combining
evolutionary insights from the sociological literature about concept of power with
insights from the network and ecosystems literature, this section aims to understand
better the different types of actors. Whether explicit or implicit, an actor´s strategy is
revealed by the pattern of its operating decisions. In a network setting, these decisions
should also be influenced by the structure and the dynamics of the business ecosystem
in which the actor finds itself and be consistent with the role that it decides to play, as
well as the capabilities that it decides to develop.
(1) Focal actors. The literature on complex systems suggests that ecosystems naturally
possess central actors (Wasserman and Faust 1994) or hubs that enhance efficiency
and certain kind of network stability (Iansiti and Levien 2004). Dewick and Foster
(2018) recognize that the focal actor stimulates impact in the ecosystem through its
position but also due to its buying power. Generally, the position of the focal actor and
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its influence on centrality of value co-creation can be proposed as a useful way of
conceptualizing and measuring relationships in an ecosystem (Akaka, Vargo and
Lusch 2012). A position might be powerful for an individual actor in terms of having
the capability to deploy a range of resources. Focal actors play an essential part in
shaping the stability and capabilities of the ecosystem by orchestrating the resources
or influencing other actors. Focal actors may also increase the networks robustness
through load balancing and reallocation of resources between different actors.
Potentially focal actors decrease the complexity involved in the coordination and
integration efforts necessary for improving the resource integration process and
achieving growth of the ecosystem. They also have an impact on the ecosystems
dynamics, and may give smaller actors access. (Iansiti and Levien 2004). If the
ecosystem is changing or growing focal actor can be displaced over time. New hubs
may emerge to take over their function. Often, early movers in such scale-free
networks are more likely to become focal than those who join the network later. How
far resources in the ecosystem can be used to secure specific benefits depends upon
securing whatever compliance is necessary from other actors in the resource
integration process (Giddens 1985). Network structures may exhibit a characteristic
property. Fig. 3 demonstrates different schematic pattern of connections. Each node in
Fig. 3 symbolize an actor or a resource. A small number of nodes in the network are
more richly connected compared to the vast majority of actors of the ecosystem.
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Overtime, it turns out that this structure will always emerge similarly, if these
connections are, first, expensive to traverse or establish (f. e due to physical distance),
second, require specialization, or third, simply take time (Iansiti and Levien 2004).
One important property of networks with hubs is the degree of separation between
actors. Separation is the number of network nodes an actor has to pass by to get from
one node tin the system to any other node. Not only the position is relevant but also
the types of relations between two actors differ in strong or weak ties (Granovetter
1973). Relations are symbolized in Fig. 3 by lines between nodes. Strength of tie is
defined as a combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity and the
reciprocal services, which characterize the tie. Strong ties have a greater motivation to
be cooperative and make resources more easily accessible. Weak ties are good for
bridging networks or share ideas and information from one network actor to the other.
(Akaka, Vargo and Lusch 2012). Brown and Reingen (1987) found that when both
types of ties are available, actors selected to draw on the information provided by
strong ties because they considered more influential than from weak-tie sources.
The behavior of focal actors can have profound effects on the health of the entire
system. Focal actors in an ecosystem can act potentially as a keystone or a dominator
depending on their strategy. Henceforward this paper provides an extract of the work
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of Iansiti and Levien (2004) to shed light on the main differences between dominators
and keystone actors of control and dominion.
(2) Dominant actor. Not all focal actors will serve in a beneficial role for the
ecosystem. Actors who enter a group with a dominator accept his power in order to
gain advantages the get from being part of the dominator´s group. The acceptance
balances the hardships that compliance with the dominator´s demands imposes on
them (Blau 1964). The subordinated tend to communicate to each other their approval
of the dominator and their feelings of obligation to him. The dominance of focal
actors finds expression in-group pressure that promote compliance with the dominant
actor´s directives. By means of in-group pressure, dominant actors strengthen their
power of control and legitimate their authority (Blau 1964). Dominate actors exploit
their position by sitting on critical pathways or check points for the network
interaction. Not only the position but also metrics of physical size or abundance makes
dominant actor obvious (Fig. 3 node f.c.). Dominators occupy a high number of nodes
in the ecosystem. Therefore, dominant actors apply strategies, which attack the
ecosystem, absorb and integrate external resources into internal operations to increase
the level of control. Characteristics in favor a dominance can be that the actor controls
the access to the network for other subordinate actors, controls the standard of
interaction between actors or extracts as much (financial) benefits as it can from the
resources or the actors it dominates. These strategies may optimize the immediate
profit of the dominant actor at the cost of their long-term prospects by creating
dependencies on unhealthy business communities or by inhibiting both innovation and
the free flow of information through an ecosystem (Iansiti and Levien 2004).
Dominators are recognized easily to the extent that they fail to encourage diversity.
Dominators either take over the functions of the actor they eliminate or eliminate
those functions together. Typical strategy of dominator is to integrate vertically or
horizontally to get direct control and own a large proportion of a network. In doing so,
dominators are solely and directly in charge of the majority of value creation in their
networks, leaving little opportunity for the emergence of a meaningful ecosystem.
Dominators propose little potential value to the ecosystem, excerpt value there is for
159
themselves, leaving the starved and unstable ecosystem around it (Iansiti and Levien
2004).
(3) Keystone actor. A focal actor in a network can improve otherwise its overall
chances of survival by providing benefits to the ecosystem as a whole. Keystone
species are identified as having specific characteristics that create such benefits for the
ecosystem and its members (Mills, Soulé and Doak 1993). A keystone is an actor that
governs important ecosystem health, often without being a significant portion of the
ecosystem itself. Rather keystone players are often small by most obvious measures,
or have little presence at all in most niches of their ecosystem. Keystones fellow the
basic strategies to shape and coordinate the ecosystems and help to coordinate
network behavior. The interests of keystones are aligned with those of the ecosystem
as a whole. Thus, keystone actors serve as critical regulators of ecosystems health
(Iansiti and Levien 2004). Almost all ecosystems possess some kind of keystone. The
efficiency, innovativeness, and robustness of the actors and the ecosystem itself are
fundamentally linked to keystone´s behavior. Keystones win by strength of the
powerful platform they create and by the processes and resources they share with their
ecosystem. In this sense keystones influence but not dominate, directly or indirectly,
the behavior of a majority of the actors in the ecosystem. Their influence is less
manifested by size, than by impact. Impact in the sense that the relationships makes
them essential for the overall health of the ecosystem. Their impact extends far
beyond the number of nodes they occupy in their business network (Iansiti and Levien
2004)
The role of consumers as potential change agent compared to other actors in the
ecosystem. Having accomplished the typology of actors and the distinction of focal
actors in dominators and keystones the next step is to theorize what capabilities and
limitations consumers generally have compared with other actors in their ecosystems.
This converges to the initial question if consumers can form or reform the structure
and the macro environment they are living in. This paper focused very much on
structure within an ecosystem. The question may be considered under the lens if there
160
are structural deficits in the consumer´s role as actor in the ecosystem that prevents
him or her in doing so.
Markets are energized by customers´ desires and firms should be consumer-orientated
because firm´s profit are driven by customer satisfaction. Thus, all activities of the
firm should lead toward satisfying customers (Lusch and Vargo 2014). Most
consumers suffer a lack of self-sufficiency in today´s life and depend on specialized
value propositions of firms to satisfy their needs (Wallace and Wolf 1986). In the dyad
between firm and consumers, generally the firm has the choice to select consumers
who fit best to its defined target group and increase its profit. The other way round the
consumer has the choice between the value propositions of different competing firms
or not to exchange.
Generally, both actors in the dyad may use the concept of asymmetrical
interdependence as a power source to attract and convince the counterpart. Hence, for
both actors in the dyad the strategy to strengthen their respective power is to improve
their status, association, feelings of attraction or impressive qualities (Blau 1964).
Doing so makes an actor more attractive and promise that associating with him will be
rewarding. Exchange theory disclose strategies how unreciprocated exchange
differentiates power: gratitude, force, subordination are manners to handle the
imbalanced exchange in the dyad. Further alternatives are abdication of exchange or
leave the dyad and find another actor outside thy dyad.
Giddens´ (1985) distinction of scope of dominance from its intensity shed light on
limitations of single consumer´s potential to form and reform the structure and macro
environment. A single consumer is rarely in superordinate positions to the firm nor
able to control large areas of activities of those. What is more, single consumers have
little intensity of control, as the sanctions that can be invoked to secure compliance are
limited to e.g. boycott or go public. Therefore, the strategy of going beyond the dyad
of firm and consumer and seeking solidarity (Blau 1964) with other consumers or
institutions opens up.
With the discourse of knowledge (Foucault 1981), consumers are also able to create
power. Consumers have to be empowered or empower themselves by acquiring
161
operant resources. Operant resource like knowledge or effort may help consumers to
overcome situational stress by too much choice (Schwartz 2004; Iyengar and Lepper
2000) or the lack of transparency to consider all choices (Giddens 1984).
Thus, for consumers who intent to change the market it appears recommendable to
strengthen their limited power beyond the dyad. Considering the ecosystem may
indicate if this is likewise. Awareness of the dynamic and context-specific
configurations of time and space of resources is necessary for a concept of power in an
ecosystem. These configurations provide the density that is necessary for value
creation (Lusch, Vargo and Tanniru 2010). Generally, power beyond a dyad can be
strengthened by dividing the opposition (Blau, 1964). In the encounters of exchange
between consumer and firm opposition may mean that a firm services many
customers. The other way around consumers again have reinforce operant resource
like knowledge or effort to get transparency about choice.
Another way to strengthened power beyond the dyad is to form coalitions (Blau
1964). Firms must be aware of competition regulations but consumers may form
consumer protests, such as boycotts or class actions lawsuits, if appropriate. This leads
to a third way to strengthened power beyond the dyad. This is the case when third
parties, such as e.g. courts, consumer organizations or lobbyists, mediate a power
conflict between consumers and firms. This makes an enforcement of consumers´
activities necessary to evolve to a focal actor with many relations to other consumers
or stakeholders that potentially influence or are influenced by any given exchange
(Vargo and Lusch 2012).
Both, Giddens (1984) and Foucault (1988), recognize the transformative functions of
power, and thus per se the capability to form or reform the structure and the macro
environment they are living. Therefor the structure and dynamic of an ecosystem is
reviewed to find out if there are structural deficits in the consumer´s role that prevents
him or her in doing so.
Fig 3 symbolize a typical setting with the firm f. a in a focal position surrounded by
many consumers (b…r). Node f. a is the critical pathway to get access to node f. c.
except for consumer q that also maintains relations to node f. b. Firm f. a as a hub and
162
focal actor may behave like dominator or keystone. The role of dominator is to force
the consumer to exclusively source via its pathway. Playing the role of a keystone is to
enable the consumer and give access to sources via its pathway.
The size of node f. a is bigger as it consolidates all the nodes around it. By considering
deeper the consumers´ nodes (b…r) the (open) triangle (e, f, g) and the group of four
(j, k, l, m) stands out. In the (open) triangle, node e serves as a hub for f and g. The
triangle scenario may occur for example in families where node e e.g. is doing the
shopping for the other members (f, g). The group is a set of actors where many
activities are negotiated at a household, team or buying center level (Miller 1998).
The alternate relations between the members of the household are determined
depending on skills or power sources for accomplishing the activity (e.g. shopping,
negotiating) (Scott, Oates and Young 2015). Beyond the single bucket of customer
nodes, the possibility to structure helps to avoid disorientation through sudden shift in
social context (Akaka, Vargo, and Lusch 2013) whereas an actor may have different
social positions and roles (Blau 1964). E.g. the same actor may behave differently in
different roles of friend, co-workers, family members, or superior (Hinton 2014) and
make him an inconsistent actor (McDonald et al. 2009). At least the triangle scenario
makes evident that consumers also can be a hub and thus a focal actor, even the size
and the number of related notes tends to be lower.
Social media platforms show a different scenario. There, research shows the role of
influential member (‘influencer’). An influencer is an actor that occupies a central
position in the network with numerous and closer relationships to other consumers.
Thereby it is more like that this actor is an influencer in its network (Kietzmann et al.
2011). Analog to Granovetter (1973) strong relationships are lasting and affect-laden
and weak relationships are characterized as infrequent and distant.
If consumer´s are in the position to be a focal actor, it is still open what role they play:
keystones or dominators. Keystones influence, directly or indirectly, the behavior of a
majority of the actors in the ecosystem. Consumers, especially the social media
influencer may have an influence on other consumers within their network, but rarely
with the majority of actor in the ecosystem. Dominant actors apply strategies, which
163
attack the ecosystem, absorb and integrate external resources into internal operations
to increase the level of control. The intention of consumer to apply these strategies are
rarely realistic. Consumers may change their actor´s concept within the ecosystem. If
the single consumer intents to dominate the ecosystem, an option might be to change
the role and found its own firm. This move goes along with integrating external
resources into internal operations to increase the level of control. Thereby intensity
and scope are significantly increased.
Discussion The aim of this paper is to find out if consumers are able to form or reform
the structure and the macro environment they are living in. After a broad conceptual
review on concepts of power, the article offers some theoretical findings. Firstly,
approaches in marketing indicates that either macro forces and structures (Porter 1979;
Kotler and Keller 2006) play a central role in shaping marketing practices or
consumers with a proper agency to resist the meanings that companies try to force
upon them (Fiske 1989, Peppers and Rogers 2005; Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000).
Giddens´ (1984) structuration theory and the duality of interplay between actors and
the structures potentially pacifies this conflict. The dual view allows that one the on
hand actors create and exercise power and on the other hand that power influences or
even limits those actors. Secondly, the article identifies different sources of power on
the micro-level (asymmetrical interdependence, imbalanced reciprocity) and on the
macro level (socialization). The actor-to-actor notation of S-D logic may offer a more
revealing and transcendent view on an ecosystem (Lusch and Vargo 2014). However,
reviewing literature make obvious that not all actors within an ecosystem have the
same relevance for and power within the ecosystem. The article offers a differentiation
of distinct types of actors, following their power and domination within the
ecosystem. Focal actors in an ecosystem can act potentially as a keystone or a
dominator depending on their strategy. The roles of keystones and dominators in an
ecosystem are characterized. Thirdly, five typecasts of strategies are found to handle
imbalanced reciprocity (Fig. 1). Later these strategies are applied in the dyad between
consumer and firm. Power has transformative functions (Giddens 1984; Foucault
1988). Thus, per se consumers as every actor in the ecosystem has the capability to
164
form or reform the structure and the macro environment they are living. The analysis
of different types of actors in the ecosystem make the structural shortcomings of the
actor consumer obvious. His position, the number and strength of relations are rather
small. If at all, the strategies -forming coalitions and mediation with other consumers,
stakeholder or institutions - appear promising to have an impact and become a
keystone (Blau 1964).
More generally, all actors in the system suffer from interdependence and a lack of
self-sufficiency (Wallace and Wolf 1986). Business leaders of firms face a
fundamental challenge by the management of resources that are not directly owned
and thus under their control (Iansiti and Levien 2004). Lack of choice and the rather
weak position compared to other actors in the network affect consumers. The practical
implication of this paper is to empower all actors in the system to strengthen their
knowledge about awareness, access, adaption and integration of resources. If a given
actor does not have the necessary information or knowledge to integrate and apply a
particular resource, value cannot be created (Akaka, Vargo and Lusch 2012). The
challenge is the struggle to perceive accurately the meaningful and relevant
relationship with other resources within an ecosystem (Hinton 2014).
For further research the squeeze between scope and intensity (Giddens 1985) of rule,
sanction and more generally power is a promising field for further research. Also,
considering non-human actors and their agency especially in highly automated
systems appears promising.
The author chooses S-D logic as a theoretical framework to understand the complexity
of social and economic exchange between actors. As limitation of this article, there are
other approaches in relationship and network marketing, which also offer ideas to
consider. In addition, both ecosystems and the concept of power affecting different
levels of the ecosystem. Caveats or limitations with this approach of analysis may
arise from the use of a theoretical concept. Future empirical research is necessary to
prove the findings.
165
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Engaging dissensus: A reflexive
and collective approach to alcohol
social change
Marie-Louise Fry*24, Griffith University, Australia
Linda Brennan25, RMIT University, Australia
Josephine Previte26, The University of Queensland, Australia
Abstract
To date, intoxicated alcohol consumption has been addressed using a variety of methods and
approaches; none of which pose credible solutions or present a relevant road map for creating a
more positive future. Argument continues about whether or not alcohol, which remains a legal
drug in Australia, as well as many other countries, is consonant with health or well-being
(emotional, social and physical). Furthermore, the extent to which corporate actors are, or can be,
part of the solution to - rather than the cause of – the alcohol problems depends on whether
industry is viewed as the ‘tainted enemy’ or as a partner contributing to shared understanding
with capacity to manage and reduce alcohol related-harm (Herrick, 2011; Thom, 2005). The
complexity of social problems reflects in the continual dissensus about what needs to be done,
whether or not it needs to be done at all; and who it needs to be done with, or for. The problem
then becomes intractable (McKenzie-Mohr, et al., 2011) and ‘wicked’ (Kennedy and Parsons,
2012) to the point where scalable solutions seem to be impossible (Hastings and Domegan,
2013). Dissensus is also evident in the discourse about what constitutes research evidence, as
there are disparities across the system whereby actors within the social issue network value
24 [email protected] 25 [email protected] 26 [email protected]
171
different ideas about how to address solution opportunities. What has eventuated is a social
change landscape dominated by warfare, dissensus and intractability due to entrenched and
bifurcated adversarial perceptions of what is necessary.
This paper advocates for a harnessing of the dissensus that is occurring within the alcohol
social change agenda; calling for a reflexive, collective turn inclusive of industry as a relevant
and necessary alcohol change partner. Engaging industry offers the potential to form new
collaborative partnerships and move beyond the current bounded institutional logic that
dominates alcohol social change agenda. Prior to illustrating the value of industry as a protagonist
of alcohol social change, the paper first overviews the complexity of wicked problems, then
discusses collective intelligence as an approach to engage dissensus, arguing for a post-political
consensus based discourse inclusive of industry as an alcohol social change partner. Finally, the
results of a collective intelligence process whereby controversial stakeholders were invited to
discuss alcohol social change, thereby obtaining a previously unaddressed stakeholder’s views on
the problem, are presented.
172
Globalisation, (Neo)
Colonialism, and Marketing II
Track Chair: Olga Kravets
Co-Chair(s): Cagri Yalkin
173
The Middle Class and the Market:
Imagery Rhetoric from Colonial to
Nehruvian India
Apoorv Khare27, Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli, India
Arindam Das, IMI-K, India
Himadri Roy Chaudhuri, IMI-K, India
Scholars in marketing have highlighted liminality and contestations as key characteristics
exhibited by middle class consumers in developing societies such as India. In this paper, we
propose that this negotiating middle class emerged during the late colonial and early (Nehruvian)
independence period in India.This paper takes the issue of market level tension from the middle-
class consumer’s prevaricated market response to aspects of hybridity or market tensions that
negotiates and straddles the western and oriental mores. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, we
propose that the Indian middle class, formed during the late colonial to early independence
period, is a hybrid state that created a cultural sphere where, through a programmatic mimicry,
the colonial hangover was adopted only to be disrupted. In the way of analysis of this hybrid state
of the middle class, their liminalized consumerist desires and their corresponding representations
in visual advertisements we provide a semiotic reading of a select set of Indian print
advertisements published within the aforementioned time frame.
174
The dynamism of global-local
cultural interaction: A multi-sited
ethnographic study on global music
consumption of Vietnamese young
consumers
Nhat Nguyen Nguyen, University of Lille, France
Our study aims at analyzing the dynamism of the interaction between global and local cultures.
Prior studies on globalization have examined the power imbalance between one global and one
local culture. Little research has investigated the interaction of two or more global cultural forces,
which come from different localities, with one local culture. To redress this gap, we investigate
that interaction in examining the lifestyle construction of local consumers through their global
cultural commodities consumption. We ground our study in the context of Vietnamese young
consumers’ consumption of South Korean pop music and Anglo-American pop music. The
analysis of our multi-sited ethnographic data reveals different possibilities of globalization which
could occur in one locality. The data analysis also shows an alternative model of cultural
hybridization. That is, local consumers do not modify global and local cultural components but
they use these components to valorize their local culture.
175
Technology, Globalization, and the
Future
Alex Reppel28, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Darryn Mitussis, Queen Mary University of London, UK
The aim of this research is to scrutinize digital technologies as forces of globalization and to
investigate their potential to facilitate forms of cultural domination. Drawing on the philosopher
Günther Anders, we explore exaggeration as a method of assessing the future at a time of
accelerating technological progress. By accompanying established methods rooted in an
understanding of the past, we suggest that exaggeration offers macromarketing scholars a method
to work towards a balanced perspective on that future. Using surveillance for illustration
purposes, we revisit selected utopian and dystopian visions of science fiction, which we
recognize as realized exaggeration of scientific potentials and technology's inspirational
character. Viewed through the lens of Günther Anders's method of exaggeration, dystopian
fiction in particular constitutes a promising avenue for macromarketing scholars to visualize the
possible long-term consequences of digital technologies, including the social costs they incur and
forms of grassroots resistance they stimulate.
Anders, Günther (1956/2002) Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der
zweiten industriellen Revolution. 5th ed., vol. 1. C.H. Beck, München.
Anders, Günther (1980/2002). Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten
industriellen Revolution. 3rd ed., vol. 2. C.H. Beck, München.
Anders, Günther (1965). Philosophische Stenogramme. C.H. Beck, München.
176
Food Marketing II
Track Chair: Claudia Dumitrescu
Co-Chair(s): Renée Shaw Hughner
177
Perceptions of Food Availability:
An Examination of Low Income
Consumers
Priyanka Jayashankar29, Iowa State University, USA
Sekar Raju, Iowa State University, USA
Poverty in the USA has resulted in high levels of food insecurity among low-income consumers
(Coleman-Jensen et al 2016 & Rank 2001). Some of this is due to lack of food availability in
their neighborhoods (Talukdar 2008) but other factors also affect it. Understanding the factors
that decrease food availability is critical to address this problem. Two studies are reported in this
research. Study 1 examines the factors that affect the perceived availability of food among low-
income consumers using a survey. Study 2 utilizes a field experiment to increase perceived food
availability.
The theory on food well-being examines the behavioral factors that affect consumers’
relationship with food (Block et al. 2011). Our consumer-oriented narrative of the antecedents of
food availability resonates with the food well-being concept, which shifts the focus from a
functional approach to a behavioral approach (Block et al 2011). We evaluate marginalized
consumers’ well-being by examining their perceptions about food availability. This is consistent
with the work that sees food availability from an access perspective – a structural view (Morland
et al. 2002; Rose and Richards 2004). We add to this by incorporating variables that enhance our
understanding of food availability. Blocker et al. (2013) have discussed how social relations aid
well-being. Prior nutritional habits also predict perceptions of food availability (Drewnowski and
Eichelsdoerfer 2010; Drewnowski; Darmon 2005). Nutritional knowledge (Smith and Morton
2009; Shaikh et al. 2008) and civic infrastructure for food donations help increase perceived food
178
security (Morton et al 2005). This research captures how demographics shape perceptions of food
availability.
Study 1
To determine the factors that affect perceived food availability, we gathered survey data from 435
participants in Iowa, USA. The survey discussed accessibility, social cohesion, nutritional
knowledge, civic infrastructure, demographics, and perceived food availability. Social cohesion,
civic infrastructure and nutritional knowledge were significant predictors of perceived food
availability. Low-income users associated greater time taken to reach their primary grocery store
with lower levels of food availability. Hispanics, African-Americans and those with no schooling
experienced more food unavailability.
Interestingly, we found that social cohesion affected food availability. Does perceived food
availability increase when low-income consumers have better social ties? This question was
examined in Study 2.
Study 2
A field experiment was conducted where participants (same population as Study 1) were either
reminded or not reminded of their social ties prior to answering questions on food availability.
All participants also answered questions on the quality of their social ties. The expectation was
that recalling social ties will reduce perceived food insecurity but this effect would only be seen
with positive social ties and not with poor quality ones.
A random half of the ninety-two low-income participants answered a questionnaire with a
question about their friends/relatives before answering the perceived food availability question.
The other half answered the food availability question first and then the friends/relatives
question. The results indicate that reminding consumers of their social networks helped reduce
perceived food unavailability but only when such relationships were positive.
General Discussion
This research highlights key variables that affect perceived food availability and provides
direction to policymakers on the antecedents of food insecurity. We find that food insecurity that
low-income consumers report is a function of the social connections that consumers have and the
quality of their neighbourhoods.
179
References
Block, L. G., Grier, S. A., Childers, T. L., Davis, B., Ebert, J. E., Kumanyika, S., & Pettigrew, S.
(2011). From nutrients to nurturance: A conceptual introduction to food well-
being. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 30(1), 5-13.
Blocker, C.P., Ruth, J.A., Sridharan, S., Beckwith, C., Ekici, A., Goudie-Hutton, M., Rosa, J.A.,
Saatcioglu, B., Talukdar, D., Trujillo, C. and Varman, R. (2013). Understanding poverty
and promoting poverty alleviation through transformative consumer research. Journal of
Business Research, 66(8), 1195-1202.
Casagrande S, Whitt-Glover M, Lancaster K, Odoms-Young A, Gary T. (2009), Built
environment and health behaviors among African Americans: a systematic review.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 36, 174–181.
Coleman-Jensen, A., Gregory, C., & Singh, A. (2014). Household food security in the United
States in 2013. USDA-ERS Economic Research Report, (173).
Drewnowski, A., & Eichelsdoerfer, P. (2010). Can low-income Americans afford a healthy
diet? Nutrition today, 44(6), 246.
Drewnowski, A., & Darmon, N. (2005). The economics of obesity: dietary energy density and
energy cost. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 82(1), 265-273.
Gustafson A, Sharkey J, Samuel-Hodge C et al. (2011), Perceived and objective measures of the
food store environment and the association with weight and diet among low-income
women in North Carolina. Public Health Nutrition, 14, 1032–1038.
Morland, K., Wing, S., Roux, A. D., & Poole, C. (2002). Neighborhood characteristics associated
with the location of food stores and food service places. American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, 22(1), 23-29.
Rank, M. R. (2001). The Effect of Poverty on America’s Families Assessing Our Research
Knowledge. Journal of Family Issues, 22(7), 882–903.
Rose, D., & Richards, R. (2004). Food store access and household fruit and vegetable use among
participants in the US Food Stamp Program. Public health nutrition, 7(8), 1081-1088.
Smith, C., & Morton, L. W. (2009). Rural food deserts: low-income perspectives on food access
in Minnesota and Iowa. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 41(3), 176–187.
180
Shaikh, A. R., Yaroch, A. L., Nebeling, L., Yeh, M. C., & Resnicow, K. (2008). Psychosocial
predictors of fruit and vegetable consumption in adults: a review of the literature.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 34(6), 535-543.
Suranyi-Unger Jr, T. (1981). Consumer behavior and consumer well-being: An economist's
digest. Journal of Consumer Research, 8(2), 132-143.
Talukdar, D. (2008). Cost of being poor: retail price and consumer price search differences across
inner-city and suburban neighborhoods. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(3), 457–471.
Table 1: Study 1
Variable T
Time taken to reach grocery store -3.09**
Hispanic 2.43*
Black or African American 2.05*
No schooling 2.09*
Social cohesion 4.42**
Civic infrastructure 2.31*
Dietary knowledge 1.97*
Note: ** p < .01; * p < .05
181
Table 2: Study 2
Variable T
Social ties cue -2.75**
Social ties quality 1.75
Cue x quality interaction 2.92**
Note: ** p < .01
182
Complex Change and The Older
Household’s Food Consumption
Practices
Sue Vaux Halliday, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Ariadne Beatrice Kapetanaki30, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Wendy J. Wills, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Angela Dickinson, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Our study raises the importance of a holistic social system to support the older people household
as they engage in everyday food acquisition and consumption practices. Aging is a natural,
inevitable process that presents challenges to independence (Bernoth et al. 2014), so there is a need
to acknowledge the move from independence to interdependence. Adopting an ethnographic
approach, our study was framed around 25 households aged 60+ in the East of England – some
with agency, able to adapt, while on the other hand, others were found to have weak (or in the
process of losing) agency and unable to completely adapt to the changes within their environment
needs. These households reflected a diverse demographic mix, with a cross-section of ages, gender,
living status (alone, co-habiting, sheltered housing) and residential area (urban, rural).
This study empirically confirms the work on two social imaginaries for later years theorised by
Gilleard and Higgs (2013) and demonstrates how these concepts are reflected in the everyday
practices of later years households. Our findings are in line with the concepts of third (hail) and
fourth (frail) age which are seen as complex social imaginaries rather than simple stages based on
chronological and demographic terms. How individuals adapt to those factors that trigger
183
vulnerability (Baker, Gentry, and Rittenburg 2005) is what is crucial in determining vulnerability
as opportunities to marshal support (agentic third age) or as a problem that overwhelm and cause a
decline into dependency - fourth age (Bernoth et al. 2014). This is where theoretical
conceptualisation can frame practical action.
This empirical development and construction of two social imaginaries provides a dynamic context
for marketing, organisation and policy responses to issues raised by our findings.
An important finding is that the lack of adaptability was linked not only to mental health issues,
emotional vulnerability, and being anti-social but also to anti-interdependence. The key conclusion
to be drawn is that it is not the passing of time but the adaptive resources in the face of adversity
that prevents or delays the fourth age. This insight provides a focus on the meaning of the practices
older people engaged in and supports Schatzki’s (2012) theorisation of sites as spaces held and
filled with meaning.
Marketing theory is advanced by seeing that the role for organizations in reducing vulnerability in
later life is to mesh their goals with the teleoaffective elements above all while meeting needs and
emotions with products and especially services. This is the way to meet the ethical challenge of an
aging population with an increase in potentially vulnerable older people to create structures that
can serve to counter their decline into vulnerability (Bernoth et al. 2014). There are sets of food
acquisition and consumption practices that could usefully be much better supported by wider
societal and marketing resources. These can enable older people to remain in the agentic third age.
At the same time, these practices will facilitate resistance to decline into the fourth age. There is
also an influx of resources that could be structured into care to enable those in the dependent frail
stage to exit and return to the third age.
Our research shows that older people are exposed to many factors that can lead to vulnerability, as
they get, prepare and consume food. Failure to adapt to adverse changes can lead them to entering
the fourth age. However, they can and do adapt by employing practices that include the use of
social networks, planning for the future and using tools to remain independent and in the agentic
third age. Those who work with older people, such as carers, GPs, social enterprises, community
food services and charities, could be re-organised in ways to better provide for them and their
family/carers.
184
Marketing responses are also vital to support older people in remaining or returning to the third
age when their food well-being is compromised. For example, supermarket in-store offers and sales
promotions that serve older consumers’ needs could usefully be introduced. Wider aisles, times
with assistance and slower checkout lanes for those who enjoy the social aspect of shopping, or
need to spend more time in the checkout due to physicality constraints. Moreover, accessible and
clean supportive facilities, such as toilets, are beneficial to all, but really vital for those more at risk
of an impending spiral of decline.
Finally, services that deliver food at home could include different meal sizes to help older people
meet their appetite and nutritional needs. Indeed, the spectrum of independence through to
dependence via interdependences can now be the focus of organisational interaction with food
practices in later life, thereby reducing vulnerability. Thus, practical conclusions that flow from
this significant study are linked to assets reinforcement and obstacles elimination to ensure that
older people have the resources to positively adapt and avoid entering the frail fourth age leaving
the hale third age.
This can be theorized as our contribution to researching older households’ food acquisition
practices. We effectively researched the agentic third age and how decline into the fourth age
happens, can be resisted and delayed and even reversed. We have explained an element of the
phenomenon of the lived experience of the older household and these two social imaginaries which
leaves room for further research into this pressing theoretical and practical management and
societal challenge.
References
Baker, Stacey Menzel, James W Gentry, and Terri L Rittenburg (2005), "Building understanding
of the domain of consumer vulnerability," Journal of Macromarketing, 25 (2), 128-39.
Bernoth, Maree, Elaine Dietsch, Oliver Kisalay Burmeister, and Michael Schwartz (2014),
"Information management in aged care: cases of confidentiality and elder abuse," Journal
of Business Ethics, 122 (3), 453-60.
Gilleard, Chris and Paul Higgs (2013), "The fourth age and the concept of a ‘social imaginary’:
A theoretical excursus," Journal of Aging Studies, 27 (4), 368-76.
185
Schatzki, Theodore R (2012), “A primer on practices”. In Practice-based Education: Perspectives
and Strategies, J. Higgs, R. Barnett, S. Billett, M. Hutchings & F. Trede, eds. Rotterdam:
Springer, 13-26.
186
Perspectives on Ireland’s Origin
Green Programme: Balancing
Growth and Sustainability
Lisa Koep31, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
Aidan O’Driscoll, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Edeltraud Guenther, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
The food industry, due to its economic and societal significance, has undergone significant scrutiny
recently, and a number of issues have been emerging: for example, the tension between under-
/malnourishment and rising obesity, specifically in developing countries (Witkowski 2007), the
clashes between plant-based and meat-based diets (Beverland 2014) and slow food versus fast food
(Chaudhury and Albinsson 2015, Bommel and Spicer 2011). Most importantly though, the food
industry is characterised by environmental sustainability challenges. With the global population set
to increase by more than 2 billion by 2050, the world will need to produce 70% more food from
limited land and water resources. Fears surrounding food sustainability, and indeed global
warming, are leading to significant actions by food manufacturers and retailers (Bord Bia 2015;
Killeen 2000; Maughan and O’Driscoll 2012).
This paper explores in-depth how a relatively small country, Ireland, seeks to address this
challenge. Ireland aims to become a world leader in sustainably produced food via the national
sustainability programme Origin Green which currently has over 600 food producing firms signed
up to an ambitious programme of evidence-based sustainable production. The programme, heavily
supported through the Irish government, is executed by Bord Bia, the Food Marketing Board; thus
the line between performance and marketing aspiration may be blurred at points.
187
Combining a marketing systems approach (Layton 2007, 2008, 2011) with a paradox lens
(Fairhurst et al. 2016; O’Driscoll 2008, Putnam et al 2016), the activities of the Origin Green
programme are analysed in relation to its major structural and functional elements and the micro-
macro interface, in order to investigate if the clashes between environmental sustainability and
economic growth can be reconciled. Specific focus is placed on the interactions and transactions,
to draw out the implications in a networked society (Albareda and Waddock 2016).
Interview data, field notes, archival data, policy documents and newspaper articles gathered during
a four-year period during a research enterprise partnership with Bord Bia, a qualitative case study
approach (Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 2009) is used to develop a detailed, longitudinal examination of
the programme to address the research question.
The findings of this study provide important learnings regarding the contradictory forces at play,
the interactions between marketing and society, and how micro, meso and macro dynamics are
integrated. It is shown that the complex structure of the Origin Green programme brings together
a multitude of participants from diverse backgrounds, resulting in conflictual demands, which Bord
Bia has to address and unite. Further, the programme faces the challenge of balancing cooperation
and competition amongst its participants. Albeit not without criticism, the Origin Green
programme provides an interesting case of public and private organisations bonded in one
governing framework to tame the paradox between economic growth and sustainable development.
188
References:
Albareda, L., & Waddock, S. (2016). Networked CSR governance: A whole network approach to
meta-governance. Business & Society.
Beverland, M. B. (2014). Sustainable eating: mainstreaming plant-based diets in developed
economies. Journal of Macromarketing, 34(3), 369-382.
Bord Bia. (2015). Origin Green Sustainability Report 2015. http://www.origingreen.ie/wp-
content/themes/origingreen/sustainability_report/Origin_Green_Sustainability_Report.p
df, date accessed: 14.11.2016.
Chaudhury, S. R., & Albinsson, P. A. (2015). Citizen-consumer oriented practices in naturalistic
foodways: The case of the slow food movement. Journal of Macromarketing, 35(1), 36-
52.
Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management
Review, 14(4), 532–550.
Fairhurst, G. T., Smith, W. K., Banghart, S. G., Lewis, M. W., Putnam, L. L., Raisch, S., &
Schad, J. (2016). Diverging and converging: Integrative insights on a paradox meta-
perspective. The Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 173–182.
Killeen, D. (2000). Food security, a challenge for human development. In J. Seymour (Ed.),
Poverty in plenty, A Human Development Report for the UK. United Kingdom: UN
Environment and Development.
Layton, R.A. (2007). Marketing systems: a core macro‐marketing concept. Journal of
Macromarketing, 27(2), 193‐213.
Layton, R.A. (2008). The search for a dominant logic: a macro‐marketing perspective. Journal of
Macromarketing, 28(3), 215-227.
Layton, R. A. (2011). Towards a theory of marketing systems. European Journal of Marketing,
45(1/2), 259-276.
Maughan, R., & O’Driscoll, A. (2012). Rethinking community-based retailing. In E. O’Callaghan
& D. O’Riordan (Eds.), Retailing in Ireland: Contemporary Perspectives (p. 49–54.).
Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.
189
O’Driscoll, A. (2008). Exploring paradox in marketing: managing ambiguity towards synthesis.
Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 23(2), 95–104.
Putnam, L. L., Fairhurst, G. T., & Banghart, S. (2016). Contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes
in organizations: A constitutive approach. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 65–
171.
Van Bommel, K., & Spicer, A. (2011). Hail the snail: Hegemonic struggles in the Slow Food
movement. Organization Studies, 32(12), 1717-1744.
Witkowski, T. H. (2007). Food marketing and obesity in developing countries: analysis, ethics,
and public policy. Journal of Macromarketing, 27(2), 126-137.
Yin, R. (2009). Case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage
Publications Ltd.
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Social marketing
practice and macromarketing
reflections I
Track Chair: Josephine Previte
Co-Chair(s): Christine Domegan
Ann-Marie Kennedy
191
Systemic Behaviour Change: Irish
Farm Deaths and Injuries
Kieran O’ Connell, Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland
Maurice Murphy32, Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland
ABSTRACT
While the Irish agricultural sector accounts for just 6% of the working population of Ireland, it consistently
has the highest proportion of fatal incidents of any sector - generally ranging from between 35% and 45%
of all workplace fatalities in any given year. This was again evident in 2014 where 55% (30 of the 56) of
the fatal workplace incidents were in the agricultural sector. Agriculture has an ageing workforce with the
average age of an Irish farmer now standing at fifty-seven and farmers are eight times more likely to be
fatally injured in a farm accident than the general working population. Interviews were conducted with
farmers and farm safety advisory bodies. The findings from this research show that a systems social
marketing approach should be adopted to eliminate farm deaths and injuries and that interventions should
be co-created with the farming community. A grass-roots mentoring system needs to be established to advise
farmers on best practice. This needs to be modelled on 3 main pillars (individual farm visits, courses in safe
farming, and group farm walks) delivered by and for farmers. Live testimonials from farmers who have
been involved in farming accidents also need to be incorporated into all farm safety talks and
demonstrations. These need to show farmers the physical, emotional and financial consequences of a
farming accident. These farm accident victims should attend individual farm visits, courses in safe farming
and group farm walks. Practical workshops need to be set up so farmers learn specific skills appropriate to
their farming situation. Lecture-based teaching where farmers sit and listen about safe farming practices
should be avoided as farmers like to learn by doing. The issue of farm safety needs to be addressed at a
macro marketing level and needs to involve a broadening of the traditional 4Ps to include People, Policy
and Partnership.
192
KEY WORDS
Farm safety, Attitude, Behaviour, Social norms.
1. Introduction to Irish Farms, Farm Types and the Agricultural Sector
The agri-food sector in Ireland contributes €24 billion to the national economy, accounting for
6.3% of gross value added, nearly 10% of Ireland’s exports and provides 7.7% of the country’s
employment (GL Noble Denton 2014). More specifically, 58% of the agri-food sector’s workforce
comes from agriculture, forestry and fishing (GL Noble Denton 2014). The Irish Census of
Agriculture 2010 estimated that there were 139,829 active farms in Ireland in 2010 employing
165,370 annualised work units (AWUs) and that in total, when family labour is included, it is
estimated that approximately 400,000 persons are exposed to health and safety risks on Irish farms
(Health and Safety Authority 2015).
Approximately 88% of farm holdings are male-owned (GL Noble Denton 2014) with 50% of the
male farm owners being 55 years or older, and perhaps more significantly in terms of health and
safety, 25% of all male farmers are aged 65 or older (GL Noble Denton 2014).
2. Background Statistics on Farm Deaths in Ireland
While the Irish agricultural sector accounts for just 6% of the working population of Ireland, it
consistently has the highest proportion of fatal incidents of any sector generally ranging from
between 35% and 45% of all workplace fatalities in any given year (Health and Safety Authority
2015). This was again evident in 2014 where 55% (30 of the 56) of the fatal workplace incidents
were in the agricultural sector (Health and Safety Authority 2015). This compared to a total of 47
workplace fatalities in 2013 with 16 fatalities in agriculture (Health and Safety Authority 2015).
An analysis of fatalities by the Irish HSA (Health and Safety Authority) covering 2003 to 2012,
showed that dairy farming and mixed farming accounted for the largest proportion of deaths (35%
and 29% respectively) (GL Noble Denton 2014). Older workers were also significantly over-
represented in fatalities with 41% aged between 65 to 99 years old, and 20% aged 55 to 64 years
old (GL Noble Denton 2014). Perhaps reflecting the gender profile of farming as an industry, 95%
of the fatalities were male (GL Noble Denton 2014). Childhood deaths accounted for about 10%
of fatalities with over half of these caused by tractors/machinery or other vehicles. Some regional
effects were also apparent with a high number of fatalities occurring in Cork (29 deaths between
193
2003 and 2012), double the next highest county - Tipperary (14 deaths in the same period). It is
noted that these counties have high levels of intensive dairy farming (GL Noble Denton 2014).
Table 1 shows the amount of farm fatalities in Ireland within a five year period (Health and Safety
Authority 2015) and shows the number of farm fatalities declining every year from 2010 to 2013
but then a sharp increase in 2014, where the number of farm fatalities almost doubled in comparison
with 2013. The spiking of fatal incidents (from 11 in 2009 to 30 in 2014) is alarming, as there had
been a general downward trend from 1997. However, the significant increase in farm deaths in
Ireland since 2009 is of grave concern and has interrupted and reversed this general downward
trend to an alarming extent (Health and Safety Authority 2015).
In the ten year period from 2005 to 2014, there were 193 farm fatalities, averaging over 19 deaths
per year or 16 fatalities per 100,000 workers in the farming sector (Health and Safety Authority
2015). The fatality incident rate for 2013 in the agricultural sector was 15.9 fatalities per 100,000
workers in comparison with 2.1 fatalities per 100,000 across the general working population
(Health and Safety Authority 2015). Put simply, there has been no significant reduction in the
number of farm deaths, and farmers were 8 times more likely to die working on a farm than in the
general working population (Health and Safety Authority 2015).
In comparative European terms, Ireland has made considerable progress in terms of its farm safety
record, currently ranking in the top 5 for lowest rates of farm fatalities (Health and Safety Authority
2015). The vast majority of these farm fatalities were potentially preventable (Health and Safety
Authority 2015). As with any workplace, the primary responsibility for farm safety resides with
the business owner, in this case the farmer.
Figure 1 shows the major causes of farm deaths in Ireland in the years 2005 - 2014 (n = 193). It
identifies that tractors, farm vehicles and machinery make up nearly 50% of the causes of death.
Livestock contribute 13% to the cause of death, with drowning and gas accounting for 11%. The
remainder of fatality causes were due to falling from a height (9%); timber related (7%); falling
objects and collapses (7%); and electrocution (2%) (Health and Safety Authority 2015).
In relation to farm injuries, it is important to bear in mind that the statistics are more difficult to
compile than those for deaths. This is due to the gross under-reporting of non-fatal incidents and
injuries by farmers, with the average reported to the Irish Health and Safety Authority of just 100
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per year, despite their legal obligation to do so (Health and Safety Authority 2015). The Irish Health
and Safety Authority relies to a great extent on the findings of the National Farm Survey conducted
by Teagasc (Irish farming advisory body) for trends in non-fatal incidents. The 2011 Irish National
Farm Survey results estimated that Irish farm injuries increased by 35% to 2,459 injuries per
100,000 farms reported for the year 2010, compared to the previous survey estimate of 1,815
injuries per 100,000 farms in 2006. This is still a reduction in the numbers recorded in 2001 (3,000
injuries per 100,000 farms) and 1991 (5,000 injuries per 100,000 farms) (Health and Safety
Authority 2015).
3. Farmer Attitudes and Behaviours as a Contributor to Farm Accidents
The environment, technology and the person (“farm safety trichotomy”) are three aspects of
accident involvement in farming that are inextricably linked with one another, each influencing
safety:
(1) Environmental characteristics include the type and size of the farm, farming activity, presence
of children or elderly persons on the farm, etc.
(2) Technology involves the type and condition of machinery or vehicles and the type and condition
of personal safety equipment for instance.
(3) Person relates to a person’s perception of risk, their acceptance of risk, their attitudes and beliefs
about behaving safely or unsafely (Finnegan 2007).
GL Noble Denton (2014) in their comprehensive report acknowledge the role of these three aspects,
but focus on the person to understand how farmer attitudes and behaviours could be changed. As
other researchers have concluded (Van den Broucke and Colemont 2011), injury in farming is due
to behavioural factors such as the poor use of machinery or poor handling of animals (rather than
non-behavioural risk factors such as farm characteristics and even demographic characteristics).
The following sections present some of the key research relating to the person, involving social
and psychological factors identified from the literature.
3.1 Risk-Taking as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm Safety
Seiz and Downey (2001) cite how their small scale study found that farmers explained the causes
of accidents in a number of ways, including risk-taking such as taking unwarranted shortcuts, doing
makeshift repairs on machinery, acting carelessly, working without due concentration and fatigue,
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hurrying and impatience. These specific causes were understood by farmers to be under their
control, compared to causes they perceived to be out of their control such as time pressures, poor
weather and market forces.
3.1.1 Beliefs on Risk Taking as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour
Gil Coury et al. (1999) report as cited by Finnegan (2007) that it was excessive self-confidence and
carelessness that led to farmer accidents with their animals. This idea of a farmer’s behaviour
(when risk-taking) being linked to intrinsic identity markers (i.e. belief that they are expert in the
use of tools or in their handling of animals) has been reported elsewhere (Mullen 2004), whereby
individuals took risks or did not wear personal safety equipment because it reinforced to others that
they were “tough” or “macho”. As Murphy (1981) claimed, farmers may hold a belief that they
should be tough and independent individuals, a belief that may discourage them from using safety
equipment in case they are ridiculed by other farmers for being “soft”. He goes on to state that
using safety equipment and following safety practices goes against the grain of many of these
individuals.
3.1.2 Demographics as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour towards Risk
Age-related differences in risk-taking were also proposed whereby younger farmers (e.g. below
30) were more likely to take risks due to their lack of training and limited experience, exposing
themselves to greater risk of fatal injuries (Finnegan 2007). Older farmers may also take greater
risks, as it has been shown that they often use older machinery/tractors which may be defective and
neglect the use of protective devices (Collins McLaughlin and Mayhorn 2011; Finnegan 2007).
They generally do not value technological safety measures such as ROPS (Roll-Over Protection
Structures fitted on tractors) when compared to younger farmers (Collins McLaughlin and
Mayhorn 2011), which was explained by the finding that older farmers may not see the benefits of
new technology.
Finnegan’s (2007) research based on the Irish National Farm Survey found that 54 was the median
age for injury in male victims. However, it is likely the aging process may explain increased injury
rates for older farmers (Collins McLaughlin and Mayhorn 2011). For instance, declining visual
acuity and auditory capability, as well as a range of physical/motor and cognitive impairments may
lead to errors which result in injury. Medical conditions in older farmers have also been observed
to be related to accident involvement (Collins McLaughlin and Mayhorn 2011).
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3.1.3 Socialisation as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour towards Risk
It is possible that whether or not a person is willing to engage in unsafe behaviour may be rooted
in their experience (GL Noble Denton 2014). The role of “socialisation” (learning the social norms
of a given environment) may be important, whereby family and friends can influence an individual
to behave in a certain way (Phelan et al. 2007). Mullen (2004) argued that early socialisation of an
individual entering a workplace could have a key influence on shaping safety attitudes. Finnegan
(2007) cites that attitude formation relating to safety begins in childhood, where cues are taken
from the behaviour of others on the farm.
Farmers may “incorrectly assume that unsafe or careless behaviour is the norm, and refrain from
healthy or safe behaviour, to comply with this perceived norm” (Colémont and Van den Broucke
2006, p. 229). Seen from the opposite end of the safety spectrum, Seiz and Downey (2001)
suggested that farm parents could (and did) provide lessons in safe practices early on for their
children, and were aware that they needed to be positive role models in the area of safety.
3.1.4 Safety Planning and Compliance as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm
Safety
It can be argued that having formal approaches to risk management is more likely to minimise the
possibility of injury compared to an absence of such formalised procedures (GL Noble Denton
2014). However, as identified in Finnegan’s Irish National Farm Survey study, a large proportion
of Irish farmers did not adequately engage in safety planning, with almost half reporting they did
not always consider health and safety issues, either for themselves or others (Finnegan and Phelan
2003). This may in part reflect work cited by Stave (2005) who suggested farmers typically relied
on an intuitive way of problem solving, rather than relying on detailed planning. This supports the
idea that although farmers may carry out risk assessments, they are not always documented (HSE
2009). Moreover, farmers believed that documented risk assessments and procedures existed only
to satisfy the regulator, and farmers with small farm holdings often believed that documented risk
assessments were inappropriate in their work (Finnegan and Phelan 2003).
3.1.5 Fatigue as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm Safety
A BOMEL (HSE 2009) study found that self-employed farmers believed that fatigue was a major
health issue for them, particularly during specific times of the year, e.g. peak calving season. Often
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the work is carried out alone in order to save costs on contracting. Administrative paper work was
a significant feature for these farmers, and therefore compounded their sense of fatigue. No specific
reference was made to how this affected safety in the study, but it is implicit that greater fatigue
(both mental and physical) may increase the chances of an accident through inattentiveness, slowed
reaction times, adopting shortcuts etc. (GL Noble Denton 2014). The results also found that
farmers often had to work seven days a week with little chance of a holiday (HSE 2009).
3.1.6 Stress as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm Safety
There have been high levels of stress reported in farming (GL Noble Denton 2014). Hope et al.
(1999) found that in their sample of 170 Irish farmers, around 65% claimed to suffer from stress
due to pressure at work, and also money worries. Stress in British farmers has also been identified
as a problem for self-employed farmers mainly associated with financial pressures, but also
pressure from increased paperwork relating to increased government bureaucracy (HSE 2009). It
is often the case that farmers of smaller farms, who farm livestock, who are socially and physically
isolated, are particularly prone to stress (HSE 2005). Walker and Walker (1987) found that
financial stressors for male farmers were evident with other key stressors relating to time pressures,
government policies, personal illness at peak times, weather, social isolation, work over-load, and
pressures in staying abreast of new technology and products. However, it was also reported that
stress levels could vary across the farming population based on age (younger) and type of farming
(grain and livestock).
3.1.7 Previous Accident Involvement as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm
Safety
For farmers that had not experienced injury, there may be a level of indifference towards safety
measures because such farmers may not fully recognise the value of adopting such measures
(Finnegan 2007). Repeated non-injury from a series of risk-taking actions (such as not wearing
personal safety equipment) may reinforce risk taking because there is a sense that “I can get away
with it” (Collins McLaughlin and Sprufera 2012; Glasscock et al. 2006; Mullen 2004).
Consequently, it might be expected that previous involvement in an accident leading to injury or
near miss might make a farmer more risk averse or at least more acutely aware of the dangers in
farming work (GL Noble Denton 2014). Some support for this came from analysis of the Irish
National Farm Survey data (Finnegan 2007). Similarly, witnessing an accident or hearing about
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one, can impact a person’s risk appraisal such that they are less likely to tolerate risk (Mullen 2004).
Research findings from a BOMEL study (HSE 2009) indicated that UK self-employed farmers
believed that agricultural health and safety information would be more compelling if it illustrated
the human cost of accidents, and that general awareness-raising of accidents could “never be
overdone”.
3.1.8 Seasonal/Time Factors as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm Safety
Finnegan (2007) cites that several farm studies in a number of countries have found seasonal
distributions to accident occurrence, but generally the conclusion is drawn that frequency of
accidents are associated with increasing farming activity, such as calving or harvesting periods
during the year. Finnegan (2007) citing his own empirical work, confirmed the greatest incidence
of injury occurred in autumn and summer periods. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest
that late morning and early to mid-afternoon are particular times when accidents are more likely to
occur.
Time pressures leading to the skipping of safety measures or adoption of “calculated risks” were
also identified in farmers (Collins McLaughlin and Mayhorn 2011). Mullen (2004) in her review
of the literature, stated that short cuts are taken when there are performance pressures as in the case
of “role overload”. In effect, a person is less likely to carry out safe-working practices, when they
feel under pressure to perform a task quickly. If this condition is repeated over time, it is suggested
that short cuts or unsafe practices can become the normal way of working (i.e. habitual).
3.1.9 Farm Size and Profitability as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm Safety
The size of a farm influences safety, with research supporting the idea that farmers of larger farms,
are at greater risk of having an accident, partly because there can be more workload and exposure
to risk (Phelan et al. 2007). However, other research supports the finding that farmers of smaller
farms are more at risk. Murphy (1981) as cited by Phelan et al. (2007) found evidence for smaller
farms adopting older technology in an “older environment” (i.e. aged buildings), which increased
risk, especially when there were lower budgets for farm improvements, when compared to larger
farms. In a review of Irish National Farm Survey data in 2006, it was found that just over half of
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the respondents who had experienced an accident on their farm, had a farm size of less than 20
hectares (McNamara et al. 2007).
3.1.10 Market and Societal Forces as a Contributor to Attitudes and Behaviour on Farm
Safety
The influence on farming resulting from market forces has been illustrated in UK HSE research by
the Policy Studies Institute (HSE 2005), whereby farmers recognised the power of supermarkets in
dictating market prices. Consequently, farmers were aware they were competing with overseas
producers of similar produce who could offer cheaper prices, leading to slimmer profits for farmers
based in the UK. This had the effect of intensifying the farmer’s work to produce profit, such as
producing more, using less contracted labour, increasing mechanisation and working longer hours
(HSE 2005). The net result of such outcomes can influence risk especially for farmers of small
farms, where much of the work is carried out by the farmer themselves (HSE 2005).
Similar to market forces, others have commented on society’s demand for produce at the cheapest
prices that further reduces profit margins for farmers (Elkind 1993), a situation that can mean
reduced money for farmers to spend on health and safety measures, as well as affecting the well-
being of farmers in general. The influence of society was also captured by Murphy (1981) who
commented that society generally believes farmers are “resilient” and “rugged”, which may shape
the self-identity and beliefs farmers hold, that can impact on how they operate on their farms.
4. Methodology
Eleven interviews were conducted for the purposes of this research between October 2016 and May
2017. The researchers interviewed farmers who were victims of farm accidents and specialists
within the area of farm safety. These interviewees were sourced from detailed discussions with the
Irish Health and Safety Authority (HSA) in relation to who would be good to talk about farm safety.
They advised that a number of farmers who had been involved in farm accidents had made an Irish
HSA produced DVD on farm safety and were very interested in the area of farm safety. It was
believed that these farmers would be good to interview as their knowledge and experience of how
easily accidents can happen and how they can be prevented would be useful. This ensured the
researchers gathered information regarding the farmers’ personal beliefs and feelings surrounding
the research topic.
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It was also believed necessary to interview farm safety experts and individuals active in preventing
farm accidents in Ireland to gain an insight into current best practice in farm safety education.
These experts then pointed the researchers in the direction of a Swedish farm safety initiative that
had yielded very positive results, so contact was made with the coordinator of this programme as
well. The research objectives were as follows:
What can be done to improve farm safety attitudes and behaviour among farmers?
How important is a good social norm of safe farming practice among farmers?
Are farmers involved in farm accidents more aware of safety?
5. Findings and Discussion
In many of the farming accidents that have occurred in recent years, complacency played a
significant part, where the farmer became over-confident carrying out the same farm work every
day. When farmers become complacent while carrying out farm work, concentration levels will
drop and the potential for farm accidents occurring will significantly increase. Most farmers think
that farm accidents will never happen to them but this is not the case. One farm safety campaigner
stated:
A lot of this farm work is common sense to farmers but they become very complacent. Farmers know the
difference between right and wrong and it is like when you are driving a car, you know you should not be
driving over a certain speed but you still take the chance. The more times you get away with it, the greater
the chance you will do it again.
It is vital to educate farmers on farm safety before an accident occurs to them on the farm. The aim
is to eliminate complacency and show that accidents can happen to anyone when performing farm
work and try to establish strong social norms on farm safety to make safe farming practices the
norm for all on the farm.
Parents must act as role models on farm safety to their children to ensure that no unsafe farming
practices get passed on to their children. It is vital that parents are willing to adopt farm safety
measures around the farm to ensure that their sons and daughters do not pick up any unsafe farming
practices in the future. Children will very easily imitate the unsafe farming practices of their
parents, if they witness unsafe farming practices from a young age at home. One farmer stated:
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The problem with farming is we learn from our fathers on how to do certain jobs. They have the power to
act as good role models and thus reinforce good behaviour or act as bad role models and reinforce bad
behaviour.
There needs to be discussion among all members of the family to ensure strong social norms on
farm safety are established within the farm. Having strong social norms on farm safety will lead to
improved attitudes on farm safety among farmers and further lead to improved farming practices
on the farm.
Primary, secondary and third level schools and colleges have a significant role to play in educating
children and young adults on the importance of farm safety. When farm safety is brought into the
curriculum in schools, this ensures that young people learn good farm safety practices and will then
have the opportunity to use this knowledge in a positive manner when farming at home. One farm
safety campaigner stated:
The school is key because a young child will go home and say, “Dad that is dangerous” or they would say
to their parents “you cannot be on the mobile phone when you are driving the tractor”. This will
encourage the parents to adopt safe farming practices.
The incorporation of health and safety into the Agricultural Science subject for the Irish Leaving
Certificate exam (at the end of secondary school) in 2019 will be of great benefit to raise student
awareness of the importance of farm safety. Farm safety education needs to become a primary
concern for schools and agricultural colleges.
An integral part of what students learn in schools and agricultural colleges needs to be about farm
safety. This should be accompanied by guest speakers who are victims of farm accidents - students
can then see the real-life consequences of not implementing farm safety measures around the farm.
More practical demonstrations surrounding the importance of farm safety need to also occur in
agricultural colleges. One farmer stated:
I think practical demonstrations will stick in the head longer than reading about something or listening to
a speaker. The aim is to make sure that the farmer that does not farm safely leaves with a change of
attitude and will change his behaviour when on his own farm.
Many older farmers also work beyond the retirement age and still perform dangerous farming
practices on a daily basis. It is important that older farmers are advised of their vulnerability to
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farm accidents due to their age, through informal visits from farm advisory bodies or fellow
farmers, as they can point out the dangers on the farm. Older farmers are more prone to a farming
accident as they become less alert of their surroundings on the farm while carrying out farm work.
One farm safety expert stated:
The older farmer is a man who has done his farm work in the same way for years. He does not see the
need to change his ways of farming. He represents a hard segment to reach with a farm safety message.
Older farmers also tend to use older and less maintained machinery which do not possess the latest
up-to-date safety features compared to the more modern machinery available on the market.
It is important that farmers have good facilities on the farm to carry out farm work e.g. when
handling dangerous farm animals. Every farmer needs to be vigilant of the hazards that are on the
farm especially the risks associated with livestock that can be extremely unpredictable. Schemes
like the European funded TAMS II (Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme) and KT Scheme
(Knowledge Transfer Scheme) are of huge benefit to farmers as they receive European grant aid to
make farm safety improvements around the farm. For farmers to qualify for the schemes they must
do a farm safety course. One farm safety expert stated:
If a farmer is applying under TAMS II, they must attend a half day training course solely highlighting the
dangers associated with farming and go through the risk assessment procedures for the investment they
are undertaking as well as the code of best practice.
This is of huge benefit to farmers as it makes them aware of the importance of farm safety. Live
farm safety victim testimonials should be incorporated into these talks/courses. One farmer stated:
Victim testimonials come head and shoulders above everything else as a means of communication when
dealing with farm safety. They have the most impact as they involve real farmers telling real stories. Each
farmer then thinks that the accident could happen to them.
Mentoring programmes would be of huge benefit to farmers (both young and old) to teach them
the importance of farm safety. Farmers will learn and improve their knowledge on farm safety in a
social setting with other farmers. Practical training or demonstrations on farm safety appeal to
farmers far more than classroom based learning, as it is action-learning. The social interaction
among farmers where they can talk and learn about how important it is to implement farm safety
features should be very worthwhile. One farmer stated:
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More training courses for the older farmer showing them the consequences of what can happen through
farm accidents are definitely needed. New farmers should be put on a mentoring programme where
support and advice is got from experienced farmers. The mentoring programme would target certain
areas and bring ten to fifteen new farmers together where they would hear about best practice from an
experienced farmer.
It is hugely important that victims of farm accidents attend and speak at the mentor programme, so
farmers have the opportunity to see the physical, emotional and financial consequences a farm
accident can have on the farmer and listen to how easy a farm accident can occur. Culturally,
farmers need to change their way of thinking towards farm safety and ensure farm safety is an
integral part of every aspect of farming life. One farm safety campaigner stated:
If 5 or 6 farmers who are neighbours and friends work together in a group with a coordinator or mentor
to bring them together and visit each other’s farms and constructively criticise each other in terms of
getting the farm yard right, the machinery right, the handling facilities right, the safety of the younger and
the older people on the farm right, well then that should be a recipe for success.
Mentoring programmes should be modelled on the hugely successful Swedish Safe Farmers
Common Sense programme. The results of the Swedish Safe Farmers Common Sense Programme
are impressive with 48,000 farmers participating (out of an estimated 71,000) and a reduction in
farm deaths in 2013 to zero. Something similar to Sweden’s Safe Farmers Common Sense
Programme should be implemented in Ireland. There are three key issues to the success of this
programme.
Firstly, the Safe Farmers Common Sense Programme involved the trained farm safety advisor
(often farmers themselves) walking around the farm and together with participants looking at the
various risks that existed on a farm. They would then visit six stations dedicated to a special
concept. These farm walks were also designed as a family event where there were contests with
prizes, and refreshments. Participation was free.
Secondly, the Safe Farmers Common Sense Programme involved individual farm visits with the
trained farm safety advisor and the farmer walking around the farm and identifying the most
important safety risks. They used a special education method that helps the farmer generate
solutions for their own problems. The aim was to develop specific action plans to change the
attitude and behaviour of that individual farmer towards farm safety. The Swedish farmers had to
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pay 250 SEK (€25) to get the farm visit. Paying something was felt to be important to communicate
that the programme was of value to farmers.
Thirdly, the Safe Farmers Common Sense Programme involved courses on farm safety. Three
meetings were arranged to achieve “Safe Farmers Common Sense”. The aim again was to change
attitudes and behaviour towards accidents with the goal that farmers would improve their own
regular work environment. There were group discussions on safety; films about the risks towards
safety; how to make the farmer’s own action plan; and how to make their own emergency plan.
Materials and a free first aid course were provided to farmers and participation again cost €25.
The Swedish farm safety expert stated:
Farmers themselves were engaged in the process and some of the mentors were farmers with an interest in
safety. There was a process put in place where one of these mentors visited the farm and advised on risks
that existed. They then both developed a meaningful plan to make the farm considerably safer by fixing
any issues.
The social interaction (between mentor and farmer, and between the farmers in the group) is key,
where they discuss the risks that are involved in carrying out farm work. The local farmers are
neighbours and friends who work together in a group with a coordinator or mentor to bring them
together and visit each other’s farms and constructively criticise each other in terms of getting the
farm yard right, the machinery right, the handling facilities right, the safety of the younger and the
older people on the farm right. This impacts positively on changing attitudes and behaviour towards
farm safety. The Swedish farm safety expert stated:
The Safe Farmers Common Sense programme was successful due to the fact that all agricultural
organisations supported the initiative. We also got great help from the media (newspapers, radio and
television). The concept was simple - through education and information, the accidents would decrease.
We incorporated the farmers’ voices into the design of the programme. They had to decide how the
counselling should be designed. We offered courses, farm visits and advice.
The farm visits (that are part of any mentoring programme) should have a farm accident victim
speaking about how his accident happened, what the physical, mental and financial consequences
of the accident are, and what can be done to avoid this accident in the future. The key importance
of farm accident victims being used in educating farmers was stressed by all interviewees. Farm
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accident victim testimonials play a significant role in improving farmer attitudes and behaviour
surrounding farm safety. They illustrate graphically to other farmers the consequences a farm
accident and a farm injury can have on the family and the fundamental changes that must occur on
the farm for the farmer to stay safe and keep farming. One farm safety expert stated:
The farmer always thinks economically and the financial cost of the injury should be stressed in any farm
safety message. Reinforcing the financial benefits of working safely e.g. remaining injury-free, and thus
being able to continue to be active, productive and able to provide for oneself and one’s family, should be
stressed in any victim testimonial.
Farm accident victim testimonials show other farmers how easily a farming accident can happen
on the farm and if they had the chance again how they would ensure farm safety was implemented
on the farm. Farmers are not just telling their personal story about the farm accident they
encountered, they are also educating farmers on the importance of implementing farm safety
measures around the farm, before a fatality or a serious accident occurs on the farm. Farm accident
victim testimonials whether in person or on DVD need to be accessible to all farmers not just at
various official IFA (Irish Farmer Association) meetings but at locations like local cattle marts,
local farmer co-ops, the Irish Ploughing Championship, etc., as some farmers may not be able to
attend IFA meetings due to pressure of farm work. One farmer stated:
I think the “Survivor Stories” DVD that the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) produced is good. They
are real farmers telling real stories about real farm accidents. They show how easy farm accidents can
happen and the life-long consequences of farm accidents.
Practical skills-based training would give farmers the opportunity to socially engage with other
farmers and learn the importance of implementing farm safety around the farm. It is important that
farm safety training is developed for all farmers of different ages, so that the training is made
relevant to the farmer’s age and his needs. Farm safety training needs to be either free or at a
subsidised cost for farmers to attend as the importance of farm safety needs to be stressed to all
farmers, especially those under financial pressure. Training should have an effect on attitude and
behaviour towards farm safety. One farmer stated:
More training courses for the older farmer showing them the consequences of what can happen through
farm accidents are definitely needed. New farmers should be put on a mentoring programme where
support and advice is got from experienced farmers. The mentoring programme would target certain
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areas and bring ten to fifteen new farmers together where they would hear about best practice from an
experienced farmer.
Practical workshops throughout Ireland are important to teach farmers the value of farm safety.
Farmers work in small groups and the social interaction in the workshop will appeal to farmers far
better than larger lecture type meetings. Farm workshops facilitate discussion among farmers about
farm safety and show them the logic behind implementing farm safety measures on the farm. The
workshops should involve training on all the most dangerous jobs on the farm that have resulted in
farmers being killed or seriously injured. One farmer stated:
If we got farmers aged between 15 and 40 into a farm safety workshop in small groups of 7 or 8
discussing farm safety, that would have really positive effects on changing attitudes and behaviour among
farmers. Sometimes, these big meetings where someone is talking at the top of a room are not as effective
as the smaller hands-on workshop where skills are more easily transferred.
This training should include tractor driving skills, working from a height, working with livestock,
agitating slurry and being in the presence of slurry gases, and the importance of maintaining
machinery like making sure handbrakes and brakes are in good working order. Farmers should then
leave the workshops with the required knowledge on simple and practical tips to implement farm
safety on their own farm.
Workshops on the importance of farm safety can also be an effective tool to establish a social norm
of good farm safety practices. When positive social norms around the importance of farm safety
get established on every farm, this will result in improved attitudes and behaviour on how important
farm safety is and how to implement it while conducting farm work. One farm safety expert
advised:
I think it is key to have that kind of learning involving applied workshops, where the farmer learns while
doing the job. This will go down well with farmers and will ensure that the farmer takes home some
valuable skills.
It is important that farmers are encouraged to participate in workshops on farm safety as this can
influence best practice on farms. Even simple advice to farmers to always carry a mobile phone
with them when out farming is important, so the farmer can ring someone if he is in trouble.
A retirement scheme would be a valuable programme to many older farmers as they might not have
a successor to take over the farm. Older farmers are often reluctant to invest in more modern
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machinery that has more safety features. Many older farmers will continue farming the way they
have done for years - this can often pose a challenge when educating older farmers on the
importance of farm safety. One farm safety expert stated:
Some farmers work ten to fifteen years longer than the average person and they are the cohort of people
that are in real danger. I see them in real danger as they are doing the same unsafe things as they did
years ago because they have become comfortable and complacent.
This shows the challenges faced by various farm safety organisations in attempting to improve an
older farmer’s attitude to farm work. The retirement scheme will give the older farmer the
opportunity to transfer the land to a younger farmer knowing that they will have an income.
Farm safety campaigns at local cattle marts throughout the country would be very beneficial in
getting the farm safety message out to all farmers on the importance of farm safety. Some farmers
might not be attending official farm advisory meetings on the importance of farm safety, but may
be attending the local cattle mart. There could be stands on farm safety as well as promotional
material handed out at the mart. One farm safety expert stated:
Farmers learn informally when they go to the mart. They talk about cattle breeding, machinery and silage
quality but the one thing that is often not in their vocabulary is farm safety. This can change and should be
changed and the cattle mart represents an ideal forum to start this discussion.
High profile figures who are very involved in the area of farm safety like sports rugby player Sean
O’ Brien can play a major role in raising awareness on the importance of farm safety among
farmers. More emphasis needs to be put on getting high profile figures from farming backgrounds
to become ambassadors to promote farm safety. These ambassadors for farm safety need to be
picked carefully so they appeal to the farming community. One farm safety expert advised:
The public love national figures. If you wanted to do a farm safety campaign and told farmers that Sean
O’ Brien (Irish rugby player) was going to be at the farm safety stand, the amount of farmers (young and
old) that would turn up just to see Sean O’ Brien would be huge, and they would also get the farm safety
message as well.
These national figures need to have credibility within the farming community, otherwise the farm
safety message will be lost. Linking the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association - an amateur sporting
organisation in Ireland) with farm safety messages is a good way to target farmers with the farm
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safety message. Many farmers (both young and old) follow the GAA and will be exposed to a farm
safety message if it is linked to the GAA. One farm safety expert stated:
When we launched the Champions for Change campaign in 2015, Donegal played Tyrone in the first
round of the GAA Ulster football championship. Donegal Creameries, owned by Aurivo were the sponsors
of the Donegal GAA team. They did a one off special jersey with “Stay Safe on the Farm” written on the
front of it.
These networks are very powerful ways of getting the message out to farmers on how important
farm safety is for all people on the farm. The continuous repetition of the importance of farming
safely through various networks is vital for farmers to improve their attitude and behaviour towards
farm safety. This should ensure a strong social norm is created, among all farmers, to farm more
safely.
6. Implications for Practice
Changing farmer attitudes and behaviour represents a huge challenge. A cultural shift in attitude is
required to ensure that farmers engage in safe farming practices. This cultural shift in attitude
should lead to safer behaviour by farmers but this could take a generation to achieve. It will only
be achieved through multiple stakeholders delivering the farm safety message. There is an urgent
need for a national farm safety mentoring programme to be set up in Ireland. This will require
funding and commitment at both national and EU levels.
This should be modelled on the Swedish Safe Farmers Common Sense programme which had 3
main pillars – individual farm visits, courses in safe farming and group farm walks. This was so
successful that it managed to reduce the number of farm fatalities in Sweden to zero in 2013. This
educational farm safety mentoring programme will nurture a social norm of safe farming practices.
This has enormous implications for the Health and Safety Authority and farm organisations in
terms of lobbying the government, politicians and EU institutions to initiate and fund such a
scheme, in view of the number of farm deaths and injuries, not just in Ireland but across the EU.
This national farm safety mentoring programme should involve talks from farm safety specialists,
practical demonstrations, as well as live testimonials from farmers who have been involved in farm
accidents. This programme has to be established with a view to incorporating the whole family and
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making it an enjoyable as well as an educational experience. The Swedish model should be used
as a template for this national mentoring programme.
This process of farm safety mentoring can also take place at a local voluntary level, where
neighbouring farmers would visit each other’s farms and “advise” on farm safety hazards. This is
especially relevant in the case of older farmers and farms where there is no successor identified to
take over the farm. This should be set up by the various farm advisory bodies and done on an
informal basis, where older farmers are advised on how to take precautions in view of their failing
eye-sight, hearing and movement, when operating on the farm.
This farm safety mentoring programme should be set up in every village in Ireland. The aim should
be risk awareness, risk assessment and risk avoidance. Behaviour change requires commitment and
that change has to start at grass-roots level. Cultural change will only take place if all farmers take
ownership of the farm safety debate. This will involve a bottom-up approach as much as a top-
down approach. This should ensure a change in attitude as well as behaviour. This has implications
for Government and the EU, in terms of who conducts this mentoring system and more crucially,
how they conduct it.
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210
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211
Phelan, J., Ruane, D. J., and Finnegan, A. (2007), A Farm Safety Model for Irish Farms, Paper
presented at Association for International Agricultural and Extension Education
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for health and safety”, Journal of Extension, 39(6), 6FEA5.
Stave, C. (2005), Safety as a Process; From Risk Perception to Safety Activity. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden.
Van den Broucke, S., and Colémont, A. (2011), “Behavioral and non-behavioral risk factors for
occupational injuries and health problems among Belgian farmers”, Journal of
Agromedicine, 16(4), 299-310.
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Family Relations, 36(4), 374-378.
Table 1: Fatal Incidents in Agriculture and Forestry (2010 – 2014)
(Health and Safety Authority, 2015)
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Figure 1: Major Causes of Irish Farm Deaths (2005 – 2014)
(Health and Safety Authority, 2015)
213
What role does dynamic
complexity play in social marketing
for sustainability change, if any?
Dr. Christine Domegan33, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland
Dr. Patricia McHugh34, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland.
Michelle Devaney35, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland.
Dr. Michael Hogan36, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland.
Professor Benjamin Broome,37 Arizona State University, USA
Abstract
To achieve the UN 2030 sustainable development goals (SDGs) to end poverty, to
protect the planet and deliver prosperity for all, social marketing is emerging within
macromarketing as a potential subdomain offering mechanisms and modalities for
transformation. Macro-social marketing and social marketing systems, drawing upon the success
of environmentally focused community social marketing in relating sustainable individual
behavioural change to the barriers and enablers in a meso context, are concentrating on systemic
change across governments, the private sector, civil society and people (McKenzie-Mohr 2011,
Mittelstaedt 2014, Kennedy, 2016, 2017 and Duffy 2016). The focus by necessity of such
macromarketing work is orientated towards the inherent complexity of transforming societies and
33 [email protected] 34 [email protected] 35 [email protected] 36 [email protected] 37 [email protected]
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marketing provisioning systems towards sustainability. Weaver (1948) in a seminal science and
complexity paper defines complexity as the “problems which involve dealing simultaneously
with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole” (p.540).
Complexity embraces variable messiness. It is characterised by concomitant variation, temporal
sequencing, linearity and non-linearity support and interactions among variables.
The devil is in the detail, the detailed complexity of a sustainability issue and associated
participant behaviours embedded in complex systems. Recent examples from macro social
marketing and social marketing systems are founded on systems theory and show the detailed
complexity of systems at work. For example, Kemper and Ballantine (2017) address obesity
through formal and informal institutional change and multi-level socio-technical transitions
accounting for political and corporate resistance. Huff et al. 2017 document changing the culture
of gun violence through internal, up, mid and downstream marketing tactics used by NGOs,
consumer interest groups and collectives, volunteers, and citizens influence policy makers.
Similar multi-faceted macro social marketing is documented in sustainable ecotourism (Duffy
2016), fast fashion (Kennedy 2017) and financial crisis (Duffy 2017) while social marketing
systems detailed complexity is investigated in marine conservation (Jenks, Vaughan and Butler
2010), healthy lifestyles (Venturini 2015) and ocean literacy (McHugh, Domegan and Duane
2018). Such system based examples identify the detailed complexity surrounding participants, the
immediate environment and the numerous barriers and enablers that need to be considered for
sustainable change.
Beyond the detailed complexity inherent in systems and institutional theories, there is
another type of complexity implicit but absent from current macro social marketing and social
marketing system manifestations relevant to sustainability change. Peter Senge, in his renowned
Fifth Discipline work explains there is
“the sort of complexity in which there are many variables: detailed complexity. But
there is a second type of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity,
situations where cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of
interventions are not obvious” (2006, p. 71).
While recent macro-social marketing and social marketing system empirical studies and
conceptual frameworks (Duffy 2016, Kennedy 2017, Duffy 2017 and McHugh, Domegan and
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Duane 2018) advance detailed complexity knowledge through the use of systems theory and
associated cultural, material social and institutional theories, they fail to uncover the dynamic
complexity that ‘brings the system to life’. There is a lack of evidence regarding the patterns of
behaviours, choices, actions and reactions as participants self-organize in response to others in
their immediate environment. The ‘system’s pulse’ is absent. The patterns of participant
behaviours - co-operation, collaboration or competitive – the action-reaction-response-action
cycle as the participants “influence one another in response to the influence they receive” has yet
to be explicated (Macy and Willer 2002, p.144). The ebb and flow of the dynamic complexity
relates not just to the participant behaviours but to the changes, modifications and alterations in
their relative behaviours, interactions and interconnections (Page 2015). It is “dynamic
complexity, not detail complexity, which arguably poses the greatest challenge” (Hovmand 2014,
p. 9) to macro social marketing and social marketing systems over the coming years if the fields
are to assist with implementing UN 2030 SDGs.
This paper questions ‘what role does dynamic complexity play in social marketing
sustainability change, if any? The paper illustrates a dynamic complexity perspective that
compliments and advances the detailed complexity practice of macro social marketing and social
marketing system thinking. The paper demonstrates how dynamic complexity, building upon
detailed complexity, can translate into social marketing systems practice. The context is SDG 14,
the conservation and sustainable use of the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable
development and a European ‘Blue Society’, a society where humankind lives in sustainable
harmony with the sea.
Using a system methodology (Warfield 1974, Warfield and Cardenas 2002) the first phase
of research, a detailed complexity investigation, involved sixteen groups of stakeholders (N =
228) in pan-European barrier consultations across eight countries. The stakeholder consultations
generated a total set of 774 barrier statements and 16 structural barrier maps relating to
sustainable marine eco-system (Figure 1).
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Figure 1: Leisure and Tourism Portuguese Stakeholder Structural Barrier Map
Figure 1 shows the barriers to the left of the map significantly aggravate (make worse) barriers on
the right. Figure 1 highlights the multi-faceted nature of a marine system, not from a natural
ecosystems perspective (e.g. plants, birds, fish etc.) but from a service science/systems
perspective. Different levels of the system are evident in the structural map, for example,
‘Governance and Strategy’ is associated with taking place within the macrosystem whereas
‘Knowledge’ could be argued to be micro or meso system within each stage.
The second research phase, a dynamic complexity exploration, encompassed an EU,
country and sectoral multidisciplinary meta-analysis. The meta-analysis computed a series of
barrier scores, Position, Antecedent, Succedent, Activity, Net SA and Influence Scores, for each
of the barriers in each of the 16 structural maps. This resulted in an EU influence model or
system of interdependencies of barrier issues for a sustainable marine ecosystem (Figure 2). A
similar process generated three regional influence maps (Mediterranean, Atlantic and Baltic),
Lack of a maritime culture (2) Lack of education for the sea! (6)
Inadequacy of the regulatory national legislation (19) Coordination (11) Lack of systematized information about the different sectors related to the sea (12) Lack of knowledge about the sea (3)
The various entities are not able to communicate (9) Proliferation of centres of decision (45)
“Cargo capacity” of the coastal areas (16)
Inability to join all stakeholders in any decision related to an activity of “sea usage” (15)
Lack of a national strategy for the external promotion of the recreational boating (37)
Conflicts between different tourist uses of the coastal areas (especially beaches) (35)
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eight country influence maps and six sector influence maps (a Place to Live, Food Supply,
Transport, Energy, Human Health, Leisure and Tourism).
Figure 2 An EU Multi-Stage Influence Map for a Sustainable Marine Ecosystem
Figure 2 is read from left to right. The barrier issues on the left have more overall influence on a
sustainable marine ecosystem than issues on the right. Figure 2, the EU Influence Map suggests
that change taken in relation to barriers themes on the left is more likely to have a stronger impact
on the overall system of barriers. In addition, such actions could relieve some of the pressure that
currently exists on the barriers that are contained within themes on the right side of the map,
making it more likely that actions designed to address these barriers will be successful. Thus,
change taken to address barriers in the Attitudes and Awareness theme, that is to tackle
“unfounded attitudes and lack of awareness of marine issues” could have substantial impact on
developing a more sustainable marine ecosystem, and could enhance the possibility of successful
actions impacting barriers in themes that lie further to the right in the map, such as
‘Environmental Concerns’. In other words, if change focuses first and foremost on ‘Attitudes and
Awareness’, a ripple effect could be felt throughout the system, making it somewhat easier to
take actions tailored to themes such as ‘Sectorial Issues’, as well as other themes that are on the
right side of the map. Once the dynamic complexity of the system influence cycle is seen, it
becomes possible to resolve the barrier issues as a unit, sub or focal system as opposed to
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adopting a piecemeal or individual effort to change single barriers that adjust parts of a system.
The dynamic complexity map, Figure 2, begins to highlight the interdependencies between multi-
level system elements in the focal marine system which a detailed complexity map, Figure 1,
cannot do. In general, when circumstances and facilitative factors allow, there is likely to be
greater ‘payoff’ in the long run from actions taken to address barrier themes on the left side of the
influence map. But it is sometimes necessary, because of environmental, sustainable and resource
considerations, to start at a different point along the influence structure.
This paper contributes to the emerging body of macro-social marketing and social
marketing systems knowledge by advocating a significant role for dynamic complexity theory in
relation to sustainability change. The paper identifies how important barriers negatively influence
each other and how these difficulties are interrelated and interconnected to uncover the detailed
complexity of a SDG 14. The interdependencies provide a contextualised dynamic complexity
view of issues as they are perceived by participants and a composite picture of the co-ordinated
changes called for. The rich understanding of the detailed and dynamic complexities at work can
be used as a strong basis for disrupting unsustainable habits and building system stakeholder buy-
in to legitimise strategies for policymakers, governance and regulators.
With the rise of complexity theory, an interdisciplinary field resulting in the ballooning of
knowledge well suited to systems theory and thus the development of macro-social marketing
and social marketing systems, other complexity methodologies may offer greater potential to
unlock the dynamics behind SDGs (Sterman 2012, Hovmand 2014, Biroscak et al. 2014). While
Warfield’s system methodology begins the process of revealing the detailed and dynamic
complexities, it had non-linearity limitations. It does not undertake dynamic feedback modelling.
Even when dynamic feedback modelling is undertaken, Williams (2017) recommends further
statistical modelling and triangulation with samples (test/training and resampling) and ensembles
models, while Cilliers (1998) and Byrne and Callaghan (2014) advocate reflective and qualitative
comparative analysis.
Finally, to close the complexity loop, the differences in how stakeholders are engaged in
change processes and how macro social marketing and social marketing systems approach
systemic change for sustainability has important ramifications for how the change mechanisms
and system functions change, or not. The leadership nature of macro social marketing may limit
the change strategy and tactics whereas a social marketing systems approach may have more
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systemic change to offer as an outcome, as a social marketing systems modality addresses how
best to implement negotiated, collaborative solutions, for ‘win-win’ and ‘compromises’ where
each party gets a portion of what they want.
In conclusion, in the context of a marine environment and the call for sustainable use of
our seas and oceans within the UN 2030 SDG 14 agenda, this paper examines ‘what role does
dynamic complexity play in social marketing for sustainability change, if any?’ It finds a
complexity framework advances systems theory for macro social marketing and social marketing
systems by unearthing the dynamics of the relevant marketing provisioning system. It holds
dyanimic complexity presents significant potential for marketing and macromarketing to advance
as a social science.
220
References
Biroscak, Brian, Tali Schneider, Anthony Panzera, Carol Bryant, Robert McDermott, Alyssa
Mayer, Mahmooda Khaliq, James Lindenberger, Anita Courtney, Mark Swanson, Aston Wright
and Peter Hovmand (2014), “Applying Systems Science to Evaluate a Community-Based Social
Marketing Innovation: A Case Study”, Social Marketing Quarterly, 20(4), 247-267.
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Dinnin Huff, Aimee, Michelle Barnhart, Brandon McAlexander and Jim McAlexander (2017)
“Addressing the Wicked Problem of American Gun Violence, Consumer Interest Groups as
Macro-social Marketers” Journal of Macromarketing, 37(4) 393–408.
Duffy, Sarah (2016), “New Perspectives on Marketing Systems: An Investigation of Growth,
Power, Social mechanisms, Structure and History”, doctoral thesis, University of New South
Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Duffy, Sarah, Gavin Northey, and Patrick van Esch (2017), "Iceland: How Social Mechanisms
Drove the Financial Collapse and Why It’s a Wicked Problem", Journal of Social Marketing, 7
(3), 330-346.
Hovmand, Peter (2014), Community Based System Dynamics, Springer, New York.
Jenks, Brett, Peter W. Vaughan and Paul Butler (2010), “The evolution of Rare Pride: Using
evaluation to drive adaptive management in a biodiversity conservation organization”,
Evaluation and Program Planning, 33, 186–190.
Kemper, Joya, Paul W. Ballantine (2017), “Socio-Technical Transitions and Institutional Change
Addressing Obesity through Macro-Social Marketing”, Journal of Macromarketing, 37(4) 381–
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Kennedy, Ann-Marie (2016), “Macro-social marketing”, Journal of Macromarketing, 36 (3), 354-
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Methods” Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 37(4), 347-355.
McHugh, Patricia, Domegan, Christine and Sinead Duane (2018) “Protocols for Stakeholder
Participation in Social Marketing Systems”, Social Marketing Quarterly. Available online
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Mittelstaedt, John D., Clifford J. Shultz, William E. Kilbourne, and Mark Peterson (2014),
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Resilience and Social Marketing: A
Socio-Ecological Approach to
Wicked Problems
Mathew Wood, University of Brighton, UK
Introduction and Background
Social marketing has seen important developments in the last four decades since it was first defined
in Kotler and Zaltman’s (1971) pioneering paper. Subsequently, there was a shift in focus from
promoting social good using traditional marketing techniques - viewing issues as ‘products’
needing to be ‘sold’ - towards an individual-focused approach, drawing influence from areas such
as applied behaviour analysis (Geller, 1989). These earlier views focus almost exclusively on
attempting to change the behaviour of individuals, usually referred to as “downstream” social
marketing. Upstream and downstream are terms used in a public health metaphor to describe two
alternate approaches to preventing and dealing with health issues (Donovan and Henley 2010;
Dorfman 2003; Gordon 2012). Downstream social marketing places responsibility for change with
the “consumer”, although it is recognised “target audiences” may require support and
encouragement (Wood 2016a).
More recently researchers have stressed the importance of “upstream” social marketing,
which involves influencing policy and changing the environment within which individuals are
situated (Gordon 2012; 2011; Hoek and Jones 2011; Wymer 2011). Upstream social marketing
focuses efforts on decision-making groups who have an influence over a target market and includes
politicians, media figures, community activists, corporations, schools, and foundations (Gordon
2012; Kotler and Lee 2008). Gordon (2011) discusses the application of upstream social marketing
activities to influence policy around issues such as tobacco, alcohol, food, and gambling. Gordon’s
view of upstream social marketing includes advocacy and lobbying, and is supported by Wood
(2012), Wymer (2011); Hoek and Jones (2011); Kennedy and Parsons 2012).
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At the same time, there has been a much greater emphasis on the co-creation and delivery
of customer-oriented services: “midstream” social marketing (Russell-Bennett, Wood, and Previte
2013; Zainuddin 2013). Tapp and Spotswood (2013), in critiquing the domination of downstream
thinking as exemplified by the use of the 4Ps framework, highlight the social aspects of behaviour
change and the role played by service staff. Frontline service staff can be pivotal in establishing
effective relationships and conversations with clients (Wood 2016b; Wood and Fowlie 2010).
Midstream social marketing should be used to help ensure health and other services are designed,
developed and delivered to meet the needs of users. The three levels of social marketing activity
(downstream, midstream and upstream) can also be interpreted using social-ecological models and
together can contribute to the development of resilience (discussed below) amongst individuals,
families and communities.
A Socio-Ecological Approach to Social Marketing
Social marketing principles demand that mixed-methods interventions should be developed based
on audience insight and understanding, taking into account segmentation, competition and
exchange processes (Andreasen 2002; NSMC 2007). These approaches largely ignore the social
ecology of behaviours. For example, there is a clear association between most health and social
issues (obesity, smoking, alcohol, drugs, teenage pregnancy etc.) and deprivation (Pickett and
Wilkinson 2015). Individuals and their families who face poverty, unemployment, poor housing
and inadequate education are much more likely to experience the issues and problems which
become the target of social marketing interventions. It is therefore argued that attempting to change
specific behaviours, while ignoring their underlying socio-economic and environmental bases, is
illogical and largely ineffectual: social marketing is treating the symptoms rather than their
underlying causes.
Resilience – an Integrating Concept
Resilience is closely connected with the application of social-ecological models, which focus on
the impact of environmental factors and child development on long-term outcomes (Campbell et
al. 2012; Wood 2016b). In the social marketing discipline, resilience is typically used in the context
of ecological sustainability (Cinderby et al. 2016; Eagle, Hamman, and Low 2016), sustainable
tourism (Hall 2016), or the ability of communities to cope with disasters (Daellenbach et al. 2016;
Rawson 2016). In the fields of developmental psychology and social work, resilience has
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traditionally referred to an individual’s ability to adapt and “bounce back” when faced with
adversity (Masten and Coatsworth 1998). More recently, the socio-ecological model has been
applied by Ungar, Ghazinour, and Richter (2013), who state that in order to develop effective
interventions to build resilience, the primary focus should not be on understanding characteristics
of individuals, but rather the socio-ecological environment in which an individual resides, and how
the multiple systems that they interact with facilitate them to develop resilience or not. Ungar’s
(2008, p. 225) definition of resilience offers a way forward for social marketers:
“In the context of exposure to significant adversity, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to
navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural and physical resources that sustain their
well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be
provided and experienced in culturally meaningful ways.”
This definition of resilience has particular value for social marketers, and resonates with
the work of researchers who take a systems perspective on social marketing (Brychkov and
Domegan 2017; Domegan et al. 2016). A resilience-based approach to behaviour change would
look at the relationships and communications between individuals, families, schools, service
providers and the wider community with a view to offering appropriate support through a
consistent, holistic multileveled programme (Hart and Heaver 2013). As with social marketing, the
client lies at the heart of this approach but much greater emphasis is given to the environmental
forces - including commercial marketing activities - which impact his/her behaviour. The resilience
approach means switching from targeting “problem behaviours” and short-term behaviour change
to thinking about working with young people and families to build long-term resilience to a range
of risk factors (Hart et al. 2016; Wood 2016b; Wood 2016c).
Conclusions
Building resilience should play a key role in future social marketing interventions designed to
address wicked problems, for example childhood obesity. From a socio-ecological perspective
research findings highlight the importance of a child’s micro-system and the influence it has on
their development (Wood 2016b). Focussing on resilience implies a relationship-building, person-
centred, holistic and long-term developmental approach (Masten 2016). Rather than blaming and
targeting individuals the goal should be to create an environment that supports parents, families
and communities to build resilience at the micro, meso and macro levels (Bronfenbrenner 1986).
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For social marketers driven by a desire to improve individual and social welfare, and to reduce
inequality in society, resilience offers a means to understand behaviour change holistically. It has
the potential to move us away from issue-based interventions, targeting individuals who are
perceived as having a “problem”, to thinking about the emotional, relational, environmental and
systemic influences on behaviour. Systematic social marketing thinking, allied with the skills and
knowledge of educators, psychologists, and social workers, would be a powerful force for social
change.
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229
Sustainable & Ethical
Consumption III
Track Chair: Sabrina V. Helm
230
The consumer as (political) agent
of change: possibilities and
boundaries for true environmental
impact in clothing consumption
Tina Müller38, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Wencke Gwozdz, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
The aim of this study is to empirically examine two distinct phenomena of sustainable consumer
behaviors, which have yet received limited attention in research, i.e., reducing consumption and political
consumption. The study’s contribution is twofold: 1) describing the prevalence of consuming less and
political consumption and 2) examining the prerequisite for such consumption behavior, perceived
consumer responsibility, in a British sample. The data collection took place in December 2017 as part of a
fourteen-day diary survey study. Participants were acquired via the participant platform Prolific and
received monetary compensation for partaking. The final sample consists of 778 participants with a mean
age of M = 36.85 (SD = 10.99, Range = 18-63) and a median monthly net income of a £1000. Female
participants are overrepresented with 71%. The survey comprises further items not discussed in the current
paper. An overview over the measurements used for the current analysis is provided in Table 1.
Reducing consumption
Reducing personal consumption through buying less or deciding not to buy certain environmentally
and ethically harmful products at all are promising avenues towards the development of more sustainable
societies (Clayton et al. 2015). Reduced consumption has been studied using multiple terms by various
scholars, some of them referring to at least overlapping phenomena (Chatzidakis and Lee 2013). Prominent
examples are consumer resistance (Cherrier et al. 2011; Nepomuceno et al. 2017), anti-consumption (Iyer
and Muncy 2009) or voluntary simplicity (Shaw and Newholm 2002; Zamwel et al. 2014), all of which can
231
be seen as responses to prevailing unethical as well as environmental damaging production and consumption
patterns or protest against the domineering force of corporations and consumer culture.
The current paper specifically focuses on consumers’ goals to reduce personal consumption in the
area of clothing. To this end, participants were asked to indicate how important the goal of reducing their
clothing consumption is to them. While 24.43% of the participants indicate not having this goal, the
remaining 597 participants indicate a medium importance (M = 3.54, Range = 1-7).
The different notions of reduced consumption to some extent differentiate by motivations
underlying the respective phenomena, whereby motivations can be based on a focus towards individual or
societal outcomes (Iyer and Muncy 2009). Individual motivations can be e.g., avoidance of spending or
personal health concerns. Societal motivations build on the belief that consumption has broader implications
for the society and that society as a whole can benefit if consumption would be reduced. Consumers with
societal motivation avoid buying certain products because they understand them as threat to societal well-
being, e.g., as their production contributes to environmental degradation or takes place under unethical
working conditions (Chatzidakis and Lee 2013; Nepomuceno et al. 2017). Building on this societal
motivation, forms like anti-consumption and consumer resistance also emphasize the idea of the active
consumer, who is exerting influence on market actors and advocating personal ethical and environmental
convictions through conscious consumption decisions. Those forms of reduced consumption are closely
related to the phenomenon of political consumption.
Political consumption
According to its definition, political consumption at least partially overlaps with other scholarly
terms, e.g., ethical consumption, responsible consumption, sustainable consumption or green consumption.
Political consumption can be defined as the act of individually or collectively engaging in a variety of
consumption behaviors based on a motivation to express political, ethical or environmental convictions and
with the aim of influencing institutions or current market practices as well as bringing social, political and/or
environmental change (Atkinson 2015; Baumann, Engmann, and Johnston 2015; Micheletti and Stolle.
2012). Following this definition, individuals can use their consumption decisions to exert influence on
corporations or general market practices in order to change them. Implicitly or explicitly, many scholars
using political or ethical consumption (e.g., anti-consumption behaviors like buycotting or boycotting
certain products) refer to the same concept (Copeland and Atkinson 2016). However, understanding such
consumer behaviors as political behaviors means acknowledging the phenomenon as a new and
unconventional possibility for political participation, which has a broader scope than e.g., isolated acts of
(sustainable) consumption.
232
The current paper examines two of the main assumptions of political consumption more closely.
Firstly, it evaluates which actors participants perceive as responsible for bringing change in a problematic
industry like the clothing industry, and whether they actually ascribe responsibility to themselves as
consumers. Secondly, it assesses the role of political motivations next to other motivations for reducing
one’s own clothing consumption.
To this end, participants were asked to indicate the perceived share of responsibility between
different actors in the clothing industry (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). Results indicate that – for both, causing and
fixing environmental and social problems – consumers see the majority of responsibility with four main
actors: government and policy–makers, manufacturers in production countries, clothing retailers and
consumers themselves. Notably, for both contexts participants rate their own responsibility lower than the
responsibility of the other three main actors.
Exploring motivations for the goal to reduce clothing consumption reveals saving money, having
more than needed and economic necessity as the three most common motivations (Fig. 3). Environmental
as well as social impact concerns rank behind these three main motivations. Political engagement is not a
strong motivation and ranks second to last only before spiritual reasons.
Discussion
The current study shows that there are three main issues with seeing consumers as agents of change
and ascribing them responsibility for sustainable developments in the clothing sector. First of all, the
promotion of greener products and services in the past did not get us any closer to the urgently needed
reduction of carbon emissions and material throughput. However, the current data suggests that sustainable
consumption patterns like reducing consumption seem not popular – at least in the area of clothing
consumption.
Secondly, the notion that consumers are incentivizing the supply of sustainable clothing via their
demand for such products might not suffice for making urgently necessary steps towards sustainable
production and consumption. As the data suggests, consumers do not necessarily accept any particular
responsibility for fixing environmental and social problems on their behalf. To the contrary, they see
responsibility to a bigger extent with the supply side, i.e., governments, policy-makers and manufacturers.
Thirdly, even when a goal of reducing consumption was important to participants, it was mainly
based on economic motivations like saving money. Political engagement, at the same time, has proven to
play a very minor role as motivation for reducing consumption. Taken the low median income of our sample
into consideration, increases in income could even further affect the motivation to reduce consumption
negatively.
233
Additionally, the last two issues call into question the understanding of the consumer as an active
agent of change above and beyond single consumption decisions, e.g., for broader change of corporations
or current market practices. More research is therefore needed to further explore the political aspect of
consumption in depth and define e. g. how it delimits and connect to other concepts of sustainable
consumption.
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Table 1 Measurements
Question Items Answer categories
Please indicate how important
the following goals are to you in
relation to your clothing
consumption.
To reduce my clothing
consumption
I don’t have this goal
Not very important – Very
important
Please indicate how you see the
balance of responsibility
between the following groups
for causing the environmental
(e.g., pollution) and social (e.g.
child labor) problems of the
clothing industry?
Move the bars to indicate each
groups’ share of responsibility.
The total sum must equal 100%,
and one or multiple groups can
have 0.
Governement and policy
makers
Consumers
Clothing brands and
retailers
Manufactures in production
countries
NGOs and charity
organisations
Media
0%-100%
Please indicate how you see the
balance of responsibility
between the following groups
for fixing the environmental
(e.g., pollution) and social (e.g.
child labor) problems of the
clothing industry?
Move the bars to indicate each
groups’ share of responsibility.
The total sum must equal 100%,
and one or multiple groups can
have 0.
Governement and policy
makers
Consumers
Clothing brands and
retailers
Manufactures in production
countries
NGOs and charity
organisations
Media
0%-100%
235
Question Items Answer categories
You indicated that you have a
goal to reduce your clothing
consumption. In the following
we are interested in what
motivates you to have this goal.
Please rate for each
consideration below whether it
is a relevant reason for your goal
to reduce your clothing
consumption.
Environmental impact
concerns
Social impact concerns
Out of economic necessity
Felt moral obligation
Personal health concerns
Saving money
Political engagement
Lack of interest in clothing
Spiritual reasons
Having more than needed
already
Not at all relevant –
extremely relevant
Figure 1 Share of responsibility for causing environmental and social issues in the clothing
industry across different actors
236
Figure 2 Share of responsibility for fixing environmental and social issues in the clothing
industry across actors
237
Figure 3 Mean relevance of different motivations for the goal of reducing personal clothing
consumption
238
“Knowing better doesn´t change a
thing” - (Why) do PEB-experts fail
to overcome the barriers to
sustainable behavior?
Gabriele Torma39, Aarhus University, Denmark
Extend abstract
(Why) do pro-environmental behavior (PEB-) experts engage in unsustainable work behavior?
(How) do PEB-experts determine when, why, and how to fail engaging in sustainable work
behavior? What strategies do PEB-experts apply to cope with their unsustainable work behavior?
Explaining PEB-experts’ unsustainable work behavior and associated coping strategies is an
important issue as it provides us with novel insights on what we can realistically expect from
ordinary consumers exposed to interventions aimed at driving sustainable behavior.
Many - if not most - of today’s environmental problems are rooted in unsustainable human behavior
(Foley et al. 2011, Rockström et al. 2009). Solving these problems obviously requires changing
consumption patterns into a more sustainable direction (Steg and Vlek 2008). Knowledge and
motivation need to go hand in hand to effectively implement a change of consumption behavior.
As Kastner and Matthies (2014, p. 182) highlight, “only a well informed and highly motivated
consumer will contribute to sustainable consumption in the long”. Hence, understanding why even
PEB-experts may engage in unsustainable behavior is likely to provide us with novel and crucial
insights. For one thing, PEB-experts have - by definition - expert knowledge regarding the
environmental consequences of alternative behaviors (Hoffman 1995). This expert knowledge is
constantly extended and updated as PEB-experts are regularly exposed and work with the latest
239
insights from sustainable behavior research. For another thing, PEB-experts - given that they have
self-selected into their job - are likely to have a high level of motivation towards pro-environmental
behavior in any domain. Given their qualification, it is reasonable to assume that they had other
job options. Hence, having chosen the job that let them become a PEB-experts is likely to reflect a
concern for the environment and a high motivation to drive sustainable behavior. However, besides
lack of motivation, also other, commonly discussed barriers to sustainable behavior such as lack of
knowledge and/or problem recognition, lack of time, or limited financial resources do typically not
apply to PEB-experts (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002, Schwinghammer 2014, Shanteau 1988,
Thøgersen 2014). Hence, unsustainable work behavior (Blok et al. 2015) by PEB-experts raises
questions.
In the work context PEB-experts are likely to find themselves in some sort of social dilemma
(Osbaldiston and Sheldo 2002). One the one hand - as argued above - they are concerned for the
environment and motivated to drive sustainable behavior. On the other hand, a PEB-expert’s job
encompasses aspects associated with negative environmental impact. A physical conference
participation, for example, typically involves high-impact potential - such as substantial travelling
to the venue (Budeanu 2007) - and low-impact potential - such as unsustainable consumption at
the venue - such as bottled water (van der Linden 2015) or (red) meat (Graham and Abrahamse
2017). Hence, a physical conference participation is prone to negatively impact the environment
and, as such, most likely stands in contrast of PEB-experts’ motivation and goals (Cialdini 2014).
At the same time, however, a conference participation or similar business meetings are necessary
for PEB-experts to maintain the network, present current work, obtain feedback, and influence the
peer group and policy makers. Conference participations and similar business meetings are also
likely to increase PEB-experts’ reputation, which, in turn may help driving pro-environmental
behavior. Put differently, it seems that there is substantial tension between PEB-experts’ motivation
and goals on the one side and important aspects of their job on the other side.
In light of the aforementioned dilemma PEB-experts are confronted with, it seems that there is
value in understanding how PEB-experts deal with the tension they experience in their work
behavior. Of particular relevance is the question of whether PEB-experts employ specific strategies
to deal with the tension they face (Kaklamanou et al. 2015, Torma, Aschemann-Witzel and
Thøgersen 2018). In particular, if PEB-experts possess strategies which they successfully
implement to have a positive sustainable behavior balance, we need to understand those strategies
240
in order to pass them on to the wider public. This is not least of high importance to secure PEB-
experts’ function as role-models, multipliers, and teachers of promising ways to drive consumers’
pro-environmental behavior. For example, research found that PEB-experts’ involvement in
environmental education activities is an important prerequisite to steer consumers’ consumption
behavior into a more sustainable direction (Thøgersen and Ölander 2003). However, if PEB-experts
fail to develop and apply such strategies - hence, if they fail to engage in sustainable behavior - this
raises severe questions regarding the environmental impact of research and teaching aimed at
changing consumer behavior towards a more sustainable direction.
To address the questions raised at the beginning, I apply a qualitative research design (Silverman
2017). In particular, I rely on qualitative interviews with PEB-experts (Bogner, Littig, and Menz
2009). Applying a problem-centered interview-technique as a type of semi-structured interviews
acknowledges that I as a researcher have pre-knowledge and expectations on possible explanations
of the findings. Hence, using this technique will allow me to explicitly keep an open mind towards
potentially new meanings, while I will still be able to probe into particular aspects of the
phenomenon of interest (Flick 2015, Witzel 2000). I focus on PEB-experts’ participation at
previous business meetings (e.g. conferences) as ex-post investigation of their consumption
behavior.
For the interviews, I rely on network sampling as the author works in the field of PEB-research.
The expert sampling will be a type of purposive selection that takes some basic variety into account
(e.g. gender, age, level of experience and country of origin). Here, I consider using additional
deviant sampling to test my findings and to explore their limits (Robinson 2014). After some pilot
interviews, about 25 interviews will be conducted. The interviews will be recorded for subsequent
transcription and coding. The data-collection is planned and ready to be carried out, results will be
analyzed and reported before the conference.
241
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243
Consumers as
Change Agents III
Track Chair: Mahsa Ghaffari
Co-Chair(s): Cristina Longo
Lin Su
Andrew Parsons
244
Emergence of sustainable fashion
and the institutional actors of
change
Zeynep Ozdamar-Ertekin40 41, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey
Deniz Atik42, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA
Abstract
The current fashion system based on speed of change and affordable prices, has negative
outcomes on society and environment, posing a threat for future generations. By benefiting from
institutional theory and market system dynamics approach, the study aims to provide a more
macro perspective of market formation by explaining the emergence of a new sustainable market
within context of fashion and how different institutional actors contribute to this market change.
Ethnography is used as a research method, supported by in-depth interviews and secondary data
on sustainable fashion practices. The study contributes to market system dynamics and
institutional theory by having a more macro perspective of market formation, focusing on market
emergence driven by different institutional actors.
Keywords: Sustainability, Fashion, Markets, Institutional Theory
40 [email protected] 41 corresponding author 42 [email protected]
245
The emergence of communal
entrepreneurship: the case of
passionate retrogamers
Marine Boyaval, Lille, France
The market has not always been associated with capitalism (Arnould, 2007). By essence, a market
is a place of exchanges where goods are designed, produced, and sell from producer to customer
(Caliskan and Callon, 2003). Over time, the market has become more complex. As Fligstein and
Dauter (2007) describe it, the market is “a social arena where firms, their suppliers, customers,
workers, and government interact” (p.107). Several stakeholders, such as intermediary actors
(retailers) or regulators (states and institutions) are installed in the market and make the interactions
and practices more complex. Besides its economic role, the market is also a place of social
interactions and construction, at an individual level by the construction of identity (Holbrook and
Hirschman, 1982) but also at a societal level by the construction of norms and mores (Baudrillard,
1976). By extension, the market has become the place for profit and self-regulation rather than
balanced exchange, becoming the ultimate symbol of capitalism. Indeed, as Fuchs (2014) explains,
the basic principle of capitalism has always been to accumulate capital and power in the form of
money, knowledge and culture through politics. To make these accumulations more effective,
several key sectors of society have been remodeled and controlled over time. Individuals were
forced to bow themselves to the rationalization of time, labor and consumption, etc. Because of
these societal changes, the relationship between individuals and markets (both work and
consumption) has suffered a loss of power balancing. Growing dissatisfaction due to the damaged
relationship in between consumers and the dominant actors of the market has led some consumers
to express their discontent and find ways and places to resist (Penaloza and Price, 1993; Kozinets
and Handelman, 2004) and / or resistance by consumers (Giesler, 2007; Kates and Belk, 2001;
Kozinets 2002). Several consumer research have identified strategies deployed by consumers when
they are dissatisfied with a particular market actor or a brand (Singh, 1990; Hunt, 1997) such as
246
bad word of mouth and the use of social media to spread it (Ward et Ostrom, 2006,). But we also
see other forms of resistance. Indeed, self-production can be linked to resistance to mainstream
offers. Consumers, alone or collectively, can decide to resist to unilateral accumulation and produce
alternative offers by bypassing the mainstream market (Schouten and Martin, 2014). There is a
sociological tradition that carry interest for the self-production of consumers in mundane (de
Certeau, 1980). This status was labeled as “prosumer” derivated from consumer and producer
(Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Indeed, prosumers do engage in the production of products, services
and experiences for their own use and/or for the use of their fellows, community and tribe (Cova
and Ezan, 2008). They can do this with the support of firms (Humphreys and Grayson, 2008) or
freed from any companies’ interferences – what is called emancipated self-production (Cova et al.,
2013). There are several studies in the marketing literature that have observed and studied these
phenomena of creation of alternative offers (Schouten and Martin, 2014, Scaraboto and Fischer,
2012, Scaraboto, 2015, Goulding and Saren, 2007). They highlight that such initiatives are taken
by consumers to address a lack in the market, whether it is a lack of products or ethical issues.
Consumers or collectives are improving their consumption to compensate for imperfect markets,
and making a stand. These different forms of product creation, or even market emerging from
consumers can be seen as forms of unconventional entrepreneurship. These consumers engage in
a disruptive path where they shift from their consumer dedicated role to the one of prosumer to, for
some of them, the role of entrepreneur. Few studies (Schouten and Martin, 2014, Cova and
Guercini, 2016) have shown how such projects are initiated and developed. Thus, the interactions
in between the members of a collective and the dynamics they undertake to create an offer remains
scarce. Especially when these consumers’ projects aim at questioning the dominance of a
mainstream industry by slowing down / challenging the speed of innovation and technology. Yet,
some sectors have demonstrated such symptoms such as the vinyl industry, movie industry,
photography industry or video game industry. Consequently, our context is dealing with the video
game industry and is exploring the phenomenon of retrogaming. Our research (1) explores how,
when and why entrepreneurial projects are emerging within the retrogaming communities, (2) to
understand how these projects can move from intra-community projects to entrepreneurial projects,
and (3) to evaluate the consequences on the mainstream market. The article is structured as follows:
first, we outline the conceptual framework. Second, we describe the retrogaming movement and
the method chosen to investigate the entrepreneurial projects within this specific context. We go
on to present and discuss our findings.
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Conceptual Framework
1. Consumer collectivity: how members consume and produce together
There are several studies and concepts around the phenomenon of consumers that gather
themselves around a product or a practice of consumption. Indeed, many studies have tried to
understand the motivations of these groups, the goals but also their internal dynamics. Many
concepts are to be found in the literature: tribes, subcultures and brand communities. Thus, we can
find the tribes: meeting a given group (of insiders) around images (totem) that act as vectors of a
community that allow to experience emotions in common. (Maffesoli, 1988, Cova and Cova, 2002,
Cova, Kozinets and Shankar, 2007), consumer subcultures: "a distinctive subgroup of the car
society selected on the basis of a shared commitment to a brand, a product or a particular consumer
activity. (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995, p.43, Kozinets, 2001), brand communities: "a
specialized, non-geographically delineated community based on a structured set of social
relationships between brand admirers / enthusiasts." (Muniz and O'Guinn, 2001, p.412, Muniz and
Schau, 2005), We can also add the concept of community of practices: a group of people who work
together and are constantly inventing local solutions to problems that they encounter in their
professional or leisure practices. Over time, these people share their knowledge and expertise in
order to evolve together (Wenger, 1998, 2005). All of these concepts portray individuals who have
come together around a product, a brand, a consumer idea, and have begun to cooperate, co-
produce, and consume together. Some groups defy the consumer society (Kozinets 2002, Goulding
and Saren 2007), where others just wish to share experiences and emotions with others consumers
(Cova and Cova, 2002), while some of them defend a brand or a consumer practice (Cova and Pace
2006, Muniz and Schau 2005), or just let their creativity express itself to fuel, optimize, improve
the practice of their passion collectively through creation and innovation (Wengler 1998, Fuschillo
2016).
Some of those gatherings actually propose different ways of consumption, even sometimes
production. As the burning man festival studied by Kozinets (2002) or the Gay pride by Kates and
Belk (2001), those communities propose an alternative way of consuming products or cultures in
comparison to the normative way of consuming of the majority of the society. However, while
those gathering are ephemerals, other practices have been seen on the market emaneting from
consumers. Indeed, we can observe the growing popularity of « do it yourself » practices (Watson
and Shove, 2008). This kind of practices has been theorized a long time ago by Toffler (1980) as
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prosumption. A prosumer is a consumer who will produce for his own use products and services,
which he can find on the market, in order to enter into self-sufficiency on certain parts or on the
totality of his consumption. According to Toffler (1980), prosumption is not a contemporary
behavior but a behavior that has evolved over time, experiencing latency phases. Indeed, according
to the author, we went through three phases in our relationship to consumption and production. The
first wave during which agriculture dominated, the state of prosumer was effective especially for
self-suffciency. The second wave of industrial revolution during which the individual began to
spend much of his time working in factories to produce goods that he did not consume. Prosumption
began to withdraw in favor of consumption. And finally, the third wave, where the state of
prosumer returns for three reason (Toffler 1980): more free time, the costs of services that can
easily be done itself, and the increase in knowledge and skills acquired by individuals. Then,
according to Kotler (1986), individuals are increasingly interested in producing or at least
participating in the production of what they consume because they want to increase the quality of
products consumed. Those movements of self-production have inspired communities that start to
produce for their members a product or service lacking on the market. Like the mini moto
community studied by Schouten and Martin (2014) or the Geocaching community by Scaraboto
(2015), those communities gathered themselves to think, design, create and launch new
products/services to fulfil their own consumption. Those examples of collective prosumption can
be seen as a form of collective entrepreneurship. In the next section, we explore how such
phenomenons can be linked to entrepreneurship.
2. Entrepreneurship and alternative forms of entrepreneurship
The concept of entrepreneurship is associated with several disciplines but more generally with
management and strategy. Indeed, it is a term that covers the activities that contribute to the
formation and growth of a company through the pursuit of an opportunity beyond the resources
that we control. It is a very operational concept that has been studied particularly in terms of
economic performance, profit, risk, etc. However, in marketing, this concept has also been
analyzed on a more individual level. Indeed, according to Shane and Venkataraman (2000) the
concept of entrepreneurship analyzes several consequences other than the performance of the
company, such as individual welfare or the positive or negative impact on the economy of society.
They analyze the process of starting a business but can go back further in the process to analyze
the first steps. This concept focuses on the individual choices of the person who undertakes the
entrepreneurial project and how he or she discovers and exploits market opportunities. There are
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many definitions of the concept of entrepreneurship, we have chosen to retain the following two
that are the most used and which covers the two spectrum of analysis of the concept: "the scientific
study of how, by whom, and with what means the opportunities to create future products and
services are discovered, evaluated and exploited "(Venkataraman, 1997, p.119). The other
definition that opposes this one is "the study of the formation of company or organization" (Klyver,
Hindle and Meyer, 2008).
There are several entrepreneurial profiles raised by the literature. Indeed, at first the entrepreneurial
individuals have been described through the classic course called causation (Fisher, 2012), it is the
path closest to the Schumpeterian vision of the entrepreneur, that is to say very sure of himself,
methodical and having an unshakeable faith in his project. "According to a causal model, an
individual entrepreneur decides on a predetermined goal, then chooses the means to achieve that
goal (Sarasvathy, 2001 in Fisher, 2012). It is described as a linear journey from the discovery of an
opportunity to its evaluation to its exploitation in order to create a business (Shane and
Venkataraman, 2000). In the meantime, the entrepreneur goes through a cognitive process of
analysis of the resources available and / or to provide to carry out his objective, as well as his
motivation and the risk incurred. At the early stages of the entrepreneurial project, the individual
that takes this path can be called a nascent entrepreneur which is someone in the process of
establishing a business venture (Reynolds and White, 1997).
However, other studies and researchers (Henricks 2002, Shah and Tripsas 2007, Cova and Guercini
2016) have shown that there are alternative pathways and profiles than the “classic one”. These are
four alternative profiles: the lifestyle entrepreneur, the entrepreneur by accident, the user
entrepreneur, and the tribal entrepreneur.
● The lifestyle entrepreneur is an entrepreneur whose goal is not primarily to improve his
standard of living through profit, but rather to improve their quality of life (Henricks, 2002).
Their first motivation for creating an entrepreneurial project is therefore not profit but the
search for a certain lifestyle: leaving the workforce to become their own boss; return to live
in their country of origin spend more time with their family, etc. (Saleilles, 2006). However,
the entrepreneurial lifestyle does not totally exclude the economic aspect of its project,
profit is not the main goal but is not necessarily excluded. It is also characterized by an
ability to adjust its entrepreneurial path on its main objective.
● The entrepreneur by accident is an individual who engages themselves in a creative
project that leads them to become an entrepreneur even if it was not the goal at the
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beginning. These entrepreneurs realize at one point that their projects fit into a specific
industry and can succeed while being outsiders of the industry at the outset (Fiet, 1996).
These entrepreneurs are very creative and very responsive. They know how to seize the
opportunity to integrate a market that they are foreigner to and to share and sell their
creation. Their original project was not intended to be shared, just as their accumulation of
knowledge was not intended to serve an entrepreneurial project (Aldrich and Kenworthy,
1999).
● The user entrepreneur is "a dissatisfied consumer by what they find on the market, and
who will themselves respond to their need, adapting as they can the available goods"
(Guichard and Servel, 2006, p.30). User entrepreneurs are characterized by a "passionate
desire to share their solutions with others and eventually commercialize these solutions"
(Shah and Tripsas, 2007, p.123). Shah and Tripsas (2007) still define user entrepreneurs in
two categories: the pro (professional-user) and the consumer (end-user). The professional-
user is an employee within a company that uses a product of their invention in their
professional life. They end up leaving their company to develop and sell their idea. The
end-user is an individual who uses a product of their invention in their everyday life, the
product has a dual purpose to the extent that the end-user derives benefits from his personal
use and sale. Another important characteristic of the entrepreneurial user is their
relationship with their "innovation community" (Shah and Tripsas, 2012). This relationship
is special because the entrepreneur will tend to place the interest of the community even
before the individual interest. The community provides help and support of all kinds to the
entrepreneur. In some cases, it becomes difficult to separate the entrepreneur from their
community. We can even say that some projects are then more an innovation and a
collective creation rather than an individual one.
● The tribal entrepreneur has been described by Cova and Guercini (2016) as a passionate
and creative individual, having accumulated knowledge of their passion both historically
and materially, or in the market where their passion evolves, and who begins to manufacture
for their own use products or services to better satisfy their passion. Tribal entrepreneurs
tend to share their creations with a community of other passionate tribes, who usually push
them to develop their idea in order to spread it. On this point, this profile is close to that of
the user entrepreneur. The relationship with the community is just as important in the case
of the tribal entrepreneur, it also provides support and assistance, whether financial, moral
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or technical. Like the accidental contractor, a tribal entrepreneur's project is primarily
personal and did not have the initial purpose of being marketed. But once the project is
identified and supported by the community, these entrepreneurs will tend to seek the
approval of their peers as well as their advice and even their support for the development
of their projects in the corresponding market. (Cova and Guercini, 2016). In this case too,
it's hard to tell the difference between the entrepreneur and his community. This type of
entrepreneur can refer to studies such as those of Goulding and Saren (2007) on the Gothics
or Martin and Schouten (2014).
Other forms of entrepreneurship have been observed and proposed in the literature including the
concepts of collective and social entrepreneurship. These are forms of entrepreneurial projects
carried by groups of individuals contrary to the profiles above which highlights individual profiles.
Indeed, whether one or the other projects are carried out in community for different purposes.
Social entrepreneurship is a form of entrepreneurship serving the public interest. It covers all
economic initiatives whose main purpose is social or environmental and where the majority of
profits are reinvested for the benefit of this mission (Barthélémy and Slitine, 2014). Collective
entrepreneurship brings together all forms of entrepreneurship emitted by a group of individuals,
mostly from an already existing company. According to Reich (1987, p.82) "in collective
entrepreneurship, individual skills are integrated into a group; this collective capacity to innovate
becomes greater than the sum of individual contributions. This form of entrepreneurship is
therefore primarily based on community, knowing that each member has the same level of
responsibility and risk on the shoulders regarding to the joint project. This form is not easy to
implement in an already existing company, leaders must recognize the creativity and innovation of
employees, and propose a structure to encourage this type of behavior. But it is also necessary that
the internal structure of the company is fluid, and that the internal boundaries which different
collaborators are lowered. (Mourdoukoutas, 1999).
Context and Methodology
1.1.The retrogaming market
The video game market is a market that emerged thanks to the popularization of the game Pong in
1972. It evolved greatly since 1976, whether in terms of technological innovation, business models
or popularity until it became one of the strongest entertainment market of the XXIst century. This
market has become increasingly popular through the years, more accessible in terms of prices,
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platforms and devices (lounge console, portable console, mobile, etc.), and more diversified in ages
and genders. It is a global market that represented 99.6 billion dollars and nearly 1.2 billion players
in 2015 (CNC study), with major dominant companies like Tencent, Sony and Microsoft. Players
are associated with the “geek” culture which are individuals with a high level of expertise in gaming
(McArthur, 2009). Within this culture, not every player appreciates the evolution and innovation
of the video game market. Some consumers, mostly some of the oldest ones (40 to 50 years old),
are quite against the latest technological developments and have decided to regroup themselves to
form a movement called retrogaming in 1996. Being a retrogamer involves playing on old consoles
with old games (ranging from the first consoles of the 1980s to the consoles of the late 1990s)
and/or collecting these objects. This movement is partially built upon nostalgia for the beginning
of the video game market. The nostalgia is partly expressed across the importance of materiality.
Retrogamers are very attached to their consoles and games because they have instilled objects with
a strong emotional power, a link to their childhood memories (Belk, 1990). They really are
nostalgic for the past that they consider to be the golden age of video games. Thus, to bypass the
current market they are practicing retrogaming. This movement can be considered as a slow
movement approach against the market’s innovation to stay in the past a bit longer. Mainstream
firms and gaming studios have been trying to catch up with this movement for the past 5 years.
Through the practice of retrobranding (Brown et al., 2003) i.e. the commercialization of retro
products that combine old-fashioned formats with cutting-edge functions, they have tried to
propose remastered versions of famous games (Duke Nukem 3D 2013, The Legend of Zelda,
Twilight Princess 2016, Trilogy Crash Bandicoot 2017) or new-old consoles (Mini NES in 2017)
to reach this public. However, dedicated forums and Facebook pages (such as MO5, Rgamer,
Retrogame France) reveal that retrogaming does not only reach nostalgic players, it is also
attracting younger players. Those insights from those online pages show us that retrogaming is not
only motivated by a nostalgic bias. Indeed, retrogaming is above all being together and share a
great time by playing or telling about its own experiences and memories. Thus, they can be both
identified as a tribe and a subculture since they are both sharing experiences and emotions together
(Cova and Cova, 2002) and in resistance against the mainstream market’s technological
innovations (Kozinets, 2001; Schouten and McAlexander, 1995).
1.2.Methodology
We adopted an interpretive approach based on a sequential mixed method (Bahl and Milne, 2007).
First, in-depth interviews were conducted among 15 informants, in France and Québec, following
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a phenomenological approach (Thompson et al., 1989). Some interviews were conducted face-to-
face (9) and some via Skype (6). The informants were between 20 and 40 years old. All informants
are male except for interviewee number 9 who is sharing the entrepreneurial project with his wife
(Jérôme and Maria). The sample was recruited using the insider method (Belk, 2007) for some
respondents because the first author is a gamer. Facebook and word of mouth were used to complete
the recruitment. Through an emic self-identification approach (Arnould and Wallendorf, 1994), all
informants described themselves as passionate about video games and, especially, retrogaming.
Table 1 summarizes the main information about the informants. Pseudonyms are used to ensure
anonymity.
The informants also were at different stages of their entrepreneurial projects. Indeed, some projects
are in their very early stages (see Table 2), while others (6 out of 15) have reached the
commercialization phase. Table 2 presents the projects’ descriptions and the level of progress for
each one based on the steps described by Cova and Guercini (2016).
Interviews started with a “grand tour” question (McCracken, 1988) on informants’ backgrounds
about video games in order to bring them in a nostalgia mood and open the dialogue. Next, they
shared their perception about retrogaming phenomenon. And finally they spoke about their projects
in details. The audiotaped interviews lasted between 54 and 137 minutes. Transcriptions provided
a total of 229 pages of data material. The data were analyzed using a hermeneutic approach
(Thompson et al., 1994; Thompson, 1997).
In order to evaluate how the members of the subculture were interacting and supporting
entrepreneurial projects, a second data set was collected online among retrogamers. Five websites
were identified (France retrogaming, “joueur du grenier” forum43, retrogaming section of gamekult,
jeuxvideo.com (forum), and the Facebook page of Retrogame France) and a link to a survey posted
on all of them with 3 closed questions and 2 open-ended questions that people were free to answer
spontaneously. 143 people answered the survey. the first question let the people described
themselves as retrogamers fans or not, it was was used as a filter and we ended up analyzing 134
answers of “fans”. The first open-ended question was looking for spontaneous answers on what
was supposed to be the fundamental values of retrogaming. The last three questions (2 closed
questions and an open-ended question) tested how the members may support entrepreneurial
projects in retrogaming. We analyzed the open-ended questions using a double blind coding
43 “Player of the attic”
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technique. Then by the process of investigator triangulation (Bryman and Bell, 2007) a final code
was chosen to analyze the data. We use the data from the survey in a interpretive manner (Bahl and
Milne, 2007) because it gives further insights into the retrogaming community in addition to the
interviews. For the purpose of this research, we will present the findings together, divided into
three themes: (1) Why projects emerge from the retrogaming community (2) How those projects
emerge and turn into communal entrepreneurship? (3) What are the market dynamics.
Findings
Early findings allow us to explore an atypical transformation of passionate individual who after
joining a group of fellows are dragged into a communal entrepreneurial project. First, the data show
that the mainstream market has induced the reactance of the retrogamers and drag them into
resisting through self-production. Indeed, they declare that they are frustrated and disappointed,
that they feel betrayed by the market that they once loved and that they feel obliged to protect.
Second, the findings will show how projects emerge from those angry communities and highlight
the importance and the role of the community in the entrepreneurial process and question a meso-
level of entrepreneurship with a resistance pattern to the mainstream market. Third, we will present
the reactions of our respondents to the market’s attempts to reclaim this niche.
1. Why projects emerge from the RG community
When we ask at our respondents what they think about the current video game market the reactions
were very often negative. Indeed, we could feel the disappointment from their testimony about
recent video games that they tried.
Recently, I was disappointed with "Metal Gear 5", the game started very fast but
there were intern problems in Konami who fired the creator of the game and
consequently, the end of game was not finished. And they left the game like that
without anything. It was a series that was close to my heart and I was very
disappointed when I saw that. (Jérome)
Here as Jérome explains, the first problem with the current market is that they keep trying to use
iconic video game sagas as Metal Gear to launch new games but without the expertise and creativity
of the original creators. As we will see just after, the technicity and authenticity of video games is
an extremely important asset for a good video game. Thus, as Yann highlights, getting rid of the
original creators is a proof for retrogamers of disrespect of the essence of their loved games.
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In a video game there is a story, a universe, and then behind the story there is a
thinking head, an artist! Then when the artist decides to leave for contractual
reasons, 99% of the series of games lose their essence, their authenticity… (Yann)
Then, Yann continues with the fact that video games are supposed to make people feel emotions
like joy or fun and that’s not the case anymore for him:
Video games today it is rare that we fall on a game where we can say "Whouaa" it's
something new, because yes they improve the gameplay, the graphics, but for me
what I'm looking for in a good video game is the story, the emotion, the pleasure of
playing. (Yann)
According to our respondents, the problem with current games is that big editors forget what makes
a good video game. The community tends to agree with our respondents through the responses
expressed in our online survey. According to them, video games have several fundamental values
that must be respected in order to make good games. These values are seven in number:
preservation, technicality, friendliness, nostalgia, fun, discovery and authenticity (see Figure 1).
Since these consumers consider that the market fails to follow these fundamental values, they
decided to take up the torch. Thus, we see clearly here the motivations of these players to
collectively create games that speak to them and especially respect the key values of video games.
The most important value for retrogamers is preservation (19%). This first one expresses more a
duty calls for retrogaming members than an actual characteristics of video games. It is a double
meaning value that covers at once preserving video game as a heritage for future generations and
also protecting the roots and the “soul” of video games. It is a core value because it show us that
the early history of video game and his culture has to be preserved and transmitted to younger
players because it is a rich and skilled culture that deserves to be cherished as Philippe says :
I want to introduce video games to people who do not have access to them, the
goal for me is to help people discover aspects of video games that they would not
have discovered on their own, to show them that this is the work of a goldsmith,
that a lot of people have worked on them, motivated people who wanted to
improve this art. It's important to show everyone what video games looked like
30 years ago. (Philippe)
But this culture also needs to be kept away from the market to avoid alteration through profit.
Indeed, the retrogaming community tends to reject the mainstream market’s evolution because
from their point of view “new” games denature the heritage of the first video games. This rejection
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of the mainstream market and its evolution can be perceived as a countercultural phenomenon
(Hebdige, 1979; Yinger 1982). This is a traditional form of consumer resistance against the market
(Fournier 1998; Kozinets, 2001; Roux, 2007). Thus in this form of resistance, the discourses
deplore the profit goal and praise pleasure and fun, like this quote from Yannick:
Companies nowadays are interested in profit, you know the people who made
video games before used to wonder what they could do to make the player happier
in the game. Now it’s, like, I sell my game for 70 euros, they’ll play for 20 hours
and that’s that. (Yannick)
As we said earlier, the community agrees with our respondent on their values. Many informants
from the survey express how video games are important to preserve: “need to respect the integrity
of the games” (R88), “the memory of heritage and respect for masterpieces” (R92), or “preserving
the world of video games” (R24). There is a principle of preserving legendary productions in order
to protect the essence of video games. Members of the tribe even present themselves as gatekeepers
for the integrity of retrogaming culture: “I will continue to keep our old machines alive, to ensure
the younger generation understands what playing video games really means! (R73).
Then, all the others values of video games praised by retrogamers are really about the game’s
characteristics themselves. Indeed, we have the technicity (18.1%), retrogamers are fascinated by
the technicity of retro games, more precisely the technical features of old games like graphics (pixel
art) or the difficulty of the gameplay (i.e. the specific way in which players interact with a game)
back at the time. They also are impressed by the skills and knowledge that were used for crafting
a game years ago. Some informants are purists and prefer to use old devices to fully enjoy the
authenticity of technicity, like Patrick who plays with old game pads :
It's really better on the original console, getting back the basic media is having the
original game pad, it is a lot in terms of manageability, with an emulator (i.e.
computer software that reproduce game console) it's different, the experience is
not fully filled. (Patrick)
Then we have the conviviality and sharing (16.8%). They seem very attached to the sharing
dimension. Indeed, they prefer to experience and play video games with other people, share a good
time together on the same couch. But this sharing dimension also emphasizes the wish to share to
other generations. This is a strong linked value to preservation. As Maria pointed out, parents love
to show to their kids how they played at video games before, what do they look like, and so on:
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The funny thing is that we saw a lot of dads show or play with their child: "look, I
discovered this game when I was young, it was really good." Show them what they
had seen in the beginning, when the consoles came out, so they taught them and
shared a unique moment with them. It's really interesting when you see that. (Maria)
We also have in the value the nostalgia (12.3%) which is not a surprise regarding the nature of
retro movement in consumption (Brown et al., 2003). Respondants are talking about retrogaming
as “reliving moments of pleasure experienced in the past” (R10) like this person was connecting
with his youth, or R42, who says that he likes to “replay games that marked my childhood”. They
cherish their memories of happy moments with family and friends, and reach these memories
through objects and little rituals (McCracken, 1988). Furthermore, objects such as consoles or
games remind them pleasant memories from their youth, giving them a sense of ephemeral security
(Kessous and Roux, 2008). As Davis (1979) explains, nostalgia is more than just memory; it is
memory with the pain taken away, and the positive feeling that emerges tends to transform the
present into a negative time.
The fun and amusement (9.3%) is another very important part of retrogaming. It is nevertheless
an entertainment such as movies or sports. Consequently, retrogaming makes people feel a lot of
emotions as Yann who is affected by those games:
There have been moments in my life where I was eager to plunge into my gaming
world because my day was a burden and I know that when I immerse myself in my
little world I will enjoy it. Video games make me laugh and cry, they are
omnipresent and I hope it will always be like that. (Yann)
Thanks to the survey, this value can also be linked to the idea of shared entertainment. For example,
R26 describes the perfect evening as “A Nintendo, Mario Bros and an evening between friends”,
while R108 wrote “Have fun together ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯”.
The discovery (8%) is a value that refers to the happiness to discover and or rediscover games that
retrogamers never played before or forgot about. This wish of discovering everything may turn into
an obsessive behavior about collect and have every single pieces of retrogaming period, as Bastien
says it can be overwhelming:
The pleasure of playing with consoles I had in the past and trying games that I didn’t have
when I was a kid. Then it becomes an obsession, inevitably you want to try everything..... in
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my collection two years ago, I had 120-130 titles, I wanted more, I wanted to test
everything.... (Bastien)
And finally, there is the authenticity (6.6%). This last one is linked to the preservation of the
game’s soul. They cherish and protect the corruption of their passion from the mainstream market
by keeping this full authenticity around games and consoles. It kind of regroups all the other values
to consolidate the community and its ethos, but it can especially be referred to the technicity
because they really attached the soul to the creator of the game as R50 says “stick to the original”.
All the values are interconnected, one cannot exist without the others. Thus as they don’t find
games that fit with their values they create themselves products to fulfil their passion communally.
The next section shows how they can create new products and experiences that the community
supports and values.
2. How projects emerge and turn into communal entrepreneurship?
Unsurprisingly, at first, our informants are all passionate about retrogaming. Due to their
unconditional passion they all became experts and started to seek other people to share their passion
with. They integrated a community of passionate people like them. Through the interaction with
the group, they gained self-confidence and started producing an idea or a device for their own use,
beginning by essence prosumer. As an example we can take the path of Simon, a young computer
scientist who is currently creating a retro game that he will release soon on the internet. Being both
an enthusiast of video games, especially retrogames, and of programming, he quickly joined forums
for game developers. On this forum everyone can criticize and give advice on other developing
games. It is a platform of mutual help between developers where honesty is very important:
On Reddit, a forum aggregator with all the topics you can imagine, they have a
topic on the game development and the thing is that they are pretty
straightforward. The advantage is that on this topic there is a group of developers
of video games, we all go through, we are all in the same boat, we all know that
if we troll a game,well the guy is going to be trolling his game too, so there is no
point in doing it. You see, there are guys who ask for advice on programming,
design, and you have guys who ask for advice on their current project. (Simon)
We see here the mutual help but always in a spirit of constructive criticism. For Simon, the use of
this kind of forum allows him to participate actively in the life of the community, showing his
commitment he legitimately integrates it. In addition, this forum of advice and support will be an
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asset in the next stages of its project. Then, Simon will start to produce and share his little projects
on this forum to gain advices and feedbacks:
It's important, you need feedback, it's essential in a project, you'll go further with
feedback, it's always better to see the door arrive rather than taking it in your
face, and I do not want to give it to my loved ones because I'm afraid their
opinions are not objective. On Reddit or steam I will have objective comments, if
it's bad it's bad. (Simon)
In fact, we can see that his personal project becomes a project for the group where everyone gives
advices and comments, but only the members of the community that know the rules, the value, and
the goal of those projects. Thus, those project kind of turn into a collective form of prosumption
which haven’t been highlighted that much in the literature. Indeed, they create together, as a
community, a weness, projects to fulfil their passion for everyone.
Then, the community of retrogamers regularly spots personal projects and encourages the
passionate consumer to share and develop it for the group. The person who started a self-production
ends at the head of a bigger project surrounded and supported by like-minded enthusiasts. But it
wasn’t the goal of this person at the first place, they are kind of propelled into it. As Pierrick who’s
starting his own video game news online journal:
No, it wasn’t planned at all, it happened when I left my job... entrepreneurship
isn’t necessarily my thing... you know, it’s not exactly a big company, it’s just
something I’ve put together myself, but it’s not negligible either... but I feel
confident, I’m not all on my own. I know there’ll be people interested, but I don’t
think we’re going to generate the same revenue as the big websites, but that’s not
what we’re aiming for either. (Pierrick)
At this point, we can acknowledge that our findings find a lot of similitudes with the tribal
entrepreneur of Cova and Guercini (2016). The entrepreneurial path is the same: (1) passion for a
recreational activity and knowledge-accumulation, (2) active participation in the tribe, (3) creation
of a self-made project, (4) discussion of the project with the tribe/testing and prototyping, (5)
launching the product within the tribe, and (6) commercialization.
Our informants acknowledge that they become entrepreneurs without planning it at the beginning
and that they struggle with this status. As Cova and Guercini (2016) explain, a tribal entrepreneur
is a passionate consumer “who mostly innovates with and for the tribe before considering it as an
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entrepreneurial activity” (Cova and Guercini, 2016, p. 38). Indeed, our analysis reveals that only 7
out of 15 respondents describe themselves as entrepreneurs. There are two reasons why our
informants do not declare themselves as entrepreneurs.
First, they did not intend to become entrepreneurs as the entrepreneur by accident (Aldrich and
Kenworthy, 1999). Like Steven and Yann, who created a retrogaming space in a small garage:
In the first place we were just passionate and we said we would have fun in our
garage. And it was along the way when the world was saying "oh yeah it’s crazy
sick!” that we said to ourselves that we were on to something and should just keep
going. (Yann)
Second, they do not feel like “working” because the boundary between passion and work is blurred.
The majority of our informants told us that the time spent on their project is foremost pleasant:
The time I spend developing the game is just fun. I never considered it as a job,
it is not a task, I’d never force myself to do it. (Christophe)
These consumers engage with the tribe for leisure even when it comes to the entrepreneurial stage,
they still experience fun. Thus, their entrepreneurial labor is more likely to be described as
“playbor” (Hakken, 2010) or serious leisure (Stebbins, 1982).
Third, they don’t associate the project with the idea of money and profit. As Damien says, they
don’t seek financial profitability :
No, it's not really a job in the sense that when we think work we think pejorative
stuff like I have to work to pay my bills, (in our project) we work not so much for
the money but we work because it feels good, it's cool. (Damien)
We also can argue that profitability is not in the retrogaming community values, they are rejecting
the business part of the current video games market. It is another explanation why they may feel
reluctant to connect with the term of “entrepreneur”.
Finally, the term itself is questionable. The project has been spotted, supported and developed
among a community more as a communal project of prosumerim than an individual one. All our
informants acknowledge the fact that they won’t make it to the commercial stage without the inputs
of their fellows :
We want the community to participate, to offer ideas, to find themselves in the
game and to tell their friends: “this mall is in the game thanks to me”. This
strengthens the trust between the development team and the players and it brings
added value that players are looking for. Since everything is dematerialized today,
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it’s better if we can move from the physical object to a real relationship between
the player and the developer, it brings a sense of having participated, it makes it
a personal experience. (Kevin)
Therefore, our respondents highly value the role of the group and the community agree with this
statement through the survey. At the question “How would you help them [the passionate person
and his or her project]?”, they express which kind of help they are ready to propose to those
different projects. This help varies according to the person from simple advices to technical or
financial help. We collected 317 answers from 134 persons (average of 2.36 answers per
respondent). Indeed, 31.2% of answers mentioned simple advices, 30% sharing the project around
them (by word of mouth or social network), 14% a technical help (coding, modeling, designing,
etc.), 12% a material help (loan or donation of material or local), 10% a financial help
(crowdfunding or personal donation), and 0.9% a marketing help (communication, project
management).
Their choices are explained by a set of motivations that are deeply intertwined with the values of
the retrogaming tribe. Indeed, they want to support entrepreneurial projects in order to preserve
and diffuse the retrogaming heritage (32.5%) “To share the video game culture and make it
discover to a neophyte audience” (R27), sharing an experience with other passionate
(23%) “ Share ideas about my passion with other passionate people” (R40), by pure passion
(17.5%) “ It is one of my passions so it is with great pleasure” (R11), solidarity (8%) “To give a
chance to people who get involved themselves for their passion” (R58).
If we compare a classical way of an entrepreneurial project from the emergence of an idea to the
commercialization of it, to this atypical form of entrepreneurship we can actually see its communal
nature. therefore rather than a tribal entrepreneur, we are dealing here with communal
entrepreneurship.
We can highlight the positive and negative sides of communal entrepreneurship by contrasting with
the traditional steps of entrepreneurship. The nascent entrepreneur will go through incremental
steps (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000) : 1. Identification of an opportunity on the market, 2.
Evaluation according to the available resources (skills, money, time, and so on), 3. Planning the
progress by searching the missing resources, and 4. Exploiting the opportunity. Our informants
follow a different path. First the nascent entrepreneur is lonely. Communal entrepreneurship is, by
essence a collective experience. It’s also more challenging for the nascent entrepreneur, due to a
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lack of resources, to be skilled in every domain. In the contrary, the tribe contributes and supports
the communal project by providing useful resources at an early stage and throughout the process.
Finally, another strength of communal entrepreneurship is that the members are both contributing
to the project and the first consumers and ambassadors (Cova and Guercini, 2016) of the project,
they secure the launching when it comes to the commercialization phase.
There is a dark side to communal entrepreneurship. Actually, during the testing phase, the group
can also act negatively with the designated entrepreneur. They are demanding and want to monitor
closely the project. Specifically, they act as gatekeepers of the retrogaming community’s ethos.
Having a community by your side can be a burden (Hong and Chen, 2014). Even if the
entrepreneurs are interacting with fellows, some of their choices may sometimes be disliked by the
community and overruled. As Christophe, who faced such resistance, explains that it takes skills –
and time – to communicate with the community:
When you develop a game you have to be good at communication, you have to
know how to communicate with the community, you have to explain to them why
certain functions take time to implement, why particular decisions were made,
you need tact and patience. When I was developing a big change in the game that
took me several months, I was attacked by members of the community. They were
quite virulent at the time. (Christophe)
And even if you don’t make any mistake, our informants reveal that they want to please the
community so badly that they stress out.
In a way we sort of put pressure on ourselves in the sense that we do not want to
disappoint them. I don’t know if we’re just imagining it but I get the impression
that there is an expectation of development or maybe it's just an impression ....
But is that our feelings or reality, I don’t know. (Steven)
I get the impression that people are waiting but I don’t know if that’s true, we
put ourselves under pressure, we know that we have invited some companies to
conferences, we want to keep a kind of high enough standing, but I don’t know
how much the community expects this, or if it is more a case of us bringing it on
ourselves. (Martin)
Consequently, some of our informants feel both grateful but also highly dependent from the good
will of the group. Thus, some entrepreneurs as Simon explained that they were ready to shut down
a project if members of the groups consider that it doesn’t respect the ethos.
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I think that if one day I no longer enjoy developing improvements (to my game), it
will be over, I won’t go that far. If I see it more as an obligation than a desire, I
won’t be able to continue, it would be a chore rather than fun… if that happens,
I’ll either put together a team to deal with it or give the project to someone else.
(Simon)
On the next section we will see what are the consequences for the video game market of such
projects.
3. Market dynamics
The video game market through the emergence of this consumer driven market segment is
evolving. Big firms are struggling with customer loyalty and jeopardized by consumers who shift
away from the dominant market to embrace alternative offers tailored by other consumers.
Moreover, consumers have now access to a lot of websites that provide tools, software, video
tutorials, forum and advices, even funding and retailing solutions. “The end of the road” for
communal entrepreneurial projects is the independent video game market, not only for retrogamers
but for gamers at large. Players such as the retrogamers identify themselves through those
independents games that are produced by independent artists freed from the big editors of the
sector.
The old games it was everything except profit, they didn’t care, they created fun
games, that's what I like from retrogames, the profit was secondary. Independent
games now reproduce this system, those are guys who create for fun. [...] We return
to something more "classic" [with independent games]. You realize that people who
play independent games share the same vision as you. (Simon)
Thus these alternative offers proposed by independent studios are very appreciated by the
community. As we said before in the context section, the big editors are trying to reach this niche
with a retrobranding approach (Brown et al., 2003) by reworking old games into remastered ones,
but as Maria underlines, it’s rarely a commercial success because they omit the values that are
important to this public and tend to spoil the original essence of the game:
In fact, what we do not like in reeboots is that they modify certain parts of the
character's story that were important and that's something we do not like that they
modify, the story of the character itself! Because in the end, we are attached to the
264
character, we know his story and when they totally change that, it's ... it becomes
incomprehensible. (Marina)
They are also very aware about who is producing those games. Indeed, publishers don’t lure
players, they try to pass off new games as independent ones, more creative and detached from the
negative image of the publishers, but they don’t deceive the players whether it is by pretending to
be independents as Jerome points out or by buying small independent companies as we explain
Yann.
The problem now is that there are big publishers who say that they make
independent games whereas precisely an independent game is without big
publisher behind. So they make us believe that it is independent to sell more easily
when it is not. They do it because they have more sympathy from players like that.
(Jérome)
When we talk about small programmers, they make their game by passion, they
are inspired by other games, it evokes nostalgia, tributes, but when it is acquired
by a big company, we will talk in terms of profit, passion will be put aside…
(Yann)
They don’t fool either the retrogaming community that we interviewed via the online survey. In
the survey, 6 projects from our informants were described and when asked “Do you think these
projects come from individuals (retrogaming fans) or companies?”, 86.5% answered correctly that
they were emanating from retrogaming fans.
To conclude this section, companies can’t ignore anymore the empowerment of consumers. They
are fully prepared and equipped to replace market products with auto-produced products and to
provide a unique experience. They even gather themselves to optimize the production, the
development and the distribution, creating and sustaining a market like the mini moto community
did in the US (Martin and Schouten 2014).
Discussion
This paper aims at participating to the conversation on the emergence of consumer-driven markets
(Schouten and Martin 2014), the value created in collaborative network (Scaraboto 2015) and the
blurred conditions of consumption and production (Cova et al. 2011; Zwick 2015). Through the
retrogaming community which is creative and anchored in a specific ethos, we show how a niche
265
market emerges supported by the commitment of the members of its community. the main
characteristics shared by the consumers engaged in entrepreneurial projects is that they have
decided to overtake their consumer status to become prosumer in their own video game
consumption. We also see how disappointed, frustrated and resistant the community is against the
mainstream market. They display several key values that they identify as “forgotten” / “betrayed”
by the mainstream market. This community who is rooted in a form of resistance to the mainstream
market starts to take the lead to put a new market back on track through what we labeled communal
entrepreneurship. To explain the concept, the communal projects are new form of entrepreneurship
that emerge from the motivation of a sum of individuals who gather, share resources to propose
products that are lacking in the mainstream market. In our case, their goal is to protect and/or
restore products that the mainstream market is not providing anymore or not evaluated as authentic
/ credible anymore. Thus, alike the community of mini-motos (Martin and Schouten, 2014),
individuals’ ideas or projects are spotted by the community and push to be a broader communal
project. They commonly create a niche market or at least make relive a segment of the videogame
market which was abandoned by the mainstream actors. By doing so, they literally shape a “niche”
market i.e. a “nook” in the market where they regain control and provide a solution that was no
longer existing. The data suggest that the role of the communal entrepreneur is understood and
experienced as a devoted role to serve the community by first guaranteeing a good access to the
product (Biraghi, Gambetti and Pace, 2018), but in our case, to stay loyal to the community’s
values.
Besides the insider status of the entrepreneur, this type of entrepreneurship has multiple features :
1. A strong and reliable community behind the project (moral, financial and material supports), 2.
A faithful consumer base for the commercialization phase, 3. A strong legitimacy among the
retrogamers community and the sympathy and respect of those players, 4. The project is developed
within the community where everyone know the values and the rules, 5.The person (who initiated
the original idea) is chosen by the community and becomes the ambassador of a more communal
project,
Our data suggest that the situation should not be taken for granted or idealized. The dark side of
the communal entrepreneurship is also that 1. The strong ethos of the community can overwhelm
the entrepreneur and the project, 2. The community tends to monitor everything and to control the
development of the project outside the boundaries of community, 3. The community can easily
crush the project and his original owner if he steps out of the rules and the values, 4. At some point,
266
having a very demanding community can be a burden by putting a lot of pressure on the
entrepreneur, 5. Those projects based on hobbies are not taken seriously by the society and/or the
institutions, the dominant imaginary still makes these passions “childish hobbies” which can be
difficult for the entrepreneur to overcome (Cova and Guercini, 2016).
To conclude, the nature of this entrepreneurship is still blurry. Some strategic answers were
launched by the firms to get back this niche public and it shows that it is not anecdotal. More
broadly, some questions need to be further explored and deepened. Specifically, the form, nature
and impact of the value produced on consumer driven markets. The ability of resistance niche
markets to slow down the mainstream market. Finally, knowing that new technologies may foster
those types of self-production and diffusion, questioning the future of prosumption as an alternative
form of exchange.
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Tables and Figures
Table 1. Sample description of interview’s informants with quotes
Name / age / interview
duration
Occupation Self-description
Simon
23
106 mins
Employee
I am a passionate guy. My passion is video
games and programming, and whenever I
have free time I dedicate it to that
Nathan
20
97 mins
Student
Yes I am passionate about video games. I
like video games and I’m very interested in
them.
Kevin
27
96 mins
Student
I am a passionate player, at my age I’m
still playing video games and I always will.
Pierrick
23
99 mins
Student
I have always known video games, I think
there hasn’t been one week in my life when
I didn’t play video games, it’s my major
hobby, I’m fond of it.
Baptiste
31
155 mins
Self-employed
I’m so happy when I play an old video
game that I had when I was young, and
even happier when I can try a game I
couldn’t have when I was young, I get so
274
excited about discovering new games.
Christophe
23
83 mins
Student
It’s a passion for sure, even when I am at
work I think about improving my game, I
love spending time on it, even during the
weekend, the holidays, I very often work on
it.
David
40
54 mins
Teacher
I got my first personal computer when I
was 14, I was able to start understanding
how a video game works and it was then
that I realized it was my passion.
Patrick
25
61 mins
Employee
I started playing video games at 5 with the
Gameboy. Then I got a lot of games
consoles, I had to slow down during my
college studies but I’m still a frequent
player and I think I’ll continue this way
Jérôme and Maria
30 and 28
66 mins
Unemployed
I got my first game console when I was 4,
a Master System, I was so excited, when I
went to my cousin’s place we played
together, it was so much fun, I very quickly
fell in love with video games. My parents
didn’t want to buy me other games
consoles, so when I grew up I bought all
the consoles I missed out on during
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childhood
Yannick
27
59 mins
Self-employed
Video games are important to me, they
always have been, I have played since I
was a kid, since I first had a joystick in my
hands. I will always come back to them.
Philippe
23
77 mins
Self-employed
I was passionate about video games when
I was younger, yes. Buying magazines,
figurines, test readings ... Now I like video
games, I'm always following the news, but
I just don’t play anymore.
Steven
39
137 mins
Self-employed
It is because we are passionate that we
created our company and then we found
other enthusiasts. […] the project also
fulfills this need, people say “finally we
have met people who share our passion”.
Yann
30
137 mins
Self-employed
Video games are part of my daily life, for
me every night I play a bit, for 1 or 2 hours!
If tomorrow they didn’t exist anymore, I
would lose the magic, a hobby which is
important to me, as much for amusement
as for mental health, I need my little
moment of play.
Damien Self-employed I’m passionate for sure, it's my daily life,
it's my life. I have to be careful actually,
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37
81 mins
not to be in there all the time.
Martin
23
120 mins
Student
I love programming, video games, I am
still a gamer, beyond that I love role
playing, card games, I’m always
discovering new games no matter what
form, not only video games, so yes I am
passionate
Table 2. Informants’ projects
Name Project
Phase
(based on Cova and
Guercini, 2016)
Simon Starting to develop adapted retrogames for PCs
Step 3:
Creation of a self-made project
Nathan
Currently developing a role play game with 2
partners with the aim of starting up a company
Step 3:
Creation of a self-made project
Kevin
Currently developing a role play game with 2
partners with the aim of starting up a company
Step 3:
Creation of a self-made project
Pierrick
Creator and editor of a website dedicated to video
games (old and new)
Step 6: Commercialization
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Baptiste
Former owner of a video/retro game store
Online seller of retro games and consoles
Step 6: Commercialization
Christophe Lead programmer for a video game as a volunteer
Step 2:
Integration into a tribe
David
Journalist on video game web site, programmer and
president of a retro gaming association
Step 6: Commercialization
Patrick
Planning to create a retro video game in the very
near future
Step 1: Knowledge-
accumulation
Jérôme and
Maria
Retrogaming exhibition participants
Step 2:
Integration into a tribe
Yannick Planning to create a video game in the distant future
Step 1: Knowledge-
accumulation
Philippe
Planning to become an archive supervisor for digital
culture and especially video games
Step 1: Knowledge-
accumulation
Steven
Owner of an arcade room with retrogames (with
Yann)
Step 6: Commercialization
Yann
Owner of an arcade room with retrogames (with
Steven)
Step 6: Commercialization
Damien Owner of an arcade room / bar with retrogames Step 6: Commercialization
Martin
Programmer of video games and co-founder of a
gaming association that puts professionals from the
gaming industry in contact with amateur enthusiasts
Step 3:
Creation of a self-made project
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279
Discursive (re)legitimation of meat
consumption: a historical critical
discourse analysis of the
normalization of the consumption
of animal flesh (Work-in-progress)
Lucie Wiart, Lille, France
Industrialized meat production creates a plethora of negative externalities: on the environment, on
human health or on animal welfare. Yet overall demand of meat has increased, although some
consumers convert to vegetarianism or “flexitarianism”. In Western diet, meat seems to be the most
symbolic food (Fischler, 1990) and still has strong ingrained positive associations that constitute
its consumption as a habit difficult to change.
In this paper we wish to address beliefs and symbolic construction that structures our meat-based
diet at a macro-level and prevents a change toward more sustainable diets. To view meat
consumption as a historical, economic, cultural and ideological construct means there is no natural
reason to eat flesh of animals. As a ‘commonly accepted’ practice, meat consumption could be
addressed in institutional theory through the use of theoretical construct of legitimacy (Humphreys
and LaTour, 2013). The study of legitimation enables the understanding of the normative
structuring of market dynamics and consumption practices.
The notion of legitimacy is well examined in organization studies (see Suchman, 1995; Scott,
1995). Drawing on neo-institutional theory, many studies in consumer research argue that what
constitutes a normal practice is the result of a social process making the presence of it compatible
with the regulative, normative and cognitive aspects of the market (Johnson et al, 2017; see
Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013, Press and al, 2014, Humphreys and Latour, 2013). Although these
studies traditionally focus on these three bases of legitimacy, recent studies also examine its
280
discursive aspects and its connection to power (Vaara, Tienari, & Laurila, 2006; Vaara, 2014;
Humphreys, 2010; Johnson et al, 2017).
We draw on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989) to link legitimacy to its socio-political
underpinnings (Vaara and Tienari, 2008, Vaara et al., 2006, Vaara, 2014). In this perspective of
discourse analysis, legitimation not only deals with specific issues but is also related to broader
social structures and institutions (Vaara, 2014). Thus, CDA is an interesting perspective since it
focuses on power and ideology (Fairclough, 1989; Van Dijk, 1985). As it presupposes system of
values, legitimation is indeed ‘one of the main social functions of ideologies’: it draws on and
reproduce them (Van Dijk, 1998, p.236). Thus, ideologies provide foundation of legitimacy
judgment. They normalize certain representation of the identity to which individual must conform
to and thus offer a ‘position for the subject’ and ‘action-oriented sets of beliefs’ (Eagleton, 2007,
pp. 1-2).
We draw on this cultural view of ideology as defining accepted behavior in a particular context
(Marion, 2006). In doing so, we embrace a Foucauldian conceptualization of power and discourse
to examine the notion of “normalization” (Foucault, 1977, 1981). This theoretical perspective led
to a need to provide historicized account of the discursive strategies that govern and legitimize our
consumption practice. We thereby integrated CDA and genealogical approach (Foucault, 1977,
1981).
On the micro-level of analysis, we draw on the strategies used for legitimation identified by Vaara
et al. (2006), based on Van Leeuwen’s work (1995, 1999): normalization, authorization,
rationalization, moralization and narrativization. Thus, drawing on the discursive legitimation
allows us to study ideologies mobilized at a macro-level of analysis and discursive strategies
mobilized at a micro-level.
To do so, we conducted a historical discourse analysis from 1945 and gathered media articles on
meat consumption from two French newspapers: Le Monde and Le Figaro. We consider that media
has a crucial role in constituting senses of legitimacy as well of illegitimacy (Vaara et al, 2006;
Humphreys and Latour, 2013).
Preliminary results shows that the discursive construction of animal as objects helped the non-
questioning practice of meat eating in a context of increased and institutionalization of meat
consumption from 1945 to the 70’s. Then, we observed a new framing of the practice with media
281
discourses addressing issues surrounding meat consumption. Since, the topic is a field of social
conflict and we observed ideology struggle between “carnism” (Joy, 2009) and veganism occurring
through antagonistic discourses. We observed normalization, moralization and rationalization
discursive strategies helping the relegitimation of meat consumption in a context of reintegration
of animals into discourses. Especially, the construction of a carnivorous identity helped
naturalization of meat consumption. Conversely, the construction of vegetarian identity as weak,
abnormal, sectarian and moralistic figure helped the delegitimization of vegan ideology and
practice.
Thus, we aim to deconstruct how normality is discursively created and examine the (re)construction
of such normality when it is challenged via resistances. Our preliminary findings illuminate how
discourses (de)legitimize some consumption practice by (de)constructing its normality and
rationality.
Limited consumer research questions how power operates and defines “normal” and “deviant”
consumption behaviour (Denegri-Knott et al, 2006). Thus, we contribute to the literature on the
“discursive power model” (ibid) and on ideological underpinnings of legitimation and
normalization of consumption practices. Drawing on CDA, genealogical approach and discursive
aspects of legitimacy, we contribute to the understanding of historical processes of legitimating,
delegitimating and relegitimating consumption practices both from macro-level and micro-level
perspective.
We show how discourses around meat legitimize its production and consumption, shape market
dynamics and have macro-effect on practices of eating. Future research will intend to examine how
consumers cope with these discourses and can resist through practice of vegetarianism and
adherence to vegan ideology. Therefore, veganism could be interpreted as a counter-practice of
self-constitution and resistance to dominant diet. Eating practices can thus be conceived as both
disciplining and liberating: they can be either technologies of domination or technologies of self
(Shankar et al, 2006).
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References:
Denegri-Knott, J., Zwick, D. and J.E. Schroeder (2006), Mapping Consumer Power: An Integrative
Framework for Marketing and Consumer Behavior, European Journal of Marketing, 40:9/10,
950-971
Fairclough, N. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman
Fischler C., 1990, L’Homnivore, Paris, O. Jacob.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and the Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, Michel. 1981. “The Order of Discourse.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist
Reader, edited by Robert Young, 51–78. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Humphreys, A. (2010). Semiotic Structure and the Legitimation of Consumption Practices: The
Case of Casino Gambling, Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3)
Humphreys, A. and LaTour, K. (2013). Framing the game: Assessing the impact of cultural
representations on consumer perceptions of legitimacy, Journal of Consumer Research,
40(4), 773-795
Johnson, G.D, Thomas, K.D et Grier, S.A, When the burger becomes halal: a critical discourse
analysis of privilege and marketplace inclusion, Consumption Markets and Culture
Joy, M. (2009), Why we love dogs, eat pigs and wear cows, an introduction to carnism, Conari
Press, 204 p.
Marion, Gilles. 2006. “Marketing Ideology and Criticism: Legitimacy and Legitimization.”
Marketing Theory 6 (2): 245–262.
Scott, W. R. 1995. Institutions and organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Shankar, A., Cherrier, H., Canniford, R. (2006). Consumer empowerment: a Foucauldian
interpretation. European Journal of Marketing, 40(9/10), 1013-1030
283
Suchman, M. (1995), Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches. The Academy
of Management Review, 20(3), 571-610
Vaara, E., Tienari, J., & Laurila, J. 2006. Pulp and paper fiction: On the discursive legitimation of
global industrial restructuring. Organization Studies, 27: 789–810.
Vaara, Eero, and Janne Tienari. 2008. “A Discursive Perspective on Legitimation Strategies in
Multinational Corporations.” Academy of Management Review 33 (4): 985–993.
Vaara, Eero. 2014. “Struggles over Legitimacy in the Eurozone Crisis: Discursive Legitimation
Strategies and their Ideological Underpinnings.” Discourse & Society 25 (4): 500–518.
Van Dijk, T. 1998. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.
Van Leeuwen, T., & Wodak, R. 1999. Legitimizing immigration control: A discourse-historical
perspective. Discourse Studies, 1: 83–118.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 1995. The Grammar of Legitimation. London: School of Printing, School of
Media.
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Perspectives on
justice and value creation I
Track Chair: Michaela Haase
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Panel Session: Marketing in a
High-Speed, Post-Fact World
Josephine Previte, University of Queensland, Australia
Pawan Jain, University of Wyoming, USA
Leyland Pitt, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Mark Peterson, University of Wyoming, USA
John Mittelstaedt, University of Wyoming, USA
Abstract
The panelists in this special session bring a diverse set of research interests to the topic of
marketing in a high-speed, post-fact world. The panel will bring expertise in social marketing,
stock-market volatility, branding, the common good, as well as sustainability. What is to be
trusted in a world awash in data and information? Additionally, can institutions adequately cope
with the increasing speed and volumes of information today? If so, how?
In the past US election cycle, and mirrored by similar events in Europe, two trends have
come to dominate social discourse: truthiness (the validity of something based on how it feels)
and post-fact (taking a position that ignores facts). Human discourse has always contained
elements of these, but the nature of the Internet and social media has pushed truthiness and post-
facts to new levels. The purpose of this panel is to explore the complicated relationship
institutions (such as not-for-profit firms, markets, firms, government and the media), as well as
movements (such as the sustainability movement) have with flows of information today.
Social Marketing. Social marketing as an applied tool of agents (such as governments)
use facts to educate consumers/markets about healthy behaviours. However, health ‘facts’ have
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always been contestable – health education is based on particular health reality (take the view on
obesity - consider the subjective position of practitioners on healthy body weight versus plus-size
models and fashion brands catering to men and women of bigger size). Social issues (e.g., from
obesity to climate change to migration) – are continuously disrupted by fake narratives – framed
by the specific interests of the ‘credible source’ (what Berthon and Pitt (2018) point to when
talking about how ‘those in power determine the language that determines reality’). Fake news
raises questions about shifting boundaries of ethics; when facts are so malleable, what constitutes
an “ethics of care” by marketers/social marketers.
Financial Markets. High frequency trading (HFT) has become a global phenomenon. It’s
based on reducing the lag time – known as latency – between order submission and execution or
cancellation so that order outcome is reported almost instantaneously. A number of market
mishaps, though, have drawn HFT to the attention of regulators. Pawan Jain will show how HFT
amplifies systemic risk by increasing shock-propagation risk, quote-stuffing risk, LOB attrition
risk, and tail risk. The incidence of extraordinary market-wide volatility in large groups of stocks,
such as occurred during the Flash Crash on May 6, 2010, in the U.S., is of significant regulatory
interest. Regulatory responses to systemically risky events (such as flash crashes) include a single
stock circuit-breaker or limits on the movement up or down of a single stock, but they do not
explicitly focus on measures of systemic or correlated risks. One implication of Jain’s finding is
that low-latency markets may benefit from safety features such as kill switches, circuit breakers,
and rigorous software testing, which prevent the proliferation of risks from one stock to another
and to the trading system at large.
Firms. The panel will explore the complicated relationship firms have with fake news:
Brands both fuel fake news and are burned by it. Next, we will turn to the intellectual and
instrumental roots of the post-truth world: postmodernism and technology. , show how
marketing became a purveyor of the postmodern worldview, and how brands have increasingly
adopted truthiness and post-fact positions.
Sustainability. Over the last, 40 years, macromarketing scholars have contributed
meaningfully to understanding the role of marketing in society. Macromarketing – taking a
systems view of the interplay between marketing and society—has had a rich history of
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scholarship. Traditional macromarketing topics have included quality of life, ethics, the
environment, marketing systems, marketing history, and poor countries. A macromarketing lens
offers theory to explain market dynamism of contemporary markets. But how will the
sustainability movement be affected by the institutional stress resulting from the increased speed
and volumes of information today and in the future? The panel will discuss this question and
others related to the transparency of institutions—a hallmark of institutions pursuing
sustainability in recent decades.
Common Good: The notion of the Common Good manifests itself in both the secular
(Reich 2018) and Catholic Social Teaching literature (Laczniak 1999). Macromarketing has
considered the role of the Common Good as an interpretation of papal encyclicals (Laczniak and
Klein 2010; Klein and Laczniak 2013), as a vehicle for understanding distributive justice (Santos
and Laczniak 2009; Laczniak and Santos 2010), and as a lens for development of ethical decision
models (Klein, Laczniak and Murphy 2006; Laczniak, Santos and Klein 2016). The Common
Good variously “consists of our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens who are
bound together in the same society” (Reich 2018, p. 18), and “the sum total of social conditions
which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more
easily” (Pope Paul VI 1965). What these perspectives share is a common acceptance of truth and
fact. What is the meaning of the Common good in post fact world? Does a Common Good exist,
and is it achievable? What does this mean for marketing and marketing systems, and the
developmental role marketing systems play in advancing the Commong Good?
References
Berthon, P. R., & Pitt, L. F. (2018). Brands, Truthiness and Post-Fact: Managing Brands in a Post-
Rational World. Journal of Macromarketing, forthcoming: 0276146718755869.
Klein, Thomas A. and Gene R. Laczniak (2013), “Implications of Caritas in Veritate for
Marketing and Business Ethics,” Journal of Business Ethics, 112 (4): 641-651.
Laczniak, G. R. (1999). Distributive justice, Catholic social teaching, and the moral responsibility
of marketers. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 125-129.
288
Laczniak, Gene R. and Thomas A. Klein (2010), “Caritas in Veritate: Updating Catholic Social
Teachings for Macromarketing and Business Strategy,” Journal of Macromarketing, 30
(3): 293-296.
Laczniak, Gene R. and Nicholas J.C. Santos (2010), “The Integrative Justice Model for
Marketing to the Poor: An Extension of the S-D Logic of Distributive Justice and
Macromarketing,” Journal of Macromarketing, 31 (2): 135-147.
Laczniak, Gene R., Nicholas J.C. Santos and Thomas A. Klein (2016), “On the Nature of ‘Good’
Goods and the Ethical Role of Marketing,” Journal of Catholic Social Thought, 13 (1):
63-81.
Pope Paul VI (1965). Gaudiem et Spes (Joy and Hope). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
December 7.
Reich, Robert B. (2018), The Common Good. New York: Albert A. Knopf.
Santos, Nicholas J.C. and Gene R. Laczniak (2009), “’Just’ Markets from the Perspective of
Catholic Social Teaching,” Journal of Business Ethics, 89 (Supplement 1): 29-38.
Bios for Panelists
Josephine Previte is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Queensland. Dr Josephine
Previte’s research focuses on issues related to the use of qualitative and digital methodologies in
marketing and health service research, gender and embodiment issues in social marketing
practice and social technology influences on consumer behavior. She has worked on a broad
range of social marketing projects including alcohol consumption, breastfeeding, breast-
screening, blood donation and new technology use to deliver social marketing services. Her
research interests in social marketing, technology and consumption contexts has led to
publications in academic journals, book chapters and conference papers, and delivered findings to
invited speaking engagements.
Pawan Jain is a finance professor at the University of Wyoming’s College of Business. He is
willing to consider financial markets as embedded in societies, rather than autonomous of
289
societies and societal influences. For example, his research on systemic liquidity risk highlights
the effects of a country’s diversity of thought on the volatility found in a country’s stock market.
His research suggests that societies which are more open have less herding behavior in markets
and fewer stock-crashes. He is already a veteran presenter who has received sharp retorts about
his proposals for curbs on computer-driven, high-frequency trading from young staff at
regulatory agencies (who intend to soon leave for more lucrative jobs in the private sector for
trading firms). His works on stock market liquidity have appeared in the Journal of Corporate
Finance, and the Journal of Financial Markets.
Leyland Pitt is Professor of Marketing and the Dennis F. Culver EMBA Alumni Chair of
Business at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. The
author of more than 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals, his work has been accepted for
publication by such journals as Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Advertising,
Information Systems Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Sloan
Management Review, Business Horizons, California Management Review, Communications of
the ACM, and MIS Quarterly (which he also served as Associate Editor), and in 2000 he was the
recipient of the Tamer Cavusgil Award of the American Marketing Association for the best
article in Journal of International Marketing.
Mark Peterson teaches marketing classes across all levels (undergrad, EMBA and PhD) at the
University of Wyoming. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Georgia Tech in 1994 and
joined the University of Wyoming faculty in Fall 2007. Mark is currently the editor of the
Journal of Macromarketing—a journal that focuses on how marketing and society influence each
other. In this way, he is a thought leader for better business practices. SAGE Publications
published Mark’s book Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach in 2013. Mark has
years of experience in the marketing research industry where he served as a methods consultant
on field-research projects for a variety of clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-
ups. His more than 50 refereed-publications have appeared in leading journals in marketing,
innovation and entrepreneurship.
John Mittelstaedt is the Dean of the School of Business Administration at the University of
Dayton. His research focuses on marketing systems, external scale economies, and the interaction
290
of religion and markets in society. He is past president of the Macromarketing Society, and
serves on the Editorial Policy Board of the Journal of Macromarketing.
291
Food Marketing III
Track Chair: Claudia Dumitrescu
Co-Chair(s): Renée Shaw Hughner
292
Consumers’ Literacy of Front of
Pack Labels: Opportunities for
Improving Food Well-Being
Sheena Leek44, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Isabelle Szmigin, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
With 27% of the UK population obese (OECD 2017) the UK Government aims to improve
consumers’ food literacy through providing legible and understandable Front of Pack (FoP)
labels to enable people to make informed food choices. Food literacy consists of three
components 1) declarative knowledge, 2) procedural knowledge and 3) the motivation to use the
knowledge (Block et al. 2011). Consumers obtain information through various activities
including reading FoP labels, which develops their declarative knowledge. The application of the
knowledge during food decision making such as purchasing is the procedural knowledge and
involves the development of food related scripts e.g. how to put together a healthy diet which
supports the consumer’s food related goals.
In 2013 the UK Foods Standards Agency (FSA) developed a series of recommendations for FoP
labels to provide a consistent way of presenting nutritional information to customers. These FoP
labels should contain the following (Department of Health 2016)
Energy presented in kilojoules (kJ) and kilocalories (kcal) for a specific portion and per
100g/ml of the product.
The amount in grams of fat, saturated fat, sugar (total) and salt in a specific portion of the
product.
The percentage reference intake (%RI) of each of the nutrients for a specific portion of the
product.
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Color coding of the nutrients as red, amber or green.
The portion size of the product expressed in a readily understandable way.
The FSA stated that the descriptors “high”, “medium” and “low” could be used in conjunction
with the colors red, amber and green; this is known as traffic light labelling. FOP labels are
voluntary for manufacturers and retailers (Department of Health 2016). Whilst traffic light FoP
labels are widely accepted (Babio et al. 2013), the current research examines consumers’
understanding of the elements of FoP labels and gains in-depth insight into how this information
is processed when making purchase decisions.
Methodology
A qualitative approach combining interviews and the think aloud technique was used. Three
product categories (ready meal lasagna, muesli and bread) were chosen. FoP labels are commonly
used when purchasing ready meals and cereal (Mintel 2017) and 80% of adults consume sliced
packaged bread (Mintel 2016). Participants were presented with six FoP choice sets, two for
each of the three product categories. Each FoP label choice set was presented on a white
background with no further information. The participants were asked which product from each
choice set they would purchase. Fifty interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using
thematic analysis.
Findings
Whilst the majority of participants trusted and understood the traffic light colors, some
misunderstood the % reference intake (%RI) thinking it to be the percentage in the product.
Participants did not relate the amount in grammes to the % RI. For the lasagna choice sets, the
majority of people selected the products with the most green nutrients. Some people selected a
product with red nutrients, but kept the calorie and fat content relatively low as they suspected the
product with the most green would taste bland. Different brands often have different portion sizes
as was the case with lasagna which made it difficult for participants to compare and calculate
nutrient differences. With the muesli the majority of participants avoided the products with the
most green nutrients as these had red for the sugar content, rather focusing on the lowest sugar
levels. For bread there were no red nutrients, so participants eliminated products with two amber
nutrients and then used calories to make their choice.
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Discussion
Participants generally trusted and understood the traffic light coloring and whilst there were
issues with interpretation of the %RI and the grams, they knew the benefit of selecting products
with lower values. This process is in line with the FSAs recommendations. The heuristic of
selecting the product with the most green nutrients was applied easily when the other products
were predominantly red. The anticipated nutrient profile influenced consumers’ choice, e.g.
participants expected lasagna to be high in fat and salt to imbue flavor and subsequently picked a
product with intermediate levels of these nutrients. When the balance of colors was similar some
consumers examined the calories or %RI, however some did not refer to the figures at all.
Consumers often did not identify differences in products’ portion sizes. When they did, they
struggled to compare the products possibly due to cognitive overload (Szmigin and Gee 2016).
The consumers were generally food literate, but factors such as price, brand, habitual purchasing,
time pressures reduced the likelihood of FoP label use in real life. The FSA, retailers and
manufacturers can further enhance literacy through providing information on the overall balance
of nutrients in the diet and providing consistent portion sizes within product categories. Retailers
and manufacturers should reformulate products to avoid being the poorest nutritional choice in a
product category.
References
Babio, Nancy, Paloma Vicent, Leonor Lopez, Anna Benito, Julio Basulto, and Jordi
Salas-Salvado (2013), “Adolescents’ Ability to Select Healthy Food Using Two
Different Front-of-Pack Food Labels: A Cross Over Study,” Public Health
Nutrition, 17(6), 1403-1409.
Block, Lauren G., Sonya A. Grier, Terry L. Childers, Brennan Davis, Jane E.J. Ebert,
Shiriki Kumayika, Russell N. Laczniak, Jane E. Machin, Carol M. Motley, Laura
Peracchio, Simone Pettigrew, Maura Scott, Mirjam N.G. van Ginkel Bieshaar
(2011), “From Nutrients to Nurturance: A Conceptual Introduction to Food Well-
Being,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 30(1), 5-13.
Department of Health, (2016), “ Guide to creating a front of Pack (FoP) nutrition label for pre-
packed products sold through retail outlets”
https://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdfs/pdf-ni/fop-guidance.pdf.
295
Mintel (2017), Attitudes towards Ready Meals and Ready-to-Cook Foods – UK, June
2017, Mintel, London.
Mintel (2016), Bread and Baked Goods –UK, October 2016, Mintel, London.
OECD (2017), “Obesity Update 2017,” http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Obesity-
Update-2017.pdf
Szmigin, Isabelle, and Veronica Gee (2016), “Mystification and Obfuscation in Portion
Sizes in UK Food Products,” Journal of Business Research, 75, 176-184.
296
Low Food Prices Culture: A
Systematic Review of the
Literature from the Quality of Life
Marketing Perspective
Crina Tarasi45, Central Michigan University, USA
Claudia Dumitrescu, Central Washington University, USA
Food pricing strategies have important consequences on the quality of life (QOL), at both
individual and macro levels. While food pricing strategy, as one of the marketing mix elements,
has received considerable attention in the marketing and agricultural economic literatures, the
practice of low food pricing has demanded substantially more attention from (macro) marketers
and public policy makers in recent years. Most importantly, a recent review of the existing
literatures emphasizes the mixed and rather confusing implications of such food pricing
strategies. The purpose of our research is thus to review existing food pricing research, discuss
the implications of low pricing strategies, at both micro and macro levels, and indentify gaps and
avenues for future research that could contribute to the (macro) marketing literature and practice.
Quality of life marketing refers to marketing practices – i.e., pricing of food products – intended
to enhance consumer well-being (CWB) while preserving the other stakeholders’ well-being
(SWB) (Lee and Sirgy 2004). Therefore, our food pricing literature review includes two
categories based on the impact of food pricing on the two QOL marketing stakeholders:
consumers and other relevant stakeholders (i.e., producers/distributors/suppliers, local
community, environment). In the first category, our literature review relates to the impact of low
pricing strategies on CWB, at micro and macro levels and, in the second category, we review
297
these pricing tactics from their impact on SWB perspective.
Low-income individuals spend a significantly lower percentage of their total food dollars, away
from home, as opposed to their high-income counterparts (You et al. 2009). Therefore, one view
is that affordable food prices could provide the opportunity for low-income individuals to
consume food away from home. Due to the affordability that comes with a low price, those
consumers’ QOL may be enhanced (positive outcomes of low pricing for CWB, at a micro level);
moreover, famine levels may decrease (positive impact of low pricing on CWB, at a macro
level). Another view is that low food pricing leads to overconsumption and excessive intakes of
sugar and saturated fats, all of which contribute to obesity, cardiovascular disease, and type-2
diabetes (Waterlander et al. 2012). This marketing strategy has in fact received criticism from
consumer advocacy groups and policy makers due to its detrimental impact on the population’s
food intake. Value size pricing is a well-known marketing practice that refers to the fact that
consumers prefer to consume large volumes due to the value for money they receive.
Nevertheless, lower prices per unit for large portions translate to increased purchases and
consumption of specific (not necessarily healthy) products (Wansink, 1996; Vermeer et al.,
2010). Along the same lines, portion sizes of energy-dense foods have increased significantly
during the past 30 years in the US and Europe; large portion sizes leading to increased
consumption of food products that have been considered a factor of the obesity epidemic and its
related health issues. Despite a general decrease of food prices, over the past 60 years, the price
for fruits and vegetables has in reality increased; additionally, along with low prices, promotional
strategies are, to a great extent, used for energy-dense, nutrient-poor food products as opposed to
healthier, more nutritious foods (Block et al., 2011; Christian and Rashad 2009; Story and
Faulkner 1990) (overall, negative impact of low pricing on CWB, at a macro level).
The well-being of producers, suppliers, distributors, local communities, and/or the environment
should also be considered, when marketing practices such as low pricing are used. As an
example, when food prices are set significantly low with the intent to drive competitors out of
business, that predatory pricing strategy can negatively affect local communities (Ortmeyer 1993)
(negative effects of low pricing on SWB, at a macro level). Also, low food prices may lead to
distributors’/producers’ failure to make acceptable profit margins (Lee and Sirgy 2004) (negative
impact of low pricing on SWB, at a micro level).
298
Generally, we are relying on the market systems to find the balance between not enough and too
much, but as hunger and obesity are significant problems, especially for the less fortunate in our
society, the evolution in understanding the relationship between food prices and wellbeing is
important for policy makers and (macro) marketers alike.
References
Block, L. G., Grier, S. A., Childers, T. L., Davis, B., Ebert, J. E., Kumanyika, S.,
Laczniak, R. N., Machin, J. E., Motley, C. M., Peracchio, M. L., Pettigrew, S., Scott, M.,
and van Ginkel Bieshaar, M. N. G. (2011), “From Nutrients To Nurturance: A Conceptual
Introduction To Food Well-Being,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 30(1), 5-13.
Christian, Thomas and Inas Rashad (2009), “Trends in U.S. Food Prices, 1950–2007,”
Economics and Human Biology, 7 (1), 113–20.
Lee, D. J. and Sirgy, M. J. (2004), “Quality-of-Life (QOL) Marketing: Proposed Antecedents and
Consequences,” Journal of Macromarketing, 24(1), 44-58.
Ortmeyer,G.K. (1993), “Ethical Issues in Pricing,” in Ethics in Marketing, N. C. Smith and J. A.
Quelch, eds. Homewood, IL: Irwin, 3889-404.
Story, Mary and Patricia Faulkner (1990), “The Prime Time Diet: A Content Analysis of Eating
Behavior and Food Messages in Television Program Content and Commercials,”
American Journal of Public Health, 80 (6), 738–40.
Vermeer, W. M., Steenhuis, I. H., and Seidell, J. C. (2010), “Portion Size: A Qualitative Study Of
Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Point-Of-Purchase Interventions Aimed At Portion Size,”
Health Education Research, 25(1), 109-120.
Wansink, B. (1996), “Can Package Size Accelerate Usage Volume?” The Journal of Marketing,
1-14.
Waterlander, W. E., Steenhuis, I. H., de Boer, M. R., Schuit, A. J., and Seidell, J. C. (2012),
“Introducing Taxes, Subsidies Or Both: The Effects Of Various Food Pricing Strategies In
A Web-Based Supermarket Randomized Trial,” Preventive Medicine, 54(5), 323-330.
299
You, W., Zhang, G., Davy, B. M., Carlson, A., and Lin, B. H. (2009), “Food Consumed Away
From Home Can Be A Part Of A Healthy And Affordable Diet,” The Journal of
Nutrition, 139(10), 1994-1999.
300
Promoting Food for the Bin? A
Literature Review and Coupled
Survey and Waste Sorting to
Holistically Explore the Relation
between Price Promotions and
Consumer-Level Food Waste
George Tsalis, Aarhus University, Denmark
Birger Boutrup Jensen, Aarhus University, Denmark
Jessica Aschemann-Witzel46, Aarhus University, Denmark
Acknowledgements
The study was conducted as part of the WASTEPROM project funded by the Aarhus University
Research Foundation (AUFF).
Food waste is a topic which has received increasing attention during the past years. A large share
of food waste is wasted in consumer households. The causes of food waste in consumer households
are rather complex and interrelated (Aschemann-Witzel et al. 2015). The price of food, however,
plays a particularly important role for the issue of food waste, and one of the most prominent
arguments is that pricing mechanisms in food marketing trigger consumers to over-purchase and
over-stock food items (Stuart 2009).
301
Interestingly, though, pricing mechanisms are also suggested as a means to tackle the problem of
food waste: reducing the price of suboptimal food allows to sell foods otherwise wasted in retail,
or such foods are offered in alternative retail chains such as food banks at very low prices. In
addition, consumers who specifically focus on price promotions might at the same time be those
who might be conservative, thrifty and cautious with what they have bought. Thus, price appears
to play a dual role, first as a major cause and second as a potential powerful measure in solving
food waste.
In order to assess which role price promotions appear to play for food waste and in consequence
of that knowledge derive the right recommendations for responsible marketing of food, the current
extended abstract reports on two research studies: Firstly, a systematic literature review; Secondly,
an explorative study of household´s waste sorted to uncover the food waste per food category and
in half- or unopened packages, coupled with survey answers and purchase data from the same
households, in order to link consumer´s self-reported attitudes to the actual behavior. The study
thus contributes to exploring the state of the art and the potential empirical links in order to derive
recommendations for responsible marketing or policy making in respect of the complexity of the
topic. So far, only one other study of a similar kind has been done (Parizeau et al. 2015).
The literature search was limited to articles published in peer reviewed journals published in
English between 2007 and 2017 in ISI Web of Science and Scopus. 24 studies were identified. The
household waste sorting (weighing food waste divided by category) was conducted in November
in a community of individual houses in Mid-Denmark. The same households gathered their food-
related purchase receipts within a time frame of 3 weeks and filled out a survey questionnaire on
their attitudes and behavior as well as demographics. The analysis is ongoing and the final results
can be presented by July.
The results of the review show that the relationship between price promotions and consumer-
related food waste is ambiguous and thus inconclusive (see table 1). There is no apparent difference
in the methods used for studies with a positive versus a negative relation found.
A first rough analysis of the results of the waste sorting study of key figures with bivariate
correlations (Pearson, two-tailed) shows that there are no significant correlations between the self-
assessed deal proneness in shopping, the self-assessed average extent of food waste, the share of
receipts in discount stores among the receipts, and the overall food waste per capita as observed in
302
the sorting. If anything, there tends to be a negative relation between deal proneness and self-
reported food waste (-.152; p = .126). However, further analysis is needed to explore the data more
in depth.
The results of the literature review provides evidence that the relationship between consumer level
food waste and price promotions is ambiguous. Even though the majority of the identified studies
find that price promotions lead to increased food waste amounts, there is evidence from a number
of studies that this is not always the case. In conclusion, even though these results do not allow to
make a definitive attribution of causality, they provide evidence that the relationship in question
needs to be explored further within a larger network of antecedents that influence food waste
behavior.
The results of the waste sorting support the finding of the literature review: there is no clear relation
to be found, although the small sample size is a limitation. So far, data might only indicate that in
self-reported data, there could be a tendency of deal prone consumers to also report lower food
waste levels.
We conclude that the straightforward relation between low prices and price offers and food waste
sometimes portrayed in the media does not seem to hold true, neither when inspecting food waste
research nor in a study coupling self-reported respective price and food waste behavior with actual
purchase and waste behavior. Ongoing qualitative interviews with households chosen based on the
key variables might shed greater light on the relation.
303
References
Aschemann-Witzel, Jessica, Ilona E. De Hooge, Pegah Amani, Tino Bech-Larsen, and Marije
Oostindjer (2015), “Consumer-related food waste: Causes and potential for action,”
Sustainability, 7 (6), 6457–77.
Parizeau, K., von Massow, M., Martin, R. (2015), “Household-level dynamics of food waste
production and related beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours in Guelph, Ontario,” Waste
Management 35 (2015) 207–217.
Stuart, Tristram (2009), Waste: Uncovering the global waste scandal, London: Penguin.
304
Table 1: Literature review results
Type of study Relationship direction
Positive Neutral Negative Total
Quantitative Waste separation 0 0 2 2
Survey 6 2 3 11
Quantitative &
Qualitative
Diary & Survey 0 1 2 3
Survey & interviews 1 0 1 2
Qualitative Interviews 1 0 0 1
Observations 4 0 1 5
Total: 12 3 9 24
305
Gender,
Intersectionalities, and
Macromarketing I
Track Chair: Wendy Hein
Co-Chair(s): Josephine Previte
306
Intersectionality between gene and
gender: biopolitics and the control
of risky female bodies
Mohammed Cheded47 48, De Montfort University and Lancaster University,
UK
Gillian Hopkinson, De Montfort University and Lancaster University, UK
The aim of this paper is to explore the role of biological identity factors in reinforcing oppression
experienced in the marketplace, and assess what a study of the intersectionality between gender
and genetic identity has to offer to the macromarketing scholarship. To do so, we discuss the
concept of geneticism drawing on the sociology of health and illness, before connecting it to other
‘isms’ of oppression. Thus, we attend to the cultural, social and historical contexts of the
construction of a genetic identity, which leads to consider the intimate connection between gene
and race49 (Siddhartha, 2016). Then an illustrative case is provided, which relates gene to gender;
namely the BRCA gene mutation and breast and ovarian cancers. Within this case, we focus on the
rise of the market of prevention in the context of genetic propensity to breast and ovarian cancers,
partly due to the possibility of reconstruction of the heteronormative female body through the breast
47 [email protected] 48 Corresponding author 49 We will explore, in the full paper, the historic relationship between eugenics and genetics, and how genetics
discourse has sought to carve out a distinct and untainted area. American eugenics was embedded in an openly racist
ideology of white supremacy (Allen, 1983), and eugenics’ programmes were focused on controlling and reducing the
breeding of the unfit/genetically defective (or what was defined as such). It is therefore not surprising to see the efforts
of genetics science to demarcate its commitments from those of eugenics throughout history. Probably the most notable
narrative is the depiction of genetics knowledge as a platform for individual choice. At the core of the rhetoric of
individual choice is the freedom to choose – therefore contrasting it with the coercive discourse of eugenics. However,
and as we will discuss in depth in our full paper, these distinctions largely depend on the social, historical and cultural
contexts where they are traced. Indeed, genetics reproduces and reinforces several eugenics ideologies, as has been
debated in the sociology of health and illness literature. This is particularly relevant when considering how it shapes
the causal attributions between the individual, the disease, and the state (Kerr, 2004, Tutton, 2012, Rose, 2007).
307
reconstruction surgery. Our analysis illuminates the experiences of oppression in the marketplace
resulting from geneticism, but also the politics of access to genetic knowledge. Finally, the case is
connected back to the discussion on gender, intersectionality and macromarketing.
To illustrate the intersectionality between gender and genetic identity, this paper focuses on the
market for preventive solutions for breast and ovarian cancers. We use a multitude of public online
sources such as newspapers (including Angelina Jolie’s letter to The New York Times, ‘my medical
choice’ (Jolie, 2013), which has sparked an enormous interest amongst various market actors),
activist’ websites, and online support groups. We emphasise prevention in the context of genetic
propensity for these illnesses. We focus on a specific set of genes, the BRCA genes (BRCA1 and
BRCA2). The inheritance of a BRCA mutation is associated with an increased risk of developing
breast and ovarian cancers over a lifetime. Our objective is to examine the performativity of
knowledge claims about the gene, the body and the disease affecting the newly redefined at-risk
entities (Butler, 1993; Lupton, 2012); as well as the new consumption practices targeted at these
entities, centred on risk prevention and the reconstruction of the heteronormative body (Klawiter,
2008; King, 2004). Thus, we highlight genetic determinism or ‘geneticism’ (Lippmann, 1991;
Nelkin and Lindee, 1995) as a possible medium of oppression. Genetic determinism or ‘geneticism’
comes into play when a disease is talked about predominantly in terms of genetic causality. Within
geneticism, the gene is understood as a strong determinant of the essence of personal identity50, as
it provides a ‘scientific’ explanation for the occurrence of degeneracy. The mapping of the genome
defines and delineates the normal human body through the othering of diseases and other
imperfections. Thus, it constructs the human body as a flawed version of a supposedly existent
ideal, perfect code (Van Dijk, 1998). We aim to highlight, within this paper, the interplay of
geneticism and other means of oppression, such as sexism and heterosexism, in constituting women
bodies as sites of control. In keeping with a macromarketing perspective, we look across a range
of market actors with a particular emphasis upon the positioning of women as consumers of
prevention in the era of genetic citizenship (Kerr, 2004).
The empirical work brings to the fore the transformation of the discourse of survivorship to
previvorship through the movement of the locus of action from ill to pre-ill bodies. This discourse
has a pivotal role in mobilising action, both from the affected women and the various market actors.
50 The way genetics determines the essence of personal identity is different from eugenics, as it marks a shift from the ‘gene as controller’ to the ‘genome as book of life’ or ‘master code’ (Van Dijk, 1998).
308
Locating our research within a feminist postructuralist framework, we discuss the various
narratives and symbols of survivorship and previvorship, and their co-constitutive relationship with
the marketization of breast cancer movement. This the redefinition of its prevention, and the
shaping of a market around preventive solutions. As we trace these discursive movements, we
demonstrate the involvement of two major approaches to breast cancer activism. On the one hand,
the mainstream activism focuses essentially on fundraising, and has worked towards the
destigmatisation of the disease, research funding, screening and education. The mobilisation
around the pink ribbon is a great example of such activism. Mainstream activism contributed
strongly into shaping the treatments, the screening methods, as well as the number of spaces for
support available for patients. However, this type of activism does not necessarily challenge the
established approaches of its areas of action (research, screening and education), as has been
pointed out by feminist critiques (Klawiter, 2008; King, 2004). On the contrary, it reiterates and
reinforces the geneticism discourse. On the other hand, feminist activism has been geared towards
political action. The main purpose of these activists is destabilising the dominant methods of
understanding and acting on breast cancer. Some of the major topics that it addresses are
environmental contaminants as a cause for cancer (as opposed to a sole focus on genetic
determinants), the blurring of the lines between prevention and early detection, as well as issues of
access to the marginalised such as poor people, ethnic minorities, disabled, and LGBT women.
These two movements do not diverge only through their commitments but also through the framing
of the female body. Whilst the mainstream breast cancer movement promoted unscarred,
heterofeminine albeit cancerised bodies, feminist activists championed making spaces available for
the expression of “alternative images, alternative discourses, and alternative ways of embodying
breast cancer” (Klawiter, 2008, p. 169). We uncover similar practices within the pre-ill female
body, carrier of a faulty gene – or BRCA positive. Within this context, taking control of the
occurrence of breast cancer through preventive surgery, is interwoven with the possibility of re-
enactement of the heteronormative body through reconstructive surgery51. This latter approach
51 By re-enactment of heteronormative body through reconstructive surgery, we do not imply that female sexuality
interferes with their access to treatment (or at least, we do not explore this aspect), nor that there is a typical physical
representation of LGBTI female bodies. Instead, we refer to the heteronormative conceptualisations of the female
body, and the making of the ‘possibility’ of reconstruction as a necessity, and an integral part of the preventive
procedures. This in turn marginalises the scarred, one breasted and un-breasted female bodies following preventive
surgery – whether this visual representation is due to issues of access (financial, geographical, legal, etc.), or to
individual choice.
309
provides previvorship a ‘restitution narrative’ (Frank, 1995), where the ‘loss’ of womanhood
through the removal of breasts can be fixed through various technologies of the body. These
technologies of the body (Foucault, 2004) such as breast reconstruction, prostheses, wigs and a
careful choice of clothing, transform breast cancer previvors’ bodies, so they can mirror the image
of healthy ones – an ideal that is encouraged within the previvorship discourse. We trace the spatio-
temporal movement of the ‘restitution narrative’, as it travels from cancerous to pre-cancerous
bodies, from the ill to the pre-ill, aided by the geneticisation discourse.
In focusing on geneticisim, we provide an understanding of an additional layer of intersectional
identities. While destabilising the control of the body by conceptualising a part of it as defectous,
genetics discourse fosters simultaneously a sense of control, by making additional options available
to reduce uncertainty, and re-enacts what is considered as a ‘normal’ female body through a
heteronormative lens. However, if we consider the need to organise and control something
frightening and chaotic as stemming from its initial representation as such, then the centricity of
the notion of control of degeneracy to genetics becomes problematic. By shedding the light on
these considerations, we hope to extend the literature on women bodies as sites of control within
the macromarketing and critical marketing literature (Gurrieri et al, 2013; Maclaran et al.,2009),
by highlighting the role of geneticism in pushing the neoliberal body project under the banner of
individual choice.
310
References:
Allen, G. (1983) The misuse of biological hierarchies: the American eugenics movement, 1900-
1940, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 5(2), pp. 105-128.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, New York, NY: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2004) The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, (eds.)
Senellart, M., Ewald, F. and Fontana, A. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frank, A. (1995) The wounded storyteller, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gurrieri, L., Previte, J., and Brace-Govan, J. (2013) Women’s bodies as sites of control: Inadvertent
stigma and exclusion in social marketing, Journal of Macromarketing, 33(2), pp. 128- 143.
Jolie, A. (2013) My medical choice, The New York Times, May 14, op-ed contributor. Available
at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/opinion/my-medical-choice.html [Last accessed:
08/2017]
Kerr, A. (2004) Genetics and society. London: Routledge.
King, S. (2004) Pink Ribbons Inc: breast cancer activism and the politics of
philanthropy. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 17(4), pp.473-492.
Klawiter, M. (2008) The biopolitics of breast cancer: changing cultures of disease and activism,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lippmann, A. (1991) The geneticization of health and illness: implications for social practice,
Endocrinologie, 29 (1-2), pp. 85-90.
Lupton, D. (2012) Medicine as culture, Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.
Maclaran, P., Caroline, M., Elizabeth, P., and Emma S. (2009) Praxis or Performance: Does Critical
Marketing Have a Gender Blind-Spot? , Journal of Marketing Management, 25 (7–8), pp. 713–28.
Rose, N. (2007) The politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first
century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Siddhartha, M. (2016) The gene: an intimate history, London: Penguin Random House.
Tutton, R. (2012) Personalizing medicine: Futures present and past, Social Science & Medicine,
75(10), pp.1721-1728.
Van Dijck, J. (1998) Imagenation: Popular images of genetics, London: Macmillan.
311
Constructing ‘white beauty’ in
Indonesia
Jeaney Yip52, University of Sydney, Australia
Susan Ainsworth53, University of Melbourne, Australia
Introduction
This research analyses the discursive construction of beauty through beauty advertisements and its
visual representations in an Indonesian women’s magazine (Femina). We focus on how they
inscribe cultural and competing discourses in constructing and marketing beauty in Indonesia, a
developing and increasingly global country with a sizable emerging middle class that is the largest
in Southeast Asia. Ideas of beauty are constructed that not only promise youthful, smooth and fair
skin to affluent middle-class consumers, but promote the constant ‘upscaling’ of lifestyle norms.
Gender, beauty and colourism
Advertising is a key process through which gender is culturally constructed and encoded: we learn
how to be appropriately ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ through the texts that circulate within our
context (e.g. Williamson 1978), an argument illustrated at length in Goffman’s (1976) Gender
Advertisements. However, later scholars have suggested that the ‘codes of gender’ are more
complex, ambiguous and unsettled, in part at least because of cultural diversity (e.g. Hochschild,
1990). We see advertisements then as a way of exploring not only how gender is encoded but also
culture, class and ethnicity, colour and race. Advertising of course also constructs beauty as
advertisers notoriously promotes a “beauty ideal” (Greer 1999) which has long been criticised for
representing women in a problematic way.
52 [email protected] 53 [email protected]
312
Research on the advertising of beauty provides an opportunity to understand more about how
gender, race and colour circulate in ‘economies of cultural fantasy’ (Harris 2009: 5), related to the
pursuit of higher economic and social status. Beauty is also highly globalised (Jones 2011) with
the increasingly standardised communications campaigns run by creative advertising agencies who
are predominantly Western or ‘Western trained’. This has contributed to a ‘transnational look’
(Frith, Shaw and Cheng 2005), a ‘reduction in the range of global variation in beauty ideals’ (Jones
2008, p.150), and a ‘narrow representation of beauty’ (Yan and Bissell 2014). We question the
extent of this resultant homogeneity in a non-Western context that is under-studied and developing
economically. The intersections between race, markets and consumption (Grier, Thomas and
Johnson 2018) are complicated in a social environment that is politically, ideologically and socio-
culturally different to the West.
The scholarship of beauty in an Asian context draws on theories of ‘whiteness’ (Ariss, Ӧzbilgin,
Tatli and April 2014; Green et al 2007) and ‘colour’ (Glenn 2009), constructs related to, but not
the same as ‘race’, which carry complex meanings generated by the intersection of gender, colonial
history, ethnicity, class and globalization (Rondilla 2009; Saraswati 2010). Whiteness can be
defined as the production and reproduction of dominance, as well as socially constructed
normativity and privilege (Green et al 2007). While whiteness takes different forms depending on
context, it is a consistent signifier of power and privilege whose assumptions need to be challenged
and questioned (Grimes 2001). Studies on skin whitening products (Glen 2008, Nadeem 2014,
Chia et al 2015) in other contexts associated whiteness with social mobility, Anglo-saxon
superiority and youth. .We are specifically interested in the construction of beauty ideals in the
Indonesian context, and use discourse analysis to uncover discursive strategies used in that
construction process. We acknowledge that beauty in this context is inter-discursive with race,
whiteness and globalisation which we seek to deconstruct.
Indonesia as a Context
A Dutch colony for four hundred years till 1945, Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago
consisting of 13,667 islands. A large country in terms of size and population (estimated 270 million
in 2017), it is also the world’s largest Muslim population. With rich historical encounters that
include Indians, Chinese and Arabs during pre-colonial period coupled with Dutch and later
Japanese colonialism experiences, modern Indonesia also has American pop culture influences
313
coupled by recent ‘Hallyu’ or the South Korean wave that has hit Southeast Asia by storm. Against
the backdrop of ethnic diversity, rapid economic growth and modernisation in recent years,
Indonesia has a burgeoning middle class market estimated to be of 74 million consumers (as at
2016) according to the Boston Consulting Group. Consumerist in orientation, the middle-class have
resources to use material goods as social markers of identity and status, but they are also interested
in pursuing comfort and wellness to enhance one’s life standing.
Methods and Findings
We analyse how beauty is constructed in advertisements by four Indonesian indigenous beauty
brands that have appeared in an Indonesian women’s magazine (Femina) in a five year period from
2013- 2018. Published since 1972, Femina was chosen for this research as it is Indonesia’s first
women magazine (http://www.feminagroup.com/about.us, accessed 18 February 2016), designed
to target middle upper class educated women aged 20 – 35 year old in large Indonesian cities.
Advertisements, beauty articles and beauty products produced by these four brands (which include
skincare, bodycare and makeup) make up the dataset. While beauty in post-colonial Indonesia on
the one hand is constructed as a desire to be Western-like, its construction is also not entirely
homogeneous. There are contextual elements and non-Western influences that impact on how
beauty is constructed and marketed in Indonesia such as social class, religion, ‘Asian’ whiteness,
global discourses and other inter-Asian dynamics. Our findings reveal that being beautiful in
Indonesia is to be fair, modern and natural. While models featured in all beauty related
advertisements are fair, whiteness in this instance is not always constructed racially as ‘Western
white’ but as a state of perfection to pursue; pigmentation and its associated flaws (black marks,
flecks, spots) are impediments to perfection that should be vanished, disguised or treated. Another
interesting discourse associated with beauty is the prevalent usage of English in the advertisements
in what is essentially a non-English speaking nation. English serves as a means for upward mobility
as to be able to speak English is a privileged position that fosters cultural superiority and an elite
status in Indonesia. The whiteness and sense of modernity often combines with another discursive
strategy on the naturalisation of beauty. Reference to nature and natural food such as certain
vegetables or fruits (both native and foreign to Indonesia) associates not only beauty with food but
promotes an aversion towards chemicals in achieving beauty.
314
References:
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316
Between the sheets: Gendered
neoliberalism, intimacy, and
women’s sexual (consumption)
practices
Alexandra S. Rome 54, ICN Business School, France
Aliette Lambert55, University of Exeter, UK
In recent decades, the female-oriented erotic industry – and associated consumption practices – has
burgeoned (Evans and Riley 2015). Fashion conscious and female-oriented ‘erotic boutiques’ (Martin
2016), coupled with designer sex toys (Bardzell and Bardzell 2011; Harris 2017), and a widespread
infatuation with the risqué or taboo in popular culture and media texts (Dymock 2013; Ford 2016; Musser
2015) have fostered a sexually assertive female consumer subjectivity (Evans and Riley 2015).
Underpinning this subjectivity is what Gill (2017) calls a ‘gendered neoliberalism,’ marked by prominence
afforded to neoliberal notions of choice and agency which masks patriarchal influences and gendered
inequalities (Gill 2008). This gendered neoliberal subjectivity is bound up with a consumption logic
whereby women are argued to be able to become whatever they like by engaging with consumer culture in
expressing their (sexual) agency (Evans, Riley, and Shankar 2010b). Despite these cultural shifts, sexuality
as an arena for consumer practice and experience remains largely unexplored (Walther and Schouten 2015).
Within the realm of consumer research, the study of sex is often relegated to one of three camps:
sexualized advertising (Dahl, Vohs, and Sengupta 2011; Choi et al. 2016; Reichert, LaTour, and Ford 2011);
gendered and/or sexualized identities (Bettany et al. 2010; Kates 2002, 2004); and more recently, sex shops
and the production and consumption of female sex toys and lingerie (Bardzell and Bardzell 2011; Evans,
Riley, and Shankar 2010a; Jantzen, Østergaard, and Vieira 2006; Walther and Schouten 2015; Wilner and
Huff 2017). However, existing research, to our knowledge, has yet to address women’s sexual experiences
54 [email protected] 55 [email protected]
317
from critical, feminist perspectives. This lack of attention might be because critical feminist theory calls
into question the agentic consumer subject so central to cultural consumer research theorizing (Catterall,
Maclaran, and Stevens 2005; Fitchett, Patsiaouras, and Davies 2014). However, in order to dismantle
patriarchal interests and widen the scope of critique in marketing, feminist theorizing that problematizes
this consumer subject position is essential (Maclaran 2015).
In this paper, we draw on postfeminist theory (Gill 2008, 2017; Lewis 2014) that underpins the idea
of gendered neoliberalism to analyze findings from a study on emerging adult women’s sexual and romantic
lived experiences and their interactions with consumer culture. Multiple depth interviews and projective
techniques were used to generate data about how young women experience and relate to the contemporary
feminist movement in this context. In total, 14 American women, aged 20 to 31, were interviewed 2-3 times
and also created digital (Pinterest) collages that were discussed throughout the course of the interviews. This
resulted in over 52 hours of recorded dialogue and over 1,060 single-spaced pages of text. We analyzed the
data from a critical, feminist perspective, finding that a gendered neoliberal ideological positioning
manifested in three ways: an authoritative positioning relative to male partners; a submissive sexual
positioning regardless of feminist identification; and repulsion toward the female body. We briefly
summarize these findings through three representative participant accounts.
“I would like cut his balls off if he didn’t show up when he was supposed to. … I mean he just, he does
what he’s supposed to, I guess. And I know that sounds like controlling, but… I mean, I think, that is part
of marriage though” – Chelsea, 24 years old.
First, in line with what McRobbie (2009) termed the “new sexual contract,” many of the participants
adopted a hyper-active, ostensibly authoritative or dominate stance in their lived experiences of romantic
relationships. To gain power in their relationships with men, participants engaged in tactics of emasculation
in banal situations that were often relegated to the commercial domain, such as dictating men’s fashion
choices or the time they should arrive at a dinner party. Participants who were not in committed relationships
enacted their ‘relational empowerment’ by demonstrating their savviness on dating platforms and/or by
establishing their autonomy outside of standard (heteronormative) relationship practices.
“I really feel it’s pretty important [that my partners orgasm] because I feel like it’s unfinished business if
they don’t, because I feel it’s so much easier for them. It makes me feel like I haven’t done something right
if they don’t” – Krista, 24 years old.
Second, based on data on the most intimate aspects of these women’s lives – their sexual
relationships – on the whole, participants enacted heteronormative, gendered roles between the sheets, so to
speak. Even women who strongly identified as ‘feminist’ seemed to relinquish this part of their identity,
318
becoming submissive in order to afford their partners a sense of masculinity and power. We might explain
this, in part, by drawing on previous research which finds that young women rely on gendered media texts,
such as the Fifty Shades of Grey series, as a way to navigate their sexual experiences and romantic
relationships (Click 2015). It seems, moreover, that female sexuality is commodified and embedded within
the logic of a gift economy, whereby women work to give their partners’ orgasms whilst men take them
(McClelland 2014).
“I always perform [oral sex] on him, I don’t really like it when he does on me. I think vaginas are gross,
so. Don’t touch me down there, don’t look at me down there. … I feel just gross down there all the time. I
just don’t think you can ever be fully 100% clean down there and I don’t want someone’s mouth there, so.
I wouldn’t want to put my mouth down there, so.”- Khloe, 20 years old.
Thirdly, when discussing their bodies, participants often expressed disdain and, on some level,
disgust and shame toward their genitals. In particular, they believed their vaginas to be dirty, repulsive, and
unclean (Fahs 2014 arrived at a similar conclusion). As such, they often reported feeling uncomfortable
with their partners performing oral sex on them but did not express the same sentiment towards male
genitalia or oral sex. This, we argue, suggests that the vagina has become a site for intense self-surveillance;
although practices around the vagina and the role of vaginal aesthetics have not been widely studied
(Rodrigues 2012).
These findings demonstrate that young women’s sexual and intimate lived experiences are mediated
by a hegemonic gendered neoliberalism (Gill 2017; Rottenberg 2014) predicated on patriarchal scripts
embedded in consumer culture. This is, in many ways, unsurprising given longstanding claims of a
gendered, female consuming subject at the heart of a neoliberal culture of consumption (Sandlin and
Maudlin 2012). But reflecting on the most intimate aspects of the lives of young women demonstrates an
inherent contradiction between participants’ understanding of themselves as free, able and equal, and the
constraining, anxiety-provoking and oppressive consumption practices shaping their relationships and
(sexual) lived experiences. The latter is reflected by intensified surveillance, self-monitoring, and self-
optimization of the sexualized body (Evans, Riley, and Shankar 2010b). Thus, adding to critiques of the
sovereign and agentic consumer (Fitchett, Patsiaouras, and Davies 2014), through this research we urge
consumer researchers to acknowledge and explore the paradoxes underpinning consumer capitalism
(Carrington et al. 2016). In doing so with this study, we hope to offer a more systemic critique of the
underlying patriarchal structures that predicate even the most intimate aspects of our lives.
401
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Revising Contested Cultural Meanings,” Journal of Marketing Management, 33 (3-4), 244-71.
404
Sustainable &
Ethical Consumption IV
Track Chair: Sabrina V. Helm
405
The Deviance between Religious
Tenets and its Culturally
Influences Public Practices- Are
We Willing to Bridge the Gap in
the Quest of being Sustainable?
Saman Zehra, University of Wyoming, USA
We live in a religious world with more than eight in ten people subscribing to a religious
group worldwide (Global Religious Landscape 2012). Since religion shapes the ideology of its
adherents with regard to one’s purpose and existence in the world, ideal conduct throughout life,
and associations held with fellow human beings and the elements of nature, its influence on life
aspects is not only pervasive but also deep and profound. It is expected that religious individuals
by virtue of their consciousness of a higher power, belief in after-life, and faith in values of
compassion, moderation, and kindness should be controlled in their actions that encourage
extravagance, exploitation of resources, and disruption of the balance in nature.
The burgeoning inter-disciplinary scholarship on sustainable development (Pezzey 1992)
is pushing the discourse forward by generating mass awareness. In 2011, 69 percent of global
online consumers admitted being concerned about climate change/global warming (Frighetto
2011). Despite the high awareness regarding sustainable matters and with people expressing their
disappointment about environmental degradation, a little social change is happening (Howard
2000). According to Kals and Maes (2012), sustainable behaviors as well as environment
endangering decisions are strongly discerned by environment-specific cognitions and emotions
that bear moral perspectives, thus implying the importance of the role of morality as an
antecedent motivating factor of sustainable actions. Religion’s contribution as a source of
morality in canonical sociology is well-documented (Kant 1998, Durkheim 1975). Therefore, the
406
connection of religious beliefs, religiosity, and religious affiliations to sustainable behavior
seems likely. Specifically, research also shows that religion significantly relates to the
performance of sustainable behavior (Minton, Kahle, and Hyun-Kim 2015). Religion has
historically been an important part of several visions of sustainability (Johnston 2013). Despite
this, religious rituals and practices are also in contrast to the tenets of majority religions that
advocate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles. At large, the cultural practice of religions is pitted
against the religious tenets. Though the major religions of the world (Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism, and Buddhism) have a clear and strong stance on environmental sustainability and the
world is largely religious, environmental degradation is on an exponential rise. This points to an
existing gap between tenets and practice of faith. It is not only intriguing to the mind but also a
pressing need of the hour to assess whether this gap has been consciously created (by adherents,
social institutions and commercial organizations) or has taken a natural course as the societies
evolved and how the same dictates the shift in one’s ideology with regard to conservation of
environment.
The present study aims to look into the existing deviance in the context of religions of
Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam and their manifestation as culturally influenced practices
during celebration of religious festivals. It also seeks to explore the intentions and willingness of
the followers of these religions to acknowledge and reduce this deviance for the larger good of
fostering environmental sustainability.
According to the Environment protection Agency (EPA) (2010), the waste generated by
American households increases by 25 percent during the period between Thanksgiving and
Christmas. This amounts to an additional annual waste of 1 million ton in the U.S. alone. The 33
million Christmas trees sold in the U.S. every year (EPA 2010), paper and plastic bags, gifts
wraps, decorative materials and enormous quantities of unconsumed food ends up in landfills
after Christmas. In 2014, 4.2 million festive dinners were wasted across the United Kingdom
amounting to £64 million (Portocarrero 2015).
The Islamic festival of Eid-ul-Adha, celebrated by more than 1.6 billion adherents of
Islamic faith around the world by making animal sacrifices causes animal pollution especially in
developing countries due a lack of proper waste management facilities. Due to an improper open
disposal of animal refuse like intestines and other uneatable stuff, the yearly celebration of the
festival leads to excessive soil and water pollution. The problem is pervasive in developing
407
countries due to lack of resources such as open spaces or abattoirs. Hence, the blood from the
slaughtered animals is drained out in the open and into water bodies causing water pollution. The
biological oxygen demand (BOD) of aquatic life increases due to the tannery wastes released in
water risking the life of fauna.
The Hindu festivals of Deepawali (celebrated by the followers of Hinduism by
worshipping goddess Lakshmi (goddess of wealth), displaying large fireworks, lighting of
earthen diyas and candles, and decoration of houses with artwork) and Ganesh Chaturthi
(celebrated by worshipping and subsequently immersing large idols (of Hindu god Ganesha)
made of clay/ plaster of paris and painted with bright colors into lakes, rivers, and seas) are a
growing concern to the environmental conservation. India, home to 94% Hindus in the world
(Pew Research Center 2012), faces considerable environmental degradation during the festival
seasons. During Deepawali, crackers and sparkles are burn emitting metal pollutants into the
atmosphere in addition to other pollutants (Kulshrestha et al. 2004). This festival is celebrated
over a span of five days. But a huge amount of crackers and sparkles are burnt mainly on the
main day of the festival. In 2015, the pollution in New Delhi (India) was reported to have soared
to hazardous levels reaching 40 times the limit set by the World Health Organization (BBC
2015). Every year, environmentalists and the government of India have been making appeals to
the masses to discontinue the use of firecrackers. Diwali referred, as the festival of lights, does
not bear any religious reference to firecrackers. Semi-structured, personal in-depth interviews
will be conducted with the study participants. The study population to study the above aspects
would be chosen from India (for Hinduism and Islam) and the United States (for Christianity).
As in 2001, India was home to 827 million Hindus and 138 million Muslims (Government of
India, 2001). Similarly, the people ascribing to the Christian faith are the largest in the United
States than anywhere else in the world (Pew Research Center, 2015).
408
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410
Bridging Paradigms for
Sustainability: Propositions for a
Relational Paradigm based on
Indigenous Belief Systems
Ann-Marie Kennedy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Cathy McGouran, University of Liverpool, UK
Joya Kemper, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Abstract
The current Western dominant social paradigm (DSP) is incompatible with an ecocentric
worldview and perpetuates negative environmental consequences (Kilbourne and Beckmann
1998). A proposed alternative is the new environmental/ecological paradigm (NEP) (Dunlap and
Van Liere 1978) that is posited as a solution to sustainability issues (Kilbourne, McDonagh and
Prothero 1997). However, the two contrast so much that a shift from one to the other is
vehemently argued against and conceptually rife with problems. Instead this article seeks to
explore the bridging merits of indigenous people’s environmental philosophies as examples of
historically supported and effective sustainable philosophy. Through explication of both the DSP
and NEP and reflection on both through an indigenous relational viewpoint, propositions for a
bridged paradigm that supports sustainability, and application for sustainable business is
undertaken.
The current DSP believes in economic growth, laissez-faire economics, humans rule or
domination over nature, individual property rights and technological solutions to environmental
problems (Cotgrove 1982, Dunlap 2008). This dominant worldview is said to perpetuate current
sustainability (environmental, social and economic) issues (Beddoe et al. 2009, Borland and
411
Lindgreen 2013, Matutinović 2007) with a desire for increased material well-being intensifying
consumption and promoting materialism.
As such, it is difficult for business to carry out ecological concerns with anthropocentric
views that contradict them (Kilbourne et al 1997). Kilbourne et al (1997) discuss a need to
progress from the current western DSP which values increased economic growth over quality of
life and the environment. A fundamental paradigm shift is needed for business research and
practice in sustainability to develop (Kilbourne 1998), as the current DSP does not acknowledge
the limits to continuous growth, the intimate connection between humans and nature, and the
relationship of the economy to nature (Dunlap and Van Liere 1984, Marcus et al. 2010,
Robertson 1983). It has been posited that the alternative paradigm is the new
environmental/ecological paradigm (NEP) (Bansal and Kilbourne 2001, Dunlap and Van Liere
1978, 1984, Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, and Jones 2000, Dunlap and Van Liere 1980, Kilbourne
and Beckmann 1998). With its base in ecologism, the NEP could drive transformations of society
rather than reform it (Dobson 1990).
Unfortunately the current western DSP and NEP are incompatible as the latter is based on
an ecocentric system of beliefs - it values nature because it has an intrinsic value and therefore
deserves protection in its own right - and the former on anthropocentric beliefs – which values
nature because it maintains human life (Borland and Lindgreen 2013, Kilbourne 1998, Thompson
and Barton 1994). A shift of paradigms could lead to more sustainable business practices, as a
more ecocentric view of the world has been shown to be more likely to look after the natural
environment, as well as support funding and regulations for the environment (Hawcroft and
Milfont 2010). Consequently, adopting an ecocentric view allows for development of new
approaches to sustainability in marketing (Borland and Lindgreen 2013) and business strategy
(Borland, Ambrosini, Lindgreen, and Vanhamme 2016).
However, shifting from the DSP to NEP has not yet widely occurred, suggesting that
business and marketing philosophy based on ecocentrism may be difficult to implement. In
addition, transitioning from the DSP to the NEP needs to be further expanded upon (Borland et
al. 2016, Iyer 1999, Shrivastava 1995), especially in the business and marketing context (Borland
and Lindgreen 2013, Fitchett and McDonagh 2000, McDonagh 1998). Previous research has
touched upon an ecocentric organizational or business philosophy (e.g. Borland et al. 2016,
Borland and Lindgreen 2013, Gladwin, Kennelly, and Krause 1995, Purser, Park, and Montuori
412
1995) but tend only to focus on ecocentric aspects or do not provide practical applications or
transitions to a new DSP.
We argue that a worldview inspired by Indigenous beliefs, specifically a Relational
worldview (Spiller, Pio, Erakovic, and Henare 2011, Tapsell and Woods 2010), may offer more
specific business philosophies which practitioners and academics can draw upon. It also offers a
more palatable transition from the current neoliberal DSP to a holistic and ecocentric one. While
the specific practices of indigenous peoples are most probably ungeneralizable, the beliefs and
view of the world that enables this behaviour is of primary interest to us here. For instance, when
considering the Maori definition of sustainability, it differs ever so slightly from that of the
Brundtland (1987) report, but with profound impact. Intergenerational equity is their focus, so
that all parts of the ecosystem are passed on to the next generation in as good or better state as
they were found. Thus, extending the current definition of sustainability we might conclude that
sustainability is not a process that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their needs” (Brundtland 1987, p. 43), which infers a
sufficing view is acceptable, but that:
Ensures the social and natural environment are protected or improved to provide
intergenerational equity at the very least.
We outline the Relational Paradigm, emphasizing a flat, decentralized and participatory
governance structure. A drive towards goals which attain environmental, social, and spiritual
well-being instead of profit first, puts value in technology’s ability to complement and not replace
the natural environment. It is a business model which values co-operation, alliances and unity. As
such, six propositions follow that are based on the view of the indigenous people of New
Zealand, the Maori people, who hold a relational view of the world. The implications for
sustainable business and marketing practice of adopting a relational paradigm are also proposed.
Proposition 1: An organization that follows a Relational view of the world would function
using a flat, decentralized and participatory governance structure.
Proposition 2: A Relational view of the world advocates a drive towards goals which attain
environmental, spiritual and social well-being instead of profit first.
Proposition 3: A Relational view of technology puts value in technology’s ability to
complement and not replace the natural environment, advocating for technology that enables
personal growth and co-operation.
413
Proposition 4: A Relational view of the world sees intergenerational equity apply to humans
and non-humans along with all the natural environment and as such includes the natural
environment as an equal stakeholder in decision making and behaviour.
Proposition 5: A Relational view of the world takes a holistic and systemic approach to
decision making and behaviour that “aims at the harmonisation, integration and
reconciliation of the various elements of a situation” (Marsden 2003, p.34).
Proposition 6: A Relational view of the world believes that political, technological, economic,
social and environmental goals should be achieved through co-operation, alliances and unity.
Many scholars have advocated a move from the DSP to the NEP but none have provided a
blueprint for paradigm change, which is argued as necessary for ensuring the health of our
environment. It is too easy for us as academics to argue that a shift is needed from the DSP to the
NEP, but how one gets there is a complicated question with multitudes of possibilities.
Indigenous peoples have wrestled with sustaining their environment throughout history and many
have succeeded (Wills-Johnson 2010). Their view of the world can provide lessons in such an
endeavor as it provides clear pathways for appropriate and sustainable behaviours for businesses
and marketers, taking a relational point of view of sustainability - the Relational Paradigm. The
Relational Paradigm is based on traditional ecological knowledge and perspectives from
indigenous cultures around the world and is combined with ecosystem services. We start with its
potential influence on the basic philosophy behind sustainability.
In sum, the western DSP has a basis in two key areas, liberalism and anthropocentrism. In
contrast to the western DSP, the NEP is based on an ecocentric viewpoint and seeks decentralized
politics, steady state economics, humane technology, holism and co-operation. We outline each
of the three paradigms in Table 1 below, conceptualizing for the first time all of the differences
between the DSP and NEP. As readers will see, the NEP and Relational Paradigm share many of
the same characteristics but the Relational Paradigm, as outlined above, offers more concrete
suggestions for businesses, particularly expanding the philosophies behind the political and
economic elements.
Conclusion
Few papers have set out to explore marketing and management aspects from an ecocentric
perspective (Borland et al. 2016). This paper set out to examine how the Relational Paradigm
could bridge the gap between the DSP and NEP. In outlining propositions for a business to adopt
the Relational Paradigm, we hope to inspire business uptake and future research in the area.
414
Specifically, empirical testing of the relational paradigm and development of scales for its
measurement would benefit future researchers in the area. Case studies on organizations that
adopt a relational paradigm would flesh out the differing circumstances and applications of it in
business and CSR. Surveys of groups of businesses and their CSR and sustainability practices
and a comparison with their paradigms (DSP, NEP and Relational) would also provide further
guidance and insight.
A paradigm shift from the current western DSP is paramount. The relational paradigm is
proposed based on a view that we are all part of an interconnected web with nature, and that a
constant need for growth instead of personal growth and relational fulfilment speaks to the
sustainability agenda and is seen as a more manageable, practical and palatable shift but no less
ecocentric and holistic than a full paradigm shift to the NEP.
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Table 1: Comparison of Characteristics of Western DSP, NEP and Relational Paradigm
Characteristic Western DSP NEP Relational
Political Liberal Decentralized Flat,
decentralized,
participatory
Economic Liberal Steady State Well-being before
profit
Technological Optimistic Humane Humane
Structural Atomism Holism Holism
Functional Competitive Co-Operative Co-Operation
Human Position Anthropocentric Ecocentric Ecocentric
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Exploring traditional Chinese
cultural values and pro-
environmental self-identity as
drivers of Chinese sustainable
consumption
Dr Anita Lifen Zhao56 57, Swansea University, UK
Dr Nicole Koenig-Lewis58, Cardiff University, UK
Dr Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd59, University of Gloucestershire, UK
Prof. Janine Dermody60, Oxford Brookes University, UK
China is facing unprecedented environmental challenges because of its transformative economic
reform and rapid industrial growth over the last four decades. This is manifest in the increasing
impact of China’s consumer classes and their consumerism e.g. emerging super-rich elite and
affluent consumers with changing consumption patterns (McKinsey Quarterly, 2012) as well as
increasing appetite for status and luxury consumption (Belk, 1999; Wong & Ahuvia, 1998). Judith
Shapiro (2012, p. 20) encapsulates this concern in her question, “[I]s there a possibility of reshaping
[China’s] national identity …, or will ‘face’ and conspicuous consumption continue to govern
Chinese actions at home and abroad?”.
56 corresponding author 57 [email protected] 58 [email protected] 59 [email protected] 60 [email protected]
419
President Xi suggests one positive way forward for China, as a leading socialist
(collectivist) country, is to promulgate a harmonious coexistence between man and nature (China
Daily, 2017). This is rooted in the Chinese cultural values of collectivism and harmony. In
particular, the man-nature orientation (MNO) advocates balance between humankind and nature.
This cultural value can facilitate the solution advocated by President Xi, by encouraging
environmentally-friendly consumption (Chan, 2001). This is further supported by the research of
Polonsky, Kilbourne and Vocino (2014) who explored the connection between China’s traditional
cultural values and several pro-environmental behaviours. However, against the transformation of
its economic progress, the notion of China as a wholly collectivist society (Hofstede, 1980) is
questionable. The research of Arnett (2002), among others, suggests China is becoming more
individualistic as the ‘free-market’ becomes firmly embedded within its psyche. Thus, viewing
China on an individualism-collectivism continuum is too simplistic in investigating the drivers of
sustainable consumption in China.
Accordingly, in our study we uniquely contribute to theory by examining the sustainable
consumption behaviours of China’s consumers through a combined lens of pro-environmental self-
identity (PESI), which is an environmentally-friendly identity rooted in consumption (Dermody et
al. 2018) and traditional cultural values. Specifically, we examine the relative influence of
horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism and MNO values on Chinese consumers’
sustainable consumption behaviour, mediated by PESI (See Figure 1). Hence our study extends
the value-identity-personal norm model advanced by van der Werff and Steg (2016) and
strengthens the prominence of PESI as a mediator (Dermody et al. 2015; Dermody, et al., 2018) in
this cultural values-identity-behaviour relationship.
The vertical dimension of values represent hierarchy, whilst the horizontal emphasises
equality of individuals (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998). Horizontal individualists (HI) view the self as
autonomous and believe individuals are inherently equal with a desire to stand apart based on their
uniqueness (Cleveland & Bartikowski, 2018). In contrast vertical individualists (VI), whilst also
viewing the self as autonomous, consider inequality as unavoidable and prefer to stand out from
others via their competitive gains, social advancement and power (Cleveland & Bartikowski,
2018). Therefore, it can be reasonably expected that individuals with high HI, as opposed to high
VI, would be more considerate of environmental issues in their consumption decisions.
Collectivism is characterised by the priority of group-goals. Horizontal collectivists (HC) believe
members are equal, hence criticising in-group competition; however, vertical collectivists (VC)
420
accept hierarchy and subsequent in-group competition to achieve authority over other groups
(Cleveland & Bartikowski, 2018).
Furthermore, MNO is an ancient Chinese cultural value which pursues a balance between
human kind and nature where Taoism is embedded in its principles (Yau, 1988). MNO supports
the notion that human beings are considered as part of nature when preserving nature relationships
(Chan, 2001). Thus excess or inappropriate consumer behaviour would not appear to be congruent
with MNO whereas pro-environmental behaviours would be.
Data were collected from 503 Chinese consumers via an international panel company. All
constructs were measured by previously validated multi-item scales and tested for reliability and
validity. No issues were identified. Given the intended contribution of our study and the potential
strengths of bootstrapping procedures (Preacher & Hayes, 2008), the PROCESS mediation macro
(Hayes, 2013) was used to analyse the data with the proposed model explaining 41% of the
variation in PESI and 31.4% in sustainable consumption behaviour (Table1).
The traditional values of collectivism (HC, IC) and MNO significantly impact on self-
identity within our context of sustainable behaviours. Whereas VI individuals, who are
competitive, accept inequality and seek social status (Cleveland & Bartikowski, 2018; Holt, 1998;
Triandis & Gelfand, 1998), did not have a significant relationship with a PESI. However, HI who
are self-reliant, value “doing their own thing” (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) and prefer to stand out
via self-transcendence, did have a significant relationship with a PESI. Both PESI and HC
significantly and directly influence sustainable consumption behaviour, only VI does not
significantly affect behaviours through PESI.
Therefore, in considering marketing approaches to increase sustainable consumption
behaviours in China, several issues should be considered. Firstly, policies to promote traditional
cultural values, except VI, can be used to support a consumer’s PESI which, in turn, will
significantly influence their sustainable consumption behaviours. Secondly, whilst HC appears the
most powerful influencer of PESI and sustainable consumption behaviours, horizontal
individualists provide an interesting opportunity by supporting their need to stand apart from others
in a more self-transcendent orientation. Finally, further support for VC as a route to sustainable
consumption has been established which is congruent with China’s cultural development
(Cleveland & Bartikowski, 2018).
421
Figure 1. Research Framework
Table 1. Structural Model Path Coefficients (PROCESS)
422
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424
Consumers as
Change Agents IV
Track Chair: Mahsa Ghaffari
Co-Chair(s): Cristina Longo
Lin Su
Andrew Parsons
425
Consumer responses towards
cosmeceutical claims
Jie G. Fowler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Les Carlson, Ning Wang
(Extended Abstract)
Cosmetics were not even regulated until the 1930s (Liang and Hartman 1999; Newburger
2009) but after 16 cases of blindness were associated with Lash Lure Eyelash aniline dye,
Congress took action to protect consumers regarding cosmetic use (Riordan 2004). The Federal
Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) set the regulatory infrastructure for cosmetics based upon
prevailing knowledge at that time. The FDCA was modified in 1960 by the Color Additive
Amendment and again in 1966 by the Federal Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. The criteria for
evaluating cosmetics was intended to be very similar to established benchmarks for gauging
evidence-based medicine, i.e., controlled clinical studies using large panels with “blinded”
volunteers, use of accepted instrumental technology and/or proven clinical assessment
methodologies, well-chosen measurement parameters, and statistical analysis of the results
(Evidence-Based Cosmetics 2011). Still, Congress put more stringent controls on manufacture
and preparation of foods and drugs than on cosmetics (Newburger 2009).
The FDA is charged with enforcing the FDCA in terms of policing cosmetics that use
labeling that is false or misleading (Liang and Hartman 1999). As noted, though, cosmeceuticals
represent a gray area between cosmetics and drugs because cosmeceuticals possess properties of
both cosmetics and pharmaceuticals (Liang and Hartman 1999; Rinaldi 2008). The legal
distinction between drugs and cosmetics is that drugs cure, treat, mitigate or prevent disease or
affect the structure or function of the body while cosmetics do not have these purposes. Yet,
Alpha Hydroxy Acid (AHA), an exfoliant which can remove the surface layer of skin as a
treatment for scars, wrinkles, acne and to lighten skin, is a cosmetic additive. As removing skin
426
could be regarded as affecting body structure, AHA might be deemed a drug per the FDA
(Ringlow 2014) though, AHA is featured in cosmetic advertising. Thus, AHA qualifies as a
cosmeceutical because it exhibits properties of both cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
In essence, cosmeceutical is a “hybrid” expression derived by combining cosmetic and
pharmaceutical information (Fowler, Reisenwitz, and Carlson 2015). According to Merriam-
Webster (2017), cosmeceutical is defined as a cosmetic preparation that has pharmaceutical
properties. For instance, Benzoyl Peroxide or Retinol is a cosmetics ingredient that possesses
both cosmetic and pharmaceutical properties (Mukherjee et al. 2006). In addition, if a product is
labeled with seemly natural ingredients such as botanical components, marine extracts, or
vitamins, it should still be considered as a cosmeceutical (Jackson 2017). The medical
community acknowledges that cosmetic products have been marketed as cosmetics but reportedly
also contain biologically active ingredients. Examples include anti-wrinkle skin creams with
ingredients such as alpha lipoic acid and dimethylaminoethanol (MedicineNet 2017). Marie Jhin,
M.D. notes that even though cosmeceuticals may contain active medical ingredients that could be
beneficial in some way, consumers of these products also need to realize that cosmeceuticals
have not undergone rigorous investigation by the FDA. Consequently, neither the truthfulness of
cosmeceutical claims nor the benefits of these products can be assumed by consumers (Jackson
2017).
Because cosmeceutical claims appear to contain properties of both cosmetics as well as
pharmaceuticals, they may represent a “grey area” in that such claims are neither entirely
classifiable as cosmetics nor as pharmaceuticals (Fowler, Reisenwitz, and Carlson 2015).
Consequently, the jurisdiction domain applicable to cosmeceuticals is unclear, i.e., if
cosmeceuticals were viewed strictly as under the umbrella of pharmaceutical province then the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could exert authority over the potential misleading/
deceptive nature of these claims under the auspices of the cosmeceutical representing a drug. On
the other hand, the cosmetic industry prefers that such claims are viewed as “natural” (i.e., not a
drug) thereby avoiding FDA supervision even though provided claim substantiation is often
based on incomplete or insufficient testing (Fowler, Reisenwitz, and Carlson 2015). How
cosmeceuticals and the advertising of these products should be evaluated is clouded further by
the reality that the U.S. is one of only two nations that allows direct to consumer pharmaceutical
advertising (DTCPA); evidence which is perhaps indicative of a less intrusive regulatory
environment in the U.S. regarding these products. Moreover, advertising of pharmaceutical
427
products to consumers is a sizeable and rapidly growing phenomenon in the U.S. (DeLorme et al.
2006).
Consequently, consumers may have to proceed with little direction together with
concomitant caution when consuming these products. Perhaps most importantly, cosmeceutical
product consumers also want more information in the claims, i.e., the informational worth of a
cosmeceutical advertising claim is the most important reason in determining whether consumers
try the advertised cosmeceutical product (Meng and Pan 2012). Thus, further investigation of the
nature and scope of cosmeceutical advertising claims seems warranted specially to determine the
degree to which consumer informational needs are being met. Hence, the area of cosmeceutical
claims appears to be ripe for additional investigative endeavor and consequently, the purpose of
this paper is to assess the nature of cosmeceutical claims as well as explore potential implications
that may arise from their examination. Regarding the latter, we also investigate how consumers
respond to the different types of cosmeceutical claims in print ads.
In order to examine how consumers respond to the different types of claims, we utilized a
mixed method approach to investigate consumers’ response towards the claims. First, we
developed a typology centered on claim classifications and was derived by examining a broad
sample of cosmetics ads. Table 1 demonstrates the five cosmeceutical claims the researchers have
found.
Table 1: Cosmeceutical Claim Typology
Scientific Claims Types Description Examples
Scientific Image
The claim associates a general statement
which results in a broad-based scientific
image.
“Innovative Science”
Scientific Process The claim deals with technology, or the
production process.
“Apple Stem Cell Technology”
“IntuiGen Technology”
Scientific formula-
Natural
The claim is natural ingredient-based.
“Vitamin A and E”; “Argan Oil”
“ 100% pure Elastin Protein and
Marine collagen”
Scientific formula-
artificial
The claim is artificial ingredient-based. Adipofill’in complex; Mexoryz
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Scientific performance The claim involves scientific results based
upon research.
“Based upon our lab research, 80
percent of women felt winkle were
reduced within 4 weeks”
Combination The claim appears to have multiple facets
(shown above).
In addition, we chose five fashion magazine titles from 2016-2017 that contained the most
ad pages e.g., InStyle, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and W. For each magazine title, we selected
four issues e.g., from March, June/July, Sept/ Oct, and December to represent the four
seasons (some magazines combine two issues into one for June and July). Only ads with
sufficient size (one page) were used to enhance readability (Ford et al. 1998) and duplicate ads
were eliminated. This process resulted in 140 ads for the content analysis. The authors selected
judges with diverse backgrounds to ensure that their views reflected those of the general
consumer population, more so than if individuals with only cosmetics background had served as
judges (Carlson et al. 1993). In other words, the prior experience and current occupations of the
judges in the current study were quite diverse and which could contribute to tendencies to
evaluate the cosmetics claims differently. The judges were shown a total of 140 ads and they
were asked to categories the ads based upon the second typology which was developed by
Carlson et al (1993).
Table 2: Misleading and/or Deceptive Typology
Misleading types Description
Vague/Ambiguous The claim is overly vague or ambiguous. It contains a phrase or
statement that is too broad to have a clear meaning.
Omission The claim omits important information necessary to evaluate its
truthfulness or reasonableness.
False/Outright lie The claim is inaccurate or a fabrication.
Acceptable The claim is classified as being acceptable.
The key findings demonstrate a summary of differences found across the categories of
each typology in the content analysis ( =42.04, df =15, p=0.001). In terms of the
429
misleading/deceptiveness typology categories, the analysis revealed that claims were more often
classified as being Vague or as an Omission. For instance, formula-natural claims tended to be
classified as an Omission. In addition, performance claims were classified as omissions and as
false. Furthermore, cosmeceutical claim types were identified as “natural formula based” and
least often as “process/technology based.” Though natural formula based claims can be vague or
an omission, the findings also indicated that some natural ingredients can be deemed as
acceptable. However, artificial ingredients seemed to be less satisfactory as none of these claims
were deemed to be acceptable. Finally, performance based claims were deemed to be reflective of
an omission which may be due to a lack of providing sufficient information on how the research
implied in the claims was conducted.
The content analysis reveals that consumers are skeptical towards such claims. As such,
there is a need to further investigate how consumers responses from a large sample size. In doing
so, the authors developed a survey based upon the previously developed scales including
trustworthy, and skepticism towards advertisement. The variables were chosen due to the content
analysis results which shows that consumers are skeptical towards the claims. Additional
constructs include but not limited to attitude towards advertisement, (attitude toward scientific
terms, technology readiness index, and domain-specific innovativeness (Chattopadhyay and
Nedungadi 1992; Goldsmith and Hofacker 1991; Obermiller and Spangenberg 1998; Ohanian
1990; Parasuraman 2000). The survey is designed to further investigate if the skepticism towards
the claims have impact on the altitudes towards the claims and the ads in general.
A total of 509 female respondents participated the study. The survey results (path model)
show that for all five claims types, skepticism significantly impacts attitudes towards the claims,
and the attitudes towards the claims has significant impact on attitudes towards the ads. That
being said, the cosmeceutical claims have influence on how consumers perceive the ads in
general. Additionally, the analysis shows that consumers’ technological knowledge also have
positive impact the attitudes towards all five types of the scientific claims. Furthermore, among
the five types of claims, consumers mostly likely to trust natural ingredient claims and least likely
to trust technology claims which may due to the difficulty to understand such claims without
adequate information provided by advertisers. Finally, the means for all five types of claims were
below average which indicates that consumers are skeptical towards the claims due to the
missing/inadequate/vague information provided in the ads. In general, this finding is consistent
with the content analysis.
430
The goal of this research was to delve more deeply into a specific type of cosmetic
advertising claim, i.e., cosmeceuticals that heretofore have not been subjected to the form of
research scrutiny that we attempted in these studies. The analysis demonstrates that consumers
have difficulty to understand majority of the scientific claims without adequate information
provided by advertisers. The impetus for this research arose because of the uncertain status of
how these claims might be viewed by cosmetic consumers and because the FDA, under whose
authority the supervision of cosmetics is bestowed (i.e., in terms of assessing the safety of these
products) has not assumed a regulatory role regarding advertising based cosmeceutical claims
(Liang and Hartman 1999). Indeed, the FDA does not even acknowledge the existence of this
product category. The FDA specifically notes that the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act
does not “recognize any such category as ‘cosmeceuticals’” and moreover, that the “term
‘cosmeceuticals’ has no meaning under the law” (FDA 2002).
We hoped in this research to provide insight about cosmeceutical claims which included
determining the frequency of occurrence of these claims. If cosmeceutical claims only appear
rarely, if ever, in ads in media accessible to cosmetics consumers, then it might be argued that
this is an area that requires little if any additional consideration. On the other hand, if such ad
claims do emerge frequently in sources used by cosmetics consumers, then the next step might
include determining the type of claims being evidenced in cosmeceutical advertising as well as
assessing the degree to which these claims may be perceived as misleading/deceptive in order to
ascertain whether consumer information needs are being met. The latter is particularly important
because even though consumers desire information to aid decision making about cosmeceutical
products (Meng and Pan 2012) that information must be in a form that is useful and not
misleading/deceptive in content.
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434
Consumers drive fairness for
farmers: a social enterprise
perspective
Lilliemay Cheung, The University of Queensland, Australia
David Fleischman61 62, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
Peter Jenner, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
Our research examines the role of macro-structures in shaping market practices, including
consumption and production, in a food system operating as a social enterprise. The paper draws
on the related literatures of service-dominant (SD) logic (Vargo and Lusch 2006; 2016),
transformative service research (TSR) (Anderson et al. 2013; Fisk et al. 2016) and consumer
culture theory (CCT) (Arnould and Thompson 2005; Arnould, Price and Malshe 2006).
Extending earlier work on community supported agriculture (Thompson and Coskuner-Balli
2007), we argue that in this context consumers act to shape the market centered around an
alternate organic food market system in response to frustration with the dominant market
offerings from large-scale, commercially available food supplied by large corporations.
The aim of the research is to unpack and explore how and why consumer practices can
drive changes at a societal level. In particular, we examine how consumer practices have driven
demand changes and how consumer agency, as the active pursuit of action that is driven by
choice and aligned to important values, can change widespread market practices. We argue that
consumers and producers are equal partners in a trading relationship that is captured within the
philosophy of a “social enterprise” (Defourny and Nyssens 2010; Galera and Borzaga 2009).
More importantly, we emphasize the role that democracy (Woods 2004) plays in exchange
61 Corresponding author 62 [email protected]
435
relationships which to date has not been considered in detail in the literature on S-D logic or
TSR.
Employing the theoretical lens of S-D logic, we argue that this sustainable food system is
conceptualised as a service ecosystem in that it is a “relatively self-contained, self-adjusting
system of resource integrating actors connected by shared institutional arrangements and mutual
value creation through service exchange” (Vargo and Lusch 2016, p. 161). The exchange
practices engaged in by the actors construct and reconstruct structure and agency within the
parameters of the system (Edvardsson et al. 2011). Therefore, through the act of resisting
commercial offerings, actors construct other viable alternatives for food provisioning, thereby
creating demand for and support of an alternative food network (Thompson and Coskuner-Balli
2007). By doing so, the consumers who purchase food outside the hegemonic corporations could
also be considered a practice of activism where consumers question the morals and ethics of their
choices to consider broader social and environmental implications (Kozinets and Handleman
2004). Consumers can effect change by embracing the alternate food system and voice their
dissatisfaction with the hegemonic commercial market logic. Thus, in turn, exercise the principles
of democracy by supporting a social enterprise built on more equitable economic values (Galera
and Borzaga 2009; Woods 2004). In the context of a market, democratic practices are defined as
the ability of actors to participate decision-making; engage in open dialogue between all parties;
focus on the collective well-being of the entity and not individual gains; and are driven by an
ethical or moral regard (Woods 2004).
This research is a case study (Einshardt and Graebner 2007; Yin 2003) of a social
enterprise whose mission is to support a more democratic food system through linking consumers
more directly with famers providing local, seasonal food grown with ecological integrity. Data
was collected from 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews (Cheung, McColl-Kennedy and Coote
2016; Prell 2013. We also conducted participant-observations of interactions between customers,
staff, suppliers and farmers in the food system over a nine-month period between March and
December 2017 and recorded extensive field notes. The data analysis concentrated on
understanding how consumers and producers constructed meaning from their food purchasing
behaviors informed by Practice Theory (Schatzki 1996) in which he argues social practices are
the fundamental unit of analysis of all social phenomena. In this context, we consider practices to
be the actions and decisions to be normalized, routine activities that are exhibited through the
436
mundane act of food consumption and production. This is not to say that the everyday is
predictable, but rather than many of the decisions and choices, food eaters and food growers are
often habituated in the context of food consumption. Through the data analysis of the verbatim
transcriptions we were able to develop a conceptual framework of the democratic principles that
underpin practices undertaken by both consumers and producers of fair trade in this social
enterprise.
Content from the interviews revealed how consumers played an active role in establishing
the network driven by their growing dissatisfaction with price, quality and experience of
purchasing food from large corporations. Supporting a social enterprise gave consumers the
opportunity to “make a difference”, to “send a signal” to large corporations that “consumers want
to have a relationship with the food they eat”. Even if the consumer often feels “powerless”,
“dissatisfied with the taste, quality and price” of food available in large supermarkets, they often
didn’t see any alternative. Significantly, loyal social enterprise consumers use their food
consumption practices, preferences and choices as an opportunity to demonstrate their social
values. One consumer suggested that “supporting local farmers is a really important
responsibility in this community”. The outcome repositions the farmer (producer) as a visible,
important part of the community via consumers leveraging their agency for a food system model
that supports stakeholder inclusion and transparency.
The normalised and often routine practices that organic consumers participate in include:
not buying fresh food from large supermarkets; joining fresh food co-ops; subscribing to food
box deliveries schemes; purchasing fresh food from weekly or monthly local community
markets; buying directly from farmers on the farms; volunteering to assist with harvesting,
packing, ordering and deliveries within the regional food hub; recycling packaging, and
consciously minimizing food waste by freezing and preserving surplus foods. In contrast to
supermarket shopping, the customer practices described involve considerably more effort and
inconvenience. In many cases consumers face limited choice and repetitive assortments of fresh
food associated with surpluses of seasonal harvests. Some committed consumers consciously do
not restock if the food supplies run out low.
Consumers were often motivated by anti-consumption values (Chatzidakis and Lee 2012)
and offered a range of range of reasons for doing so. Some said they wanted to “make a stance
437
against globalisation”, or “were concerned about climate change and food security”. Others felt
boycotting large corporations were practices that would “reduce waste” and “reward more
environmentally sustainable producers”. In line with Chatzidakis and Lee (2012) not all
arguments for certain consumer practices can be viewed as rational opposites to other
alternatives. For example, we also found that while consumers may be committed high ethical or
environmental values in relation to food purchasing this was not always the case in other areas of
consumption such as fashion, transportation or fuel.
The interviews with producers in the regional food network also provided rich insights
into the how consumer demand to have a direct connection with the farm drove the establishment
of the organic food social enterprise. According to one of the farmers, consumers wanted to
“change the food system, fundamentally, change the system”. Further he suggested that “it might
be as simple as they want to buy fair trade coffee or purchase of reusable cup, but more and more,
consumers understand that the food system is one place that they can make a difference”. At the
heart of the social enterprise is the moral value of a “fairer system” where “true-cost economics
can highlight the true value of food” taking into account the economic, ecological, social justice
and environmental costs of growing food. The social enterprise sprung from “getting the farmers
and the consumers together”. The farmers “said these are the things we can grow and developed a
seasonal calendar” – “the consumers designed the boxes based on what the farmers said they
could grow”. Farmers also discussed the importance of collaborative, democratic decision-
making underpinning the business strategy. Constant themes of “fairness”, “integrity and trust”,
“realistic and clear expectations”, “mutually beneficial relationships”, “sharing risks”, “resisting
being strong-armed into delivering unrealistic high yields or risky crop selections” and “co-
operating with other farmers rather than competing” were apparent in the research.
Increasingly food consumers are concerned with the modern economic practices prevalent
in commercial food systems in the developed world, such as the concentration of markets in
agricultural from the farm, through processing and right to the supermarket shelves. The trend is
for a small number of large players to control global control of food systems (iPES 2017). “This
means that the vast majority of farmers, consumers and communities are left out of key decisions
about how we farm and what we eat,” (Hendrickson, Howard and Constance. 2017, p. 1). This
type of collaboration between actors embedded in regional food networks, such as the one in this
case study, offer consumers an alternative to large global food systems (Holt Giménez and
438
Shattuck 2011). According to Thompson and Coskuner-Balli (2007) “the ideological appeal of
CSA flows from what appears to be a simpler (and more indubitable) choice of a very specific
form of food production and consumption,” (p. 151). Many CSAs are organized as social
enterprises. Social enterprises are organisations driven by a primary social purpose that trade,
wherein profit goes towards the fulfillment of mission rather than profit maximisation for
shareholders (Doherty et al 2014). An important feature of social enterprise is the inherent social
capital which is derived from the multi-stakeholder collaboration and mutuality (Pearce 2003).
“Social enterprise is a way in which people can work together to create wellbeing in terms of
equality and fairness…whereby economic activity is a means to an end not end in itself” (Kay et
al. 2016 p. 224).
In our case study the food consumption and production practices can be defined as
expressions of a common area of agency representing shared goals at community level and
embodying a gradual shift from utilitarian–private visions to economic models based on
solidarity and the defence of common goods (Renting 2012). Working collectively, the food
network actors are able to create new ‘spaces to manoeuvre’ for organizing food production,
distribution and consumption differently (Renting 2012, p. 298) and work as ‘agents of change’
at a local level, with the intention of wearing down dominant institutional narratives and practices
that work against their values. Even if change is gradual, the local actors within a sustainable
food network continue resist dominant commercial offerings, marketing strategies, and
corporatized political agendas, with the intention of providing alternatives to centralised global
food systems.
We conclude by suggesting that the exploration of social enterprises that operate with a
democratic orientation will be useful additions to current theorising regarding how and why
consumer practices change macro-level structures and attain civil societal outcomes such as
sustainability, community development, and fairness. According to Renting and his colleagues
(2012, p.289), actors embedded in sustainable food networks are ‘reshaping the relations between
food practices and the market in ways that go beyond material and economic exchange’ and that
contribute to more democratic food economies.
439
References
Anderson, Laurel, Amy L. Ostrom, Canan Corus, Raymond P. Fisk, Andrew S. Gallan,
Mario Giraldo, Martin Mende, Mark Mulder, Steven W. Rayburn, Mark S. Rosenbaum, Kunio
Shirahada and Jerome D. Williams, (2013), “Transformative Service Research: An Agenda for
the Future,” Journal of Business Research, 66(8), 1203-1210.
Arnould, Eric J., Linda L. Price and Avinash Malshe, (2006), “Toward a Cultural
Resource-Based Theory of the Customer,” in S.L. Vargo and R.F. Lusch (eds.), The Service-
Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate and Directions, Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe Inc.,
320-33.
Arnould, Eric J. and Craig J. Thompson, (2005), “Consumer culture theory (CCT):
Twenty years of research”, Journal of Consumer Research, 31(4), 868-882.
Cetina, Karin Knorr, Theodore R. Schatzki and Eike von Savigny, (eds) 2005. The
Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. New York: Routledge,
Chatzidakis, Andreas and Michael, W.S. Lee (2012) “Anti consumption as the study of
reasons against”, Journal of Macromarketing, 33(3), 190-203.
Cheung, Lilliemay, Janet R. McColl-Kennedy and Len V. Coote, (2017), “Consumer-
citizens Mobilizing Social Capital Following a Natural Disaster: Effects on Well-being. Journal
of Services Marketing, 31(4/5), 438-451.
Defourny, Jaques and Marthe Nyssens, (2010), “Conceptions of Social Enterprise and
Social Entrepreneurship in Europe and the United States: Convergences and Divergences,
Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 1(1), 32-53.
Doherty, Bob., Helen Haugh, and Fergus Lyon (2014), “Social enterprises as hybrid
organisations: a review and research agenda”, International Journal of Management Reviews,
16(4), 1-20.
Edvardsson, Bo., Bard Tronvoll and Thorsten Gruber, (2011), “Expanding Understanding
of Service Exchange and Value Co-Creation: a Social Construction Approach,” Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science, 39(2), 327-339.
440
Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. and Melissa E. Graebner, (2007), “Theory Building from Cases:
Opportunities and Challenges,” Academy of Management Journal, 50 (1), 25-32.
Fisk, Raymond P.P., Laurel Anderson, Bowen, D.E., Thorsten Gruber, Amy Ostrom, Lia
Patrício, Javier Reynoso and Roberta Sebastiani, (2016), “Billions of Impoverished People
Deserve to be Better Served: a Call to Action for the Service Research Community”, Journal of
Service Management, 27(1), 43-55.
Galera, Giulia, and Carlo Borzaga, (2009), “Social Enterprise: An international overview
of its conceptual evolution and legal implementation,” Social Enterprise Journal, 5(3), 210-228.
Henderickson, Mary K, Phillip, H. Howard and Douglas Constance (2017) “Power, Food
and Agriculture: Implications for farmers, consumers, and communities,” University of Missouri
College of Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources Division of Applied Social Sciences Working
Paper.
Holt Giménez, Eric and Annie Shattuck (2011), “Food crises, food regimes and food
movements: rumblings of reform or tides of transformation?”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(1),
109-144.
International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, (2017), “Too big to feed:
Exploring the impacts of mega-mergers, concentration, concentration of power in the agri-food
sector”, downloaded from www.ipes-food.org on 12 November 2017.
Kay, Alan., Roy, Michael, and Cam Donaldson (2016) “Re-imagining social enterprise”,
Social Enterprise Journal, 12(2), 217-234
Kozinets, Robert V., and Jay M. Handelman. (2004), "Adversaries of Consumption:
Consumer Movements, Activism, and Ideology." Journal of Consumer Research 31(3), 691-704.
Pearce, John (2003). Social enterprise in any town. London: Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation.
Prell, Christina., (2013), Social Network Analysis: History, Theory and Methodology, UK:
Sage.
441
Renting, Henk, Markus Schermer, and Adanella Rossi (2012), "Building food democracy:
Exploring civic food networks and newly emerging forms of food citizenship," International
Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 19(3), 289-307.
Vargo, Stephen L., and Robert F. Lusch, (2016), “Institutions and Axioms: An Extension
and Update of Service-Dominant Logic,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44(1), 5-
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What It Is Not, What It Might Be,” in The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate
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442
Marketing and
economic responsibility:
historical roots and
contemporary interpretations
Panel Chair: Michaela Haase
443
Panel Session Marketing and
economic responsibility: historical
roots and contemporary
interpretations
Special session chair:
Michaela Haase63, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
The title of this panel is a reference to an article published by the institutional economist John M.
Clark in the Journal of Political Economy in 1916: The Changing Basis of Economic
Responsibility. In this article, Clark argued for the development of an economics capable to
provide the actors with the knowledge required to act responsibly in a complex, dynamic world.
In case of economics, Clark was convinced that laissez-faire economics cannot cope with this
task and that there is a need for the development of an economics of responsibility.
What can be asked of economics, can be asked of other disciplines as well. In line with this view,
the panelists look at the marketing discipline and its potential role as knowledge provider within
the canon of social-scientific disciplines. What kind of knowledge does the marketing discipline
provide? In what regard is the marketing discipline a knowledge provider for responsible
individual and collective action or could / should be considered as such? Is there a place for
different knowledge types in marketing such as scientific knowledge, moral knowledge, practical
knowledge, and aesthetic knowledge?
Reference
Clark, John M. (1916), “The Changing Basis of Economic Responsibility,” Journal of Political
Economy, 24(3), 209-229.
444
Panelists:
Nikhilesh Dholakia, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island, United States
Christine Domegan, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland and Roger A. Layton,
University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia
Michael Kleinaltenkamp, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Gene Laczniak, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Unites States
Helge Löbler, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Clifford J. Shultz II, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, United States
445
Responsibility of Marketing
Knowledge and Practice:
Misdirected Teleology and Crisis of
Ontology
Nikhilesh Dholakia, University of Rhode Island, USA
The essay by Clark (1916) is generally regarded as the first major plea for the discipline
of economics to discern, observe and promote social responsibility of that intellectual field. If this
is so, it took over two centuries of economic thinking and analysis before a strong plea for social
responsibility emerged. Dominique Bouchet, an astute social scientist, based in a department of
marketing, has observed, however, that a clearer and deeper reading of the ‘laissez faire, invisible
hand’ ideas of Adam Smith reveals that – even in the last quarter of the 18th century – Smith was
very much concerned with the social impact and the social responsibility of his ideas (Bouchet
2017).
As an intellectual field of endeavor and as a discipline, marketing traces its beginning to
the first decade of the twentieth century. The first college courses in marketing appeared in the
first decade of the twentieth century. Some pleas for socially “good” and responsible marketing
began to appear within fifty years of the emergence of the discipline of marketing (McKitterick
1958). Major intellectual milestones in the quest for social responsibility of marketing can be
marked at the years 1971 (Kotler and Zaltman 1971), 1973 (Fisk 1973), 1987 (Robin and
Reidenbach), 2001 (Sen and Bhattacharya 2001), 2004 (Maignan and Ferrell 2004), and 2008
(Vaaland, Heide and Grønhaug 2008). While intellectual efforts to inject social responsibility in
marketing have been consistent and often strong, the underlying philosophical issues – in
ontological, epistemic and practice-theoretic senses – have not received adequate attention.
The works on the social responsibility of business and marketing have focused on
questions such as this: Which practices are socially responsible, or not? What motivates
companies to adopt socially responsible practices? What are the impacts of socially responsible
446
strategies and actions on buyers, consumers and the company’s bottom line? Do buyers and
consumers care for, exhibit preference for, and loyalty toward brands and companies that act in
socially responsible ways? Can responsible marketing methods and techniques be transferred to
non-commercial and pro-social entities and sectors?
With the exception of Fisk (1973), all the leading authors on social responsibility have
been driven by the desire to advance the goals of some specific corporate or corporeal entity: a
firm, an agency, or a person. The underlying ontological quest and epistemic approach is to make
the entity ‘do better’ – in terms of goal achievement or performance relative to a competing
entity. The ‘milestone works’ cited above are teleologically driven and teleology-intensive:
advance, achieve or exceed the goals of the entity in focus.
The problem with all these approaches – and again Fisk (1973) excepted – is that the issue
of why socially non-responsible actions and decisions occur receive only cursory attention. It is
as if the general expectation is that corporate decisions and actions (as well as individual buyer’s
decisions and actions) will not be particularly ‘responsible’ and ‘good’ – efforts are needed to
identify, motivate, and channel behaviors toward responsibility. It is as if in our everyday life, the
expectation is that we will generally be unethical, immoral and even criminal – but, well, it would
be a good idea to motivate us to move us away from these ‘bad’ states and toward ‘good’ states.
In Freudian terms, it is as if the general expectation – for individuals and corporate entities – is to
be id-driven; and even modestly stable ego-driven (let alone a noble superego-driven) ways of
doing things are challenging, non-intuitive, immensely effortful and hence rare and exceptional.
To use another analogy, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) concept presents to us (and
urges us to be thankful for) the nice-looking pristine tip of the iceberg – the admirable and visible
sliver of good corporate actions, the one-tenth of the iceberg – and to ignore the menacing and
submerged nine-tenth of the iceberg that represents dark, shadowy, possibly unethical and
irresponsible actions. As any geologist will quickly point out, icebergs have a tendency to invert
in unpredictable and violent ways – destroying anything nearby and possibly causing tidal waves
and tsunamis.
Why is this the case? Why do we obsess excessively – in managerial practices as well is
in managerial and marketing theories – on how to identify, motivate and promote responsible
actions? Why don’t we focus attention – especially academic and theoretical attention, since
academia does not face the imperatives of quarterly financial reporting – on how to create
447
systems where pro-social responsibility is the norm and exceptions from the norm are, well, rare
and problematic exceptions? This is the way we expect to lead everyday life – civility is the norm
and criminality is the rare and problematic exception. Except in fields like criminal justice and
recidivism studies, we do not spend time conducting academic research on and obsessing over
how to promote normally good behavior.
In our managerial practices and even in our knowledge creation and validation endeavors,
we are faced with ontological blindspots, blind alleys and traps. The research on (and the
practices of) corporate social responsibility are informed by a concept of liberalism that is
individualistic – and hence specific personal or corporate goal-seeking become the bases for
corporate practices and academic theorizing. In that sense, left-liberalism and neoliberalism –
even when they seem violently opposed to each other, daggers drawn – share a common
philosophical base. The former strives for social responsibility, often tempered by state
regulation, while seeking individual goals; while the latter (neoliberalism) believes that
unfettered and minimally regulated markets would automatically engender the upliftment and
betterment of all. All these forms of liberalism are, at the core, teleologically individualistic.
Some of the recent philosophical directions, particularly North American, have argued that a
communitarian ontology that engenders a common good is feasible and preferable to an
individualistic liberal ontology. The political-economic power dynamics of the contemporary
world, however, relegate the communitarian ideas to the ‘wishful thinking’ basket.
The practical and theoretical challenge is to break free from the modern cage of
universalistic thinking, the idea that a way – be it the way of unfettered neoliberalism, the path of
tempered and regulated corporate social responsibility, or a novel efflorescence of communitarian
ethos – can be found, to make marketers responsible and markets fair.
We are clearly in the midst of a transmodern and postmodern epochal transformational
conditions (Fırat and Dholakia 2006), where universalistic solutions cannot be found. Among the
ideas that are workable, in such conditions, are those that seek the erasure of modern dichotomies
of producer/consumer, producer/user and owner/worker (see, for example, Fırat and Dholakia
2017). The edifice of responsible marketing and corporate social responsibility rests on the
dualist notion of protecting “us” (the consumers, the citizens) from “them” (irresponsible
corporations, uncaring state agencies), entities that could launch actions that harm us. When we
begin to erase these dualisms – not universally but in intersecting, overlapping spheres – then the
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binary of responsible/irresponsible also begins to crumble. In such a post-dualist world, we are
responsible – it is just “us”, as we begin to subsume “them” into our creative orbits.
References
Bouchet, Dominique (2017), “Adam Smith, Market and Social Change: Then and
Now”, Markets, Globalization & Development Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, Article 3.
Clark, J. Maurice (1916), “The changing basis of economic responsibility”, Journal of Political
Economy, Vol. 24, No. 3, 209-229.
Fırat, A. Fuat and Nikhilesh Dholakia (2006), “Theoretical and philosophical implications of
postmodern debates: some challenges to modern marketing”, Marketing Theory, Vol. 6,
No. 2, 123-162.
Fırat, A. Fuat and Nikhilesh Dholakia (2017), “From consumer to construer: Travels in human
subjectivity”, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 17, No. 3, 504-522.
Fisk, George (1973), “Criteria for a theory of responsible consumption”, Journal of Marketing,
Vol. 37, No. 2, 24-31.
Kotler, Philip and Gerald Zaltman (1971), “Social marketing: An approach to planned social
change”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 35, No. 3, 3-12.
Maignan, Isabelle and O. C. Ferrell (2004), “Corporate social responsibility and marketing: An
integrative framework”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 32, No. 1, 3-
19.
McKitterick, J. B. (1958), “What is the Marketing Management Concept?” in The Frontiers of
Marketing Thought and Science, Frank M. Bass, ed., Chicago: American Marketing
Association, pp. 71-82.
Robin, Donald P., and R. Eric Reidenbach (1987), “Social responsibility, ethics, and marketing
strategy: Closing the gap between concept and application”, Journal of Marketing, Vol.
51, No. 1, 44-58.
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Sen, Sankar and Chitra Bhanu Bhattacharya (2001), “Does doing good always lead to doing
better? Consumer reactions to corporate social responsibility”, Journal of Marketing
Research, Vol. 38, No. 2, 225-243.
Vaaland, Terje I., Morten Heide, and Kjell Grønhaug (2008), “Corporate social responsibility:
investigating theory and research in the marketing context”, European Journal of
Marketing, Vol. 42, No. 9/10, 927-953.
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Marketing and economic
responsibility: historical roots and
contemporary interpretations
Roger A. Layton, UNSW, Sydney, Australia
Christine T. Domegan, NUI Galway, Ireland
John Maurice Clark’s work in 1916 on economic responsibility raises important questions, not just
for his times but for the period in which we live today. In 1916 John Maurice Clark was writing as
an economist, with ideas framed by classical and neo-classical thinking – by scholars such as Adam
Smith, David Ricardo, William Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras and Alfred Marshall - who went on
to introduce the idea of workable competition in a dynamic economy. Just over 100 years later,
Michaela has asked us to consider the relevance and importance of these questions for a social
discipline that did not exist 100 years ago but which could, perhaps should, carry responsibility for
finding workable answers. She asks “What kind of knowledge does the marketing discipline
provide? In what regard is the marketing discipline a knowledge provider for responsible individual
and collective action or could / should be considered as such? Is there a place for different
knowledge types in marketing such as scientific knowledge, moral knowledge, practical
knowledge, and aesthetic knowledge?” While all three questions are important, it is the first two
that are critical if marketing is to contribute significantly to contemporary public policy and to an
understanding of the interactions among economic and social systems.
In many respects the world in 1916 was not so different to that which we confront today. A world
war was under way, in which long established empires and cultures were colliding; America, once
isolationist in spirit, was on the edge of drifting into participation in a global struggle; technologies
were being transformed, part of an ongoing industrial revolution, reaching out across the world;
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politics and power were everywhere on display, and the very bases of everyday life were under
challenge. In 2018 empires of thought and practice are colliding once again, boundaries are
tumbling, technologies are changing cultures and connectivity, politics and power are entangled in
ways that are difficult to understand, refugees and migrants are looking for a better future, and
everyday life is still troubled and challenged. There is however one profound difference between
Clark’s 1916 and our 2018. WE are at a fundamental junction in the planet’s evolution. One
species, humans and their activities, is changing the planet itself, altering its landscapes, its
biodiversity, the species and different ecosystems on earth, its oceans and seas and climate.
Dominating most humans and their activities – their transport, health, food, leisure and tourism and
energy needs – are their self-interested, short term consumption behaviours and the myopic,
stakeholder driven marketing structures that have emerged over time.
In 2018, more than a century later, we suspect that economists would still have difficulty in
answering the kind of questions John Maurice Clark and Michaela have raised. In the years
between, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Paul Samuelson have been leading
contributors to economic thought, the first emphasising aggregate demand and the role of the State,
the second favouring free markets and a minimalist role for the State, and the third, Paul Samuelson,
building on the earlier scholars to establish a mathematical foundation for economic thought that
placed fully informed rational decisions at all levels at the centre of microeconomic debate. The
resulting disconnect between macro and micro, a commitment to self-interest as the primary
motivator for all economic action, a focus on individual rather than collective action, and an
absence of insights into the workings of a market, are some of the key evolutionary factors that
have combined to limit the capability of economics to be a knowledge provider for responsible
individual and collective action.
Is marketing in a position to provide the missing answers? We suggest that the answer is “No, not
quite”, but this could and should change. While much of marketing thought shares with economics
an emphasis on methodological individualism (managerial marketing has its roots in the self-
interested, fully informed, individual decision makers that microeconomic modelling is built
around), marketing, and especially macromarketing, was also anchored in the institutions,
particularly of American capitalism. While in economics Douglass North and others highlighted
the important role of institutions, policy determination rested on a macroeconomics that reflected
individual rather than collective self-interest, on individualism rather than systems thinking. In
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marketing however both systems thinking and collective choice have played an important role. An
understanding of systems thinking helps to understand the networks of exchange relationships
found in every human community. Collective choice begins with trust, cooperation, collaboration,
self-organization and emergence, generating over time the structures and processes that form
networks of exchange. In marketing, a systems approach was used to explore distribution channels,
supply chains, and vertical marketing systems; in macromarketing the foundations were laid for
the study of marketing systems; the nature of service and the relationships that form over time as
service networks grow were considered extensively, with implications for increasingly complex
multi-level B2B networks; the contribution of marketing to the quality of life in human
communities has grown in importance; and guiding and promoting the formation of marketing
systems in developing countries such as Latin America, Africa and Asia became increasingly
prominent in the study of marketing and, especially, in macromarketing. In marketing, the study of
collective choice informs an understanding of the evolutionary processes shaping market exchange
in all human communities. In all these ways, and many others, systems thinking and collective
choice in marketing have provided significant insights informing individual and potentially
collective action.
It was however, one wide-ranging, but under-developed area of marketing thought that takes on
mounting importance when we consider again the implications of the issues raised by John Maurice
Clark and now by Michaela. This is what we have come to think of as social marketing, the wide
ranging application of marketing insights to addressing social concerns. We need now to look
behind the many outstanding examples of situations that have been addressed in social marketing,
as, for the most part, these examples focus on the application of managerial marketing principles
to immediate social marketing challenges. These principles have worked well and will continue to
do so. However, in doing so social marketing has widened the application of marketing to establish
a foundation not just in the self-interested choices of individuals, groups and entities, but to draw
on mutuality and morality in exploring the offers we seek to construct and implement; to look
beyond the individual to see the human collectives that are in impacted by our choices; to see
actions or choices in ever wider time, space and social systems settings; to see an intervention not
as an event where we can walk away as an equilibrium is established, but as a continuing
involvement in the ongoing chaos of everyday life. The venture into social marketing has opened
the door for marketing thought and practice to consider a much wider set of challenges facing
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human communities at all levels that have to be addressed – sustainability, the collective impacts
of new technologies, the collapse of boundaries separating old industries and thus markets, the
problems of addiction such as alcohol and gambling, the weight of growing obesity in many parts
of the world but especially amongst youngsters, and many more. Marketing needs wider horizons
if we are to inform responsible action.
As a case in hand, illustrating the need for wider horizons in marketing, for an understanding
of the ways that multi-level social marketing systems can form, grow and change over time,
consider the challenge of obesity in Ireland. WHO forecasts that Ireland will be the most
obese country in Europe by 2030 (WHO 2015). One of the numerous market offerings in the
fight against obesity in the Republic of Ireland is Operation Transformation (OT), a healthy
lifestyle reality programme, now grown into a national movement involving a range of
stakeholders. First aired in 2007, the programme has celebrated its 11th season. The initial OT
value-based exchange in 2007 occurred between RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster who
initiated a contract with VIP Productions for VIP to produce the programme (Figure 1). VIP
and RTÉ then engaged in exchanges with 5 OT leaders and 3 experts as part of the programme
formula.
RTÉ first aired the Operation Transformation as a ‘public service’ programme (fun plus
healthy lifestyle) and VIP produced it as an ‘entertainment plus educational’ piece. RTÉ could
have commissioned OT as a documentary - heavier on obesity knowledge, more critical of
food consumption and negative in nature, for example, endorsing sugar taxes. This would have
ruled VIP out as the producing stakeholder and set the stage for more health promotion and
medical - orientated stakeholders, e.g. gastro surgeons to buy-in.
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Figure 1: Operation Transformation Provisioning System
In 2010, phase 2 of OT emerged with safefood sponsoring the programme. safefood are an all-
island entity whose remit is to promote awareness and knowledge of food safety, food hygiene
and nutrition issues on an all-island basis. The ‘public service’ situational framing predisposed
safefood to sponsor OT based on their remit to promote awareness and knowledge of food
safety, food hygiene and nutrition issues on an all-island basis. In particular, safefood
sponsoring OT brought about a general acceptance that responsibility for healthy food
provision is shared among producers, processors, and distributors at all levels, including
caterers and the general public. Thus, OT began its expansion from a lifestyle television
programme to an interactive platform for change encouraging the public to follow and modify
their eating and exercise habits with their chosen leaders. Activities encompass the television
series with leaders as well as events featuring community groups, social media discussion
boards, radio, interactive food and exercise apps and real time events such as 5k leader runs.
The third and ongoing phase since 2013 is about Operation Transformation linkages,
connections and interactions with other Obesity focused sub-systems in Ireland such as WHO
Healthy City initiatives in Irish cities and counties. Written into the Operation Transformation
public service approach is a strong participatory foundation. The bottom up approach works
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on the assumption of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and the power of self-organization.
Individuals are perceived and treated as having the capabilities to empower themselves, with
some guidance from experts. This is in contrast to a top down perspective telling the people
what to do, as might happen in a medical or health documentary. The OT emphasis on changes
in individual and community lifestyles resonates with Healthy Ireland, a government-led
initiative aiming to provide individuals and communities with ways to improve their health
and wellbeing and solutions that “empower and motivate them by making the healthy choice
the easier choice” (Healthy Ireland 2017). Each year OT is involved in organising a series of
events, including nationwide walks and cycle days, aimed at getting people active. Each series
culminates in a 5km run in the capital; Dublin, with all leaders participating. This is supported
throughout the remainder of the year with 5k park runs in cities and towns around Ireland
including Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, Athlone and Sligo (safefood, 2015).
Taking an example from the other side of the world, in Australia (and not just Australia!) we have
an energy market completely out of kilter – potential shortages of coal and gas not met by
renewables, activists on all sides, state and federal governments in fierce political debate, energy
companies in monopoly positions but unable to invest due to political uncertainty, customers
(households and business) up in arms at price gouging and unreliability, export market contracts
for coal seam gas priced low and exhausting supply, and farmers at war with mining companies.
This seems to be a never-ending saga in which the self-interested choices of individuals, groups
and entities are dominant.
In both situations we need to draw on a blend of self-interest, mutuality and morality to consider
outcomes that seek to balance the interests of stakeholders; to look beyond the individual to see the
human collectives that are in impacted by our choices; to see actions or choices in ever wider time,
space and social systems settings; to see an intervention not as an event where we can walk away
as an equilibrium is established, but as a continuing involvement in the ongoing chaos of everyday
life
If we are to contribute to responsible action in situations such as these, then marketing must be
fully systems oriented – delivery systems, stakeholder politics and influences, technology evolution
factored in, and changing values seen as possibilities, to say nothing of infrastructural lock-in,
institutional dependencies, and of course behind it all a constant evolutionary choice process where
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countless individuals, groups and entities are all initiating change in their perceived worlds all the
time. Is there a place for different knowledge types in marketing? Our sense is that in the future
evolution of marketing each of the knowledge types mentioned by Michaela – scientific, moral,
practical and aesthetic – must be jointly located in our understanding of emergent complexity in
the evolution of interconnected marketing systems at each level in the life of a human community.
It is this understanding that will enable us to link scientific, moral and practical knowledge in our
scholarship, teaching and in policy recommendations; if framed appropriately it may contribute to
our understanding of the aesthetic in everyday life; and it might, just might, integrate
macromarketing with its micro and managerial colleagues!
What then would it take to enhance the possibility that the marketing discipline could contribute
significant insights to policy choices at all levels of social interaction. Our sense is that the
marketing discipline needs to move away from the individual to establish a deeper understanding
of collective behaviors and outcomes. The examples we have cited call for marketing to become
much more of a social discipline if we are to respond to the myriad of calls for responsible
individual and collective action in micro, meso and macro worlds that are changing before our
eyes. Many years ago, in the first issue of the Journal of Macromarketing, the Editor, George Fisk
suggested marketing could be looked at as a provisioning technology. Inspired by this but turning
it on its head we suggest that marketing should widen its ambit to become the social discipline that
studies the evolution of the multi-level networks of provisioning systems, private, collaborative and
public, that form in human communities, enabling communities to access the products, services,
experiences and ideas that are, could, or should be, part of everyday life. As we look to the future,
sustainability and fairness must become a defining issue in our understandings of the provisioning
systems needed for everyday life in all human communities.
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Marketing and economic
responsibility: historical roots and
contemporary interpretations
Theses of: Michael Kleinaltenkamp, Berlin, Germany
1. The discussion in marketing about economic responsibility is too much geared to consumers
and their behavior (“Responsible consumer behavior”). In contrast, research in management
in this respect, mainly focusses on firm-internal aspects and not that much on those related to
customers.
2. Consumers are at the endpoint of supply chain systems. Although they trigger what is
happening in supply chain systems finally because of derived demand, they typically have
only limited knowledge about (non-)responsible behaviors within the supply chains.
3. Supplier behavior within supply chain systems is mainly driven by their direct business
customers. Because of competition on the relevant markets, these customer firms are typically
in a more powerful position. Consequently, suppliers will deliver what their business
customers want and do not care that much about the wishes and needs of the consumers.
4. Product/service offerings of firms active in business-to-business (B2B) markets will not
change, as long as the purchasing behavior of their customer firms will not change.
5. Applying knowledge about supply chain systems and B2B marketing could help to foster
economically responsible behavior.
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The Enduring Legacy of Economic
Responsibility for Macromarketing
Gene Laczniak, Marquette University, USA
“We have inherited an economics of irresponsibility…We need an economics of responsibility,
developed and embodied in our working business ethics (Clark 1916, p. 210).”
Our thanks go out to Dr Michaela Haase for organizing what promises to be a thought-provoking
panel session. But more importantly, our gratitude goes to Michaela for her excellent scholarship
(Haase 2017) in highlighting the ideas of institutional economist John Maurice Clark (1884-
1963), who clearly saw so many years ago, the central role of economic responsibility in
contributing to the commonweal. Clark, a University of Chicago and Columbia professor, like his
fellow pioneer institutional economists, believed in the shaping role of institutions in determining
economic behavior and moderating social outcomes. Clark also thought it essential to distinguish
between the concepts of ‘economic value in exchange’ and ‘value to society’. Clark’s early 20th
Century writings contain many of the seminal ideas underlying contemporary corporate social
responsibility and business ethics. His thoughts about ‘value to society’ in economic analysis are
lessons of history that ought not to be forgotten and are also central premises to the
Macromarketing cannon.
As an aside, the legacy of institutional economics connects directly with many of us in this room.
In the very early 20th Century, it was the early doctoral students of institutional economists like
John R Commons and R. T. Ely (both colleagues of Clark), who went on to establish the first
academic marketing departments; in their early stages, these first marketing scholars concentrated
on understanding retailing and the distribution of agricultural products (Bartels 1976). That study
grew into our modern marketing discipline.
And as a personal aside, as a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I occupied
physical offices in Bascom Hall that had once housed John R Commons and the UW department
of economics. Then, when I first joined the faculty at Marquette University in the mid-1970s, I
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shared an office with Thomas Divine S.J., who by then was already a Dean Emeritus of the MU
College of Business. Divine, a Jesuit priest and devoted advocate of the Trade Union movement
in the USA (Jablonski 2007), had been one of the charter founders of the Association of Social
Economics in the mid-1930s, along with John M Clark.
My allotted time does not afford me a seamless narrative. Nor do I offer any novel hypotheses
inspired by the writings of JM Clark. However, I hope that the three short observations that I put
forward help inspire continued research commitment, especially among junior faculty members,
to the central issues of Macromarketing.
1. The writings of John M Clark, particularly his article “The Changing Basis of Economic
Responsibility” (1916), remind us of the pertinence of a societal focus in the history of
economic thought. For decades, in Economics and in the business disciplines mothered
by it, there has been a tension between maintaining a macro focus versus a micro
orientation. By definition, the macro approach has been more sensitive to social concerns.
In the marketing discipline, the balance of power shifted substantially in the late 1960s
with the publication of Kotler’s Marketing Management textbook (1967). By omission,
macro concerns were marginalized, and a micro organizational orientation became
dominant. Most marketing issues were increasingly seen through the corporate lens of
organizational comparative advantage (Porter 1985). We academics in Macromarketing,
seeking to preserve a broader societal orientation for marketing, have resisted the view
that the dominant role of marketing education is to prepare the next generation of
corporate bureaucrats. But many of us, myself included, have been less than courageous
in curricular struggles at our own universities in pushing back against the vocationally-
centered, non-societal tide of marketing education. In our advocacy and in our research,
macromarketers should never waiver from the analysis of the societal implications of
marketing actions and market structures, especially ethics. The writings of Clark (1916;
1936) remind us of that essential truth.
In the late 20th Century, Porter and McKibben (1988) published a comprehensive analysis
of American business education, titled Management Education and Development. The
report was particularly noteworthy because it was officially sponsored by the AACSB (an
international accreditation agency for business education) and supported by the funding of
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more than 30 corporations and corporate foundations. The authors (p. 86) of this report
expressed the opinion that “ethics” should be integrated into every class in the business
curriculum and that one of the most important challenges facing B-schools as they
approach the 21st Century is: “…to transcend the analytical and the methodological and to
incorporate an understanding of the importance of a broad, well-rounded education in the
preparation of business students (p. 317).” One cannot help but notice that such sentiment
is exactly what Clark and some of his fellow institutional economists had expressed at the
beginning of the 20th Century.
2. By implication, Clark also makes some important distinctions about different types of
knowledge. He recognizes that, “Every measure of economic reform on which he [the
economist] expresses an opinion, represents an estimate of a social value of one sort
or another, different from that of the market” (Clark 1936, p.53). Put another way,
theoretical economic knowledge may vary in its social and practical implications, with
each implication offering different considerations about moral knowledge as well. We
academics are most comfortable with scientific, descriptive knowledge—the product of
positive empiricism. Such an approach is essential to the scientific method and leads to
“A implies B” type relationships that move social-scientific understanding forward. For
example, data driven research has connected increasing GDP with growing economic
development. Ok. But is that AB relationship alone sufficiently informative?
GDP may not, often does not, capture a society’s well-being. For example, GDP increases
when more prisons are built, if more monies are spent combating growing drug addiction
epidemics, when exporting military hardware or creating a mass surveillance system for
one’s citizens. None of these economic “pluses” necessarily reflect the moral well-being
of a particular society. As Clark saw it over 100 years ago, economic impact is not the
same as societal influence, and economic science is different from moral knowledge. We
academics are not as “objective” as we like to think, when we leave the discussion of
ethics to others. The topics we choose to study is itself a value judgment; how we
operationalize variables has enormous value implications (e.g., defining global poverty as
earning less than $1 per day versus $2 per day has enormous implications). And, not
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offering an opinion about the probable social outcomes of an empirical “AB”
relationship can itself be a deeply value-laden action.
3. John Clark reminds us that exchange fairness is different from distributive justice:
“Exchange values reflect individual utilities but not the value or cost of a marketed
entity…to society…” (Clark 1936, p.50). Marketing practitioners will typically grant the
importance of seeking to achieve fairness between the buyer and seller in given marketing
transactions (Laczniak and Murphy 2006). Exchange fairness is sometimes referred to
“commutative Justice” and its analysis is limited to the direct parties to the transaction.
“Distributive Justice” (DJ) is a more inclusive concept as it attempts to assess the
common good of the society resulting from economic exchange. One definition specifies
DJ as being about the societal fairness of economic outcomes and how the benefits and
burdens of those results are allocated among various stakeholders (Laczniak and Murphy
2008). As Monieson argued in Vol. 1, No. 1 of the J of Macromarketing (1981, p.19):
“Distributive Justice is probably the central concept in macromarketing” and that, “Any
macromarketing issue worthy of attention will ultimately have to confront these
philosophically laden subjects.”
Macromarketers, due to their focus upon “the interactions of markets, marketing and
society”, and consistent with the thinking of Clark, do not limit their analysis to reciprocal
fairness among the parties to the exchange, but instead explore ancillary societal
outcomes such as unintended consequences, negative externalities and hidden costs that
might befall any stakeholders (Laczniak 2017). Often, the acceptance of a stakeholder
orientation to doing business is offered as evidence of concern for DJ outcomes.
However, one trap that Macromarketers should be aware of is that stakeholder theory has
been co-opted and is increasingly used in a purely instrumental manner (Laczniak and
Murphy 2012). For example, firms treat certain classes of employees extremely well
because they are in short supply; they extend customers every possible respect and
attention if they are categorized as important clients; companies strive to be a community
citizen especially when that firm might be seeking some public subsidies, and so on.
Laczniak and Murphy (2012) counsel that authentic stakeholder theory should not be
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conditional and/or instrumental; rather it should afford all stakeholders their rights claims
in the spirit of distributive justice.
To summarize the themes of my comments: (a) marketing history, since it bears on the
understanding of marketing systems, has always had an important role in macromarketing
scholarship. Dr Haase’s (2017) resurrection of the thinking of economist John Maurice
Clarke has done us an important service. Economic responsibility has deep roots in the
development of market thought; it is extensive and includes societal outcomes as part of
its domain; (b) the marketing concerns of managers are understandably micro due to
their prescribed duties, but the purview of marketing professors ought to be far broader;
consistent with Clark, we should consider moral knowledge as well as the scientific
dimensions of marketing behavior. As I argued in my MMS presidential address in 2015,
Macromarketers should serve as the conscience of the marketing discipline.
References
Bartels, Robert (1976), The History of Marketing Thought. Columbus, OH: Grid Publishing
Clark, John M. (1916), “The Changing Basis of Economic Responsibility,” Journal of Political
Economy, 26 (1-2), 209-229.
Clark, John M. (1926), Social Control of Business. New York: McGraw Hill.
Clark, John M. (1936), Preface to Social Economics: Essays in Economic Theory and Social
Problems. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Haase, Michaela (2017), Economic Responsibility: John Maurice Clark—A Classic on Economic
Responsibility, Berlin: Springer.
Jablonski, Thomas J. (2007), Milwaukee’s Jesuit University: Marquette 1881-1981. Milwaukee,
WI: Marquette University Press.
Kotler, Philip (1967), Marketing Management (1st ed.), New York: Prentice Hall.
Laczniak, Gene. R. and Patrick E. Murphy (2006), “Normative Perspectives for Ethical and
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Socially Responsible Marketing,” Journal of Macromarketing, 26(2), 154-177.
Laczniak, Gene.R. and Patrick E. Murphy (2008), “Distributive Justice: Pressing questions,
Emerging Directions, and the Promise of Rawlsian Analysis,” Journal of
Macromarketing, 28(1), 5-11.
Laczniak, Gene. R. and Patrick E. Murphy (2012), “Stakeholder Theory and Marketing: Moving
from a Firm-Centric to a Societal Perspective,” Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 31 (2), 284-292.
Laczniak, Gene. R. (2017), “The Hidden Costs of Hidden Costs,” Journal of Macromarketing, 37
(3),
Monieson, David D. (1981), “What Constitutes Usable Knowledge in Macromarketing?” Journal
of Macromarketing, 1 (1), 14-22.
Porter, Lyman and Lawrence E. McKibbin (1988). Management Education and Development.
New York: McGraw Hill.
Porter, Michael E. (1985), Competitive Advantage. New York: Free Press.
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Responsibility - problems based on
a misleading concept?
Helge Löbler, Leipzig University, Germany
1. Introduction
Modern societies are often characterized by complex structures of interdependent social actors.
People are intertwined in a lot of formal and informal relationships with others people, institutions
and organizations. These interrelatedness is becoming more complex and interdependent. They
encompass long chains of interactions that bind together cascades and networks of social actors
whether they are people, organizations or institutions, which have long since transcended the
traditional boundaries of the nation state and reached a global level. The striking feature of
interdependence is that many consequences of social action cannot be attributed to single
causations. Since the traditional concept of responsibility is based on causation it cannot help out
of all the problems which are connected to complex interrelatedness.
In a sense, John Maurice Clark’s groundbreaking 1916 paper can be seen as an early anticipation
of this problem. Almost a hundred years ago, John Maurice Clark (1916, p. 210) reacted to the
consequences of industrialization, which came along with an increasing interdependence of actors
demanding a new understanding of responsibility: an “economics of responsibility.” According to
his view, responsibility in an age of modernization and industrialization required going beyond the
individual “to cover a larger group—to make it [responsibility, comment of the authors] general”
(Clark 1916, p. 227). However, in his paper it remains an open question what this generalization
meant.
The present paper argues that the concept of responsibility as based on causation, on which these
thoughts are based is misleading. By introducing another concept, the paper suggests a different
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approach to understand responsibility in a modern, complex and intertwined society. By using this
new concept, it will be shown that the problems addressed by Clark and followers simply vanish.
The paper is organized like follows: in the second section the traditional concept of responsibility
is discussed with its weaknesses. In the third section an alternative concept of responsibility is
presented. The fourth section discussed application of the altermatic concepts and compares these
applications with the use of the traditional concept.
2. Traditional concept of responsibility
Traditionally, discussions on responsibility have addressed the relationship between the individual,
his/her actions and the actions’ consequences. Frequently, the perspective of individual
responsibility is used to judge individuals for being responsible for what happened as a result of
their failing or neglecting to perform certain actions (Mellema, 1985, p. 57, 1988). Given the
overwhelming focus on the negative consequences of individual behavior, responsibility scholars
use the term “blame responsibility” or “liability model” (Young, 2006) as a reference point for the
standard model of individual responsibility. This standard model of responsibility requires
identifying and evaluating the desirable or undesirable consequences of individual action for which
an individual then can be praised or blamed. According to Ladd (1992), this standard model of
responsibility is both “closed” and “backward looking:” It is closed in the sense that it ascribes
responsibility to one individual or one actor, and it is backward looking as it builds on hindsight
knowledge about the consequences, the acting individual and an entity to identify the results’
desirability.
Fig. 1 illustrates the standard model of individual responsibility. Depicted in a triangular
relationship, the standard model of responsibility creates at least a four-digit relationship between
a subject (actor, responsibility “of”, 1) an object (action, responsibility “for”, 2) and a third party
(addressee, responsibility “to”, 3) with respect to a norm (4). Typically, responsibility is defined as
an actor being responsible for something towards an addressee or a normative standard (Düwell et
al. 2011, pp. 541 ff.; Zimmerli 1987).
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Figure 1: The Standard Model of Individual Responsibility:
Ascription of Responsibility and Relationships
As long as responsibility is addressed in the way the traditional model the problems raised by Clark
and followers cannot easily if at all be solved, because causation of harmful effects are not easily
identifiable.
In the last decades, discussions on moral responsibility have this point in different ways. In addition
to analyzing individual moral responsibility, supra-individual responsibility of agents who are
acting within the context of larger groups, group collectives or even whole systems has been
discussed (Kastenholz and Erdmann, 1992). Tis discussion lead to concepts like “collective
responsibility” (Feinberg 1968; French 1971; Cooper 1972), “group responsibility” (Mellema
1988) or “system responsibility” (Bühl 1990) to capture that many individual actions are embedded
in a larger context of interactions in social groups or systems. In turn, this behavioral pattern in
modern societies also prompts a widening of focus within the concept of responsibility, as Mellema
(1988, p. 2) observes: “As contemporary societies become more complex, there seems to be more
occasion to judge the moral status of group actions. … [T]hose responsible for harms to society are
often groups, and these are frequently groups operating in institutional settings. It is less likely in
the contemporary scene that harms to society are found to be caused by persons acting alone.” As
Responsibility
Actor
‘of’
Consequences
‘to’
Action
‘for’
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a reaction, responsibility scholars have made multiple attempts to refocus the concept of
responsibility on the challenges of widespread complexity and interdependency in modern society.
As societies are becoming more complex interdependent aggregate social results are the results of
loosely coordinated action of a multiplicity of interdependent actors.
The central problem, herein is that the aggregate social results cannot if at all be assigned to the
level of the individual. It is questionable whether environmental degradation such as climate
change can be traced back to the individual action of companies and their managers let alone
individual people.
However, the reconceptualizations discussed still focus on one or several actor(s) (individual,
group, organization or society as whole) as being responsible for something in concern. This paper
argues that the assignment of an actor to be responsible is misleading.
Therefor a different concept of responsibility is presented in the next section.
3. Responsibility – a different conceptualization
At a first view one might think that the word “responsibility” verbatim means the ability to respond
or to be able to respond (Covey, 2004). In this understanding to be able to respond presupposes an
at least a two-digit degree of freedom. In other words, the ability to respond or responsibility
presupposes choices. However, one has to be aware of choices otherwise they are not there, at least
they are not part of one’s set of responses. They are not available as responses.
This view of understanding responsibility as the ability to respond is however not in line with the
linguistic construction of words composed out of two words where one is ‘ability’.
However:
These endings are found in adjectives that usually mean ‘able to be …’. For example (English
Oxford Living Dictionaries, 2018):
available: able to be used or obtained from avail
breakable: able to be broken from braking
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hearable: able to be heard from hearing
observable: able to be observed from observing
responsible: able to be responded from responding
A person can hear what is hearable. That what can be heard is the object to which we assign the
characteristic of being hearable. A sound is hearable. The sound can be heard by people. ->
Someone can respond to what is responsible. The ‘what ‘is the ‘object to which we assign the
characteristic of responsibility. In this sense an act or acting is responsible if someone can respond
to it. Hence an act or activity is reasonable if people can respond to it. That means firstly that the
ability to respond is not responsibility. It is the ability to be responded. Those how respond must
be able to respond and that means they have to have choices particularly the choice to avoid harmful
consequences of a responsible act. This concept of responsibility – which I call the choice concept
of responsibility (CCR) – looks at a person in a specific situation and asks can this person respond
to this situation, which means: can the person choose between different alternatives particularly the
alternative to get out of this situation. If the person has no choice then she cannot get out and the
only way for another person to act responsible is to create new choices which help the other person
out of the situation. This means that doing nothing can be irresponsible if a person could extend
the set of choices of another person who has only one choice.
Suppose a child of about 6 years falls into a small lake and cannot swim. You stand beside and
could help. How do the two concepts of responsibility inform us in this situation? The question to
be answered is: Are you responsible for something in this case? The answer of the traditional
concept is weak as it is only applicable if a person has done something and if this activity has
consequences for others. But what if you do nothing. Doing nothing is not really covered by the
traditional concept although law covers this case in some sense by non-assistance of a person in
danger. In this case doing nothing according to CCR is irresponsible because it does not extend the
other persons set of choices. The child has no choices, it cannot decide to swim or not to swim as
it cannot swim. So the child cannot get out of this (dangerous) situation. Another person acts
therefore responsible if it extend the child’s choices particularly by the choice to get out.
CCR looks at responsibility from those who have - in a particular situation - no choices and
therefore are not able to respond, hence the situation is irresponsible for them and everybody who
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can add choices is responsible if he or she does add choices so that the people then can respond.
CCR is different compared to the traditional responsibility model as it addresses responsibility
from the set of options of reactions (responses) a person, organization, institution or even natural
ecosystems has to react in a specific situation.
4. Comparative Exemplification of the two concepts
The above story is only one example to see how the CCR works. It also shows that responsibility
should not be assigned to a person or his or her actions in general. Neither a person nor an action
alone can be considered as responsible or irresponsible in general without reducing others’ choices.
Not the pure fact that Nestlé privatizes water in developing countries is irresponsible it is
irresponsible because it reduces the choices of the people there to get water. A privatization of
water per see is not necessarily irresponsible. It is only irresponsible if it reduces the choices of
other. This also means that reducing other people’s choices is irresponsible. The CCR allows to
distinguish several general cases.
1. Reduction of choices
If people, institutions or organizations reduce the set of choices of others they probably create a
situation of irresponsibility depending on whether the people have appropriate choices left. There
are numerous examples for this kind of irresponsibility: The most obvious case is that of a company
privatizing water and excluding local people from water access. If those people have no other
sources of water the company acts irresponsible. However according to the CCR other parties act
also irresponsible if they could offer access to water of the same quality. If the government allows
privatization of water and offers no other choices it move local people in an irresponsible situation.
With regard to the consequences there are several: The first and usually is demanded from such
companies is that it gives back the water to the people meaning that privatization is or should not
be allowed. A second option could be offering other sources of access to water for the local people
to water of the same quality. A third option could be to pay the local people for taking their access
so that they can get access somewhere else.
470
2. Leaving people alone with too few choices
This is an interesting case as it often accurse in a global world when people are faced with undesired
changes in their environment caused by a globally unidentifiable network of actors. Here the
traditional model of responsibility does not really help as was already pointed out by Clark and his
followers. In the perspective of CCR everybody and organization or institution is responsible for
those people if the can offer appropriate opportunities which help people out of their choiceless
situation. The CCR open new and other opportunities for societies to solve problems which are
irresponsible for specific people, organizations or institutions.
Not only people, organizations or institutions (i.e. entities in the human sphere) may need
responsible situation. If for example a lake is in danger to overturn it cannot ‘react’ appropriately
(to survive) in this situation; it has no choice of responses/reactions. For those who could help it is
their responsibility to do so.
3. Communalities in both concepts
Insofar as the traditional model reflects that an action must have consequences for another party it
covers the other party. The difference however to the CCR is that the traditional model starts in
some way with the actor and her action, which caused undesired consequences, leading to the
problems discussed by Clark and followers. While the traditional concept assigns responsibility to
an actor and her action the CCR assigns it to the choices an entity (individual, organization,
institution or natural ecosystem) has.
4. Von Foerster’s ethical imperative
Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative is: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices”
(Foerster, 2003). It is interesting that von Foerster did not assign the choices to anyone neither to
the actor nor to the person bearing the consequences of the actor’a action action. Foerster’s ethical
imperative is in line with CCR if applied to the choices of any kind of entity.
5. No need of norms
The CCR does not require norms to work as it is not related to any kind of norms. That it doesn’t
need norms does not mean that societies should avoid norms or even laws.
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5. References
Clark, M.J. (1916), “The Changing Basis of Economic Responsibility”, Journal of Political
Economy, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 209–229.
Covey, S.R. (2004), The seven habits of highly effective people: Restoring the character ethic,
Simon & Schuster, New York.
English Oxford Living Dictionaries (2018), “English Oxford Living Dictionaries”, available at:
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling/words-ending-in-able-or-ible (accessed May 25th
2018).
Foerster, H.v. (2003), “Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics”, in Foerster, H. (Ed.),
Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition, Springer-Verlag New
York Inc, New York, NY, pp. 287–304.
Kastenholz, H.G. and Erdmann, K.-H. (1992), “Positive social behaviour and the environmental
crisis”, The Environmentalist, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 181–186.
Ladd, J. (1992), “Bhopal: Moralische Verantwortung, normale Katastrophen und Bürgertugend”,
in Lenk, H. and Maring, M. (Eds.), Wirtschaft und Ethik:, Reclam, Stuttgart, pp. 285–300.
Mellema, G. (1985), “Groups, Responsibility, and the Failure to Act”, International Journal of
Applied Philosophy, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 57–66.
Mellema, G. (1988), Individuals, groups, and shared moral responsibility, American university
studies. Series 05, Philosophy, Vol. 61, P. Lang, New York, Bern etc.
Young, I.M. (2006), “RESPONSIBILITY AND GLOBAL JUSTICE. A SOCIAL
CONNECTION MODEL”, Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 23 No. 01, p. 102.
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A Return to Responsible
Marketing
Clifford J. Shultz, II, Loyola University Chicago, USA
A return to responsible marketing is of paramount importance. Toward that shift,
marketers – scholars and practitioners – would be well served to generate and to share
knowledge, to influence responsible decisions and behaviors in and for various marketing
systems, in equitable and enduring ways. Given that Macromarketers are fundamentally
concerned with the scholarly study of interactions among markets, marketing and society –
systemically, across space, time, cultures, institutions and even civilizations – we are uniquely
positioned to lead this initiative.
In this special session, we explore questions raised by Dr. Michaela Haase, which pertain
to the marketing discipline and its potential role as responsible knowledge provider within the
canon of social-scientific disciplines; some types of knowledge provided by the marketing
disciplines; the extent to which the marketing discipline is a knowledge provider for responsible
individual and collective action (or could/should be); and the place, and implicitly need or value,
for different knowledge types (Haase 2018).
Building on some related ideas that have evolved over the last 20 years (e.g., Shultz 1997,
2007, 2017), my thoughts are organized vis-à-vis macromarketing precepts: a comprehensive and
scientific knowledge-base, eclectic instruments for discovery, and more responsible marketing
practice and scholarship; an interdisciplinary and systemic approach, whereby “success” is
measured by and/or interpreted as societal well-being—rather than sales, profits, market share,
etc. That said, micro (or thoughtful and responsible managerial) marketing is integral to
macromarketing projects; sustainable and just outcomes are likely to be optimized when we
discover ways for macro/micro to be complementary rather than adversarial. Some points
intended to stimulate discussion and subsequent scholarly exploration:
473
We are Homo Marketus, which has implications for understanding the genesis, purpose
and responsibilities of markets and marketing; successes and failures; new responsibilities
and systemic improvements.
Social traps are inevitable and eternal; they present marketing challenges and
opportunities.
Responsible, according to whom? How do we operationalize “Responsible”? What are
appropriate measures/interpretations (for whom, in what contexts, over what timelines)
for “appropriate” behaviors and outcomes? How do we manage inevitable trade-offs that
may force marketers to act more responsibly toward some groups than others; for how
long, using what decision models?
What incentives, structures and processes will fairly and sustainably ensure agreed upon,
responsible outcomes; how do we “best” monitor, measure, compile/analyze data, report,
hold accountable, persuade/sanction?
In what ways will the macromarketing discipline and scholars be the vanguard for this
initiative, integrating knowledge from other discipline?
Marketing (knowledge) is indispensable to a healthy, happy, just and sustainable future.
As Macromarketers, we constructively engage the most vexing challenges. We move forward
with an understanding of our past, the richness of multiple perspectives and the efficacy of
eclectic tools, and our obligations to future generations, as we “revisit marketing as a form of
constructive engagement—a societal function and a systemic set of processes for creating,
communicating, and delivering goods, services and experiences to consumers and for managing
consumer, societal and political relationships in ways that benefit local, regional and global
stakeholders of these processes, justly and sustainably” (e.g., Shultz 2016, p.8).
References
Haase, M. (2018), Proposal for Special Session of the 2018 Macromarketing Conference,
Leipzig: Macromarketing Society and University of Leipzig.
Shultz, C. (1997), “Improving Life Quality for the Destitute: Contributions from Multiple-
Method Fieldwork in War-Ravaged Transition Economies,” Journal of Macromarketing,
17 (1), 56-67.
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Shultz, C. (2016), “Marketing an End to War: Constructive Engagement, Community Wellbeing,
and Sustainable Peace,” Markets, Globalization & Development Review, 1 (2), Article 2,
1-23.
Shultz, C. (2007), “Marketing as Constructive Engagement,” Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 26 (2), 293-301.
Shultz, C. (2017), “Marketing: The Next 40,000 Years,” Journal of Macromarketing, 37 (3), 328-
330.
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Food Marketing IV
Track Chair: Claudia Dumitrescu
Co-Chair(s): Renée Shaw Hughner
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The Food Risk Society in China
Ann Veeck64, Western Michigan University, USA
Zahida Luqmani, Western Michigan University, USA
Mushtaq Luqmani, Western Michigan University, USA
A paradox of risk in modern society is that technological, market-based solutions to inveterate problems
have produced new sets of risks that are increasingly incalculable, irreversible, and pandemic (Beck 1992;
Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Giddens 1991). Food systems have followed this pattern, with nature-
based problems, such as drought, floods, and insect infestations, being replaced with human-based
problems, such as toxic residues and depleted resources. As food systems become more complex and
connected in emerging nations, starvation and hunger is supplanted by chronic diseases and rising health
costs (WHO 2018).
Based on data from two decades of fieldwork, this paper tracks the changes in the risk profile of
food markets in China, from the inception of supermarkets to an era of vast choice among food venues.
While China shares many of the traits of a food risk society with the rest of the world, the speed of the
development of China’s food systems, coupled with the size of the population, has conferred unique
characteristics to China’s food risk society. These include: 1. The challenge of regulating a market
composed of so many players—both small and large-including farms, manufacturers, and retailers; 2. The
corruption in the political and marketing systems; 3. The ubiquity of counterfeit products; and 4. The
dynamics of social divisions. The paper concludes by applying lessons learned from the evolution of
China’s food risk society to propose a research agenda that addresses the intersection between people’s
food-related anxieties and the increasing complexity of the world food market system.
References
Beck, Ulrich. (1992), The Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage
477
Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky (1982), Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of
Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
World Health Organization (2018). Noncommunicable Diseases. Retrieved from:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs355/en/ on January 18, 2018.
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The Application of Protection
Motivation Theory in the Context
of Genetically Modified Foods
Chloe Wilson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Aaron Gazley65, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Hamish Simmonds, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Introduction
The development and introduction of genetic modification (GM) techniques has led to much
controversy and debate. Much of it surrounding the risks versus benefits of the technology and the
ethics of ‘playing God’. These issues constituted a major area of research in the early to mid
2000’s, however more recently there has been a paucity of research in this field, despite the issues
surrounding GM food being as prevalent today as they were then. Genetic modification involves
“the alteration of the genome of a plant or animal by the addition of new genetic material” (Science
Media Centre 2008). Research identifies numerous health and environmental benefits including
improved nutrition and increased consumer choice (Rifkin 1998). Despite the noted benefits,
consumer attitudes towards GM foods have been generally negative and at times fearful (Bredahl
2001). As such, a clear disconnect exists between science and consumers.
The application of protection motivation theory (PMT) to GM foods may help explain and
understand consumer fear. PMT is a framework developed by Rogers (1975) to measure and
understand the impact of fear appeals on attitude and behavior. Rodger’s (1975) original
formulation involved cognitive appraisal processes, the severity of the threatened event, the
probability of the events occurrence and the efficacy of the coping response. The cognitive
479
appraisal processes mediate the effect of the perceived threat through initiating protection
motivation (attitudes). In addition, environmental and intrapersonal antecedents to the process are
identified (Maddux & Rodgers 1983).
Objectives
As such, this research set out to use an adapted version of the PMT model to test consumers’
reactions to GM foods, specifically to identify:
1) The effect intra-personal characteristics have on the perceived severity of the threat and
coping appraisals.
2) The effect of perceived severity of the threat on attitudes towards GM foods.
3) The effect of coping appraisals on attitudes towards GM foods.
4) The effect of attitudes towards GM foods on purchase intent.
The research tested an adaptation of the PMT model by Milne, Sheeran and Orbell (2000).
Intrapersonal factors are considered ‘environmental’ factors that can directly influence threat
perception (Milne et al, 2000). Locus of control represents a “person’s beliefs about control over
events” (O’Cass 2003, p.64). Action coping reflects peoples’ experience in resolving problems in
daily life” (Paton 2007, p27). Threat appraisal involves the evaluative components that are
significant to an individual’s evaluation of the threat. This research focused on perceived severity
which “assesses how serious the individual believes that the threat would be to his or her own life”
(Milne et al. 2000, p108). Coping appraisal reflects the individual’s ability to respond to the threat.
Rodgers (1975) identified response efficacy as being the more important component of coping
appraisal, defined as the “concerns beliefs about whether the recommended coping response will
be effective in reducing threat to the individual” (Milne et al. 2000, p109). Both threat and coping
appraisals are seen to mediate the effect of intrapersonal characteristics on attitudes towards GM
foods.
Method and Findings
An Internet based survey was conducted on New Zealand consumers. Where possible, existing
scales (adapted to 7 point Likert type), sourced from a variety of disciplines were adapted to
measure the constructs. In total 220 responses were received. Data was analyzed using structural
480
equation modeling in AMOS, following the two-step approach. The results indicate that both the
proposed measurement model and the structural model fit the data well.
The key findings were that those who felt less control of their lives perceive the threat of GM foods
to be more severe and were less able to cope in terms of response efficacy. Interestingly, those
more predisposed towards planning also viewed the GM threat as more severe and were less able
to cope. In addition, those who perceived the threat as more severe had more negative attitudes to
GM food as did those without the ability to cope. As expected, more positive attitudes led to grater
purchase intent.
Overall, the results suggest that there is still consumer uncertainty and even fear when it comes to
GM foods, despite the lack of recent media spotlight. However, there are certain personality types
that seem more capable of dealing with GM foods – those with greater control and those less
action/planning orientated. These people perceive the threat to be less severe and are better able to
cope with it. The planning orientation finding is interesting and may suggest that these people are
more willing to ‘see how it goes’ when it comes to GM foods. As a result, these groups are more
willing to purchase GM foods. Therefore, it is the planners and those who feel less in control that
managers and policy makers need to focus their efforts on convincing the benefits of GM foods.
This research suggests that PMT theory has potential when applied to GM foods. Future research
should look to incorporate more components of the model to better understand the role that fear
plays in how consumers assess GM foods.
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References
Bredahl, Lone (2001), “Determinants of Consumer Attitudes and Purchase Intentions with Regard
to Genetically Modified Food – Results of a Cross-national Survey.” Journal of Consumer
Policy, 24(1), 23-61.
Maddux, James. E. and Ronald W. Rogers (1983), “Protection Motivation and Self-efficacy: A
Revised Theory of Fear Appeals and Attitude Change,” Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 19(5), 469-479.
Science Media Centre (2008), Genetic Modification Explained. Retrieved March 18th, 2016,
from http://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2008/09/19/genetic-modification-explained/
O'Cass, Aaron (2003), “Electoral Choice: The Effect of Voter Control and Involvement on
Satisfaction and Voting Stability,” Journal of Political Marketing, 3(1), 61-85.
Milne, Sarah, Paschal Sheeran and Sheina Orbell (2000), “Prediction and Intervention in Health‐
related Behavior: a Meta‐analytic Review of Protection Motivation Theory,” Journal of
Applied Social Psychology, 30(1), 106-143.
Rogers, Ronald W. (1975), “A protection Motivation Theory of Fear Appeals and Attitude
Change,” The Journal of Psychology, 91(1), 93-114.
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Critical Sustainable Marketing:
For What It’s Worth
Ynte K. van Dam66, Wageningen University, Netherlands
Abstract
Many marketing organisations consider sustainable development important, but especially the
domain of food and agribusiness rapidly is becoming less sustainable rather than more. It appears
that the dominant governance system that coordinates mainstream food and agribusiness markets
fails with respect to sustainable development. Alternative market systems, that may be more
compatible with sustainable development of food and agribusiness, could be based on distinct
socio-economic worldviews and governance arrangements.
A content analysis of a mainstream and an alternative compendium on agricultural marketing
demonstrates the feasibility of distinguishing underlying conventions and/or governance systems
in markets. Mainstream marketing texts are dominated by (late capitalist) industrial project
worldviews in Western contexts, and (early capitalist) industry worldviews in non-Western
contexts. The texts on alternative food markets are dominated by patrimonial worldviews,
complemented by inspired and civil worldviews, but mostly by an, as yet undefined, system of
autonomous collaboration or social anarchy. Whether market is part of the solution or part of the
problem depends on how the market is governed and what counts as success or failure in market
performance.
Introduction
In food marketing many actors claim to consider sustainable development important, but this stated
importance is not reflected in the overall market performance of food and agribusiness. In the first
decade of this century the environmental costs of food production have increased dramatically both
483
in absolute terms as relative to sector earnings (KPMG 2012). In food and agribusiness radical
sustainable innovations are slow to develop and ‘sustainable products’ mostly feature as niches in
the global food market (Blättel-Mink 1998; Varadarajan 2017). All in all the stated relevance of
sustainable development apparently is not determinant for the actual market behaviour of food and
agribusiness companies (Van Dam and Van Trijp 2013).
For decades the food and agribusiness market in developed countries has been characterised by
oversupply relative to stagnating demand, as well as by concentration and fierce competition at
various levels in the value chain (Grunert et al. 1996; Meulenberg 1993). Food companies,
especially processing industry and increasingly also retail, have responded to this reality by
adopting a market orientation (Elg 2003; Verhees, Lans, and Verstegen 2012). There is little doubt
that the managerial orientation in food marketing has contributed to higher food output and higher
productivity, resulting in lower production costs and increased per capita food production despite
a rapidly growing world population (Berti and Mulligan 2016; Tilman 1998). It is also becoming
increasingly clear that higher productivity at lower costs fails to provide a sustainable solution to
the oversupply of agricultural produce. More in general it is questioned whether the dominant
marketing paradigm of managerial orientation and economic growth is compatible with sustainable
marketing and sustainable development (Böhm and Brei 2008; Brown 2011; Cacciolatti, Garcia,
and Kalantzakis 2015; Daly 1990; Hueting 2010; Martine and Alves 2015; Redclift 2005;
Schweickart 2009; Spaiser et al. 2016; Tadajewski and Brownlie 2008; Varey 2010).
Recently two approaches on marketing relative to sustainability are distinguished (Mittelstaedt
et al. 2014). The mainstream approach sees marketing as part of the solution, whereas the
alternative approach sees marketing as part of the problem. Mainstream is the development
approach that focuses on efficiency, whereas the alternative is a critical approach that focuses on
effectiveness of market systems (Meng 2015; Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne, and Shultz 2015). Both
approaches reflect a specific view on the world and on humanity. As a consequence the two
approaches value different goals to motivate, and different incentives to influence, market
behaviour (Van Dam 2016). The difference in governance arrangements that coordinate
mainstream and alternative food markets may explain why global agribusiness is becoming less
rather than more sustainable despite the proliferation of sustainable market initiatives. The current
paper suggests that analytical tools of economic sociology (Coq-Huelva, Sanz-Cañada, and
Sánchez-Escobar 2017; Thévenot 2001) can be used to analyse the different governance styles
behind the mainstream and the alternative market systems.
484
Review of Literature
The dominant doctrine in marketing is the marketing management approach as taught in
universities and business schools around the world (Beddewela et al. 2017). Marketing
management trains prospective managers in using models of growth, efficiency, self-interest, and
profit (Koris, Örtenblad, and Ojala 2017; Örtenblad et al. 2013) that fit snugly in the dominant
social paradigm (Kilbourne, McDonagh, and Prothero 1997; Varey 2010). Consequently the
marketing management approach offers prospective managers a one-sided and myopic view on
how global markets should be exploited to suit company performances (Hunt and Morgan 1995;
Kotler 1994). Bluntly stated the managerial market is an ubiquitous mine that contains purchase
power waiting to be converted into corporate profit. The three things a company needs to do with
a market are locating it, gaining access to it, and exploiting it until it is exhausted. Marketing
management offers the tools and skills that companies need in order to find, open and exploit these
pre-existing markets (Kotler and Keller 2009; Peter and Olson 1983). This marketing toolkit is
assumed to be universally applicable because all markets are equal, and that explains why MBA
and academic marketing programs across the world are depressingly homogeneous. Being focused
on the exploitation of pre-existing markets, mainstream marketing management has a strong
tendency to view sustainable marketing in terms of targeting profitable ‘green’ market segments
with ‘green’ products, without losing their ‘non-green’ market share (Dolan 2002; Laroche,
Bergeron, and Barbaro-Forleo 2001; Luchs et al. 2010; Peattie and Crane 2005).
Contrary to this managerial view, the critical view of marketing rejects the idea of a uniform
descriptive theory of ubiquitous and pre-existing universal markets (Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard
2013). The critical view is grounded in the performative notion that marketing creates markets
(Araujo, Finch, and Kjellberg 2010). More specifically marketing theories and models normatively
guide the behaviour of corporate and political actors to create markets that conform to these
theoretical models (Araujo 2007; Geiger, Kjellberg, and Spencer 2012; Kjellberg and Helgesson
2007; MacKenzie 2006; MacKenzie 2008; Panitch and Gindin 2012; Wilkie and Moore 2007). In
the performative view the recurring observation that sustainability is incompatible with mainstream
marketing (Hart and Ahuja 1996; Miller, Spivey, and Florance 2008) implies that the dominant
managerial approach to marketing is actively creating unsustainable markets (Van Dam and
Apeldoorn 1996). The performative approach to marketing also implies that sustainable markets
could be created if marketing models and theories would be transformed accordingly. Key
485
questions are how the theories and models of marketing could and how they should be transformed.
A first step towards answering these questions is viewing the currently dominant market system,
based on marketing management theories and models, not as an unassailable ‘take-it-or-leave-it’
institution but as just one of the possible arrangements to govern market exchanges.
In terms of institutional economics ‘competitive markets’ and ‘hierarchical firms’ are two ideal
points that span a range of hybrid governance mechanisms for the coordination of economic actors
(Coase 1937; Demil and Lecocq 2006; Layton 2007, 2011; Powell 1990; Williamson 1995).
Research on corporate culture and market orientation has suggested that governance mechanisms
are better explained in a two dimensional space. On one axis atomistic competition is opposed to
within-clan cooperation and on the other axis top-down hierarchical control is opposed to bottom-
up autonomy (Deshpandé, Farley, and Webster Jr 1993; Quinn and Rohrbaugh 1983). Each of these
end-poles characterises a prototypical organisation that is defined by its own cohesive principles,
its own core values, and its own archetypical leader (father, innovator, administrator, decision-
maker). Typical market-oriented organisations with a decisive leader and a focus on goal
achievement are to be found at the atomistic side of the map, wedged between hierarchical
procedural coordination on one side and ad hoc entrepreneurial innovations on the other
(Deshpandé et al. 1993).
The ongoing French research program of pragmatic economic sociology suggests that these four
prototypical governance mechanisms are only a subset of possible conventions to coordinate socio-
economic interactions. This ‘economies of worth/economies des grandeurs’ approach has detailed
at least seven governance styles, or economic conventions (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999;
Boltanski and Thévenot 1991), and more can be found (Lafaye and Thévenot 1993). These
conventions, based on classical (mostly French) political philosophies, have been identified in
modern management texts as different governance styles within organisations (Boivin and Roch
2006; Boltanski and Thévenot 1991). These ideal-typical conventions and governance styles are
identified as the ‘inspired’, ‘patrimonial’, ‘public opinion’, ‘civil’, ‘industrial’, ‘market’, and
‘project’ worlds (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999).
An individual combines multiple roles and multiple spheres of life, being simultaneously (civil)
citizen and (market) consumer (Kilbourne et al. 1997), as well as (patrimonial) family member and
(industrial) employee, or (inspired) artist. Each individual therefore has access to, and
understanding of, a repertoire of difference governance styles due to living in different social
worlds simultaneously. Every one of these social worlds has its own abstract principles to compare
486
and to rank people (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991; Deshpandé et al. 1993). Distinct governance
styles refer to distinct hierarchical systems with incompatible measures of personal and
organisational success. Someone can be seen as successful or high-ranking in many different ways
but hardly in all of these ways at the same time or by the same people, because what counts as
utmost success in one worldview may be a sign of utter failure in another. The economy of
conventions sees firms as necessary compromises between different governance styles that are
found in political economy and management literature (Thévenot 2001). Markets already have been
described as sites of conflicting interests, conflicting practices, or conflicting realities (Kjellberg
and Helgesson 2006), but they can also be seen as sites of conflicting conventions and languages.
The opposition between the firm as ‘governance through hierarchy’ and the non-firm as
‘governance through market’ (Coase 1937; Demil and Lecocq 2006; Powell 1990; Williamson
1995) misses the point that both firm and market are hierarchically organised. The hierarchy of the
firm may be based on a compromise between industrial and other (civil, patrimonial) conventions
resulting in a distinct organisational culture (Deshpandé et al. 1993). Likewise market transactions
require compromises between different governance styles. Mainstream and alternative market
arrangements reflect different compromises between distinct governance styles and economic
conventions. Not only among firms but also among markets different governance arrangements,
different views on hierarchy and success or failure can be found.
Each socio-economic convention has its own specific vocabulary and grammar to evaluate
actors and their actions (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991; Deshpandé et al. 1993). Each convention
in a way has its own language to discuss success and failure in organisations and markets. The
verbalisation and themes used to describe a conflict in the market therefore could identify the
economic convention from which the market is viewed. The current study investigates whether this
verbal toolbox of economic conventions can be applied to identify different worldviews and
governance systems.
Method
Because the pragmatic sociology is based on the assumption of conflicting justifications of
behaviour, the methodology is focused on the analysis of problem statements in conceptual or
empirical (marketing) papers. The key assumption is that the problem statement or main research
question of a marketing text represents a critique on existing agro-economic practices. The choice
of problems and verbalisation of this problem statement should reflect the economic convention
487
from which the text is written. Classification of texts into conventions requires a content analysis
of the problem statements or research questions. A set of à priori codes for content analysis of these
problem statements into conventions is derived from an overview of the mutual critiques and self-
critiques among the various conventions (Barondeau 2015; Boltanski and Thévenot 1991). An
overview of sample codes is represented in Table 1.
The focus of the current paper is a comparison between mainstream and alternative (heterodox)
marketing texts in order to test whether the analytical tool leads to sufficiently different results to
warrant further development along this method. For mainstream marketing texts a recent
compendium on market orientation in food and agribusiness was selected (Lindgreen et al. 2010).
The compendium consists of twenty chapters by different authors, covering a wide range of
companies, organisations, products, and countries in the agricultural market. The chapters were
double blind reviewed submissions for this compendium and are assumed to be representative for
mainstream agricultural marketing views at that time. These mainstream texts are compared to a
compendium on alternative (nested or informal) food markets (Hebinck, Van der Ploeg, and
Schneider 2015b). This alternative compendium consists of eleven chapters by different authors
covering Western and non-western alternative food markets. The compendium is based on a series
of conferences in 2009 and 2011, a time-span that is comparable to the mainstream compendium.
This comparison of contemporary texts should reveal co-existing worldviews, whereas differences
in compendiums from different decades might reflect changes in Zeitgeist.
Analysis
Mainstream compendium
The analysis focused on the problem statement or main research question as explained in the
introductory sections of each chapter. Six purely descriptive chapters that did not contain a problem
statement or research question were eliminated from the analysis. This resulted in 14 problem
statements that could be analysed. For the analysis a distinction was made between five chapters
that focus on mainstream Western agri-food companies (Beverland and Lindgreen 2010; Bröring
2010; Insch 2010; Leat, Revoredo-Giha, and Kupiec-Teahan 2010; Van Raaij 2010), five chapters
on non-Western contexts (Fotopoulos, Vlachos, and Magaras 2010; Nair 2010; Palau, Senesi, and
Vilella 2010; Raj and Adhikari 2010; Santini, Cavicchi, and Zampi 2010), three chapters on
cooperatives (Beverland 2010a, b; Bijman 2010), and one on organic supply (Kottila and Rönni
2010).
488
Results
The chapters on mainstream Western companies mainly framed their problem statements in
industrial or project terms. The industrial convention is reflected in problematizing backward and
inefficient existing routines, shifting market demand, and imprecise measures (Bröring 2010; Van
Raaij 2010). The project convention is reflected in problematizing the anonymity in the market and
the rigidity of existing structures (Beverland and Lindgreen 2010; Bröring 2010). Also the chapter
on organic markets draws mainly on the industrial convention (inefficient, costs of regulation) and
project conventions (fragmented and disconnected networks, fixed dyadic relations) to
problematize the topic (Kottila and Rönni 2010).
The chapters on non-Western markets draw more upon patrimonial and industrial conventions.
The industrial convention is reflected in problematizing the constant shifts in consumption (Palau
et al. 2010), inconsistent product quality (Nair 2010), or inefficient scale of production (Fotopoulos
et al. 2010). The patrimonial convention is reflected in problematizing the commodification (Nair
2010; Raj and Adhikari 2010) and leveraging social cohesion (Fotopoulos et al. 2010).
The chapters on cooperatives reveal an internal conflict between conventions, problematizing
the industrial world in patrimonial terms, and the patrimonial world in industrial and project terms.
Therefore the problem is both stated in patrimonial terms to criticise the commodification,
standardisation and one-sided focus on efficiency of the industrial world, and in industry terms to
criticise the false modesty, fixed relations, and backward habits of the patrimonial world
(Beverland 2010a, b; Bijman 2010).
The analysed texts of this compendium suggest a pattern in which cooperatives and non-Western
markets should find a compromise between a patrimonial and an industrial order, whereas Western
markets should find a balance between industrial and project orders.
Alternative compendium
Because most chapters were not written in a positivist tradition a research question most often was
lacking from the introduction. Therefore the analysis more often covered the full text of the
chapters, as critique was dispersed throughout the text in descriptions contrasting alternative
markets to undesired arrangements. Still two chapters did not contain any contrasts and where
eliminated from analysis. This resulted in 9 chapters that could be analysed. Five of these describe
studies in non-Western contexts (Manyelo, Van Averbeke, and Hebinck 2015; Matondi and
Chikulo 2015; Medar, Hebinck, and Van Dijk 2015; Radomsky, Niederle, and Schneider 2015;
489
Schmitt, Maluf, and Ventura 2015), while four chapters have a Western or general focus (Hebinck,
Schneider, and Van der Ploeg 2015a; Milone and Ventura 2015; Schneider, Van der Ploeg, and
Hebinck 2015; Van der Ploeg 2015).
Results
The Western and contemplative chapters framed their discourse in terms of the inspired and
patrimonial conventions. The inspired convention is reflected in critique on notions of expert
authority, on mass reproduction of known structures, or on predictability of market developments
(Hebinck et al. 2015a; Milone and Ventura 2015; Van der Ploeg 2015). The patrimonial convention
dominate all chapters in a recurring critique on de-localisation, de-contextualisation of produce
into standardised and anonymous low quality commodities. Apart from the patrimonial convention
the non-Western chapters also show in the South-American studies, a civil convention (Radomsky
et al. 2015; Schmitt et al. 2015), most notably criticising the bureaucracy and complicated
procedures that characterise the industrial world. Finally the non-Western studies reveal an
unclassified critique that points towards autonomy and self-direction (Manyelo et al. 2015;
Matondi and Chikulo 2015; Medar et al. 2015; Schmitt et al. 2015). This view is reflected in
criticism on the power imbalances that favour transnational companies and that are enhanced by
existing institutions, and in criticism on the various ways in which this power is used to thwart
innovative deviations from established market relations.
The analysed texts of this compendium suggest a pattern that is dominated by patrimonial
conventions that build on the social and geographic contextualisation of food products. The
recommended combination with inspired entrepreneurship in Western markets and with social
anarchy in non-Western markets could reflect different levels of trust in the formal institutional
environment.
Discussion
The texts that were analysed in this study show that authors on mainstream food markets and
authors on alternative food markets view markets from different socio-economic conventions.
Drawing from different conventions these authors search for different compromises among
governance styles. The mainstream food system appears to be studied and discussed in terms of
industrial and project conventions. When patrimonial conventions are used, they are consistently
linked to the industrial convention, suggesting an ongoing paradigm shift. The alternative food
490
systems appear to be studied and discussed in terms of patrimonial, and to a lesser degree inspired
and civic governance order. In the alternative food markets the concept of autonomy and self-
direction was a recurring theme. Unlike the ‘bazaar’-model of creative commons and open source
software (Demil and Lecocq 2006) autonomy in the context of smallholders and independent
retailers is not indicative of the ‘inspired world’. When viewed in its context autonomy in
alternative food markets refers to a process of self-organised collaboration among actors who pool
their resources and serve their common interest to the benefit of all involved (Hebinck et al. 2015a;
Van der Ploeg 2015). This suggests a governance order that combines collaboration for the
common good with autonomy, which is would constitute an alternative economic order that comes
close to moral economy or social anarchism (Haase, Becker, and Pick 2018; Kropotkin 1892).
Market economies have three characteristics that make them superior to centrally planned
economies: the price mechanism, the chaotic process of trial and error in adapting to change, and
the diffusion of economic and political power (Kay 2009). Mainstream marketing texts see global
food markets as part of the solution and focus on the development of the first of these functions,
whereas the alternative texts see global food markets as part of the problem and devote the majority
of their attention to a critical reflection on the latter two functions (cf. Mittelstaedt et al. 2015). The
current text analysis suggest that mainstream markets and alternative markets are governed by
different and distinct governance arrangements. The analysis also suggests that neither mainstream
nor alternative markets are uniformly governed, though the differences among mainstream appear
to be smaller than the differences among alternative markets. The various ‘worlds’ of the economy
of conventions offer a feasible toolbox to analyse the governance arrangements and institutions in
different markets. The goals and the incentives that define success and failure in distinct
governance arrangements determine whether a market will be part of the problem or can be part of
the solution of sustainable economic development.
The conventions that are used in the current text analysis reflect alternative governance
mechanisms, and therefore alternative market orders, within the food domain. These social
economic conventions only partially overlap with the governance styles that are covered in
organisational literature. What is missing in both literatures is a governance style that combines
collaboration and autonomy. This governance by spontaneous temporary collaboration of
independent actors seems important in alternative market systems and should be further explored
in relation to sustainable marketing.
491
What next
It is reassuring to see that this method confirms that marketing academics from different disciplines
and backgrounds draw from different conventions and speak different languages. Next step should
be analysing the conventions and governance styles that market actors use across (mainstream vs.
alternative) food chains. If the applicability of this coding tool is confirmed in research among
marketing practitioners as well, further analysis of alternative, and possibly sustainable, market
systems is required to relate different governance conventions to the sustainability of food markets.
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500
Table 2: Key critiques between worldviews (based on Barondeau 2015)
CRITICISM on Inspired on Patrimonial on Opinion on Civil on Industrial on Market on Project
of Inspired rigid routines restraining
sacred tradition
focus on
recognised
success
collective
juridical report
rational
planning facts,
figures
commercialised
common taste
clutter that
prevents real
authenticity
of Patrimonial: unstable,
unpredictable
nepotism
vendetta
utilitarian
showing off
anonymous
dispersed
responsibility
standardised
low quality
quantity over
quality
commoditisation
detachment
illusion of
equality
of Opinion: Esoteric elitist
opacity of
personal ties
certified
information
PR that
ignores public
opinion
technocrats
unconnected to
the masses
adapt info to
consumer
whims and
wishes
personal ties and
backroom
communications
of Civil:
irresponsible
improvisation
personal
authority
subsuming
personal under
public opinion
Favouritism
Corruption
technocracy
bureaucracy
privatisation of
public service;
treating citizens
as customers
lack of
collective in
network
of Industrial: Craftmanship
personal
experience; trick
of the trade
valuing image
over
functionality
lack of profit-
driven
efficiency
waste of
capacity
conspicuous
consumption &
whims of the
market
disorder, chaos,
lack of precision
of Market:
passion and
emotion;
eccentric and
maladapted
time-space &
social
embeddedness
brand loyalty
fashion, hype
identification
collective
demand;
a stable society
not allowing
profits
rigidity of
fixed plans and
procedures
rejected
repulsed
products;
Lack of
transparency
501
CRITICISM on Inspired on Patrimonial on Opinion on Civil on Industrial on Market on Project
of Project: isolated
creativity
fixed
hierarchical
relations
‘the’ collective expertise over
flexibility
anonymity of
spot-market
transactions
unengaged
uncommitted
502
Gender,
Intersectionalities, and
Macromarketing II
Track Chair: Wendy Hein
Co-Chair(s): Josephine Previte
503
Gender, Illness, Age and
Productivity: Addressing the
Intersectionalities of Young
Women with Advanced Cancer
Teresa Pavia67, University of Utah, USA
Kathrynn Pounders68, Stan Richards School of Advertising & PR, USA
“I feel like I don't know how to do real life. I don't know where to put my energy.” (Jennifer)
BACKGROUND
This work raises an additional intersectionality that is of interest to macromarketers, productivity,
approached through the lens of gender, age and illness. Of specific concern to this research are the choices
and decisions of young women with poor prognosis illness, some with aggressively advancing disease,
some currently in remission, as they continue to carry out institutionalized gender roles within their social
and consumption groups. Age is an intersectionality that is most commonly explore din the context of
ageism. But being young and ill raises a different sect of intersectionalities. Pain and fatigue in a young
person is particularly difficult in a youth-oriented, go-getter culture like the United States. Family and
friends often do not understand the extent of the fatigue and because it is impossible to measure with a test
or an x-ray it is also under-addressed by medical professionals (Pertl, Quigley and Hevey 2014). In person
support groups often draw older patients leaving young adult with online support options (Perales, Drake,
Pemmaraju and Wood 2016) but this may mean that connections such as emergency childcare coordinated
through the support group is less likely.
504
Consequently, while a young woman facing the prospect of an early death is challenged in many
dimensions such as finding a peer group (Fitch 2007) or seeking out specialized products and services
(Pavia and Mason 2004), she also continues to live within a larger macromarketing environment that has
expectations even for women who are ill, in the realms such as sexuality (Ussher, Perz and Gilbert 2013),
parenting (Huizinga et al 2011) and work/productivity (Christophe et al 2015). The women are also
embedded in a larger culture that values productivity. Although recent research has challenged some
metrics of value production (Hasse, Becker and Pick 2018), many people cleave to traditional notions of
paid employment or child bearing/child rearing (Hasse, Becker, Nill, Shultz and Gentry 2016). Placing
employment or childbearing at the core of notions of productivity places these women as another
intersectionality in which they have become “unproductive” with an unclear sense of contribution.
This research explores how young women strike a balance deciding how to use their limited time and
energy. Specifically, we focus on the expectations these women identify, for example caring for children,
being physically attractive or being productive, and explore the institutional practices are that are
reinforced and reproduced as well as those that emerge or reshaped.
METHODS
A total of 7 first-round depth-interviews were conducted with women who had been diagnosed with Stage
3 or Stage 4 breast cancer. For women under 40, the five year survival rate from diagnosis with stage 3
breast cancer is about 50%, for those with a stage 4 cancer it is only about 20% (Anders et al. 2010). All
women were undergoing treatment at the time of the first-round interview entailing a mix of
chemotherapies, radiation, and surgical procedures. A second-round interview was done one year after the
first-round interview. The disease had advanced in four of the respondents, three remained in remission.
All respondents were under 40 at the time of the first-round interview and the cohort included women who
were married and single, white and of-color, and those with and without children.
RESULTS
Our data show women simultaneously inwardly and outward focused; simultaneously doing their best to
meet broad, often gendered, expectations and rebelling against the constraints these expectations put on
their post-treatment bodies and their limited time and energy. Because space is limited in this abstract, we
present an overview of the analysis we have done focusing on the intersectionality of productivity. Before
this summary, it is worth noting that respondents all discussed how advanced disease impacted them due
to their age noting isolation and a sense that important time was being stolen from them. They also all
discussed how this particular sex-related cancer impacted their sexuality in a negative way. Finally, the
disease had moved them from the realm of the healthy into the realm of impairment/disability.
505
The Intersectionality of Productivity
From a macromarketing perspective respondents reflected the strong Western ethos of worth that stems
from contributing through work/productivity, or replacing monetary production by being an attractive,
supportive, fertile female. These respondents were generally unable to work at all or at full capacity
outside the home. As the ability to engage in paid employment diminished, other roles like mother,
caregiver and home maker became important. When these tasks also became too demanding, women
expressed a sense of failure – that they were failing others, as opposed to their body/medical science
failing them. Additionally, in a post-treatment body, (no longer fertile and often without breasts) they felt
their ability to perform as a good sexual partner was changed and diminished. Respondents relayed how
the role of being an attractive, fun enviable partner was also elusive.
Productivity is enacted through a series of roles: worker, parent, sexual partner, friend, family member,
etc. when illness undermines one role after another as it has for these women, her ability to continue to
feel productive in some way is continually challenged. One way respondents in remission approached this
tension was by turning to internal productivity in which they made their healing or their wellness their job.
Jennifer talked about body-care as part of her scheduled work for the day, “getting back into work too,
even though I was working part-time, going to the gym was a big part of that, getting some kind of a
schedule together.” In this approach the body is a barrier to productivity that can be restored to functioning
by the intervention of planning, gumption and willpower. Valerie discussed the explicit tradeoffs she made
to enhance her productivity as a mother and wife.
You have to adjust your goals and your lifestyle that okay, you might have to take a rest in the afternoon
before, so then you have the energy for when the kids come home from school and do the things that you
actually want to do, like make memories with your kids, or go see your friends, or spend time with your
husband or family or whatever.
Another way that respondents approached the issue of productivity was to reclaim activities that one might
consider volunteer or personal hobbies into the realm of productive contributions. If they could not be
directly productive in society through a paying job, there must be some way to leverage their situation to
increase others’ productivity. Although on disability, Marina acted as a consumer reviewer for a
government grant related to breast cancer and attended a training session for becoming a more active in
policy advocacy. Several of the respondents blogged, sharing experiences and knowledge, building a
network of mostly female cheerleaders and fellow patients. Many women pushed themselves to engage in-
person with others who were ill. As Rachelle said, “If I'm going to be in this much pain and live through
this much crap, there has to be some meaning to it. I don't feel like I'm just this wise sage or anything, but
I do have some insight.”
506
Relating to the earlier discussion about the relationship of gender, illness and fertility, Marina discussed a
complicated situation in her life. Against medical advice she delayed her initial treatment for egg
harvesting and then the embryos were frozen after fertilization by her fiancée. At this point a surrogate
would be needed to bear a child; Marina may not even live another 9 months; and her finance is opposed
to this pathway. However, in terms of how to spend her remaining time, being a mother (not bearing the
child herself, but being the mother) is the most valuable activity she can imagine right now as a young, ill,
well-educated, disabled but financially stable, female.
I want to have our kids. That's just, I mean, there's other things that I'm interested in, certainly, but that's
the one concrete thing. It's like, oh, I could write more, I could take up painting, I could travel, but this
feels like the most concrete thing.
DIRECTION OF RESEARCH
Having established that productivity is an important issue for these respondents, and that moving into the
category of “unproductive” is yet another intersectionality they face, we inquire how systems could work
to reduce the sense of being a burden that these respondents, the disabled and the elderly all voice. As
raised by Hasse, Becker, Nill, Shultz and Gentry (2016), in an alternative economy a number of people
create “value” in a form that is not one that is classically measured in marketing systems (e.g., not
consuming). We believe that there is also value produced by people who have lived through demanding
life experiences that is not captured neatly through typical market metrics. Working to help others in a
support group, blogging to provide inspiration or sitting with the dying are all productive tasks that fly
below the radar. We complete our discussion by considering how the other forms of production might be
encouraged by the marketing system and how scholars might begin to asses this type of productivity.
REFERENCES
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Subjective Experience of Young Women with Non-Metastatic Breast Cancer: The Young Women With
Breast Cancer Inventory,” Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, Jun 3,
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Fitch, Margret, Gray, RE, Godel R and M Labrecque (2008), “Young women's experiences with breast
cancer: an imperative for tailored information and support,” Canadian Oncology Nursing Journal, 18(2),
74-86.
Haase, Michaela, Ingrid Becker, Alexander Nill, Clifford J. Shultz, II, and James W. Gentry (2016), “Male
Breadwinner Ideology and the Inclination to Establish Market Relationships: Model Development Using
Data from Germany and a Mixed-Methods Research Strategy,” Journal of Macromarketing, 36(2), 149 –
67.
507
Haase, Michaela, Ingrid Becker, and Doreén Pick (2018), “Alternative Economies as Marketing Systems?
The Role of Value Creation and the Criticism of Economic Growth,” Journal of Macromarketing, 38(1),
57 – 72.
McKeage, Kim, Elizabeth Crosby, and Terri Rittenburg (2018), “Living in a Gender-Binary World:
Implications for a Revised Model of Consumer Vulnerability,” Journal of Macromarketing, 38(1), 73 – 90.
Pavia, Teresa M. and Marlys J. Mason (2004), “The Reflexive Relationship Between Consumer Behavior
and Adaptive Coping,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (2), 441–54.
Perales, Miguel-Angel, Drake, Emily K, Pemmaraju, Naveen and William A. Wood (2016), “Social
Media and the Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Patient with Cancer,” Current Hematologic
Malignancy Reports, 11(6), 449–55.
Pertl, Maria M., Jean Quigley, and David Hevey (2014), “‘I’m Not Complaining Because I’m Alive’:
Barriers to the Emergence of a Discourse of Cancer-Related Fatigue,” Psychology & Health, 29 (2), 141-
61.
Schau, Hope Jensen, Mary C. Gilly, and Mary Wolfinbarger (2009), “Consumer Identity Renaissance: The
Resurgence of Identity-Inspired Consumption in Retirement,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (2), 255-
76.
Ussher Jane M, Perz Janette, Gilbert Emilee (2013), “Information needs associated with changes to sexual
well-being after breast cancer,” Journal of Advanced Nursing, 69(2), 327-37.
508
Body modification, consumer
culture, and gender identity: An
Examination of Hourglass Feature
Enhancement
Jim Gentry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Jie G. Fowler, Valdosta State University, USA
Jasmine Andrin Sisk
ABSTRACT
Nearly everyone would like to be attractive, or at least seen as “normal.” The technology
to modify one’s face and body has existed for some time, but now we have the technology to give
the individual the opportunity to evaluate what he/she will look like post-modification. As
“beauty” means different things in different cultures, the nature of body modifications across
cultures also varies. Social marketers have made attempts to reduce the growth of the body
modification industries, yet Gurrier, Previte, and Brace-Govan (2013) suggest that some of these
attempts have resulted in individuals feeling stigmatized as opposed to encouraged. We argue that
what is needed is a richer understanding of the consumer’s motivation and decision-making
processes. Our investigation generated 25 depth interviews with American females who have
undergone body modifications, to help us understand the decision-making process. To that end,
we offer implications on consumer culture and embodied identity projects.
509
INTRODUCTION
One (near) universal is that people wish to be seen as normal (Baker 2006), possibly even
attractive according to cultural social norms. Those not happy with their current level of
attractiveness have options to modify their bodies and/or faces in order to conform more closely
to societal norms. Whether the modification involves breast enlargements (the most common
surgery among American females) or reshaping one’s eye structure in order to have “bigger eyes”
(not uncommon in parts of East Asia), the desire to modify one’s body is global in nature.
Cultural differences in “beauty” are great. For example, one’s body is central to beauty in
the West, whereas one’s face is more central to Asian beauty (Frith, Shaw, and Cheng 2005).
American Anglo women generally prefer to have a body with a tan, whereas Chinese and Indian
women prefer to have a lighter or pale skin, which may be a cue of high social class as it may be
inferred that the women do not work in the fields (Li et al. 2008). Frith et al. (2005), based on
content analyses of fashion magazines from Eastern and Western cultures, suggested that in the
West, it is mainly their bodies that get noticed by men, whereas Asian women may perceive their
faces to be more important. Big eyes are very important to Chinese women, many of whom have
cosmetic surgery to create double-fold eyelids (Weber 2017). Both the Chinese and Americans
see being slim as more “beautiful,” though the U.S. version also expects women to be curvy, with
plump bosoms and behinds but very thin waists.
In countries such as Mauritania, Nigeria, and Tonga where food has been scarce, heavier
women are perceived as more attractive. In fact, Mauritania has had fat farms where women were
sent to put on weight. In some parts of Africa, scarification of the face is performed in order to
increase one’s attractiveness. In Muslim countries where wearing the hajib and burka are
common, a great deal of attention is paid to females’ eyes.
It has been frequently noted that Marketing plays a major role in the creation of body
norms. Commercial marketing has long exploited idealized, objectified beauty as an aspiration
(Joy and Venkatesh 1994; Thompson and Hirschman 1995). Scholars have recognized the effects
of these unrealistic standards such as body image issues, unhealthy eating patterns, and increased
standardization of gender stereotypes (Gurrieri, Previte, and Brace-Govan 2013; Gurrieri, Brace-
Govan, and Previte 2014). Gurrieri et al. (2013) assert that the fashion and beauty industries
present images that conform to normative codes of beauty. Further, these images when paired
with practices such as fitness programs, dieting, or surgery, foster female perceptions of
510
inadequacy regarding their appearances. Even further, the viewed body not only relates to one’s
attractiveness, but also is seen by society to be the moral equivalent of a good person (Gurrieri et
al. 2013; Joy and Venkatesh 1994).
Social marketing efforts, with aims to induce voluntary behavior change through the
adoption of marketing principles and techniques (Andreason 2006), have been made by
organizations such as the Ad Council and the National Health Service to reduce the anxiety
created by the persistent presentation of an unrealistic body norm. However, Gurrieri et al. (2013)
note that social marketing discourse has backfired to some extent as it has presented the fat body
as something to be repaired and restored to normality. Obese women have identified this
discourse as discriminating, judgmental, dehumanizing, and disempowering. Rather than being
seen as encouragement, some of these attempts to improve female health have been seen as
stigmatization.
It turns out that a decision to modify one’s body is more complex than one might expect,
and is a topic generating controversy even among feminists. For example, some question
cosmetic surgery’s need, as Bordo (1993, 1997) argued that cosmetic surgery reproduces existing
gender norms and the male-dominated society that creates them. Jeffreys (2005) uses terms such
as “women’s oppression” and “self-mutilation” when discussing cosmetic surgery. On the other
hand, some feminists see more value to cosmetic surgery. For example, Davis (2002) discusses
the potential for cosmetic surgery to be a site of empowerment, while Gimlin (2007) saw
cosmetic surgery as a potential space for personal liberation. At the same time they agree with
fellow feminists seeing some value for individual women from cosmetic surgery (Balasamo
1992; Morgan 1991) that cosmetic surgery should be highly criticized in general.
COSMETIC PROCEDURES AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
Lupton and Seymour (2003) describe the body as an object that must be groomed and
maintained in an optimal state to maximize benefit. From this perspective, the body is regarded as
an unfinished object and is viewed as mediating the negotiation of health and illness. Thus, a
cosmetic procedure may be utilized to rectify perceived deficiencies in the human body (Davis
2002). Through cosmetic procedures, individuals are able to exercise their intent to join a culture
of beauty.
Cosmetic procedures have been seen as a self-enhancement technology undermined by
negative media news (e.g., deadly frozen face, addiction, and deadly poison) (Giesler 2012).
511
However, the industry has begun to gain acceptance among consumers in recent years (Giesler
2012). This neutralized process may due to the social process of legitimation (Humphreys 2010).
For instance, Botox received approval from the FDA in 2002. Since 2007, it has become
the most commonly used non-surgical cosmetic enhancement procedure in North America to
soften a person’s frozen facial lines for up to four months (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic
Surgery 2009). The market success was led by the Baby Boomer female consumer segment. In
general, there are two types of cosmetic procedures: noninvasive and surgical procedures.
Surgical procedures may involve operations that involve cutting open the body to insert implants,
such as breast augmentation, liposuction, and rhinoplasty. Non-surgical/non-invasive techniques
consist of injections of chemicals/fillers into muscles or penetration of laser light to inhibit or
intervene with certain body parts.
.Body modifications have been increasing rapidly in recent years (Jones 2011). Thus,
research has sought to investigate the underlying popularity of these techniques used to improve
consumer identity. There is an underlying assumption that an enhanced appearance allows
consumers to better enjoy a body that is closer to their ‘ideal true’ selves (Featherstone 2010).
That being said, previous research has assumed that this consumer transformation allows the
opportunity for a renewed body with which consumers can enjoy the simple pleasures of life. One
of the most drastic forms of body modification is found in cosmetic surgery and body
augmentation, which are publicized by media as a trending form of self-improvement (Bordo
2004; Covino 2004; Doyle 2008; Gimlin 2007; Heyes 2007; Jones 2008). The American Society
for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (2016) reported that Americans have expended more than $15
billion dollars on combined surgical and nonsurgical aesthetic procedures, seeing a 11% increase
in the past year alone. Breast augmentation/reduction ranks as the second most common surgical
procedure for both men and women combined in 2016. The cosmetics industry is becoming
increasingly aggressive in its attempts to capture the attention of men and women seeking to face
the world with more self-confidence (Hill 2016).
Consumers may no longer be engaging in cosmetic surgery to feel complete but perceive
surgery as a way of maintaining acceptable body appearance (Jones 2011). In an engaging visual
market that emphasizes individuality and the admiration of celebrities, consumers may use
surgical transformation as a way to express and enhance themselves on the road to personal
empowerment. The affordability and accessibility of various body modification avenues allow
opportunities for consumers to take the enhancements they make to their bodies on Photoshop or
512
social media and apply them through real life plastic surgery. In turn, cosmetic surgery has
become highly emphasized in commercial media (Lirola and Chovanec 2012). Cosmetic surgery,
like any other type of body modification, has been advertised as a regular everyday purchase for
consumers (Elliot 2008). Being offered a variety of sizes, shapes, colors, and options to choose
from, consumers individually can plan to manipulate body features to view the effects of any
cosmetic procedures. The rising trend of body modification gives consumers a sense of self-
assurance, as they can align the external appearance of their body with how they feel about
themselves on the inside.
INSTITUTIONAL THEORY: CULTURAL AESTHETICS AND BODY PROJECTS
Beauty, in Western society, has long achieved the status of institutionalization (Meyer and
Rowan 1977). Under the institutionalized perspective, numerous social forces propel conformity
to societal norms (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Prior research suggests that cosmetic procedures
are often undertaken to meet or attain certain cultural values (e.g., Little 1998) and help to
reconstruct one’s identity (Brooks 2004). In addition, an attractive appearance not only affects
one’s romantic life, but also tends to have positive effects on psychological adjustment and
economic well-being (Sullivan 2001).
The nature of the body plays an important role in consumer research (Thompson and
Hirschman 1995). Previous research has investigated the emphasis that is placed upon
maintaining the appropriate appearance of the body within contemporary society. Marketers tend
to portray body maintenance as a basis for a marketable and appreciated appearance
(Featherstone 1982). In addition, previous research has found that consumers are recognized as
using appearance to define and communicate their consumer identity and self-concept (Berger
and Heath 2007). By focusing on the outer body, consumer culture is argued to have given way to
the desire of social nonconformity that presents an individual as different or unique as compared
to others (Nail 1986; Tian 1997). As such, in the development of a consumer’s identity to appear
different from others, consumer culture has transformed the market into one that advertises
products and services that appear to differentiate, if not enhance, the appearance of consumers.
Thus, this study aims to examine whether body modification is a form of social conformity
activity among consumers. As such, in-depth interviews were conducted, and findings are
presented below.
513
METHODS
A total of 25 female informants between the ages of 18 and 35 participated in the study in
the U.S. All participants have gone through at least one breast augmentation/reduction surgery
and/or a Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) to enhance the hourglass features. Each of these interviews lasted between one to two hours. The conversation was video recorded and later transcribed. The
interviews started with general questions regarding demographics such as surgical history, age,
and marital status, and were then followed with questions on consumption of body modification.
Questions on identity formation emerged from the conversation and were further probed for
elabora.tion.
Table 1: Informants
Pseudo Name Procedure Age
Jill Breast augmentation 22
Alexus Breast augmentation 26
Jessica Breast augmentation 35
Alexis Breast augmentation 21
Mary Breast augmentation 27
Emily Breast augmentation 33
Tiffany Breast augmentation 28
Samantha Breast augmentation 34
Meredith Breast augmentation 21
Olivia Breast augmentation 28
Molly Breast augmentation 29
Sophia Breast augmentation 26
Mia Breast augmentation 27
514
Pseudo Name Procedure Age
Emma Breast augmentation 32
Harper Breast augmentation 34
Emilia Breast augmentation 30
Sinclaire BBL/ Breast augmentation 31
Julie BBL/ Breast augmentation 22
Taylor BBL /Breast augmentation 21
Katy BBL/ Breast augmentation 25
Katherine BBL/ Breast augmentation 35
Brianna BBL 21
Logan.. BBL 25
Hayley BBL 28
Julie BBL 26
Each interview generated between 20 to 45 pages of transcripts. Then, the researchers
discussed their data analysis process/findings, and a consensus was reached within the research
team. The transcripts were scrutinized for common themes and categories and compared for
consistency across the entire data set (Arnould and Wallendorf 1994; Belk, Fischer, and Kozinets
2015; Spiggle 1994).
Much analysis occurred simultaneously with data collection and helped to determine the
direction of the study. As new data were collected, they were analyzed for points of similarity and
contrast. Analysis was an iterative process of coding, categorizing, and abstracting the data
(McCracken 1988). Data of thematic similarity were identified throughout based on keywords or
phrases. Coded data were compared and contrasted to yield a few broad categories which,
through sorting and clustering, were reduced to the more fundamental patterns that constitute the
emergent themes. The final analysis integrated the themes into a unified discussion of the identity
reconstruction process (Schouten 1991). This approach is consistent with grounded theory
procedures (Corbin and Strauss 1990), which are iterative in nature and require continually
515
collecting data, comparing categories, and revising interpretation until the process is understood
(Creswell 2013; Sayre 2001).
FINDINGS
A body modification obviously may change one’s appearance noticeably. Thus, the
common expected rationale is that one has cosmetic surgery in order to look better. However,
numerous informants noted than an even more important reason is to improve one’s self-
confidence. According to Gumin’s (2012) study of women who had cosmetic surgery, the
majority of the participants did not expect cosmetic surgery to make them beautiful. Instead,
many hoped the procedure would make them have a “normal” appearance. This notion of desiring
to be normal has been discussed in the literature for decades (Birenbaum and Sagarin 1973;
Goffman 1963, 1971). “The normal appearances they are concerned with are not normal
appearances for them but normal appearances of them” (Goffman 1971, p. 259; italics in
original). In other words, they want their appearances to be seen as normal (expected). If one’s
appearance is normal, then one is a member of the in-group (Goffman 1963) and is comfortable
with oneself. Our findings support Gumin’s conclusion.
Enhance One’s Self-Confidence
Two informants did say explicitly that they were expecting to improve their appearances.
Karin said that she wanted to be more appealing to people, while Alexus noted that she is always
going to be looked at. The more common explanation was that the informant wished to feel better
about herself. A typical rationale was similar to that of Jill:
I am beginning to take care of myself as far as exercising, trying to eat right. But…my
choice of plastic surgery was just something to make me feel good about myself. It’s not
extreme…I didn’t want to look plastic. I see a lot of women just overdo it. They don’t
look like themselves. I want to continue to look like myself.
Numerous informants said that they were bothered by their small breasts. For example,
Jessica, a wait-person, said that “I felt intimidated because I had a small breast size, which was
unattractive to most men. No impact, but it makes me look attractive for my job.” Another
informant noted that she had a friend who was having a lot of back pain due to her breasts being
so large and, when she did a breast reduction, her self-confidence improved very noticeably as
well as helping with her physical problems.
516
Besides breast augmentation/reduction, several women got “bigger butts.” Apparently, the
Kardashians, especially Kim, have influenced greatly the nature of the ideal body in American
society. The Brazilian butt lift enlarges the derriere while at the same time reducing the waist.
Support for the Modification
Boyfriends and husbands, in general, were supportive of the breast enlargement, though
several told the women that they were just fine as is. Parents, in general, needed to be sold that
the modification should take place, although there were exceptions. For example, one informant’s
mother is a cosmetic surgeon and the informant worked in her mother’s office as a receptionist.
Three informants’ mothers had their breasts enlarged in the past and were supportive of their
daughters’ quests. Most parents were reluctant, at least initially, to encourage the modification.
My family was against it but I had to do what makes me happy. Some of my friends
supported my mission. [Alexis]
I felt depressed because my father wasn’t in support, but I got over it after a few months.
[Mary]
Since my family—they’re jokesters. They would make jokes about celebrities who had
the procedure and ended up looking worse. Like if her nose surgery was messed up, they
would make comments. So, yeah, they had comments. [Emily]
I come from a family that’s like [you] don’t deviate from pretty much who you are so
pretty much [you] don’t change like certain things on your body. [Tiffany]
A few informants had body modifications without their parents’ permission or, in some
cases, knowledge. Most informants facing family resistance were able to get past that reluctance
through persistence. Samantha noticed as a high school sophomore that her breasts were not
filling out. Her parents’ response to her request to enlarge them was “absolutely not, it’s
ridiculous…You’re perfect the way you are.” She said that “I begged and begged and pleaded
and pleaded,” and they let her have a breast enlargement as a high school graduation gift.
Numerous young informants used strategies similar to the one just described in order to
convince their parents. However, some tried a more rational approach. Meredith encouraged her
parents to find other parents whose daughters had undergone plastic surgery in order to get a
better understanding of the process and of the social pressures on young females to look a certain
way.
Several informants discussed receiving support from friends. Another source of support
that was mentioned was the doctor who might perform the surgery. Clearly there is a conflict of
517
interest facing the physician as she/he relies on the several thousand dollars paid for the surgery.
In one case, a family doctor was very supportive. Some informants had known several patients of
their selected surgeons, which gave them confidence that they too would benefit from his/her
surgical skills. Numerous informants discussed how they felt more self-confident after their
consultations with their surgeons. Apparently, the surgeons had much experience with patients’
concerns and they were able to reduce their anxieties during the consultations.
Pre-Surgery Decision-Making
Surgeries inevitably cause anxiety, especially if one’s physical body is going to be
modified as a result. There is much more to self-identity than one’s physical body, but few would
argue that the body is not central to most people’s identity. While the expected outcome is a more
attractive appearance, there is also the possibility of a less attractive one. Alexis noted that
You hear horror stories all the time about women like going to Tijuana or something and
come up missing or it’s botched. In fact, there’s a whole show about that, actually called
Botched.
Similarly, Olivia noted that one is always fearful that something could go wrong while
having the surgery. “You’re always scared that something could go wrong, but I had no
complications at all.”
Molly expressed her worries prior to the surgery in more detail:
I had never had a serious procedure at the time and I was afraid of going under of course.
I also am allergic to a lot of different medications so I was fearing that, while I was
asleep, they may give me medications and I may have allergic reactions to it and I may
not wake up.
The uncertainty resulted in most informants seeking information about what their
particular body manipulations entailed. Sophia said that she did not invest much time into the
subject, but did spend four or five hours at the local library and about the same amount of time
online. In some cases, one of the parents did the investigation of publicly available sources. Many
informants knew people who had experienced similar surgeries, and they inquired about those
experiences.
Post-Surgery Reflections
While most informants were pleased with the outcome of the surgery, some noted that
there was much pain in the recovery process. Jessi said that her first period after her breast
surgery was terrible, whereas Elise said that she literally felt like she had an elephant on her
518
throat. Mia was in excruciating pain when she went to her first post-surgery appointment. He took
a look and found that her breast was out of place. So, he popped it back in, which was even more
excruciating. Thus, it took about ten days for her to start feeling normal again. Informant Emma
apparently had the most difficult recovery:
It was actually super painful so it probably took about five weeks for everything to heal.
Like as soon as I got out of surgery, I was heavily medicated and I was probably
medicated for like a week after that. I was constantly tired so I was resting a lot on my
back. My boobs were super swollen, and I constantly had to like either rewrap my boobs
or my mom would. So, it was a long process and I’m sure my family was very annoyed
with me.
Nearly all of the informants felt that the improved body appearance was worth the pain of
surgery, although a couple had to think about that for a while. One of the biggest benefits was
that shopping for clothes became far more enjoyable. Several noted that clothes fit better. Several
who had breast enlargements commented that shopping for bras was far more fun.
Some informants did not see themselves as becoming walking billboards for body
modifications. Indeed, several talked about having modifications that most people would not
notice. Post-surgery some informants still had some moral qualms. Two informants have younger
sisters about whom they were concerned:
I don’t want to go too far overboard where I don’t look naturally pretty and have my
natural state because I have younger sisters. I don’t want them to grow up feeling like you
have to make 80 million modifications to your body to feel pretty. So that’s important that
I am a role model for them in that way. [Harper]
I made modifications to my own body, so I feel like a hypocrite when I talk to my
younger sisters about it but it’s just something that they will hopefully grow to learn to
love their own bodies and not want to necessarily make any modifications. [Emilia]
DISCUSSION
Plastic surgery possesses a longer history than contemporary cosmeceutical and
nonsurgical procedures, dating back at least to the Renaissance (Gilman 1999). Today, cosmetic
surgery is often treated as a commodity (Sterodimas, Radwanski, and Pitanguy 2011) and the
individuals undergo the procedures to pass as more sexy, fit, and desirable (Bayer 2005). Changes
519
in economic patterns, the attraction of image-based mediation such as reality shows, and
advertising contribute to a cultural desire for youthful/beautiful images (Bayer 2005).
Prior research suggests that consumption and materialistic practices presented by
marketplace resources have significantly contributed to consumer identity construction. From the
perspective of utilizing material goods or specific brands to construct and further develop a
consumer’s identity, further research is needed to analyze the marketplace’s ability to provide a
substantial number of resources to assist consumers in constructing desirable individual and
communal identities (e.g., Murray 2002; Schau and Gilly 2003; Thompson and Hirschman 1995).
Thus, this study examined the consumers’ decision-making process to obtain/enhance hourglass
features from an institutional perspective.
Our investigation of the decision process around the choice to have cosmetic surgery and
one’s post-surgery reflections indicate a mixed evaluation. A very few informants were having
the surgery in order to be much more noticeable and to stand out; however, the vast majority of
the informants just wanted to be more normal and to fit in. Nearly all informants were satisfied
with their decision and with the resulting surgery. For instance, one participant stated: “I do not
want to l
ook like a walking billboard. That is not me.” It is clear that these individuals are aware of
the differences between the “ideal self” and the “real self,” although mass media play a major role
in establishing these normative cultural standards. Echoing Goffman (1959), individuals
undertake impression management to enhance to their own self-images. From this view, cosmetic
surgery is essentially a self-directed choice that enables the consumer to accomplish goals and
feel more contented with her life. So, to some extent, the results support the Davis (2002) and
Negrin (2012) perspectives: though they critique cosmetic surgery, they believe that individual
women may find cosmetic surgery to generate empowerment. Thus, on a micro level, we believe
that an argument can be made to support cosmetic surgery.
On a macro level though, it is not at all clear that the social norms that lead humans to feel
inadequate and to see the need for surgery in order to be “normal” are appropriate. We perceive
that the patriarchy has entirely too much input into the social norms concerning what constitutes
‘attractiveness.’ At the same time, we perceive that progress is being made (though slowly) in
terms of gender equity in terms of issues such equitable pay, maternity and paternity leaves, and
career opportunities. It may be that the social norms for “attractiveness” will also make some
progress. May that be the case.
520
Finally, body images characterize the perception of a consumer has of her/his body, and
these perceptions are conditioned by a field of social relationships, cultural ideals, normative
prescriptions, and moralistic meanings (Thompson and Hirschman 1995). In recent years,
sociological theorists proposed that consumer culture has entered a new age of postmodernity
(Firat and Venkatesh 1993). In this view, postmodern consumers are free to choose from a wide
range of cultural narratives and identities to become the person he/she wants or desires. Much
debate has centered on whether consumer identity has become fragmented. Our analysis supports
this argument that the modern identity has been defined by the postmodern ongoing consumption
project. Consumers sought to cope with physical changes and were able to negotiate between the
idealized conception of body and their own identity.
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Sustainable & Ethical
Consumption V
Track Chair: Sabrina V. Helm
526
Brand extension decisions for
organic products
Ritu Mehta69 70, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, India
Sanket Agrawal71, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India
INTRODUCTION
Buying organic foods and products is growing as a trend across nations (Organic Trade Association
2016; Wang et al. 2012). With the growing concern of environmental sustainability and food safety,
governments across countries are striving to determine the optimal model for sustainable
consumption, and are incentivizing businesses that adopt environment friendly practices. Multi-
national firms are trying to make the best use of this opportunity by adding organic products to
their product portfolio. However, a pertinent question is whether they should launch a new brand
or use their existing brand name to enter into the organic product category. There is limited research
that investigates the issue of branding in the context of purchase of organic products. Would
consumers evaluate organic product extensions from existing organic brands more favourably than
when the parent brand is non-organic? Secondly, would customer evaluation of extension into
organic product category differ for different extension categories based on the status of the parent
brand. The present study attempts to answer these questions.
BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT
One factor that has been consistently found to affect the success of brand extension is ‘perceived
fit’ between the parent brand category and the new extension (Hem et al. 2003, Völckner and Sattler
69 Corresponding Author 70 [email protected] 71 [email protected]
527
2006). Literature suggests that consumers may perceive similarity based on consistency on a
number of criteria that includes common physical characteristics, shared usage situation, and brand
concept consistency (Austin and Vancouver 1996, Broniarczyk and Alba 1994, Keller and Aaker
1992, Martin and Stewart 2001, Zhang and Sood 2002). Overall these studies suggest that
consumers use their knowledge about parent brand to judge the similarity of extension with the
parent brand and when the perceived similarity is high, the positive associations with the parent
brand get transferred to the extension product. When the extension is perceived to be technically
or functionally dissimilar to the existing brand products, customers doubt the intentions of the firm
and its competency in providing the product. For instance, Aaker and Keller (1990) and Keller and
Aaker (1992) found that overall extensions closer to parent brand category were evaluated higher
on the ability of the firm to manufacture the product extension. Low product category similarity
has also been found to generate negative feedback effects on parent brand attitudes (Milberg et al.,
1997). Based on the above discussion, we expect that consumers will perceive brand extension into
organic category in the same product category as the original brand to be more similar than into
any other category and shall also have more favorable evaluations for extensions into same category
than a different category. Therefore, we hypothesize:
H1a: Consumers perceive greater fit towards the extension into organic product when the extension
is in the same product category than when it is in a different category.
H1b: Consumers have a more favorable attitude towards the extension into organic product when
the extension is in the same product category than when it is in a different category.
There is limited empirical research that investigates the evaluation of extension based on whether
the parent brand is organic or not. However, there is reason to believe that if a firm has previous
experience of providing organic products, then its organic brand extension will be perceived to
have greater fit as well as more favorable evaluations from the consumers as compared to a firm
originally not into organic products. The fact that the firm has experience with other organic
products is expected to lend credibility to the firm in terms of expertise and skills required to
manufacture organic products and thus there is likelihood that the future launches of organic
products from the firm will be evaluated more favorably by consumers. Kim and Chung (2011)
demonstrated that consumers’ prior experience in terms of frequency of purchase of organic
products has a positive influence on their purchase intentions for other organic products. Hence, if
a brand has earlier been associated with organic products, consumers are more likely to buy organic
528
products of the same brand. Therefore, we hypothesize:
H2a: Consumers perceive greater fit towards the extension into organic product when the parent
brand is organic than when parent brand is inorganic.
H2b: Consumers have a more favorable evaluation towards the extension into organic product
when the parent brand is organic than when parent brand is inorganic.
METHODOLOGY
A 2 (parent brand: organic, non-organic) x 2 (extension category: same as parent brand, different
from parent brand) between-subjects design was used to test the hypotheses. Approximately forty
students enrolled in under-graduate programs responded to the four experimental conditions.
Hypothetical brands in food category were chosen to avoid any preconceived associations with the
brand name. ANOVA was conducted controlling for prior brand attitude.
RESULTS
The analysis revealed that consumers evaluated extensions into organic products more favorably
and with greater perceived fit in the same product category as opposed to extension in the different
product category. Also extensions into organic product from organic parent brand versus non-
organic parent brand were judged as having more fit and positive evaluations. Thus, hypotheses 1
and 2 are supported.
CONCLUSION
This study contributes to the literature of organic products in the domain of brand extension by
investigating the effects of organic status of parent brand and category of extension on perceptions
of perceived fit and evaluations of the extension. The findings give insights to marketers as to what
would be the best way to get into organic product category with brand extension.
529
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530
Informal university linkages with
government scientific research:
facilitating market adoption of
household solar technology
Ali Aljamal72, American University of Kuwait, Kuwait
Mark Speece73, American University of Kuwait, Kuwait
Mohsen A. Bagnied74, American University of Kuwait, Kuwait
Extended abstract
This paper discusses informal collaboration between the American University of Kuwait
(AUK) and the Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research (KISR) on Kuwait’s sustainable energy
initiatives. KISR is doing considerable work on adapting solar technology to Kuwait conditions.
The Government aims to supply 15 percent of energy demand from renewable sources by 2035
(Alsayegh 2016). KISR currently is fitting 150 houses with rooftop solar panels to demonstrate
the feasibility of household-level energy production in Kuwait (Al-Qattan 2016).
The technical side of this is well-covered by KISR, but gaining wider adoption of residential
solar energy is partly a marketing issue. Islam & Meade (2013) show the importance of educational
campaigns, i.e., marketing communications. Fabrizio & Hawn (2013) show that adoption is heavily
influenced by the associated ‘ecosystem’ of complementary goods and services. The marketing
72 [email protected] 73 [email protected] 74 [email protected]
531
value chain (using terminology in Olsen 2014) includes suppliers of equipment, pre- and post-sale
services for advice and/or maintenance, and even things like an active social media environment
where users discuss the technology.
Figure 1 illustrates the problem, using a standard technology adoption S-curve. The
technical side of the 2035 Initiative is about the upper right side of the curve, which shows the
proportion of households using solar once the technology is fully in place. The marketing problem
is about the lower left side at the beginning of the curve. Innovators must first adopt, and then very
early adopters must respond to begin gaining market acceptance. If the marketing is poorly done,
the innovation will never take off. Sometimes new technologies are simply not very good, but
often they fail because poor marketing has failed to convince people to adopt good technologies.
In several advanced undergraduate classes, we orient part of the teaching toward the
marketing and economics side of innovation diffusion. Senior students in AUK’s marketing
capstone course have developed marketing campaigns to introduce household solar energy to
Kuwaiti families. Their initial work requires qualitative in-depth interviewing with Kuwaiti home
owners, to thoroughly understand who might adopt this technology very early, and why. This
information is used in a survey questionnaire which lower division students in the marketing
principles classes use to collect data to further understand behaviors at the beginning of the
diffusion process.
In an upper-level environmental economics class, students worked on estimating household
energy usage and how consumption might change with the solar option. From this, they estimated
the impact on government energy requirements and the cost of producing that energy. They can
also assess the impact and costs of various government policy options. A new behavioral
economics course, jointly taught with marketing, will examine how to influence acceptance of
policy initiatives designed to foster solar acceptance at the household level.
Results from these classes can be used in static simulations to understand the impact of
marketing initiatives on innovation diffusion in the Kuwaiti market. The basic Bass model captures
both innovation, where a small percentage of consumers just like trying new things, and imitation,
where other consumers are influenced to try products when they see and hear about others who
have adopted (Meade & Islam 2006).
532
The basic model can be written to model both f(t) = adoptions at a particular time t, and F(t)
= cumulative adoptions. Then
dF(t)
f(t) = ------ = [ p + qF(t) ] [ 1 – F(t) ]
dt
where p is the coefficient of innovation, and q is the coefficient of imitation. The model can be
adjusted to account for a ceiling on cumulative adoption which is less than 100 percent of the
market, as well as for marketing impact on p and q.
The solution to the differential equation yields an F(t) which is an S-curve. Based on
findings in the marketing courses, we can look at the impact of marketing elements. Based on
calculations in the economics class, we can compute economic impact. Simulations varying p and
q can show the impact under different assumptions about marketing strategy and government
policy. We show these impacts for several likely scenarios. The new behavioral economics class
will allow some assessment of ability to influence p and q through policy initiatives.
References
Al-Qattan, Ayman. 2016. Renewable Energy Technology Deployment Challenges. Presented at the
AUK-KISR Renewable Energy Symposium & Exhibition, American University of Kuwait,
24 October, 2016.
Alsayegh, Osamah. 2016. Kuwait energy strategy 2035. Presented at the AUK-KISR Renewable
Energy Symposium & Exhibition, American University of Kuwait, 24 October, 2016.
Fabrizio, K.R. and Hawn, O., 2013. Enabling diffusion: How complementary inputs moderate the
response to environmental policy. Research Policy, 42(5), pp.1099-1111.
Islam, T. & Meade, N., 2013. The impact of attribute preferences on adoption timing: The case of
photo-voltaic (PV) solar cells for household electricity generation. Energy Policy, 55: 521-
530.
Meade, N., & Islam, T. (2006). Modelling and forecasting the diffusion of innovation – A 25-year
review. International Journal of Forecasting 22(3): 519-545.
533
Olson, E.L., 2014. Green innovation value chain analysis of PV solar power. Journal of Cleaner
Production, 64, pp.73-80.
Figure 1: Technology adoption S-curve
0
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0,6
0,7
0,8
0,9
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1 6
1 1
1 6
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5 1
5 6
6 1
6 6
7 1
7 6
8 1
8 6
9 1
9 6
1 0
1
technology adoption S-curve
time innovators
very early adopters
Market acceptance: trend slope starts
to move up
The goal: wide usage of sustainable solar energy production
We will not get here if the early stages are done poorly;
new technology
often fails to gain market acceptance
p ro
p o
rt io
n o
f h
o u
se h
o ld
s w
h ic
h h
a ve
a d
o p
te d
534
Market, Marketing
Systems, and Elements of
Culture I
Track Chair : Ingrid Becker
Co-Chair(s) : Michaela Haase
535
How to Address Culture in
Marketing Studies: An Analysis
Using the Example of the
Marketing-Systems Approach
Michaela Haase75, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Culture is probably one of the most complex, diversified, colorful and debated concepts in the
social sciences. Multiple competing research strands and definitions have evolved from its study.
In management, organization and marketing studies, business ethics, and beyond, culture is an
important topic. Macromarketing scholars addressed, e.g., the impact of cross-cultural contexts on
moral choice, the creation and change of cultural meanings through marketing, the critique of
consumption culture, and the transformation of cultural systems toward sustainability.
Taking both relevance and diversity of approaches to the study of culture as a starting point, I
wonder what the reason for the diversity of cultural approaches and research objects is and what
follows from this knowledge for marketing studies. My analysis captures culture through a social-
scientific lens, placing special emphasis on the relations of science, the social, and culture. Drawing
on approaches originating from or bearing a relation to sociology, I discuss important distinctions
and research gaps made and identified in the study of culture. I argue that cultural phenomena are
not, but are made, and are made differently by different approaches, theories, or disciplines.
Consequences for marketing studies drawn from my analysis are discussed using the example of
the marketing-systems approach.
536
1 Introduction
Culture is probably one of the most complex,i diversified, colorful and debated concepts in the
social sciences. Multiple competing research strands and definitions have evolved from the study
of culture (Denzin 1999; Patterson 2014; Peterson 1979; Thompson 1990; Wuthnow and Witten
1988). In management, organization and marketing studies (Desphande and Webster Jr. 1989;
Hatch and Zilber 2012; Schein 1996; Smircich 1983; Srivastava and Goldberg 2017), business
ethics (Melé and Sánchez-Runde 2013; Vitell, Nwachukwu and Barnes 1993), and beyond, culture
is an important topic. Macromarketing scholars addressed, e.g., the impact of cross-cultural
contexts on moral choice (Nill and Shultz II 1997), the creation and change of cultural meanings
through marketing (Cross, Harrison and Gilly 2017), the critique of consumption culture (Tharp
and Scott 1990), and the transformation of cultural systems toward sustainability (Assadourian
2010).
Taking this diversified picture as a starting point, I wonder what the reason for the diversity of
cultural approaches and research objects is and what follows from this knowledge for marketing
studies. I do not aim at a comprehensive portrayal and analysis of cultural research in marketing
studies (Deshpande and Webster Jr. 1989). Instead, I refer to the ongoing debate over marketing
studies’ scientific or social-scientific character to substantiate the assumption of a social-scientific
lens with regard to marketing studies (e.g., Hunt 1976; Monieson 1981; Arndt 1985; Dixon 1984;
Dholakia 1988; Monieson 1988; Hudson and Ozanne 1988; Jones and Monieson 1990; Firat and
Dholakia 2006; Gummesson 2009; Webster and Lusch 2013). The commentaries on Lusch (2017)
and Layton (2016) in the Journal of Macromarketing and the Australian Marketing Journal,
respectively, are two recent examples for this debate.
If marketing studies belonged to the social sciences, then it would be an element of a family (set)
of disciplines determined by both the social and the science aspect in the expression “social
science.” The works and debates mentioned above are indicative of the existence of a number of
approaches or theories in marketing studies to which the label “social science” applies. I discuss
the marketing-systems approach (Layton 2007; 2009; 2011; 2015) in place of them because of its
social-scientific character and relation to sociological systems theory. On this basis, I approach the
answer to the questions asked above by taking an indirect route, beginning with a discussion of the
relations between science, the social, and culture. For space limitations, not all possible relations
between these categories are included in the analysis.
537
The qualifier “social” in “social science” can mean different things in disciplines such as sociology,
marketing studies, organization studies, or anthropology. The “disciplines of the social are
themselves social practices that simply form another part of the social world” (Law and Urry 2004,
p. 391; Firat 2012), that is, the differences between the disciplines or their practices can be observed
and described. In this regard, one can observe that, e.g., sociology studies social action and social
order; organization studies organizations or organizational fields; marketing studies service
provision, markets or marketing systems; and anthropology “what makes us human” (American
Anthropological Associationii). As the relevance of sociological concepts and theories for the study
of market phenomena has been recognized in marketing studies (Bagozzi 1975; Dixon 1984;
Layton 2015; Shapiro, Tadajewski and Shultz II 2009), I put sociological contributions to the study
of culture – and their criticisms – in the center of my analysis.
Does the study of cultural phenomena imply that these phenomena are “there” – waiting for
someone who studies them? The examples discussed in this paper give rise to the conjecture that
this is not the case. It seems that cultural phenomena are created rather than discovered.
Consequently, I argue that cultural phenomena are not, but are made, and are made differently by
different approaches, theories, or disciplines. The question then arises how marketing studies can
or should address cultural phenomena “created” by other disciplines or if it can or should “create”
own cultural phenomena.
The indirect procedure chosen in this paper finds expression in three analytical steps: First, I
concern myself with the three basic categories selected for this study (culture, the social, and
science); second, I present examples for the “creation” of cultural phenomena; third, I discuss the
results of my analysis with regard to the marketing-systems approach. The remainder of this paper
is organized as follows: The next section introduces the framework of analysis as depicted in Figure
1. The subsequent section provides a sketch of the diversified field of study and of the much-
debated role of sociology therein. After that, the “creation” of cultural phenomena is described with
regard to sociological approaches selected because they express important distinctions or point to
important gaps in the study of culture. An interim conclusion connects the preceding part of the
paper with the analysis devoted to the discussion of the marketing-systems approach in light of the
insights gained from the previous analysis. The paper ends with conclusions and outlook.
538
2 The Framework of analysis
In this section, I discuss three basic categories, that is science, the social, and culture, and relations
between them selected for my analysis. The relations between the respective pairs the
social/science and culture/science can be read in both directions each. Reading the left side of the
triangle (Figure 1) can start with “the social” or “science.” The first case (the social -> science,
upwardly directed left arrow) represents the social aspects of knowledgeiii generation (expressed,
e.g., in disciplinary practices) and the second case (science -> the social, downwardly directed left
arrow) how sciences study social dimensions of social reality (e.g., by focusing on implicit or
explicit phenomena).
Figure 1: The Triangle of Interpretations.
Concerning the relation of the social and science, the meaning of “the social” depends on theory
and interpretation. Scholars specify the phenomena under consideration using the lenses of their
respective disciplines; and they “prepare” the phenomena in a way that arranges them to fit these
perspectives. This procedure has not led to a single, well-specified class of social entities. The
influence of Parsons’s “grand narrative” (Law and Urry 2004, p. 391) in sociology and beyond
notwithstanding, there are more theories of the social than those subsumed under sociology, and
that theories of the social are essential for the study of culture does not mean that theories of nature,
biology, or evolution can or do play no part for the study of the social word (Melonas 2017).
DiMaggio’s and Markus’s (2010) rejection of sociological (and anthropological) perspectives in
539
the study of culture and their establishment of a cooperation between sociology and social
psychology is an example for the attempt to bring to bear the disciplinary lens of social psychology.
Furthermore, the terms “social” and “science” can be combined to “social science.” This paper
does not address social science as abstract category. It focuses on sociology and marketing studies
of which it assumes that they can research the social and cultural dimensions of social worlds.
Concerning the right side of the triangle, the first reading (culture -> science, upwardly directed
right arrow) includes cultural aspects of knowledge production (Franklin 1995) and the second
reading (science -> culture, downwardly directed right arrow) social sciences studying cultural
dimensions of social worlds. Regarding the latter relation, there are remarkable differences between
the disciplines. Parsons (1951) attempted to set the agenda and paved the way for the development
of the distinctive role of sociology in the study of culture. In line with this endeavor, Kroeber and
Parsons (1958) distinguished between society and social system on the one hand, and culture on
the other hand and promoted the view that the social and the cultural are inherently connected.
The terms “science” and “culture” can be combined to “cultural studies.” As exemplified by
cultural studies, the study of culture has not led to the identification of a single and unified research
object; linked to this is that there is no discipline-overarching cultural theory, but many cultural
theories expressing the perspectives of various disciplines.
The triangle’s bottom line represents the relations between the social and culture. The interpretation
of Figure 1 begins with the left-sided arrows (focus on sociology and marketing studies as social
sciences) and continues with the right-sided arrows (focus on the role sociology plays or is assumed
to play in the study of culture); the bottom line stands for the creation of phenomena by sociology
and other disciplines including the above-mentioned cooperation between sociology and social
psychology. The next section refers to both the triangle’s left and right side (concerning the left
side without further reference to marketing studies; and concerning the right side with the exception
of the upwardly directed arrow) and the section after that to its bottom.
540
3 Ideas, relations, and multiple perspectives
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) document about one hundred definitions of the concept of culture,
differentiated in descriptive (“enumeration of content”), historic (“emphasis on social heritage or
tradition”), normative (“emphasis on rule or way; emphasis on ideals or values plus behavior”),
psychological (“emphasis on adjustment, on culture as a problem-solving device”; emphasis on
learning; emphasis on habit; purely psychological definitions), structural (“emphasis on the
patterning or organization of culture”), and genetic definitions (“emphasis on culture as a product
or artifact; emphasis on ideas; emphasis on symbols”).
Against this backdrop, it seems questionable to head for a single definition of the concept of culture
or to expect that culture can be studied with reference to a clearly specified class of phenomena.
Consequently, after their “final review of the conceptual problem,” Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952,
p. 180) do not provide a formal definition of “culture”, but present a “central idea” about its
meaning:
“Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by
symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments
in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and
selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be
considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action” (Kroeber
and Kluckhohn 1952, p. 181).
As Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952, p. 181) remark, there is “no full theory of culture,” and a number
of disciplines are involved in its study. After having taken a brief look at important commonalities
of and differences between sociology and anthropology in this regard, I glance at cultural studies
that emerged in the 1980s.
3.1 Sociology and anthropology
There is a continuity in the history of social-theoretical thought leading from Max Weber’s (1968)
approach to social action and understanding to Alfred Schütz’s (Schutz 1962) phenomenological
explication of Weber’s concept of understanding, Talcott Parsons’s understanding of sociocultural
phenomena, and Clifford Geertz’s (1973) semiotic approach to anthropology which can be traced
541
back to Parsons. Kroeber’s and Parsons’s (1958, p. 583) analytical distinction between the social
and the cultural influenced Geertz as well.
In anthropology (Thompson 1990), there is also a long tradition of researching cultural phenomena.
Geertz (1973) rejected the view that researching cultural and sociological phenomena falls into one
and claimed that anthropology is playing the lead in the study of culture. Cultural phenomena do
not merge with the phenomena studied in sociology, psychology, marketing studies, or organization
studies (to mention just a few examples). Without mentioning organizations or marketing systems,
Geertz (1973) argued that anthropologists do not study organizations or marketing systems, but in
organizations or in marketing systems.
Thompson (1990) distinguishes between a descriptive and a symbolic conception of culture in
anthropology, putting Geertz on the symbolic side. Edward B. Tylor, who established the “word
culture with its technical or anthropological meaning” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, p. 9), was a
representative of the descriptive conception of anthropology. He promoted an approach involving
“a series of methodological assumptions about culture is to be studied” which led to a “scientization
of the concept of culture” (Thompson 1990, p. 128; italics in the original). Although in different
ways, both the descriptive and the symbolic camps create representations of cultural phenomena.
Tylor (1920 [1871]) was engaged in classification, comparison, and analysis, while Geertz (1973),
drawing on Schütz’s phenomenology, tried to grasp systems of meaning and argued for creating
“thick descriptions” as representations or models,iv which are “sorting out the structures of
signification,” or established codes or frames of interpretation.
3.2 The undisciplinarity of cultural studies
I briefly address the debate over cultural studies at the end of the 1990s to get a glimpse of the
diversity of this field of study or of the practices shaping it. If the meaning of “the social” depends
on discipline-specific (or theory-specific) understandings, then, first of all, different “paradigms”
or perspectives come into play and, with it, “territorial bickering” (Long 1997, p. 1) or parochial
thinking can emerge. Divergent views on research objects, methods and methodologies have
impeded the communication between and within disciplines (Wuthnow and Witten 1988). A
striking example for a problematic communication is the “cross-disciplinary dialogue” on research
objects and research methods in cultural studies (see, e.g., Denzin 1999; Wolff 1999a) or cultural
studies’ “long history in undisciplinarity” (Turner 2017), respectively. The “perpetual resistance
542
against attempts to impose a single, umbrella-like paradigm over the entire project” (Denzin 1999,
p. 118) seems to prevail.
As can be observed in the debate over theories, research objects, methods and models of science in
cultural studies, there is also no shared view on the influence that particular approaches or
disciplines have, had, or should have on the study of culture. Dualistic views regarding the social
sciences and the natural sciences seem to have impeded “productive encounters between cultural
studies and sociology” (Wolff 1999a, p. 500). Wolff (1999a, p. 500) notes that “in the continuing
cross-disciplinary dialogue that has characterized cultural studies in the decade or so of its progress
in the United States, the discipline of sociology has been notably absent.” For Wolff, this is not a
good development because she is convinced that “cultural studies at its best is sociological” (Wolff
1999a, p. 500). Many sociologists seem to share this view, being convinced that the sociological
discipline is the “natural home” for the study of culture and that culture can and should be studied
using social-scientific methods. Steensland (2014, n.p.) makes a similar point, emphasizing the
“two core commitments” of the sociology of culturev: that the symbolic-expressive dimension of
the social life is worthy of examination, both for its own sake and because of its impact on other
aspects of social life; and that it can be studied using the methods and analytical tools of sociology.”
Wolff (1999b) reports on sociologists empirically studying cultural phenomena under the heading
of “sociology of culture” or “sociology of arts.” She criticizes the “lingering positivism of the field”
(Wolff 1999b, n.p.) that has rendered sociology irrelevant for the study of culture (for a view that
partly agrees and partly disagrees with her, see Wuthnow and Witten 1988). This is why Denzin
(1999, p. 117) criticizes “the disciplinary constraints of standard American sociology” being in
effect in sociological studies of culture, expressing his hope that critical cultural studies are able to
resist these influences. However, not all scholars share the diagnosis “positivism” regarding the
operation of sociology in cultural studies. Negus (1999, p. 560), in his review of Long (1997),
expresses his opinion that the edited volume, i.e. Long (1997), “challenges a number of common
… beliefs which continue to circulate among some European academics. One is the assumption
that cultural studies ‘over there’ are literary in orientation, all about the analysis of texts and not
grounded in any awareness of social, political, and economic conditions. Second is the caricature
of ‘American sociology’ as overly empiricist and positivistic.”
The criticism of the “state of ‘normal science’” (Wuthnow and Witten 1988, p. 49) in sociology
has led to the consideration of “larger issues” (Wuthnow and Witten 1988, p. 50), that is, “questions
543
of ideology and legitimization” (Wuthnow and Witten 1988, p. 50) – especially from a Marxist
perspective. In line with this assessment, Rodman (2017, p. 969; italics in the original) praises the
late publication of “Cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history” in 2016, that is, the publication of
Hall (2016), “as a forceful argument for cultural studies as a political project.”
Rejecting “positivism” does not include having available an alternative to it. According to Wolff,
cultural sociology, that is, the “sociological theory which foregrounds culture” (Wolff 1999a, p.
505), that is “values, beliefs, ideas and so on” (Wolff 1999a, p. 503) “will not do as a model for
cultural studies” (Wolff 1999a, p. 503) because of its shortcomings. Regarding symbolic
interactionism and late Durkheimianism, Wolff (1999a, p. 505) bemoans that these approaches
miss or ignore “a central aspect of cultural studies – namely, a theory of representation.”
Interpretive sociology, thus, is no alternative to “positivism” that has remained uncontested.
DiMaggio (1997), whose approach is grounded in psychology, remarks that “interpretive studies
offer great insight but fail to build on one another” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 263).
In a nutshell, a confusing picture arises from reports on the study of culture in the sociology of
culture (Steensland 2011), cultural sociology (DiMaggio 1997, Wolff 1999a, Wolff 1999b), or
cultural studies. There seems to be no common ground but many perspectives – each fighting for
its supremacy over the other ones (see Figure 2 below).
4 The making of cultural phenomena
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952, p. 182), for good reason, did not offer a definition of the concept
of culture. However, they disclosed their metaphysics of culture: “Culture is an abstract description
of trends toward uniformity in the words, acts, and artifacts of human groups.” This statement
expresses the conviction that regularities are part of the social world and “culture” is an adequate
label for the study of forces underlying them. This view harmonizes with the idea of social order
in sociology; it hands the plate on to sociology – an invitation gratefully accepted by Parsons.
4.1 The analytical distinction between the social and the cultural
A couple of years after the publication of Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), Kroeber and Parsons
(1958, p. 582) claimed, “all phenomena of human behavior are sociocultural, with both societal
and cultural aspects at the same time.” They also claimed the social to be the genuine domain and
research focus of sociology. As sociologist, Parsons researched cultural aspects of social
544
phenomena. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), by comparison, recognized the importance of ideas
and methods stemming from the natural sciences for the understanding of culture.
If cultural phenomena are social phenomena, then they cannot be studied without studying social
phenomena uno actu. Societal and cultural aspects can be separated for analytical reasons only:
“Separating cultural from societal aspects is not a classifying of concrete and empirically distinct
sets of the same concrete phenomena” (Kroeber and Parsons 1958, p. 582). That the classes of
cultural and sociological phenomena are coextensive, however, does not mean that the phenomena
mean the same to the disciplines studying them. Kroeber and Parsons (1958) promote an analytical
separation of studies of the social, the cultural, and the biological, and they included patterns in
form of symbolic meaningful systems and their consequences in form of behaviors and artifacts
into the study of culture.
Kroeber’s and Parsons’s (1958, p. 583) analytical distinction between the social and the cultural is
mirrored in Scott’s (1995) distinction between three institutional approaches. Scott (1995)
distinguished three approaches to institutional analysis: the regulative, the normative, and the
cognitive approach. These three approaches are not complementary tools for the study of
institutions within one analytical framework. Rather, they originate from different sources
(economics, sociology, philosophy) and express different ontological and epistemological views.
In later editions of his influential book (Scott 1995), Scott substituted “cultural-cognitive pillar”
for “cognitive pillar.” This change expresses the idea that symbolic-meaningful systems exert
influence on behavior and, thus, social order. The influence of the “cultural forces,” however, can
have various effects, that is, an order does not need to hold on for long and does not need to reach
very far.
Table 1 summarizes Scott’s perspective on the focus, ontology and epistemology of each approach:
Table 1. Three approaches to institutional analysis.
Regulative approach Normative approach Cognitive approach
Focus Institutions constrain and
regularize behavior
Means-ends relationships
Values and normative
frameworks structure choices
Socially embedded players
Social actors’ internal
representations of the social
environment structures choices
Socially constructed players
Ontological
and
epistemological
aspects
Social realism
Rational choice
Somewhere in between Social constructionism
Comparatively broad view on
social choice and action
545
Scott’s perspective provides the link between Kroeber’s and Kluckhohn’s patterns-oriented
approach and Kroeber’s and Parsons’s (1958, p. 583) definition of the concept of culture that
connects symbolic-meaningful systems, behaviors, and consequences of these behaviors such as
social orders:
“We suggest … to define the concept of culture … restricting its reference to transmitted and
created content and patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic-meaningful systems as factors in
the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior. On the other hand, we
suggest that the term society – or more generally, social system – be used to designate the
specifically relational system of interaction among individuals and collectivities.”
DiMaggio (1997), however, is not convinced about how Parsons connects mind and environment.
He criticizes Parsons’s content-orientation and psychologization of culture.
4.2 Implicit and explicit approaches to the study of culture
According to Wuthnow’s and Witten’s (1988) analyis, the views of Weber, Schütz, Parsons, and
Geertz are on the implicit side of the “major division [which] separates studies viewing culture as
implicit in social life from studies in which culture is seen as an explicit social product” (Wuthnow
and Witten 1988, p. 49). The understanding of culture as implicit in social life includes Parsons’s
characterization of culture in terms of norms and values; social-psychological approaches to belief
and attitudes; and culture as mentalité (Geertz 1973). Advocates of the “explicit perspective”
conceive of culture as a social product or social construction. Art, religion, or sciences are examples
for such “products.” Wuthnow and Witten (1988) distinguish between three categories of cultural
products: end products (things that are there or “produced” for their own sake such as the
achievement of the cognitive aims of science); cultural products which are means for the
achievement of ends (e.g., technical knowledge); and cultural products which are a byproduct of
social interaction (e.g., symbolic materials such as discourses, rituals, and texts).
Parsons’s influence is still visible in many disciplines including macromarketing (see the next
section). Parsons had extended the economic, voluntaristic model of action by norms and values.
As the shared symbolic system is considered as a criterion for the selection of alternatives, norms
and values turned into cultural variables. The approaches discussed in the next two subsections can
546
be characterized with reference to characteristics and distinctions highlighted above (patterns;
forms; content; implicit/explicit) or introduced below (internal/external). They also share the intent
to break free from the Parsonian heritage in the study of culture.
4.3 The tool-kit approach
From a Parsonian perspective, value orientations are an important characteristic of cultural
traditions. Values are “an element of a shared symbolic system which serves as a criterion or
standard for selection among the alternatives of orientation” (Parsons 1951, p. 11 f.; quoted by
Swidler 1986, p. 274). Swidler criticized Parsons for his voluntaristic theory of action, which
introduces values as essential extension of the economic model of action focusing on preferences;
her approach expresses an “explicit perspective.” Scholars relating to Parsons’s tradition consider
values as causal variable for the study of social action and structure (for critical discussions, see
DiMaggio 1997 and Smirchich 1983). From this perspective “culture shapes action by defining
what people want” (Swidler 1986, p. 274).
According to Swidler, action is not the right unit of analysis in cultural theory; for this reason, it
does not matter if individuals act in accord with their interests or values. The point that Swidler
(1986, p. 276) wants to make here is not that interests and values do not play a part at all, but that
each action is “integrated into larger assemblages, called here ‘strategies of action’” – an idea later
picked up by DiMaggio (1997). Culture “shapes the capacities from which such strategies of action
are constructed” (Swidler 1986, p. 277).
Swidler (1986, p. 273) characterizes culture as consisting of “symbolic vehicles of meaning” which
people can make use of “to solve different kinds of problems.” Strategies of action, that is
“persistent ways of ordering action through time” (Swidler 1986, p. 273), similar to logics of action
(Kleinaltenkamp 2018), are the main unit of cultural analysis. Strategies of action are
“cultural products; the symbolic experiences, mythic lore, and ritual practices of a group or society
create moods and motivations, ways of organizing experience and evaluating reality, modes of
regulating conduct, and ways of forming social bonds which provide resources for constructing
strategies of social action” (Swidler 1986, p. 284).
547
That culture is no unified system that pushes action in a constant direction, does neither include
nor exclude the emergence of order. A main difference between Swidler’s explicitly non-Parsonian
approach and patterns-oriented approaches might be the dwindling interest in the explanation of
social order as a given characteristic of social reality; instead, culture is viewed as a tool kit or
repertoire used by actors conceived of as skilled users of culture (Swidler 1986, p. 277). As it takes
actors time to develop the respective skills, costs of cultural retooling can emerge which may have
an effect on the settlement of cultures.
Swidler’s (1986) proposal is a remarkable example for the scholarly creation of complex cultural
phenomena, i.e. “strategies of action.” DiMaggio (1997), interested in gaining knowledge about
“how people use culture” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 264), readdresses Swidler’s (1986, p. 284) questions
“how culture shapes or constrains action, and more generally, how culture interacts with social
structure.” DiMaggio connects ideas stemming from the tool-kit approach with research
perspectives emerging from recent progress in the cooperation between psychology and sociology.
The idea that cultural phenomena result from the interaction of mental structures and social
environments led to a type of complex phenomena different to Swidler’s strategies of action calling
for their study by the cooperation of sociology and psychology. From DiMaggio’s (1997) analysis,
the insight can be gained that sociology and psychology cannot do the job as separate entities.
DiMaggio is convinced that the cooperation between psychology and sociology can do the work,
leading to a psychologically grounded research program on culture within sociology.
4.4 Minds, schemata, and environments
DiMaggio (1997) and DiMaggio and Markus (2010) reject both Parsons’s and Geertz’s
perspectives. With regard to Geertz, DiMaggio (1997, p. 264) states that culture is no “‘seamless
web’ … unitary and internally coherent across groups and situations.” With regard to Parsons,
DiMaggio and Markus (2010, p. 347) doubt that “culture is something coherent and stable and
located in the heads of collectivities’ members.” Also, culture is not expressed in cultural forms
(Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952) such as ideology, religion, values, etc., but in structures of social
life. In the early years of the sociology of culture, structures were addressed in terms of external,
latent variables (DiMaggio 1997), a practice that shall be substituted for the study of interactions
of internal and external elements. DiMaggio (1997) points out that it took many decades and the
development of cognitive psychology (D’Andrade 1995) to understand that culture is reducible
neither to mental states (psychological or internal items) of individuals nor to external items (social
548
representations or schemata); instead, culture is seen as emerging from the interplay between
internal and external items. The idea or insight that this interplay does not simply happen but that
there is “opportunity for choice and variation” (DiMaggio 1977, p. 265) paves the way for the
integration of the idea of cultural work (Swidler 1986) into social-psychologically based cultural
analyses. In a nutshell, DiMaggio and Markus stray away from the established paths of both the
sociology of culture and cultural sociology:
Figure 2: The divergence of the cooperative approach from other competing perspectives.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) have already mentioned that the social structures are
underresearched with respect to both sociological and psychological determinants. Prinz (2011,
n.p.) mentions the criticism that Tylor’s seminal anthropology faced because of “lumping together
psychological items (e.g., belief) with external items (e.g., art).” Tylor (1920 [1871]) had claimed,
“that culture is … ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom,
and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’” (Prinz 2011, n.p.).
According to DiMaggio (1997, p. 263), the “cognitive presupposition behind … theories of what
culture does and what people do with it, and the fundamental concepts and units of analysis” are in
need of clarification. While sociologists such as Parsons or Wolff (1999a) were convinced that
sociology constitutes back and bone of the study of culture, DiMaggio (1997) and DiMaggio and
549
Markus (2010, p. 347) emphasize the need for the study of “dynamic interaction between mind and
environment” and highlight the converging perspectives of psychology and sociology that make
this research possible. The cooperation between social psychology and sociology promises to be
able to connect internal and external items (Figure 3):
Figure 3: The system of cultural elements.
Social-psychological theories of representation address mental models or ordering schemata and
the environmental conditions that sustain and challenge them (DiMaggio and Markus 2010, p. 349).
Cultural phenomena result from the interaction of shared mental structures and the symbolic,
institutional, or material environment, that is, culture works “through the interaction of shared
cognitive structures and supraindividual phenomena” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 264). Progress in
cognitive research helped to identify (separate) the units of analysis relevant for the understanding
of the interaction of entities related to different levels of analysis, that is, is based on multi-level
research (DiPrete and Forristal 1994). In this vein, psychological research is a source of the
microfoundation of sociological or social-psychological cultural research because it helps
improving the understanding of the connection between individual cognition, shared cognitive
structures, and supraindividual cultural phenomena (e.g., values or ideologies).
From DiMaggio’s and Markus’s (2010, p. 348) social-psychological perspective, culture “is not a
bundle of traits or a stable set of norms but implicit and explicit patterns of representations, actions,
and artifacts that are distributed or spread through networks of social interaction.” Thus, the study
of culture and the study of stable, wide-ranging social orders do not fall into one. Patterns do not
need to be stable or wide-ranging entities across groups. As “people think and feel and act in
culture-specific ways – ways that are shaped by particular patterns of historically derived meanings,
practices, products, and institutions” (DiMaggio and Markus 2010, p. 348), the conduct of cultural
work does not exclude the emergence of patterns. However, patterns are not considered the main
characteristic of culture and are not necessarily identical with stable regularities.
550
If there are no forms and patterns accruing from “cultural genetics” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1958),
then the question arises what role agency can play in the emergence of cultural phenomena. In
DiMaggio’s (1997) view, “the psychology of mental structures provides a microfoundation to the
sociology of institutions” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 271); and it buttresses the “evidence for the efficacy
of agency” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 271). The strong connection between the study of culture and
institutions already shining up in Scott (1995) becomes visible here once again. People are
socialized but not determined entities: “The culture into which people are socialized leave much
opportunity for choice and action” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 265). Consequently, patterns can be
fragmented across groups and inconsistent across manifestations. Patterns are “complex rule-like
structures that constitute resources that can be put for strategic use” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 265). They
are cultural products or means instrumental to the achievement of ends. Cultural conflicts can erupt
from the clash of institutional logics (DiMaggio 1997) or the interplay of the entities represented
in Figure 3. This change in perspective changes the interpretation of the results of measurements
as well: they are not indicative of underlying cultural variables (see Deshpande and Webster Jr.
1989; Schein 1996; Smircich 1983), but of the cultural work done by mindful actors (Swidler
1986).
The study of culture focuses on “the reproduction, maintenance and modification of cultural
patterns” (DiMaggio and Markus 2010, p. 348), not upon the content of culture. As “transmitted
and created content” is part of Kroeber and Parsons’s definition of “culture” and, for Geertz, content
is in the center of his approach, DiMaggio and Markus definitively reject Parsons’s and Geertz’s
views. Although DiMaggio (1997, p. 264) acknowledges that “social constructionists have
anticipated important results of cognitive research,” social-psychological cultural research does not
draw on works associated with Schütz or Berger and Luckmann or interpretive sociology in
general.
The modifications proposed by DiMaggio (1997) and DiMaggio and Markus (2010) bring their
approach closely into line with recent developments in new-institutional theory (Greenwood and
Hinings 1996), addressing institutional work or institutional logics (Gawer and Phillips 2013;
Hampel, Lawrence and Tracey 2017; Lawrence, Leca and Zilber 2013; Lawrence and Suddaby
2006). According to “older” new institutionalist views, institutionalization leads to durable social
structures. For decades, the study of the impact of the social structure on individual and
organizational behavior was the main research object in organizational institutionalism.
551
Developments that are more recent have emphasized the role of agency in dynamic
institutionalization processes (Hatch and Zilber 2012). As institutional scholars have pointed out
(Lawrence and Suddaby 2006), actors actively create, maintain, and destroy patterns in form of
institutions.
After the interim conclusion drawn below, I address consequences for the integration of culture
into the marketing-systems approach (MSA).
5 Interim conclusion
In line with this paper’s focus on sociology, the previous sections discussed examples of
sociology’s influence on the study of culture. As social science interested in creating or maintaining
interdisciplinary connections with other disciplines, marketing studies should be aware of the state
of the art in other disciplines and therefore of the various perspectives and distinctions prevalent in
the study of culture and position itself with regard to them.
As outlined in the previous sections,
A number of distinctions is important in the study of culture including emic/etic;
descriptive/symbolic; internal/external; implicit/explicit; mind/schema/environment; and
materialism/symbolism. What scholars consider as cultural forms depend on their view on
these distinctions.
The Parsonian perspective is under pressure. Contemporary scholars are critical to both
Parsons’s system-theoretical functionalism and his legacy in the study of culture (DiMaggio
1997; Swidler 1986), perhaps even overcritical (Patterson 2014). Scholars broke free from
the Parsonian heritage and created own or new cultural phenomena.
There is no class of social phenomena independent of social-scientific knowledge (Law and
Urry 2004), and the same applies to cultural phenomena. Cultural phenomena do not exist
per se; their existence depends on preconditions set by theory, methodology, and
metaphysics. If interested in addressing cultural phenomena or answering research
questions touching upon culture, marketing studies can build on anthropological,
sociological, or social-psychological approaches doing research on culture – for a list not
including all options. In addition, marketing studies could develop own approaches to the
study of culture, that is, create marketing-specific cultural theory and phenomena.
552
The study of culture can require interdisciplinary cooperation, bridging different levels of
analysis and the combination of perspectives (for example, internal and external
perspectives).
6 On the study of culture in the marketing-systems approach
Parsons’s influence on the understanding of social systems is addressed in the next sub-section,
followed by a discussion of how the marketing-systems approach (MSA) has included culture in
its conceptual framework and models of the marketing system.
6.1 Parsons’s Influence on Marketing-Systems Theory
Parsons’s social-systems theory (Parsons 1951) has coined the self-understanding of
macromarketing as social-systems approach (Dixon 1984) and, based on this, as an approach to the
study of culture in macromarketing. Essential here is Parsons’s functionalism and, with it, the
understanding of culture as a function, that is, as something that is of relevance to the system as a
whole (Dixon 1984). Drawing on Parsons’s systems theory, Dixon’s ontology includes actors,
physical objects, and cultural objects; and the cultural system belongs to the social system’s
environment (Dixon 1984, p. 5, Figure 1). The function of the cultural system for the social system
is pattern maintenance: “Pattern maintenance is concerned with maintaining the identity of a system
by assuring conformity to the prescriptions of the cultural system” (Dixon 1984, p. 5). This view
is in accord with Kroeber’s and Kluckhohn’s metaphysics of culture.
Representations of the marketing system are considered as representations of social reality – the
research object of the social sciences. “Social reality” does not exclude much, and the research
objects specified by the disciplines differ from each other. Layton (2016) has stated reasons for the
existence of a social-scientific marketing discipline separate from other social-scientific
disciplines. He argues that there are, for a social-scientific marketing discipline, genuine problems
to solve or topics to address – topics or problems not addressed by any other discipline yet. Layton
(2016, p. 3) proposes a broad but substantial understanding of marketing as “the study of value
cocreation through voluntary economic exchange among individuals and entities in and between
human communities.” This perspective highlights a core set of social phenomena able to unify the
fragmented strands of thought or research in the marketing discipline of which innovation and
technology studies, consumer culture theory, social marketing, or macromarketing are indicative
(Layton 2016). Layton’s (2016) identification of a research object genuine to marketing studies is
553
important for its (future) status within the social sciences. The “creation” of marketing-specific
theory and phenomena is within sight.
6.2 Brief characterization of the marketing-systems approach
Addressing marketing studies, I use the example of the MSA for three reasons: First, the MSA is
sufficiently developed; a systematic statement of the approach exists (Layton 2007; Layton 2009;
Layton 2011; Layton 2015). Second, in the graphical model of the marketing system (Layton 2009),
both social matrix and environment represent the social dimensions the theory concerns itself with.
A number of selected categories or variables represent the environment, and the social matrix
visualizes the influence of the environment on the marketing system. In line with Parsons’s view,
the social matrix is a symbol for the relevance ascribed to the social dimensions of economic or
marketing analysis. Finally, both the conceptual framework of the MSA and the model of the
marketing system (Layton 2007; Layton 2009) include the term “culture” as a placeholder for
cultural analyses.
The MSA consists of several components including a definition of the concept of marketing system;
a conceptual framework including both marketing-specific vocabulary and the vocabulary of other
disciplines; a selection of essential components used to characterize the theory’s domain; and
models expressing – among others – the social embeddedness of the marketing system in its
environment.
The marketing system is the MSA’s main unit of analysis. From the perspective of the MSA, the
concept of marketing system is defined as
“a network of individuals, groups and/or entities; embedded in a social matrix; linked directly or
indirectly through sequential or shared participation in economic exchange; which jointly and/or
collectively creates economic value with and for customers, through the offer of; assortments of
products, services, experiences and ideas; and that emerges in response to or anticipation of
consumer demand” (Layton 2011, p. 259).
The conceptual framework of the MSA is the starting point for the identification and development
of intertheoretical relationships and interdisciplinary cooperation between the MSA and
approaches stemming from other disciplines (Layton 2016). The MSA’s conceptual framework
includes lists of concepts usable for the creation of representations of social entities or phenomena
554
in various institutional or organizational fields (Meyer 2017) and located at different levels of
analysis. The representation of the marketing system, its social environment, and other system-
related characteristics such as externalities and sustainability (Layton 2009, Figure 2) deploys
material and formal concepts. These concepts are used to describe the entity in question, the
marketing system (in Figure 4 inside the dotted line) with regard to the influence of socio-economic
or socio-cultural factors. The arrows in the models express formal concepts and are subject to
definition and interpretation as well. The conceptual framework also includes concepts applicable
to the description of desired and undesired action consequences in terms of sustainability and
externalities on the one hand, and growth and wealth on the other hand.
Figure 4. Representation of the marketing system (Layton 2007, Table 1, p. 238).
The MSA’s conceptual framework is a kind of “reservoir”; it contains more concepts and
categories than can be used in the development of single models. Subsumed under the heading
“environment, boundaries, inputs and initial conditions” (Layton 2007, Table 1, p. 238), the
conceptual framework includes the expression cultural context, specified as “demography, religion,
education, social structures, social change, government; impacts on individuals, groups; concern
for minorities; history; morality conceptions; values (collective or individual).” This list contains
terms for symbolic forms (education, religion, and values) and patterns, as well as hints concerning
the attitudes (“concerns for”) of the scholarly community toward cultural or socio-cultural
555
phenomena. Subsumed under the heading “outcomes,” Layton (2007, Table 1, p. 238) lists culture
and social change effects: “positive, negative; adaptive, destructive; impacts on symbols and signs,
on meaning, on structure and fragmentation.” The first list seems to reflect the culture-as-implicit-
in-social-life approach or the “culture-as-latent-variable view” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 265); the
second list contains what actors, intentionally or unintentionally, can bring about or “produce.”
From a Parsonian perspective, the variables representing the environment of the marketing system
are explanatory variables rather than action consequences. The formal concepts used in Figure 4
seem to be in line with this view: one-sidedly directed arrows don’t express interactions (the same
applies to Figure 5, see below).
Haase, Becker and Pick (2018) modified the representation of the socially embedded marketing
system (Figure 5). Figure 4 and Figure 5 differ with respect to the emphasis laid upon the social
dimension, expressed in the specification of the essential elements of the marketing system with
regard to actors, value creation and social action. Haase, Becker and Pick (2018) rearranged the
hierarchical order of concepts and introduced two macro levels:
Figure 5. Modified representation of the marketing system (Haase, Becker and Pick 2018, Figure
2, p. 66).
Macro-level 1 expresses that the marketing system is itself a systemic entity. Macro-level 2
represents the environment of the marketing system or the environmental factors considered as
relevant and for this reason included into the model. In both figures, there is no differentiation in,
556
e.g., social, physical, or cultural environments (DiMaggio and Markus 2010). A cultural approach
to the study of marketing systems could make such differentiations along the lines of DiMaggio
and Markus (see above) or otherwise. As indicated by the upwardly and downwardly directed
arrows, the environmental factors can influence the marketing system. A Parsonian interpretation
of both figures is possible; assuming the influence of structural variables on the marketing system
and its essential components.
The comprehensive consideration given to social action and value creation in Figure 5 is the most
striking difference between both representations. In the graphical model, the vocabulary is
represented by the expressions inside of the dotted line, symbolizing the inclusion of social
dimensions in the marketing system. The social matrix connects the marketing system and its
environment. Thus, the social matrix is a kind of “filter” that relates the environmental factors with
components characteristic of the marketing system. Not considered in the model is what finds no
expression within the dotted and above the dashed lines. Compared with Figure 4, in Figure 5 more
emphasis is put on the inclusion of the social dimension within the dotted line.
The interpretation of signs, words, boxes, etc. in graphic models is not limited to the graphic
representation. The model developers dispose of a more comprehensive interpretation or story of
the model. The social matrix, a model constituent, is a placeholder for the analysis of social
phenomena within the marketing system. Concerning the model interpretation, reasons for the
separation of a social matrix from the environment and the marketing system should be given.
Concerning the environment, the relation of culture and institutions is of interest. Are the
expressions outside of the social matrix (dotted line) variables potentially exerting influence on the
marketing system rather than “preconfigurations” or “grounds of social relations” (Wuthnow and
Witten 1988, p. 50)? The graphical representation is silent on this.
In both models (Figure 4 and 5), culture stands side by side with other components. From the
perspective of DiMaggio and Markus (2010), there is no “culture” that (in a model) could be
represented side by side with other components for its impact on something else. However, that the
influence of norms and values on social action is not conceived of as a cultural phenomenon, does
not mean that it cannot be studied in, e.g., sociology or marketing studies. Notwithstanding, a view
that identifies the study of culture with the effects of ideas, beliefs, values, or norms on social action
or value creation is misleading. The same applies to the extension of economic models with regard
to norms or values as explanatory variables in the name of culture. Again, the point here is not that
557
ideas, ideologies, or knowledge cannot exert influence on marketing systems or social action. The
point here is the equation of cultural research with the study of the impact of cultural variables
(Smirchich 1983). However, rejecting a Parsonian view on culture does not mean that value
orientations or socially embedded meaningful action is not important for the study of marketing
systems (Dixon 1984).
In a nutshell, both Figure 4 and Figure 5 contain no information for the “model user” (Kornwachs
2017) how to understand the term “culture” in the model. In this case, what “culture” stands for is
up for debate. I doubt that these models are socio-cultural marketing models; rather, they deploy
“culture” as placeholder expressing a gap and the invitation to close it.
7 Conclusions and outlook
Culture is no pre-given research object addressable from various disciplinary perspectives. It is not
something existent in the world, independent of divergent theoretical or disciplinary perspectives.
Culture does exist within social worlds but not necessarily in all social worlds: It is possible to
study a social world without taking into consideration what is called cultural phenomena. For non-
cultural approaches, it might be also possible to study what from the perspective of cultural
approaches are cultural phenomena to some degree. In any case, the interest in the identification
and study of cultural phenomena includes a certain positioning and commitment to cultural
perspectives. For the study of cultural phenomena might require crossing the borders of disciplines,
interest in interdisciplinary cooperation that restrains from eclecticism and arbitrariness in dealing
with concepts originating from other disciplines is helpful (Mittelstaedt 2016).
The paper addressed examples for the creation of cultural phenomena from sociological
perspectives, single or in cooperation with social psychology. Sociologists have interpreted culture
in light of their discipline’s main research topics such as social action, social order, or social
structure. Sociologists used culture as a vehicle to push their disciplinary wagons; and they have
tended to consider sociology the discipline best suited for the study of culture (Long 1997; Wolff
1999a). While I focused on sociological perspectives in this paper, I do neither promote nor reject
this view. Doing so would require a standard of assessment of which I don’t know if it is available.
If there is no concept of culture, no definition, or no “central idea” of culture independent of
disciplinary lenses, which lens is or which lenses are, then, of relevance for marketing studies? The
answer to this question depends in part on the research questions asked and in part on the research
558
strategies deployed. As mentioned above, the creation of marketing-specific phenomena is within
sight. This does not seem to hold true for marketing-specific cultural phenomena, at least at the
moment. Macromarketing has been conceived of as an interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary
project within the social sciences (Layton 2016; Peterson 2006; compare Shapiro, Tadajewski and
Shultz II 2009). Layton (2016) emphasized intertheoretical links expressing connections of
marketing studies with – among others – sociological and institutional theories. Against this
backdrop, the “use-of-culture” perspective (DiMaggio and Markus 2010) might initiate promising
future work in marketing studies. Cultural work and institutional work are overlapping research
areas; for this reason, cultural and institutional theories may cross-fertilize each other. Interestingly,
while “culture” has been used to delineate or define disciplinary boundaries (Kroeber and Parsons
1958), its interdisciplinary study can give rise to cooperative research projects, which can last long
or even lead to the development of new disciplines.
559
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Marijuana, Pit Bulls, Plastic Bags:
When Products Face Conflicting
Laws
Stephanie Geiger-Oneto, University of Wyoming, USA
Betsy D. Gelb, University of Houston, USA
Some products are so stigmatized that in the United States their sale is illegal everywhere;
nuclear weapons come to mind. More commonly, however, stigmatized products can be sold
somewhere, under some conditions, but they cannot be sold freely everywhere.
Recently scholars have been interested in the process by which stigmatized and controversial
behaviors, practices, and/or products (i.e. gambling, cosmetic procedures, drug use) become
legitimate (Rose, Bearden and Manning 2001; Humphreys 2010; Humphreys and LaTour 2010;
Giesler 2012). Legitimacy, as defined by scholars, is “a generalized perception or assumption that
the actions of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate within some socially constructed
system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions,” (Suchman 1995: 574). Researchers have
identified three types of legitimacy: cognitive, normative and regulatory (Scott 1995). Cognitive
legitimacy refers to the degree to which an industry in understood by a larger society (Scott
1995). Normative legitimacy describes the extent that an industry or practice is consistent with
societal goals, norms, or values. Finally, regulatory legitimacy refers to the degree to which an
industry follows existing laws, rules or regulations as defined by government institutions (Scott
1995; Deephouse and Carter 2005). In this paper, we focus on products which experience
conflicts in regulatory legitimacy.
From a societal perspective, the lack of jurisdictional uniformity for such products raises
conceptual questions. On the positive side, do inconsistent laws splendidly reflect voter/consumer
preferences, prohibiting, for example, the serving of alcohol in an area where its consumption is
565
religiously frowned on while letting other jurisdictions benefit from the taxes produced by public
imbibing? On the negative side, do buyers and sellers face higher costs and unnecessary
obstacles as they encounter local, state, or even national prohibitions? These are the kinds of
questions we explore here.
However, we go beyond geographic inconsistency to focus on marketing systems given
conflicting laws: categories of products sold in jurisdictions in which they are legal in the state
but banned federally, or banned in localities within a state that has prohibited precisely such bans.
Such a focus proceeds from the expectation that where local laws differ within a state, for
example, some probability exists that the state will step in to establish regulatory legitimacy by
overriding those local laws – while localities continue to enforce them. If so, an increasing
number of marketers who now face simply jurisdictional inconsistency may soon face the greater
problem of operating in an environment where they simply cannot conform to laws that conflict.
Furthermore, that issue may escalate if Congress follows the example of those state legislatures
and pre-empts statewide bans, declaring them illegal, but states continue to enforce them.
We begin by adding to previous macromarketing scholarship related to stigmatized
products, markets and laws that are inconsistent across U.S. jurisdictions (Geiger-Oneto and
Simkins 2018; Blanchet and Depeyre 2016; Bech-Larsen and Aschemann-Witzel 2012). Next,
we discuss examples of stigmatized products that, because of their unpopularity among at least
some segments of society, face non-uniform legal environments and varying degrees of
regulatory legitamacy.
We then analyze those product examples on two dimensions: 1) type of stigma (moral
concerns, public safety concerns from product use, environmental concerns -- or a combination of
these three types) and 2) the level of government at which the ban occurs.
Stigmatized Products and Inconsistent Laws Regarding Them
Research concerning stigmatized products is limited, and scholars in this area have
focused for the most part on consumer behavior concerning such product categories as genetically
modified food (Ellen and Bone 2008), pornography, strip clubs (Rich 2001), tattoos (Larsen et al.
2014), cigarettes, alcohol (Lee 2016) and street drugs (MacCoun 1993). Across product
categories, scholars use the phrase “stigmatized products” to refer to goods and services toward
which significant segments of consumers hold negative attitudes and beliefs, meaning that their
purchase and consumption can create various negative emotions for the purchaser and/or
566
user. Such emotions are especially pertinent if purchase and use of these goods and services take
place in the public domain (Bailey and Waronska 2015).
As a practical matter, stigmatized products can be uniformly banned, or uniformly
restricted, as in to adults only. Using one or more legal systems – federal, state, or local -- to ban
the sale of products considered undesirable on moral or health-safety grounds has a long history.
Beyond bans based on moral or health-safety concerns, a more recent development has seen
lawmakers banning products seen as detrimental to the natural environment, for example those
perceived to be overloading landfills, contaminating water etc. Although some environment-
driven product bans occurred in the 1950s (i.e. DDT), most such bans began in the late 1980s.
Examples include Nebraska’s state-wide ban of disposable diapers and the ban of Styrofoam food
containers in Minneapolis, MN, Freeport, ME, Suffolk County, NY and Hamden, CT (Reck
1990).
Although the reasons for banning a stigmatized product vary, a few themes recur. A
product is likely to be banned when 1) there is a strong scientific evidence that its use leads to
public harm and this harm outweighs any potential benefits of its use, 2) public opinion calls for
strict regulation or prohibition of the product (i.e. marijuana), 3) a ban protects a vulnerable
population, such as children, or 4) its use is associated with involuntary risks to the general public
(i.e. secondhand smoke or vicious dogs) and/or 5) its use harms the natural environment,
according to Hodge Jr. and Scanlon (2014). These same authors have found that geography,
demographics, and differing cultural values can influence the laws that a particular county and/or
state will adopt.
Examples: from Marijuana to Pit Bulls to Plastic Bags
Our interest in marketers who face conflicting laws began by studying the marketing of
marijuana, a product stigmatized by some on moral grounds and by some – often the same
individuals -- as potentially dangerous. We therefore approach examination of how inconsistent
legal environments add to costs by examining marijuana as the category facing a uniquely
conflicting legal environment and therefore probably the greatest proportional incremental costs -
- as well as quality concerns.
We note first, however, that while marketers of marijuana face the extreme of a legally
inconsistent environment, inconsistent laws also affect the marketing of a range of offerings.
These include but are not limited to pit bull terriers, single-use plastic shopping bags, alcohol,
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firearms, coal, emissions-limiting vehicles and equipment, and such controversial women’s health
services as contraceptives and abortions. While currently only the first two from that list face
laws that directly conflict, it seems entirely possible that other items will encounter conflicting
laws in the future.
Possible Alternatives
Once the issue of conflicting laws is seen as ranging from medical marijuana to whether a
supermarket can offer plastic bags to shoppers, it should be clear that a uniform public policy
solution is unlikely. We therefore begin our discussion with the less complex issue of state
legislatures pre-empting local bans. Interestingly, such legislative actions appear to focus on
local bans relating to environmental damage, although pre-empting the banning of dangerous dog
breeds clearly involves another category entirely.
In pre-empting local bans, state legislatures may be responding to statewide lobbying
groups and/or to the perception that they should assert authority over cities wherever they can.
The argument that dogs do not bite or that plastic bags are environmentally benign has not been
offered; the New York Times frames the conflict as one between Democratic cities and
Republican legislatures (Bodger, 2017). It would appear far wiser for legislatures to offer
substantive justifications for pre-empting local bans, for example, the “black market”
consequences of banning pit bulls. For pre-empting plastic bag bans, no justification seems
forthcoming, and as cities increase their concern with crowded landfills and other environmental
concerns such as smog it seems likely that this conflict will play out in many cities and will
involve additional products. .
Lessons Learned
To conclude, we explored public policy alternatives to minimize negative societal
consequences resulting from laws reflecting conflict regarding regulatory legitimacy -- for a few
products now, but quite likely many more in the future. Since conflicting laws arise from
jurisdictional inconsistencies, marketers of additional product categories can face such
inconsistencies as states are encouraged by the federal government to chart their own course in
controversial areas, from emissions-limiting vehicles and equipment to such women’s health
services as contraception and abortion.
Our clearest insight from this research is the likely proliferation of inconsistencies across
jurisdictions – and that those inconsistencies may trouble a legislative body that believes it has
568
the power of standardization, only to find out that as a practical matter it does not, leaving
marketers with conflicting mandates.
References
Bailey, Ainsworth A and Agnieszka K Waronska (2015), "Stigmatized Products: Fostering
Discourse on Those “Products I Would Never be Caught Dead Buying!””, in Marketing,
Technology and Customer Commitment in the New Economy: Springer.
Bech-Larsen T and Aschemann-Witzel J. (2012) A Macromarketing Perspective on Food Safety
Regulation: The Danish Ban on Trans-fatty Acids. Journal of Macromarketing 32: 208-
219.
Blanchet, Vivien and Colette Depeyre (2016), “Exploring the Shaping of Markets through
Controversies: Methodological Propositions for Macromarketing Studies,” Journal of
Macromarketing, 36(1), 41-53.
Bodger, Emily (2017), “Red States and Blue Cities: A Partisan Battle Intensifies,” New York
Times, July 6, 166 (57,650), 1, 13.
Deephouse, David and Suzanne Carter (2005), “An examination of differences between
organizational legitimacy and organizational reputation,” Journal of Management Studies,
42(2), 329-360.
Ellen, Pam Scholder and Paula Fitzgerald Bone (2008), "Stained by the Label? Stigma and the Case
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Geiger-Oneto, Stephanie and Travis Simkins (2018), “A Social Identity Perspective on the
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Hodge Jr., James and Megan Scanlon (2014), “The Legal Anatomy of Product Bans to Protect the
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Humphreys, Ashlee (2010), "Semiotic Structure and The Legitimation of Consumption
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510.
569
Humphreys, Ashlee and Kathryn LaTour (2013), “Framing the game: Assessing the Impact of
Cultural Representations on Consumer Perceptions of Legitimacy,” Journal of Consumer
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Lee, Eun Mi (2016), "Does Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) Really Work in the Case of
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University of Bridgeport Law Review, 11, 127.
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Suchman, Mark (1995), “Managing legitimacy: Strategic and institutional approaches”, Academy
of Management Review, 20(3), 571-610.
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Marketing &
Developmen I
Track Chair: Andres Barrios
571
Creative Marketing at the Bottom
of the Pyramid
Akshit Sharma, University of Richmond, USA
Dana-Nicoleta Lascu76, University of Richmond, USA
Most academic studies in marketing have focused on advanced economies and fast-
developing, large emerging markets. Until recently, only a few marketing studies have addressed
subsistence markets – i.e., De Soto (2000), Nwanko (2000), Pralahad (2002), Pralahad and Hart
(2002), Mahajan and Banga (2006), Hammond et al. (2007), Sridharan and Viswanathan, (2008),
Viswanathan et al. (2010), and Viswanathan et al. (2012). In low- and many middle-income
countries, poverty is pervasive, often encompassing large proportions of the population, with the
poor often disenfranchised from the formal economy (Viswanathan et al. 2012).
Yet, there are over 4 billion bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) individuals living below the
United Nations Development Goal of less than 1.25 dollars a day (Kaplinsky 2011), in areas that
are underserved, often rural, in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean
(Hammond et al. 2007). The potential of the BOP market is huge, as multinational firms have
more recently discovered. Major consumer-product companies such as Unilever, Procter &
Gamble, and Nestlé currently serve this segment with smaller versions of their multinational
brands, some by using sachet marketing (Pralahad 2002), and marketing the more affordable
versions of mass-market offers. Examples of such products are the $2,000 Tata Nano automobile,
a 50-dollar cataract surgery by Aravind Eye Care System, less than $0.01 per minute of cell
phone time with Airtel (Pralahad, 2012), among others.
The BOP markets represent the new economic and market development frontier: they are
572
ripe for private investment, driven by creative entrepreneurial activity, and will likely soon
experience a reduction in poverty on a massive scale. In the process of serving these markets,
multinationals and the donor community must address BOP needs, as well as deficiencies,
carefully: they must design marketing efforts and programs targeted towards the BOP, taking
initiative and showing leadership (Gupta, 2013) by ensuring that campaigns have a substantial
social marketing component.
This study will address creative approaches of marketers targeting BOP consumers using
strategies that enhance their wellbeing. These strategies emphasize:
a. Consumer health and hygiene. Successful campaigns focus not only on selling, but also
teaching BOP consumers about the importance of clean hands and personal hygiene, as in
the case of consumer goods giants Unilever and P&G who thus forged a bond of trust
between consumers and the firm (Euromonitor, 2016).
b. A more measured consumption. For example, consumers can purchase 10 sheets of soap-
coated paper in India for an estimated $0.03. Unilever developed small sachets of Sunsilk
shampoo and sold them for less than $0.02, thus increasing affordability. British company
Diageo worked with the Kenyan government to introduce an affordable alcoholic
beverage, thus reducing illegal consumption of contaminated alcohol that had led to many
deaths (Euromonitor 2016).
c. Affordable communication. Currently, BOP consumers spend most of their income on
food, housing, energy, and transportation (Hammond et al. 2007), but communications is
the fastest growing spending category (Euromonitor 2016). Firms that facilitate free or
low-cost communication are not only profitable, but serve the common good.
d. Payment facilitation. BOP consumers are rapidly adopting mobile money services, which
allow them to safely and securely send, receive and store money using a basic flip phone.
As BOP consumers lack access to bank accounts, mobile money services facilitate
transactions, helping consumers safely purchase goods and services, and save money.
e. Access to product information. Low literacy influences all subsistence consumers’
marketplace interaction (Adkins and Ozanne 2005, Hill and Stephens 1997, Viswanathan
et al. 2008). BOP consumers lack the confidence and skills needed for decisions (Hill
2002; Viswanathan et al. 2010), precluding them from planning purchases, checking
prices and other information to determine product quality, and shopping for better deals
573
(Viswanathan et al. 2010). BOP will benefit from information that firms share and that
they comprehend (pictorially, verbally).
References
Adkins, N.A. and J. L. Ozanne (2005), “The low literate consumer,” Journal of Consumer
Research, 32 (1), 93–105.
Chikweche, T. and R. Fletcher (2010), “Understanding factors that influence purchases in
subsistence markets, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 63 (6), June, 642-650.
De Soto, H. (2000), The Mystery of Capital—why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails
everywhere else, Bantam Press, London.
Euromonitor (2016), “Doing Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” June, Passport GMID
Database.
Gupta, S. (2013), “"Serving the “Bottom of Pyramid” – A Servant Leadership Perspective,"
Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, Vol. 10, No. 3, 98-106.
Hammond, A.L., W.J. Kramer, R.S. Katz, J.T. Tran, C. Walker (2007), The Next Four Billion,
World Resources Institute and International Finance Corporation.
Hill, R. and D. L. Stephens (1997), “Impoverished Consumers and Consumer Behavior: The case
of AFDC mothers,” Journal of Macromarketing, 17 (Fall), 32–48.
Kaplinsky, R. (2011), Bottom of the Pyramid Innovation and Pro-Poor Growth, World
Bank,http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/435351468325278859/pdf/703720WP0P12
450Poor0Growth00Sept011.pdf (accessed on December 22, 2017).
Mahajan, V. and K. Banga (2006), The 86% solution: how to succeed in the biggest market
opportunity of the 21st century, Wharton Publishing, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Nwanko, S. (2000), “Assessing the marketing environment in Sub-Saharan Africa—opportunities
and threats analysis,“ Marketing Planning and Intelligence. 18 (3), 144-513.
Prahalad, C.K. and S.L. Hart (2002), “The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” Business
Strategy, 26 (1), 2-14.
Prahalad, C.K. (2002). Serving the World's poor profitably,” Harvard Business Review, 80 (9),
48-57.
______ (2012). Bottom of the Pyramid as a Source of Breakthrough Innovations, Journal of
Product Innovation Management, Volume 29, Issue 1, pages 6–12.
574
Sridharan, S. and M. Viswanathan (2008), “Marketing in subsistence marketplaces,” Journal of
Consumer Marketing, 25 (7), 1–24.
Viswanathan, M, S. Sridharan, R. Ritchie (2008), “Marketing in Subsistence Marketplaces,” in C.
Wankel, ed., Alleviating Poverty Through Business Strategy, Palgrave Macmillan, 209-231.
Viswanathan, M., J. A. Rosa, and J. A. Ruth (2010), "Relationships and Commitment as
Cornerstones in Marketing Systems: Subsistence Consumer-Merchants in Chennai, India,"
Journal of Marketing, 74 (May), 1-17.
Viswanathan, M., S. Sridharan, R. Ritchie, S. Venugopal, and K Jung (2012), “Marketing
Interactions in Subsistence Marketplaces: A Bottom-Up Approach to Designing Public
Policy,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 31 (2), 159-177.
575
The Societal Implications of An
Inclusive Distribution Network In
A Subsistence Marketing
Marcos Ferreira Santos77, Universidade FUMEC, Brazil
Andrés Barrios, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia
Traditionally, poor communities are structurally denied access to resources, capabilities, and
opportunities (George, McGahan, and Prabhu 2012). This is particularly detrimental in the food
sector, where market barriers prevent low-income communities from eating healthily
(Drewnowski 2004). Since the new millennium, the private sector has been called on to develop
initiatives combining market principles with social and environmental factors to help poor
communities (United Nations 2000). A business response to the previous situation has been to
implement “inclusive business” strategies, whereby subsistence marketplaces are not seen simply
as a segment to sell to, but rather, as a strategic partner to cooperate with (Viswanathan and
Sridharan 2009). By implementing these initiatives, both private organizations and poor
communities create meaningful synergies and shared values, which support inclusive growth
(George, McGahan, and Prabhu 2012).
Consumers’ food purchasing preferences are influenced by the social context (Shaw, Mathur and
Mehrotra 1993). For example, subsistence consumers’ uncertain income and lack of infrastructure
often make them buy their food and grocery products from nearby marketplaces, “mom and pop
stores”, on a daily basis (Sabnavis 2008). Price is considered a core factor in food choice,
followed by taste and freshness (Steenhuis, Waterlander and Mul 2011). In addition, consumers
in subsistence marketplaces have particular exchange dynamics, based on their social capital,
576
which are central to the development of business models that are effective and appropriate for
such consumer needs (Viswanathan and Rosa 2010).
Layton (2011) argued that 50 years ago AMA meetings included problems of developing
countries, common markets, consumerism and environmental issues, that were then ignored, but
can't be today. As Dixon (1984), Layton (2008, 2011) and Shultz (2016) explain there is more to
marketing than the 4 Ps framework and consumer studies. Marketing was intended to sustain and
organize social activities related to market systems.
As Layton (2011, p. 210) presented the following research question, "Looking globally is it
possible to design regional food systems that might minimize the horrors of famine, earthquake
and tsunamis?” This article describes the point of view of a social organization and local
community members who were engaged in a partnership with a dairy multinational co-financed
by an international organization to develop a food retailing initiative that presented positive
impacts for business, communities, and individuals.
Investigating such a network and specially the point of view of its members and local community
members aligns with Layton (2008, p. 225) comment that "While firm and customer will always
be central, equal importance may attach to other roles, including those of information
intermediaries, suppliers, etc".
The context of this investigation was the termination of a partnership between the social
organization, an international organization and the multinational dairy company. Forty interviews
were realized with local community members and six interviews with members of the social
organization to gauge their evaluation of the partnership, its impact for the community
development and community members’ nutrition and their expectation for the future.
From the content analysis of these interviews, the authors analyze its implication for future
developments of public policies and for marketing systems (Layton 2008, 2011) in subsistence
markets (Viswanathan and Sridharan 2009; Viswanathan and Rosa 2010) while presenting a
business case for public health and development professionals that promotes products with
micronutrient fortification (Griffiths 2003).
577
References
Dixon, D. F. (1984). Macromarketing: A Social Systems Perspective Macromarketing: A Social
Systems Perspective. Journal of Macromarketing, 5(2), 4–17.
Drewnowski, A. (2004) Obesity and the food environment. American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, 27(3), 154 – 162.
George, G., McGahan, A. M., and Prabhu, J. (2012), Innovation for Inclusive Growth: Towards a
Theoretical Framework and a Research Agenda. Journal of Management Studies, 49: 661–683.
Griffiths, M. (2003). Communicating the benefits of micronutrient fortification. Food and
Nutrition Bulletin, 24(4 supplement), 146–150.
Layton, R. A. (2008). The Search for a Dominant Logic: A Macromarketing Perspective. Journal
of Macromarketing, 28(3), 215–227
Layton, R. A. (2011). Marketing: is management all that there is? Journal of Historical Research
in Marketing, 3(2), 194–213.
Sabnavis, M. (2008), “Why organized retail is good”, The Hindu Business Line. [Online]
Available from: www. thehindubusinessline.com/2008/05/28/stories/2008052850330800.html
Shaw, A., Mathur, P., and Mehrotra, N. N. (1993) A study of consumers’ attitude towards
processed food, Indian Food Industry, 47, pp. 29-41.
Shultz, C. J. (2016). There is more to marketing: An encore to Layton’s ring cycle and the
compelling case for marketing systems theory, research and management. Australasian Marketing
Journal, 24(3), 257–259.
578
Nicaragua: A Case in Marketing
and Development toward
Sustainable Well-being
Clifford J. Shultz78, II, Loyola University Chicago, USA
Raffael Araque Padilla, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Spain
Maria José Montero Simó, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Spain
Nelson Joaquin Salazar Recinos, Universidad Centroamericana, Nicaragua
Introduction
The objective of this presentation is to report on the first phase of a longitudinal study the
authors have begun in Nicaragua. The research is designed to examine the transition and
development of an evolving and in some respects distressed marketing system, with intentions to
discern good practices to improve the quality-of-life (QOL) of the country’s people, justly and
sustainably. We draw from comparable macromarketing studies (e.g., Barrios et al. 2016;
Dahringer 1983; Nguyen, Rahtz & Shultz 2014; Shultz, Pecotich & Le 1994; Shultz et al. 2005;
Slater 1968; Slater et al. 1976; Sredl, Shultz & Brečić 2017) and complementary literature to gain
insights into the markets, systems and consumption patterns within Nicaragua’s unique
geographic, political, cultural, economic, historical and administrative context.
Multiple methods will be used during the undertaking of this endeavor. The initial phase
includes examination and assessments of secondary data, followed by field research. Preliminary
579
findings are intended to lead to deeper, systemic explorations of key sectors and their reciprocal
relationships with systemic forces and citizen-consumer QOL.
The authors are hopeful the depth, breadth and length of this constructive engagement will
provide insights into plausible, good policies and practices to facilitate sustainable development
and QOL in Nicaragua and adjacent countries. In addition to scholarly contributions, the authors
intend to formulate development projects and to engage external public/private institutions via
workshops and meetings to coordinate the development initiatives of key catalytic institutions
and their stakeholders.
Nicaraguan Context
The Republic of Nicaragua, located in the Central American isthmus, is the largest of the
countries that comprise Central America, and is home to more than six million people. It is also
the second poorest country in the region (Global Finance Magazine, 2017); indeed, Nicaragua is a
developing nation, with a history marked by armed conflicts and the struggle to eradicate poverty.
It was chosen as a case study due to its particularly compelling history and because better
understanding of its marketscape and people will add to the macromarketing literature on
transitioning and recovering economies. We believe this better understanding also will have the
potential to stimulate good policies and practices, which in turn will boost socioeconomic
development.
Nicaragua transitioned from a planned economy to a more “free market” system at the
beginning of the 1990s. Nicaraguans of more advanced age experienced first-hand the
consequences of this transition, having firstly lived through a war economy and then
reconstruction of a productive and exporting national apparatus (Kinloch Tijerino, 2016).
The last two decades have produced a proliferation of private enterprise and
entrepreneurial activities in Nicaragua, accompanied by an aggressive policy to promote
commercial openness, with which Nicaragua is currently evolving in a context characterized by
high inflation, low salaries and a preponderance of informal labor. Today, contrasting realities
coexist in Nicaragua: a vigorous urban development mainly in the capital city and other principal
cities; acute poverty experienced by 24.9% of Nicaraguans and extreme poverty by 6.9% of them
(INIDE, 2016).
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Between 1998 and 2009 approximately 42.5%, of the population lived in general poverty;
between 2009 and 2014, general poverty fell to 29.6% and then to the aforementioned 24.9% by
2016 (INIDE, 2016; FUNIDES 2016). While poverty is still unacceptably high, a positive trend is
emerging. In this context of accelerated efforts to reduce the incidence of poverty – including, for
example, government investments in education, health care, energy, and commercial enterprises
(e.g., General Budget of the Republic of Nicaragua 2006-2016), in addition to contributions from
FDI – changes in the consumption habits for many Nicaraguans are evident. The current
perceptions of QOL among Nicaraguans, as well as their future expectations, likely have
changed, too.
Given this context, it is noteworthy that there is little literature that addresses the
phenomena of consumption, consumer/marketing dynamics, and their relation to QOL. Data and
other information are mainly provided by the Nicaraguan Central Bank, and only a handful of
non-governmental entities contribute to these findings. The importance of a systemic study on
macromarketing forces, consumption and QOL in Nicaragua therefore becomes evident; it
requires multi-disciplinary perspectives and an eclectic methodological tool-kit that to provide us
with a better understanding of the factors that influence the social welfare of a community, which
can be categorized as disadvantaged or flourishing (Shultz, Rahtz, & Sirgy, 2017). Building on
findings from secondary data, our field research aims to assess consumers, business
entrepreneurs, public officials, NGDOs and representatives of civil society, in urban and rural
settings, and in jurisdictions principally administered by/in Managua, León, Granada and Estelí.
By initially concentrating efforts in urban centers, we expect to obtain a more reliable and valid
evaluation of the effectiveness of public policies during the last decade (CELADE 2016).
Forward
What emerges from initial findings to be shared in Leipzig is a glimpse of a rather arcane
marketing system, but one that also has potential to enhance citizen-consumer QOL – if that
system is managed thoughtfully, sustainably and equitably. Toward that elusive goal, the authors
seek (1) to expand the collective knowledge about macromarketing factors that affect marketing,
development and QOL in Nicaragua and potentially elsewhere in Central America, (2) to assess
expectations for QOL and the evolving marketing system that ideally will contribute to it, and (3)
to generate policy proposals and good business practices to improve the sustainable QOL in
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Nicaragua through a better understanding of the complex and transitioning marketing system(s)
within and connected to Nicaragua.
References
Barrios, A., K. de Valck, C. Shultz, O. Sibai, K. Husemann, M. Maxwell-Smith & M. Luedicke
(2016), “Marketing as a Means to Transformative Social Conflict Resolution: Lessons
from Transitioning War Economies and the Colombian Coffee Marketing System,”
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 35 (2), 185-197.
Dahringer, L. (1983), “Public Policy Implications of Reverse Channel Mapping for Lesotho,”
Journal of Macromarketing, 3 (1), 69-75.
FUNIDES (2016), Segundo Informe de Coyuntura Económica. Managua: FUNIDES. Obtenido
de http://www.funides.com/publicaciones/informe-y-estudios/186-segundo-informe-de-
coyuntura-economica-de-2016/.
Global Finance (2017), “Poorest Countries in the World,” Obtenido de
https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/the-poorest-countries-in-the-
world?page=12.
INIDE (2016), Reporte de Pobreza y Desigualdad - EMNV2016. Managua. Obtenido de
http://www.inide.gob.ni/Emnv/Emnv17/Reporte%20de%20Pobreza%20y%20Desigualda
d%20-%20EMNV%202016%20-%20Final.pdf.
Kinloch Tijerino, F. (2016), Historia de Nicaragua (5th ed.). Managua, Nicaragua: Ihnca.
MHCP (2018), “Libros Presupuestarios. Ministry of Finance and Public Credit,” MHCP.
Recuperado el 31 de January de 2018, de
http://www.hacienda.gob.ni/Direcciones/presupuesto/libros-presupuestarios/informacion-
de-los-libros/
Nguyen T.T.M., D. Rahtz & C. Shultz (2013), “Tourism as Catalyst for Quality of Life in
Transitioning Subsistence Marketplaces: Perspectives from Ha Long, Vietnam,” Journal
of Macromarketing, 34 (1), 28-44.
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Shultz, C., T. Burkink, B. Grbac & N. Renko (2005), “When Policies and Marketing Systems
Explode: An Assessment of Food Marketing in the War-Ravaged Balkans and
Implications for Recovery, Sustainable Peace, and Prosperity,” Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 24 (1), 24-37.
Shultz, C. & A. Pecotich (1994), “Changes in Marketing Activity and Consumption in the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” Research in Consumer Behavior, 7, 225-257.
Shultz, C., D. Rahtz, & M. J. Sirgy (2017), “Distinguishing Flourishing from Distressed
Communities: Vulnerability, Resilience and a Systemic Framework to Facilitate Well-
Being,” The Handbook of Community Well-Being, R. Phillips and C. Wong, ed.
Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 403-422.
Slater, C. (1968), “Marketing Processes in Developing Latin American Societies,” Journal of
Marketing, 32 (3), 50-55.
Slater, C. (1976), “A Catalyst for Development,” in Marketing Systems for Developing
Countries: International Conference on Marketing Systems for Developing Countries, ed.
D. Izraeli, D. N. Izraeli, and F. Meissner, New York: Wiley, 3-17.
Sredl, K., C. Shultz & R. Brečić (2017), “The Arizona Market. A Marketing Systems Perspective
on Pre- and Post-War Developments in Bosnia, with Implications for Sustainable Peace
and Prosperity,” Journal of Macromarketing, 37 (3), 300-316.
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Macromarketing &
Health I
Track Chair: Jayne Krisjanous
Co-Chair(s): Djavlonbek Kadirov
584
How I feel about my new hip: An
emotion and sentiment analysis of
online patient reviews of total hip
replacement surgery
Sarah Lord Ferguson79, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Christine Pitt80, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden
Leyland Pitt81 , Simon Fraser University, Canada
Abstract
Healthcare consumers are increasingly turning to online sources such as educational websites,
forums, and social media platforms to demystify the uncertainties associated with undergoing
medical procedures. These online sources allow consumers to share their experiences and also learn
from the experiences of others in a process of value creation that exists separate from the traditional
systems of health delivery. In our study, we demonstrate a non-invasive way of better
understanding the feelings and emotions that consumers share with each other online. Specifically,
we perform content analysis on patient reviews of an increasingly common medical procedure: the
total hip replacement. By using IBM Watson’s Natural Language Processing tool, we are able to
transform user-generated, qualitative content into quantitative data that reveals the underlying
emotion and sentiment associated with online patient reviews. In this way, our study demonstrates
a unique way of extracting insights about underlying market segments that can subsequently inform
79 [email protected] 80 [email protected] 81 [email protected]
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new marketing approaches. By better understanding the feelings that patients are sharing online
about their health and experiences with health care, marketers, policy-makers, and health
practitioners can develop strategies to improve the consumer experience and the overall delivery
of health care services.
Keywords: sentiment analysis; artificial intelligence; credence goods; health care
Introduction
Health has a number of implications for macromarketing as it is an important social and
economic issue that is linked to consumer quality of life and a just society (Brennan et al. 2009;
Layton 2009). With the advent of the internet, access to health information and consumer networks
has exploded as consumers turn to these sources to learn from each other’s health experiences. In
this way, these online sources provide an opportunity for consumers to engage in value creation
outside of the traditional systems of healthcare delivery (Hardey 2001; Stewart Loane, Webster, &
D’Alessandro 2015). They are therefore of great interest to macromarketing scholars, policy-
makers, and practitioners as learning from what consumers are saying online can inform gaps in
patient understanding and delivery of care.
One increasingly common medical procedure that has a large online presence is joint
replacement surgery, especially of the hip and knee. These surgeries have revolutionized treatment
for advanced forms of arthritis that can be extremely debilitating, impairing movement and
activities of daily living (Carr et al. 2012). It is estimated that more than 7 million people in the US
are currently living with a total hip or knee replacement, a number that is expected to grow
substantially in the next decade (Kremers et al. 2015). While joint replacements have greatly
improved quality of life for many patients, the surgery isn’t without its risks, such as infection,
blood clots, or other complications (Laupacis et al. 1993; Shan et al. 2014). Therefore, joint
replacement surgery is an elective procedure and patients should weigh the risks and benefits when
deciding whether to undergo the surgery. While health professionals can make suggestions and
help patients to obtain relevant information, the decision to undergo the surgery ultimately lies with
the patient, who may have little or no prior knowledge of what to be expected of the experience
with the surgery.
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In this way, from a consumer marketing perspective, a joint replacement can be described
as a “credence good,” which can be distinguished from “search” and “experience” offerings
(Nelson 1970). Search offerings are goods that the consumer can discern their quality through the
search process (e.g. trying on and purchasing a t-shirt), while an experience offering cannot be fully
judged until after it has been consumed (e.g. eating a meal at a restaurant). In contrast, credence
offerings differ in that their quality cannot be determined through either search or experience
(Darby and Karni 1973).
Darby and Karni (1973) explain credence goods by offering the example of an
appendectomy, or the removal of a patient’s appendix. This procedure can be classified as a
credence good because most patients are not in a position to discern when their appendix needs to
be taken out and once the surgery has been performed, most patients don’t have the expertise to
judge the quality of the surgery that was performed.
Many health procedures are examples of credence goods, including joint replacements. A
joint replacement surgery presents very similarly to the appendix removal, with the exception that
it is an elective one (i.e. a patient will not die if they choose not to have their hip replaced, but they
most certainly will die if the appendix is not removed if they have appendicitis). While a patient
may choose whether or not to have the hip replacement, the average person isn’t usually in a
position to determine if the replacement is the best course of treatment when compared with other
alternatives, and after the surgery, they are also not capable of judging how well performed the
procedure was and if the success (or failure) of the procedure was due to the ability of the surgeon
or some other factor such as the rehabilitation process or their pre and post-operative care.
This presents a potentially difficult situation for those patients trying to evaluate whether
they should undergo a joint replacement surgery. In addition to seeking medical advance from
professionals, a patient may rely on word-of-mouth in an attempt to shed light on the procedure.
They may ask friends, family and acquaintances about their experience with the surgery. With the
advent of the internet, people have an unlimited amount of word-of-mouth information at their
fingertips. A potential hip replacement patient may browse informational websites or read online
forums and discussion boards in an attempt to demystify the joint replacement process. Social
media websites in particular provide an informal avenue for patients to share their experience with
their surgeries and learn from others (e.g. Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Trusov, Bucklin and
Pauwels 2009).
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Similar to how future travellers may look up reviews on TripAdvisor before staying at a
hotel, patients (or health care consumers) also increasingly turning to online sources before
undergoing medical procedures. Patients may rely on the sentiment and emotions expressed online
by others who have undergone the same procedure in order to make up their mind regarding their
own personal decision to have a procedure. In this way, online user-generated content such as that
in patient reviews, presents a massive source of insightful data to marketing researchers (e.g.
Kozinets 2016; Belk et al. 2012). Therefore, the focus of this paper is to introduce a way for
marketers and other stakeholders such as health practitioners to analyse online patient reviews and
reveal the underlying emotion and sentiment expressed in these reviews.
We proceed as follows: first, we briefly review the literature on emotions and sentiment.
Next, we describe our study, in which we employ IBM Watson’s AlchemyLanguage tool to
examine the content of an online forum where patients share their experience with total hip
replacement surgery. Then we conclude by acknowledging the limitations of our research,
describing some implications for healthcare managers and marketers, and identifying avenues for
future research in this area.
Emotions and Sentiment
Emotions
An emotion can be described as any mental experience that has high intensity and high hedonic
content, meaning that it can be pleasurable, or it can evoke unhappiness (Cabanac 2002). While
many social scientists have attempted to distinguish between and define emotions, one of the most
well-known classifications comes from psychologist Paul Ekman (1992) who characterized the
following six emotions:
Anger: a strong feeling of displeasure and belligerence aroused by a wrong.
Disgust: a strong feeling of dislike for something that has a very unpleasant appearance,
taste, smell, and so forth.
Fear: a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc.
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Happiness: an active or passive state of pleasure or pleasurable satisfaction, or Joy: the
emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing
what one desires.
Sadness: showing, expressing, or feeling sorrow or unhappiness.
Surprise: occurs with a sudden feeling of wonder or astonishment, as through
unexpectedness.
Our research focuses on the first five of these emotions, all of which are pertinent to hip
replacement surgery. Indeed, a patient may feel anger towards their hip replacement experience,
especially for example, if they had to wait a long time for the surgery or if they experienced no
change in their pain and mobility following the surgery. Similarly, a patient may feel disgust, for
example, if they experienced some complications related to the surgery such as infection or nausea
from their medications. A patient may also experience fear, for instance, if the surgery was
unsuccessful, or if there was a possibility that they have to undergo another surgery, or if, in general,
the future was uncertain regarding their recovery. The emotion of joy could also be experienced by
hip replacement patients, for example, if the surgery gives them greater mobility and decreased
pain. In other words, they may be able to do things that they were not able to before the surgery,
therefore eliciting the emotion of joy through an improved quality of life. Finally, a patient may
feel sadness when describing their hip replacement experience, especially for instance, if the
surgery did not go according to plan, and they yearn for what might have been. In this way, the
emotions of anger, disgust, fear, joy and sadness may all be present (or not) in varying patient
experience with hip replacement surgery. These emotions form the basis of our analysis as well as
sentiment (described below).
Sentiment and Sentiment Analysis
The term “sentiment” can be used to describe an attitude, thought, or judgement towards an
event or a situation, or in other words, an opinion. Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion
mining, has developed as a tool to analyse qualitative data by generating quantitative data.
Sentiment analysis tools determine a score on a scale that ranges from positive to negative to
characterize the sentiment of the author of a piece of text. This is also referred to as the “polarity”
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of the document and provides some insight into the underlying attitude or feelings of the author of
the text (Turney 2002).
When considering the words used by patients in their description of their experience with
hip replacement, this type of analysis allows us to answer key questions including which emotions
they were trying to emphasize, the nature of the polarity of the underlying sentiment they express,
and the extent to which the sentiment is influenced significantly by the individual’s emotions. It is
unlikely that all five emotions described above impact the sentiment significantly, and so it is also
worth knowing, which emotions that were expressed had the greatest impact on their sentiment for
any one particular patient or group of patients. It is also important for marketing decision makers,
who may be health professionals in this case, to be able to understand patient sub-groups at a more
fine-grained level, and to be able to develop strategies to target marketing efforts specifically to
them. In order to investigate these questions from the viewpoint of hip replacement patients, we
conducted a study that measured the extent of both the emotions they conveyed, and the overall
sentiment they expressed in their online reviews.
The Study
Raw data was collected in the form of 98 patient reviews from Medicine.net, which is a
popular health website that provides information about a number of medical conditions, treatments,
and procedures as well as a forum were patients can share their experience with a particular
treatment or surgery. Considering the growing popularity of joint replacement surgeries, we
examined what patients were saying about their experience with hip replacement surgeries in this
study. Specifically, we explored the forum that asked patients to: “Please describe your total hip
replacement experience” (see: https://www.medicinenet.com/ total_hip_replacement/patient-
comments-276.htm). Using IBM’s Watson AlchemyLanguage tool (described below), we were
able to analyse the unstructured content of these patient reviews and obtain scores for the
underlying emotions and sentiment as expressed by these online users about their hip replacement
experience.
IBM Watson’s Alchemy Emotion and Sentiment Analysis
IBM’s Watson Technology is a platform that uses natural language processing and artificial
intelligence to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data (see:
https://www.ibm.com/watson/). One of Watson’s tools, the AlchemyLanguage function, allows
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sophisticated analysis of written text and derives semantic information in the form of a quantitative
score from qualitative data. Through its extensive natural language processing techniques, the
program is able to rapidly obtain a high level of comprehension of the content and understand the
emotions and overall sentiment expressed in a text, and also to gain an overall indication of the
sentiment of the document.
We used the Alchemy tool to detect the emotions implied in the patient reviews of their
experience with hip replacement on Medicine.net, as well as also to uncover the overall sentiment
they expressed. Each patient review was copied from the website, then pasted as text into the
AlchemyLanguage tool on IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud for analysis. Fives scores for each of
the emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) as well as one score for overall sentiment
were generated by Watson for each of the 98 patient reviews, these were recorded in excel, and
descriptive statistics were then performed on the data.
Results and Discussion
With regard to gender 63% of the respondents were female and 37% were male. With regard
to age, the majority of the respondents where between the ages of 55 and 74. Specifically, 2% of
the respondents were in the age group 25-34, 11% of the respondents were in the age group 35-44,
15% in the age group 45-54, 39% in the age group 55-64, 21% in the age group 65-74, and 10% in
the age group 75 or older.
The overall results of the study are summarized in table 1 below. There was a large range
in the number of words used in a review by a hip replacement patient. The means was 128.76, with
the longest review being 336 words, and the shortest, 25 words. The emotion and sentiment analysis
scores obtained from Watson also demonstrate the variety of patient reviews. Note that the
emotions are scored on a scale ranging from 0 to 1, and sentiment is scored on a scale ranging from
-1 to +1. Not surprisingly, the overall sentiment expressed by most hip replacement patients was
negative, with a mean sentiment of -0.35 for the sample. However, the standard deviation is quite
large (0.36) indicating that there was a great deal of variation in the positive and negative sentiment
associated with each review. Indeed, the lowest sentiment score was -0.9 and the highest was 0.69.
The highest mean score for emotion was for Sadness (0.60) followed by Joy (0.36), and
Fear (0.28), Anger and Disgust (both at 0.08). Interestingly, the mean scores for Anger and Disgust
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were extremely low and the scores for these emotions had the least variation with standard
deviations of 0.08 and 0.09 respectively. Indeed, 87% of the respondents had an Anger score of
less than or equal to 0.1 and only 2 respondents scored above 0.5, which shows that the majority
of the sample did not experience anger related to their hip replacement.
A similar trend can be seen in the results for Disgust with 92% of respondents scoring less
than or equal to 0.1. In this category, only 1 respondent scored above 0.5 at 0.54, which was the
maximum score in this category. The maximum score for both Disgust and Fear were quite low in
comparison to those of 0.84 for Joy and 0.89 for Sadness indicating that these emotions were less
prominent in the reviews. However, we found more variation in the scores for Joy and Sadness.
Indeed, the greatest standard deviation among the emotion scores was 0.24 for Joy with a range of
0.83 indicating that it was more likely for respondents to be on the extremes for this emotion with
reviews being very joyful or not joyful at all.
Sadness, on the other hand, seemed to be an emotion common to most of the respondents
with 88% of reviews scoring equal to or over 0.5. Similarly, the majority of respondents conveyed
some degree of fear in their reviews with only one respondent scoring below 0.1 and more than
half the respondents scoring above 0.2.
To gain more insight into the reviews, we went back to the data and identified the reviews
that corresponded with the highest and lowest scores on the five emotions, as well as sentiment. As
follows are 7 specific examples.
1. High anger (0.64), Patient 44 (female, age >75):
“I had a total hip replacement (THR) in February. It was determined that I had soft bones so I was
told not to put weight on the right side for 1 month, and at the end of that time to put 1/3 of your
body weight the next week, and then 2/3, etc. I walked with a walker for 3 months. Then I went to
a cane because the doctor insisted I did. I am still on a cane and this is 5 months and all the other
cases I have read, no one uses a cane very long. My thigh (just above my right knee) hurts when I
walk very far and sometimes even below my knee will hurt. I have also had two total knee
replacements and they are no problem. I am totally frustrated that I can't get rid of the cane. I am
afraid I am putting too much stress on my other hip.”
In addition to scoring the highest on anger, this respondent had the second highest score on fear
(0.70) and also scored in the higher range of sadness (0.58). The overall sentiment of this review
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was negative at -0.57. There are a number of words and phrases that signal these emotions,
including “frustrated” and “afraid.” The patient notes that she felt forced into using a cane too early
(by her doctor) and now seems to be unable to walk independently without the cane. Interestingly,
she references her experience in relation to her total knee replacements, which were “no problem”
in comparison to the trouble she has experienced with the hip replacement.
2. High Disgust (0.54), Patient 7 (female, age 55-64):
“I had my anterior hip replacement 9 days ago. A very experienced competent doctor here who
performs the latest techniques on professional athletes, and done thousands to date. I was 'told' I
would be up the first day, minimal pain, etc., untrue in my case. The doctor explained he did me up
pretty good to ensure it all was in place, muscle retraction (and not cutting tendons like the old
days) is similar to hard core blunt trauma. I am still on crutches today, small incremental
strengthening doing my passive physiotherapy every other hour. I refused any kind of narcotic and
took high dose ibuprofen, then aspirin during the day. The pain is finally manageable and I sleep
decently. Still I have deep general pain in thigh and outside calf. I walk the block once a day, ice
some, and TENS unit for stimulation helps too. I am hoping this keeps getting better!”
While this review is the highest scoring in disgust, it is interestingly also quite high in joy (0.45),
which demonstrates the complexity of healthcare experiences. The disgust may result from how
the patient’s experience differed from what her surgeon told her as well as her unwillingness to
take certain pain medications. The mid-range score on joy, on the other hand, may result from her
optimism as she mentions “I am hoping this keeps getting better!”
3. High Fear (0.77), Patient 51 (female, aged 65-74):
“I had a left total hip replacement 3 months ago and I thought I was doing well. The incisions look
great, the surgery was good, the rehabilitation went very well, but when I started outpatient therapy
I started having some problems. Every time I put weight on the operated leg I fell pain and pressure,
it starts on the hip and goes down to below my knee. I am going to see the doctor next week to see
what's going on, scared.”
Unlike most of the other reviews, which demonstrate a variety of emotions, this review is
dominated by fear, and to a lesser extent, sadness (0.36). Furthermore, the overall sentiment is
negative (-0.39). Indeed, the respondent notes that things were going well and then she suddenly
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started to experience a great deal of pain. She specifically notes that she is scared and uncertain of
what’s wrong.
4. High Joy (0.84), Patient 63 (male, aged 25-34):
“I had my total hip replacement (THR) last January and I am happy to return to my work again. I
had THR because of femoral neck fracture. At first I hesitated to have the operation because I was
young but now I am enjoying normal activity after 1 year of walking with aid. THR is one of the
most successful operations, just choose the best doctor in your place and ask for the best material
that lasts.”
In this review, the dominant emotion is joy, with little to no anger, disgust, sadness, or fear (all
under 0.1). Interestingly, this review comes from one of only two respondents in the age range of
25-34. This may explain the findings as not many younger patients tend to have this surgery and if
they did qualify to have the surgery, their previous condition must have been very dismal (Carr et
al. 2012). Indeed, the patient notes that they were walking using a walking aid for a year and now
after the hip replacement, he can enjoy normal activity.
5. High Sadness (0.89), Patient 67 (female, aged 55-64):
“I had a total hip replacement (THR) almost 5 years ago and it has been perfect. I spent 5 nights
in hospital, my rehabilitation was walking with crutches and after a month using the hydrotherapy
pool in town. I am about to have my second hip replaced, am so sick of the pain and unable to do
the things I used to do.”
This review scores extremely low on joy, anger and disgust (all under 0.05), while fear is a little
higher at 0.17. Despite the high score on sadness, the overall sentiment is about neutral (0.08). This
may be explained by the fact that the patient has already had a successful hip replacement (noting
that “it has been perfect”) but is experiencing a great deal of pain and decreased mobility associated
with the other hip, which has yet to be replaced. As mentioned earlier, the emotions that scored the
highest in our analysis were sadness and joy. Patients may describe sadness in a few ways, the most
prominent being their prior condition (often characterized by pain and lack of mobility) or their
challenges during recovery. Joy, on the other hand, tends to emerge in the reviews that focus on
the increased mobility and decreased pain felt after recovery from the surgery. In this way, both
sadness and joy may emerge as high-scoring emotions in one review or depending on where in the
rehabilitation journey a patient is, sadness may be dominant.
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6. Patient 93 (female, aged 65-74) with the lowest sentiment (-0.9)
“I had hip replacement surgery in June 2015 and was doing great. Then suddenly I am needing a
cane to walk as it feels like my hip won't support me. This usually happens after sitting even for a
few minutes. After walking a few steps it loosens up and then I am ok.”
7. Patient 90 (male, aged 55-64) with the highest, positive sentiment (0.69):
“I had anterior hip replacement done, and it is the only way to go. Just do one at a time because it
is easier to get around. I was driving one week later, with automatic and little pain, I can't wait do
get the other one done. My advice is get in the best shape you can before the surgery.”
In general, those reviews associated with lower sentiment tend to have higher scores on sadness,
while those with higher sentiment have higher scores on joy. However, those who have a higher
score on fear do not necessarily have a negative sentiment, and this may be a result of the sadness
associated with pain and decreased mobility before the surgery, not the results after recovery.
Another result that we noticed from the data was that males tend to have more positive reviews
than females, however, it is important to note that there were many more females included in the
data set than males and this follows the trend that more females undergo hip replacements then
men (Kremers et al. 2015). Regardless, more analysis should be done, especially on a larger data
set, to determine if significant correlational relationships exist with regard to gender effects as well
as between the sentiment and the different emotions.
Limitations, Managerial Implications and Future Research
The study presented here has a number of limitations. As mentioned above, the sample,
while adequate for statistical analysis, could be much larger, especially when one considering the
rising rate of hip replacement surgeries performed annually. Next, there is the possibility that there
is a degree of response bias in the data that was used in our study, especially considering that those
who write reviews tend to be either extremely satisfied or extremely dissatisfied. In other words,
those patients who are delighted with the outcome of their surgery might want to share their joy
with others via an online forum, while those who are unhappy with the result of their surgery may
try to seek comfort by posting online about their experience. Therefore, the responses that emerge
may be extreme at both ends of the spectrum. However, despite this potential bias, patients continue
to turn to online reviews and forums to gain some perspective on a potential surgery, and thus, we
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believe that the findings of the research might provide insights to both marketers, policy-makers
and healthcare practitioners.
First, the analysis technique employed here demonstrates how qualitative data can be
manipulated in such a way that it sheds quantitative light onto issues that are important to decision
makers. Second, the methodology is relatively simple and inexpensive: it simply requires copying
and pasting text into the Watson AlchemyLanguage tool and entering the resulting scores into a
spreadsheet for further manipulation. Third, the data obtained delivers real insights into the feelings
and emotions of patients, or health care consumers, who have endured a serious surgical procedure.
This represents a way of generating insights into underlying market segments, which could then be
targeted by means of different marketing strategies.
By means of examining the overall (mean) scores as well as the extremes of individual
reviews, the analysis allows health care service providers to understand what impacts patient’s
emotions towards a credence offering. Specifically, what angers, disgusts and saddens those who
have endured a negative experience that impacts their overall sentiment and what elicits joy in
those who have come away with a positive experience. It also allows practitioners to see what
combinations of emotions result in different overall sentiments when it comes to coping with the
various outcomes of any medical treatment or surgical procedure. For example, what causes a
patient to feel both fear and joy in a particular medical experience? This information can be used
by various stakeholders to better prepare patients for elective surgeries and ensure that they have a
positive experience regardless of the actual outcomes of the surgery. In this way, micro-level
comments (and their associated emotions) shared online by individual patients can aggregate to
provide value in shaping macro-level health care practices.
The research conducted in this study and our results suggest a number of avenues for future
research. First, the texts used in this research were derived from relatively short reviews – the
longest was only 336 words. While this is adequate for sentiment analysis using IBM Watson,
greater value may be extracted from longer reviews. For example, using text that is much longer in
length (e.g. 3,000 words) it is possible to discern a comprehensive understanding of the individual
personality and values of an author using the Watson Personality Insights tool (see:
http://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/personality-insights.html). This type of data could be
obtained by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with hip replacement patients, and the
content transposed into text files.
596
Second, the text gathered in this exercise could also be analysed using another content
analysis tools, such as DICTION for example, which uses a different approach based on Hart’s
(1984a; 1984b) fundamental characteristics. These fundamental characteristics could be analysed
separately or linked to the emotions and sentiment considered in this paper.
Third, a host of other statistical tools could be used to explore the data further including
structural equation modelling to establish causality, and correspondence analysis procedures to
graphically assign respondents to more homogenous groups that could be targeted with marketing
messages in more specific ways. Finally, the data generated from this study could be compared
with the same content analysis of other health procedures. As mentioned in the beginning of the
paper, knee replacements are another type of joint replacement that are increasingly common.
Future research could explore if there are differences in what patients are saying about these two
procedures, which share a number of similar characteristics, as well as those surgeries that are also
elective, but different in purpose (e.g. plastic surgeries).
Conclusion
Hip replacement surgery is rapidly becoming one of the most common medical procedures,
with the total number of procedures performed per year forecast to grow by 174% from 2005 to
2030 in the United States alone (Kurtz et al. 2007). This is not surprising due to recent advances in
surgical techniques, the aging population of the “baby-boomer” generation, and the increase in
chronic conditions such as arthritis that are now affecting people at younger ages (Kurtz et al.
2015). With the combination of these factors, we expect to see continued a continued demand for
not only hip replacements, but other credence offerings such as knee replacements, cortisone
injections, vasectomies and hysterectomies. Since health care consumers frequently turn to online
forums and social media platforms to share their experiences with health services, marketers and
other stakeholders must find new ways to extract value from the rich content of patient reviews in
order to develop strategies to better serve the diverse consumer groups obtaining health services.
597
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599
Table 1: Results – Word Count, Emotions and Sentiment of Hip Replacement Patients
Word
Count
Joy
(scored
0 to 1)
Anger
(scored
0 to 1)
Disgust
(scored
0 to 1)
Sadness
(scored
0 to 1)
Fear
(scored
0 to 1)
Sentiment
(scored
-1 to 1)
Mean 128.76 0.36 0.08 0.08 0.60 0.28 -0.35
Std. Dev 67.48 0.24 0.08 0.09 0.14 0.17 0.36
Minimum 25 0.01 0 0 0.05 0.07 -0.9
Maximum 336 0.84 0.64 0.54 0.89 0.77 0.69
600
Vulnerability in expectant-mothers
in a North-Indian rural context
Renu Emile, Jindal Global Business School, India
Maedhavini Banga, Jindal Global Business School, India
This study examines vulnerability in expectant mothers. According to the World Health
Organization fact-sheet on maternal mortality (WHO 2016), 830 deaths occur from pregnancy
and childbirth-related causes every day, and 99% of these deaths occur in developing countries.
Also, maternal mortality is higher in rural areas and amongst poorer communities. The study
distinguishes maternal mortality from maternal morbidity. Maternal mortality is the death of a
woman arising from health complications that may or may not be related to pregnancy during or
within one year of the end of pregnancy (Evans, Jeemon, Strysko, Toole and Catts 2018; WHO
2017). Maternal morbidity, on the other hand, relates to unanticipated outcomes of women in
labor that may result in physical or mental incapacity; these are directly or indirectly correlated to
prenatal, antenatal or postnatal processes (Evans et al. 2018; Koblinsky, Chowdhury, Moran and
Ronsmans 2012). This study concerns with maternal mortality. India’s maternal mortality ratio
is significantly high at 174, seven times higher than that of Russia, six times that of China and
about four times that of Brazil (World Bank 2015). Poor maternal health may not only affect the
child’s health negatively, but may also lower participation in economic activity, reduce
productivity, and sabotage the effectiveness of poverty alleviation programmes. This research-
project examines maternal healthcare in a representative North Indian rural population-set of
Haryana with specific focus on the ways in which expectant-mothers experience vulnerability.
The North Indian state of Haryana comprises 21 districts with a total population of 25,353,081
(70% rural) and a birth rate of 21.3 per thousand mid-year population (Census 2011; Economic
Survey of Haryana 2012-2013; Registrar General of India 2014). The state is very similar to
601
other North Indian states in terms of socio-economic development and socio-cultural factors such
as the preference for having sons, a lower sex ratio, and a lower social status of women. We
situate informant experiences of vulnerability (Baker, Gentry and Rittenburg 2005; Commuri and
Ekici 2008) within the larger maternal health-care system comprising “complex social networks
of individuals and groups linked through shared participation in the creation and delivery of
economic value through exchange” (Layton 2014 p.2), and interactions and connections “from
parts to wholes, from objects to relationships, from structures to processes and from measuring to
mapping” (Vargo, Koskela-Huotari, Baron, Edvardsson, Reynoso and Colurcio 2017 p. 266) in a
developing-country context.
We conducted semi-structured in-depth-interviews with twenty informants (expectant mothers
and maternal health-care practitioners) in three villages of rural Haryana. An analysis of the data
shows that the experience of vulnerability for expectant mothers in the particular rural context of
the study largely relates to first, medical services within the formal health-care sector; second, to
the social networks informants find themselves in, and third, to their own demographic
characteristics. Pertinent to the vulnerability experience are: access, infrastructure, logistics and
resources, and quality and standardization-related issues and challenges within the health-care
system; socio-cultural barriers and pressures, mobility, and privacy and confidentiality-related
issues within personal and social networks; and demographic characteristics such as education-
levels, age of marriage, type of household and number of family-members, occupation, and
income. In line with these findings, while we acknowledge individual characteristics
(biophysical and psychosocial) and states (such as mood, motivation, transitions), as also external
causes (such as discrimination and logistics) (Baker et al. 2005) as possible conditions to the
experience of vulnerability, we propose demographic characteristics and personal and social
networks as well as an understanding of the larger maternal health-care system itself as salient to
addressing vulnerability in the specific context of the study. We argue for and adopt a systems-
based model to identify and address the inadequacies of maternal health-care in the specific rural
context of this study.
602
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systematic review: Infant and maternal mortality and morbidity in developing countries,” Nursing
Undergraduate Work. 2.
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“Maternal morbidity and disability and their consequences: Neglected agenda in maternal health,”
Journal of Health, Population, and Nutrition, 30 (2), 124-130.
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of Macromarketing, 1-18.
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Sepetember%202014.pdf
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Colurcio (2017), “A systems perspective on markets – Toward a research agenda,” Journal of
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603
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604
Examining the Reciprocity
Mechanism of Sport-Based Social
Initiative: The mediating Role of
Gratitude
Seung Pil Lee82 83, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea
Abstract
The focus of the study is to examine how gratitude can play a mediating role in enhancing the
societal outcomes for participants in a sport-based social initiative. The study also seeks to learn
if gratitude spurs participants to act more prosocially through giving behavior. Therefore, the
authors develop a conceptual model depicting the structural relationships among sport
participation, gratitude, societal benefits and prosocial behaviors based on previous literature on
the social impact of sport and gratitude. Using two random samples representative of the
Singaporean residents, the study empirically shows that the frequency of participation in a range
of daily sport activities positively influences the perceived social capital and health literacy of
participants through the mediation effect of gratitude. The study also shows that participation in
sport activities enhance giving behavioral intention of prosocial behavior through serial mediation
effect of gratitude and perceived social capital in sport-based social initiative.
Key words: sport initiative, gratitude, social capital, health literacy, reciprocity
82 Corresponding author 83 [email protected]
605
Introduction
Many different kinds of organizations (e.g., the United Nations, FIFA, FC Barcelona,
NFL, FedEx, Tiger Woods Foundation) including corporations, non-profits, non-government
organizations, governments and sport entities have been utilizing sports and physical activities to
enhance societal well-being and health as well as their own economic performance. These
activities are often in the forms of social commitment including philanthropy, corporate social
responsibility (CSR), sponsorship, partnership, cause brand alliance, and social alliance (Lee &
Cornwell 2011). The number of organizations engaging in sport-based social initiatives in these
forms continuously increasing, and sports and causes currently represent the fastest growing
sponsorship categories (IEG 2013). Many researchers have examined the effectiveness of those
initiatives for organizational objectives (e.g., Cornwell & Coote 2005; Lee, & Babiak 2017;
Lichtenstein, Drumwright, & Braig 2004; Simmon & Becker-Olsen 2006). There has been,
however, little research to examine the outcomes for participants or beneficiaries in spite of the
fact that those sport based-social initiatives are literally beneficiary-oriented. One of the
challenges might be that the social outcomes for beneficiaries from sport-based social initiatives
typically are “difficult-to-measure or intangible” constructs in areas related to health, well-being,
social capital, societal equity, education, gender equality, sustainability and peace (Lee, Cornwell
& Babiak 2013). It is one thing for a program to do good work and it is another thing to
communicate these successful mechanism and outcomes to stakeholders. This type of CSR
communication might benefit from measurement. That is, the measurement of outcomes is
required for social initiative to gain social, political and financial support, especially in the form
of corporate engagement (Lee, Cornwell & Babiak 2013). In addressing this challenge in
previous work, Lee, Cornwell and Babiak (2013) developed a general instrument to measure the
social impact of sport in terms of social capital, well-being, health literacy, collective identity and
human capital. They found that participation in sport and physical activities can enhance these
multidimensional societal values, but this potential hinges on how sport programs, practices and
policies are strategically designed, delivered and communicated (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak 2013).
They suggested that future research should apply their newly-developed instrument into a specific
population and context (e.g., sport for development programs in developing countries) to evaluate
the actual developmental relationships and outcomes delivered by sport-based development
programs with more complexities and realities.
606
In sport-based social initiatives of social sponsorship or CSR practices, particularly
noteworthy is the fact that participants/beneficiaries can experience or receive either tangible or
intangible positive social benefits offered from other individuals or organizations. Given these
characteristics, gratitude might be considered as a fundamental construct to influence the social
benefits for participants in sport-based social sponsorship initiative and CSR practices. Also, the
perception of gratitude might play a role in motivating participants, benefactors (e.g., corporate
sponsors, volunteers, donors, NPO partners) and the general public to act more prosocially.
However, there has been little research to examine gratitude as an important factor to influence
the social outcomes related to social capital, well-being and health for participants in cause-
oriented sponsorship and CSR literature. Also, there has been little research to examine how
gratitude can better play a role in spurring beneficiaries, benefactors (e.g., corporate sponsors,
volunteers, donors, NPO partners) and the general public to act more prosocially in collaborative
social initiatives, ultimately promoting gratitude practices in organizational settings, community
and society at large in sport-based social sponsorship and CSR practices.
Thus, the first objective of the study is to develop a conceptual model depicting the
reciprocity relationships among sport participation, gratitude, social benefits, and prosocial
behaviors in sport-based initiative based on previous literature on the social impact of sport and
gratitude. The second objective is to empirically test the conceptual model and its underlying
mechanism of structural relationships among sport, gratitude, perceived social outcomes for
participants and their prosocial behaviors in the context of a sport-based national initiative,
‘Vision 2030: Live Better through Sport’ in Singapore, utilizing a recently-developed instrument
to measure the social impact of sport (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak 2013). Thus, the intellectual
merit of the study is to better understand the reciprocity mechanism of sport-based social
initiatives, focusing on gratitude.
Theoretical Foundation and Hypotheses Development
Social Benefits of Sport
The work of Lee, Cornwell and Babiak (2013) provided an overview of numerous policy
papers claiming that sport impacts society in terms of social inclusion, social capital, health
education, youth development (e.g., Baily 2005; Delaney & Keaney 2005; Botcheva & Huffman
2004; Jarvie 2003; Munro 2005, Seippel 2006; Tonts 2005). They concluded that there has been
607
consistent support for the potential of sport’s contribution to society, but little empirical evidence
in a standardized and systematic format. In addressing this challenge, first, they selected the five
core areas to which sport can contribute in society, encompassing social capital, collective
identities, health literacy, well-being and human capital by adapting the conceptual work of
Lawson (2005) and other scholars’ supporting literature (e.g., Chalip 2006; Chalip, Johnson, &
Stachura 1996).
Especially, Lawson (2005) argued that sport, exercise and physical education (SEPE) can
generate and strengthen social networks among participants, their families, residents of the
community, and professions, leading to social trust and norms of civil society. Secondly, he
states that SEPE can be designed to contribute to the development of collective identities by
bridging intergroup differences, facilitating solidarity and integration. Third, Lawson reasons
that SEPE can enhance and create healthy environments vital to development initiatives. Further,
he argues that SEPE can improve well-being including health, nurturing relationships,
opportunities for identity development, harmonious relations, and reduction of social exclusion.
Finally, he reasons that SEPE can contribute to human capital focused on the knowledge, skills,
attitude, competence, capacity, and citizenship of individuals and groups.
Following these groundwork for the social contribution of sport, Lee, Cornwell and
Babiak (2013) developed a conceptual measurement model for the selected five core variables to
be influenced by sport based on extensive literature review of past measures in the respective
areas. Also, they offered the paraphrased definitions for the five core variables with supporting
literature (see Table 1). Subsequently, they developed a general instrument including composite
and global measures to assess the social impact of sport in terms of a) social capital, b) collective
identities, c) health literacy, d) well-being and e) human capital. They tested the new instrument
for both psychometric properties and its theoretical relationships within a “nomological network”
(Cronbach & Meehl 1955). Their findings show that a shorter set of 15 global measure items
efficiently represent 80-90 composite measure items for the five dimensional constructs of the
social values of sport in society. One of the implications is that we can flexibly, efficiently and
practically apply the global measures to different types of sport events, facilities or activities to
assess their multi-dimensional values to society. In addition, structural equation model using a
two group comparison by the awareness of a major charity sport event in a community, shows the
frequencies of exposures to community-oriented sports (e.g., intramural sport, local softball
608
league, local tennis tournament) and participation in individual recreation sports have a
significant positive impact on the development of social capital, collective identities and health
literacy (Lee, Cornwell, Babiak 2013). Further, they found that the awareness of a major charity
sport event in the community moderated these causal relationships (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak
2013).
Adapting Lawson (2005)’s seminal work as a theoretical framework and the following
conceptual measurement model and the empirical evidences of Lee, Cornwell, and Babiak
(2013), we hypothesize that frequency of participation in a sport-based social initiative are
expected to influence the multi-dimensional values of social benefits related to social relationship
and development, well-being, human capital and health. (see Figure 1).
Hypothesis 1: The frequency of participation in a range of activities related to a sport-based
initiative positively influences the perceived social benefits of social capital, collective identities,
health literacy, well-being and human capital of participants
Gratitude, Social Outcomes and Prosocial Behaviors
In sport-based social initiatives in the forms of social sponsorship or CSR practices,
participants experience or receive positive benefits either tangibly or intangibly offered from
other individuals or organizations. For examples, first, the former Korea Republic national
football team defender, Hong Myung-Bo established the HMB Foundation in an effort to help
underprivileged children and encourage disadvantaged and at-risk youths to achieve their life
goals through football-based social development initiative (HMB Foundation 2015). More than
280 student-athletes have been receiving scholarships from the initiative for the last 12 years
since its foundation in 2004. The HMB Foundation also has been organizing the annual charity
football match for children suffering from pediatric cancer since 2003. Second, as a
government’s administrative sports organization, the Korea Sport Promotion Foundation(KSPO)
launched ‘sports voucher’ program in 2009 to partially subsidize lecture or entrance fees to sports
classes or events for children and youth from low-income families as one of the channels of
promoting healthy and active society and nation (KSPO 2013). More than 140,000 children and
youth participated in the sport voucher program for the last 6 years from 2009 to 2014, receiving
benefits from the initiative.
609
Given these characteristics, gratitude defined as “a sense of thankfulness and joy in
response to receiving a gift, whether the gift be a tangible benefit from a specific other or a
moment of peaceful bliss evoked by natural beauty” (Emmons, 2004, p.554), might be a
fundamental construct to influence the social outcomes for participants or beneficiaries in sport-
based social initiatives. In fact, many running organizations (e.g., runladylike.com 2015;
runhaven.com 2015) introduce several reasons to be thankful for running. For examples, they
reason that running offers opportunities to gets ourselves outside from house or work and
experience the natural beauty of creation by seeing others, animals, trees and the world on a run.
Therefore, gratitude might be a more immediate outcome for participants/ beneficiaries to enjoy
from fun and pleasant experiences in sport activities, especially cause-oriented sport activities,
given that gratitude also can be referred to as pleasant state and is linked with positive emotions
including contentment (Walker & Pitts 1998).
There has been consistent support for the positive correlation between gratitude and
positive outcomes related well-being, health, social relationship and youth development. For
example, Haidt (2003) argued gratitude promotes benefits exchanges and societal well-being.
Emmons and McCullough (2004) argued that gratitude is strongly correlated with healthy
psychological and social functions focusing on self-improvement and social ties. Wood et al.
(2010) also summarized that gratitude is associated with positive emotional functioning, lower
dysfunction, and positive social relationships. Especially, recent experimental studies offered
convincing evidence in support of moral motive function (e.g., Bardett & DeSteno 2006; Tsang
2006, 2007), which spurs beneficiaries to respond prosocially toward other people as well as the
benefactor. In addition, given that most studies have examined gratitude without specifying the
person or entity to whom one is grateful, it makes sense to examine how gratitude toward God is
associated with outcomes related health and well-being (Krause 2006). Given this theoretical
foundation in previous research, we hypothesize that gratitude of participants/beneficiaries is
positively correlated with the social outcomes in the context of sport-based social initiatives.
Specifically, we hypothesize that the perceived gratitude of participants mediates the relationship
from their participation in sport activities to their social benefits in sport-based social initiatives
(see Figure 1).
610
Hypothesis 2: The perceived gratitude of participants mediates the relationship from their
participation in sport activities to their perceived social benefits of social capital, collective
identities, health literacy, well-being and human capital in sport-based social initiatives
Given that gratitude would be a fundamental construct to influence the relationships and
outcomes related to cause-oriented sport sponsorship and CSR practices, we want to view it as a
more integrated mechanism. Notably, McCullough et al. (2001) originally proposed the three
functions of gratitude as 1) “a moral barometer for beneficiaries by signaling the value of the
relationship with benefactor for the gift bestowed upon them, 2) a moral reinforcer by increasing
the probability that the benefactor will bestow gifts again in the future, and 3) a moral motive by
spurring beneficiaries to respond prosocially toward the benefactor or other people” (Froh et al.,
2011, p., 312). This dynamic nature of gratitude can also play a key role in encouraging
participants, benefactors and the general public to act more prosocially in the context of sport-
based social initiative. Thus, we raise an exploratory question–whether gratitude of participants
can mediate the relationship from participation in sport and their prosocial behaviors in sport-
based social initiatives (see Figure 1).
Hypothesis 3: The perceived gratitude of participants mediates the relationship from their
participation in sport activities to their intention of prosocial behavior of willingness to donate in
sport-based social initiatives
In the following empirical work, Study 1 and Study 2 were designed to examine the
relationships between sport participation, gratitude, social benefits and intention of prosocial
behavior in sport-based initiatives. Two separate surveys were administered through face to face
interviews with independent and random samples representative of the Singaporean residents in
terms of gender, race, income, education and age (20-59) in October 2014 for Study 1 and
February 2015 for Study 2 (see Table 2 and Table 3). Each random sample was purchased from
Department of Statistics Singapore at a charge. The author also procured a local survey company
with 20 trained interviewers for door to door survey administration for three weeks. Before
starting the fieldwork, all interviewers went through an intensive training in a briefing session
designed to acquaint them with the sampling procedures and the importance of these procedures.
A briefing session for all interviewers and supervisors explained the survey objectives,
611
interviewing procedures and how the questionnaire should be administered. Mock interviews
among interviewers also ensured that they have achieved a thorough understanding of how the
questionnaire should be administered. Five dollars shopping vouchers were given to each
respondent as a token of compensation for participation in the survey administrations.
Study 1
Method
We test the hypothesized conceptual relationships in the context of a national sport-based
social initiative of Singapore. The ‘Vision 2030: Live Better through Sport (a short name is used
subsequently as Vision 2030)’ is a sport initiative led by a sport government organization, Sport
Singapore with active participation from the public, people and private sectors in Singapore. They
believe that sport can help to maintain Singapore’s social integrity and economic strength,
overcoming the challenges from an ageing population, rising regional and international economic
competition and the increased diversity within our multicultural, multiracial society. They want to
employ sport as a national strategy to stimulate positive, deeply embedded values for
Singaporeans and the nation. As one of the fundamental engines for it, ‘Active Singapore’ was
launched in April 2014 in order to create a sporting ecosystem with sports programs available,
accessible, and affordable to everyone regardless of their skill level and age. Therefore, it offers a
specific target population in the context of a sport-based development to examine the actual
developmental relationships and outcomes with realities and complexities.
Measures
Social Outcomes. Appling the newly-developed measurement of Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak,
(2013), a total of 23 items were used to assess the social outcomes of social capital (5 items),
well-being (5 items), health literacy (4 items), human capital (5 items) and collective identity (4
items). They were measured by a 10 point-Likert Scale (1=strong disagree, 10=strongly agree).
See Table 4 for this instrument.
Gratitude. Adapting the measurements of Thomas & Watkins (2003) and McCullough,
Emmons, & Tsang (2002), three items were adapted to measure gratitude. They were measured
by a 10 point-Likert Scale (1=strong disagree, 10=strongly agree). See Table 4 for the instrument.
612
Prosocial Behaviors. As one of the intention of prosocial behaviors related to the national sport-
based development initiative of Singapore, donation behavior intention was measured adapting
the donation mechanism of contingent valuation method (CVM). The respondents were exposed
to a contingent scenario, which elicits willingness to donate (WTD) to the sport-based societal
foundation. It is the National Football Academy Foundation hypothetically established as a non-
profit to promote the societal values of civic pride, community bonds, national pride and identity,
inspiration and role modeling of Singapore’s young footballers. We use the multiple bounded
discrete choice (MBDC) elicitation developed by Welsh and Poe (1998) to reduce the
hypothetical bias of contingent valuation. It requires respondents to express their donation
decision certainty for their amount of willingness to donate (WTD) as one of the five choices
including definitely yes, probably yes, don’t know, probably no and definitely no. Individuals’
minimum amount with ‘definitely yes’ is retained as the dependent variable of WTD for each
respondent. In this way, we can more conservatively measures their donation intention by
reducing the hypothetical bias found in donation format of CVM. (see Appendix 1).
Independent Variables. Frequencies of participations in sports activities (e.g., jogging,
swimming, cycling, martial arts, soccer, basketball, volleyball, tennis, golf, cricket) were
measured by the format: never, once every quarter of a year, once a month, one every other week,
1 time a week, 2-3 times a week, 4-5 times a week, 6-7 times a week.
Results
Measurement Model. We employed confirmatory factor analysis to assess the validity
of the multiple items measuring the constructs of social capital, well-being, health literacy,
collective identities and human capital, and gratitude. Using the maximum likelihood estimation
procedure, the measurement model represents the six constructs with a good fit to the data
(N=500, Chi-Square/df = 982.108/231=4.252, CFI=.929, TLI=.908, IFI=.929, RFI=.882,
NFI=.910, RMSEA=.081). All indicators loaded significantly on the constructs as expected,
showing the convergent validity. They ranged from .65 to .75 for social capital, .73 to .76 for
well-being, .72 to .77 for health literacy, .68 to .82 for collective identities, .71 to .83 for human
capital and .77 to .90 for gratitude. Also, all the constructs also exhibited reliability with
Cronbach’s alpha ranging from .84 to .90 (see Table 4). In addition, there is no correlation more
than .85 between constructs of social capital, health literacy and gratitude (Kline, 2005) and there
is no squared correlation between one and any others bigger than AVE for each construct for
613
social capital, health literacy and gratitude (Fornell & Larcker, 1981). Thus, discriminant validity
is established for social capital, health literacy and gratitude. However, due to strong correlations
(.99 for social capital and collective identities, 0.96 for health literacy and human capital, 0.97 for
health literacy and well-being), discriminant validity is not established for these constructs of
human capital, collective identities, well-being. In other words, social capital was captured as a
similar construct to collective identities, and health literacy was captured a similar construct to
well-being and human capital from the respondents of the general public in Singapore. We
further discuss this measurement challenge in the discussion section. In the following
examination for structural relationships, therefore, we focus on two separate dimensional
constructs of social capital and health literacy as social benefits from the sport-based
development initiative of Vision 2030.
Structural Model. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the social
outcomes in hypothesized directions and examine any underlying mechanism of structural
relationships among sport participation, gratitude, the perceived social outcomes for beneficiaries
and their prosocial behavior in sport-based social initiatives (Iacobucci, Saldanha, & Deng 2008).
Figure 2 depicts the serial mediation roles of gratitude and perceived social capital in the
structural relationships from the awareness, the agreement, the actual participation in a range of
sport activities and the relevant prosocial behaviors of Vision 2030 (N=500, Chi-Square/df =
274.100/664=4.153, CFI=.946, TLI=.925, IFI=.946, RFI=.904, NFI=.930, RMSEA=.079).
Findings
As shown in the model (Figure 2), frequency of participation in a range of sport activities
positively influences social capital and health literacy directly, supporting Hypothesis 1. It also
shows that frequency of participation in a range of sport activities positively influences gratitude
for beneficiaries/participants, which positively influences their social outcomes of social capital
and health literacy (Hypothesis 2). Further, it shows that only the perceived social capital of
beneficiaries/participants positively influences their prosocial behavior intention of willingness to
donate (WTDs) to both sport-based societal foundations. Thus, it also shows that gratitude can
positively influence the prosocial behavior intention of WTDs through the mediation of perceived
social capital in sport-based initiative, supporting Hypothesis 3 indirectly. Interestingly, the
health literacy in social benefits is not a significant factor to influence the prosocial behavior
intention of donation. The findings are, however, limited to be generalizable.
614
Study 2
Method
To replicate the findings, we conduct Study 2 with different sample four month later in
February 2015. The same approach as Study 1 was used for survey administration in Study 2 in
the context of sport-based social initiative of Vision 2030.
Measures
The same donation mechanism of CVM was used to measure willingness to donate
(WTD) as in Study 1. Likewise, social outcomes and gratitude were measured in the same items
by a 10 point-Likert Scale (1=strong disagree, 10=strongly agree). Also independent variables
were composed of the same format as Study 1: never, once every quarter of a year, once a month,
one every other week, 1 time a week, 2-3 times a week, 4-5 times a week, 6-7 times a week.
Results
Measurement model. We employed confirmatory factor analysis to assess the validity of
multiple items measuring the constructs of social capital, collective identities, health literacy,
well-being, human capital and gratitude. Using the maximum likelihood estimation procedure,
the measurement model represents the six constructs with a good fit to the data (N=501, Chi-
Square/df= 660.589/136=4.857, CFI=.922, TLI=.902, IFI=.923, RFI=.880, NFI=.905,
RMSEA=.088). All indicators loaded significantly on the constructs as expected, showing the
convergent validity. They ranged from .72 to .78 for social capital, .72 to .76 for collective
identities, .75 to .81health literacy, .77 to .81 for well-being, .69 to .82 for human capital and .86
to 92 for gratitude. In addition, all the constructs showed reliability with Cronbach’s alphas
ranging from .85 to .92. However, as we mentioned in Study 1, discriminant validity is not
established for these constructs of human capital, collective identities, well-being due to strong
correlations (.99 for social capital and collective identities, 0.93 for health literacy and human
capital, 0.87 for health literacy and well-being). In the following examination for structural
relationships, therefore, we focus on two separate dimensional constructs of social capital and
health literacy as social benefits from the sport-based development initiative of Vision 2030. We
further discuss this measurement issue in the discussion section.
615
Structural model. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses
including mediation effects in the causal relationship (Iacobucci, Saldanha, & Deng, 2008).
Figure 2 depicts the mediation roles of gratitude and social benefits in the relationships between
participation in sport activities and donation intention of prosocial behavior. (N=501, Chi-
Square/df= 209.745/64=2.832 CFI=.964, TLI=.948, IFI=.964, RFI=.922, NFI=.945,
RMSEA=.061). As shown in the model in Figure 2, participation in sport activities significantly
enhanced gratitude (β=.13, p=.004), which subsequently enhanced social capital (β=.41, p<.001)
and health literacy (β=.50, p<.001), supporting H1 and H2. The model also replicates the finding
that participation in sport activities enhanced donation intention of prosocial behaviors through
the serial mediation effects of gratitude and social capital, partially supporting H3. Interestingly,
the direct effect of gratitude on donation intention of prosocial behavior was not significant
(β=.09, p=.122) and the direct effect of health literacy on donation intention of prosocial behavior
was also not significant (β=-.11, p=.131).
Findings
Study 2 replicated the findings that participation in sport activities enhances donation
intention of prosocial behavior in sport-based social initiative with another representative sample.
Importantly, the work demonstrates the serial mediation roles of gratitude and social capital that
link participation in sport activities to donation intention of prosocial behavior.
As a complementary effort to reinforce the reciprocity relationship in sport-based social
initiative, the findings showed how gratitude of participants can play a significant role in
enhancing prosocial behaviors in sport-based social initiative. The study also identified the
underlying needs of social capital for those exposed to sport-based social initiative in enhancing
their prosocial behaviors.
Discussion/Implications
An important contribution of this study is to propose a conceptual framework of
reciprocity mechanism in sport-based social initiatives by integrating the constructs of social
outcomes and gratitude as well as the relevant prosocial behaviors from interdisciplinary
literature of sport management, policy, social work, psychology and economics. It implies how
sport-based social initiatives might be designed, managed and developed as a self-reinforcing or
sustaining system based on the reciprocity nature. Also, applying the conceptual model into a
616
sport-based national initiative with a sample representative of national population, the study
empirically shows that this reciprocity mechanism can materialize in the real sport-based
development initiative in Singapore.
The empirical structural model visualizes the mediation effect of gratitude in the
reciprocity mechanism, which significantly influences the two dimensions of social outcomes:
social capital and health literacy for beneficiaries/ participants. When we remove the construct of
gratitude in the structural equation model, the explanatory power (r2) for the social outcomes
becomes significantly reduced from .48 to .08 for social capital and from .50 to .14 for health
literacy. It confirms how significant the mediating role of gratitude is playing in the structural
relationships of the reciprocity mechanism in sport-based social initiatives.
Especially noteworthy is the fact that the empirical model shows that frequency of
participation in a range of sport activities in daily life can positively influence gratitude for
participants/beneficiaries. Given that there has been no research examining the relationship
between sport participation and gratitude, we examined this structural relationship in an
exploratory question. This is the first study to empirically examine that participation in
recreational sport activities in daily life can positively influence gratitude. The findings offer
significant implications to both academics and practitioners in sport management and industries
regarding how to better understand and leverage the dynamic power of gratitude in sport-based
social initiative. Future research is required to develop a stronger and deeper theoretical
framework for the relationship between sport and gratitude.
Another contribution of the study is to apply the newly developed instrument for the
Social Impact of Sport of Lee, Cornwell, and Babiak’s work published in the Journal of Sport
Management (2013) into the real industry of sport-based development initiative in Singapore. The
findings of the study can help various stakeholders (e.g., government, corporate sponsors, donors,
volunteers, sport entities) justify their investment and engagement in the sport-based national
development initiative of Vision 2030 with both theoretical and empirical evidences. In addition,
the findings from theoretical and empirical evidences are useful to build up a strategic map
regarding how to better leverage the impact of sport to society. For example, it implies that how
grateful participants/ beneficiaries feel during or through sport activities or events could be one of
the most important factors to enhance the social outcomes in the sport-based development
initiative.
617
The findings from the measurement model raise a challenge regarding why the instrument
successfully captured only the two discriminant constructs of social outcomes: social capital and
health literacy, not the five discriminant constructs as developed and tested in the work of Lee,
Cornwell, & Babiak (2013). One of the reasons might come from the samples’ characteristics
and environmental differences in interviewing processes. When the instrument was developed
and tested with a sample of college students in a classroom setting, the students might be able to
better understand the constructs and distinguish their similar question items of social capital,
collective identities, health literacy, well-being and human capital due to their active academic
ability. However, when the instrument was applied with the general public (regardless of
education level and age) in the real context of sport-based development initiative, some question
items (e.g., social capital vs. collective identity; well-being vs. human capital) can be similarly
understood and perceived by respondents. It might be considered as a gap between academic
work and practices in sport management. It also implies that the instrument of Lee, Cornwell, &
Babiak (2013) might be refined more specifically for its effective application into sport industry
with realties and complexities, depending on the characteristics of target populations and data
collection environment.
Limitations and Future Research
We have tested the conceptualized reciprocity mechanism of sport-based initiative with a
random sample of the general public of a city-state, considering the population as participants and
beneficiaries at the same time in a sport-based national development initiative. It still addresses
significant relationships and outcomes in the reciprocity mechanism. Future research should
apply this model into a more specific target population, especially those who are beneficiaries
from corporate sponsorship, corporate social responsibility, nonprofit partnerships, government
subsidy program (e.g., sports voucher) and athlete foundation. Given that gratitude is associated
with individuals’ welfare and various positive developmental outcomes for children and
adolescents (e.g., Froh et al. 2011), it can examine particular aspects of gratitude with regard to
beneficiaries, benefactors, and society at large in sport-based cause-oriented sponsorship and
corporate social responsibility practices.
Also, it can give us opportunities to develop and test a more integrated model of
reciprocity mechanism by including various stakeholders in sport-based initiatives. Further, it
gives us opportunities to examine more dynamic nature of gratitude to influence the economic or
618
social objectives of stakeholders in sport-based initiatives. For example, if we strategically
communicate that beneficiaries experience and receive the important social benefits from sport-
based initiative sponsored by a corporation, it might be effective to reduce the criticized
commercialism for corporate engagement in corporate social sponsorship and CSR (Lee &
Babiak 2017).
Admittedly, hypothetical bias and social desirability bias cannot be completely excluded
in measuring the prosocial behavior intention of willingness to donate (WTD) to the societal
foundations. Future study is required to examine the prosocial behavior of
beneficiaries/participants in sport-based social initiative in more comprehensive and longitudinal
ways. For example, some beneficiaries (e.g., sick children, football scholarship students) require
time for their recovery, development, maturity or success before they can be able to act more
prosocially. Thus, a longitudinal research is necessary to fully examine this underlying or time-
required relationships of the reciprocity mechanism of sport-based social initiative.
All these research efforts will give us a better understanding of how gratitude can play a
key role in initiating a new paradigm of sport-based sponsorship, partnerships and CSR practices.
They will foster “real win-win-win” relationships among beneficiaries, benefactors, and society
by examining the reciprocity mechanism of gratitude to influence or facilitate the outcomes for
beneficiaries as well as spur beneficiaries, benefactors and the general public to act more
prosocially in sport-based social partnerships and CSR practices.
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Table 1 Definitions and sources for conceptual measures of the social impact of sport (Lee, Cornwell, &
Babiak, 2013)
Construct Definition Sources
Social capital Social relationships and conditions including
trustworthy and diverse networks, social
proactivity and participation in community to
conducive to cooperation for mutual success in
society
Bourdieu, 1997; Coleman, 1994;
Putnam, 1995; Narayan &
Casssidy, 2001; Onyx & Bullen,
2000; Sudarsky, 1999
Collective
identities
The sense of belonging to a social group or
community reflecting self-categorization with
positive attitude and important self-concept in a
social context
Ashmore et al., 2004;
Deaux,1996; Simon &
Klandermans, 2001
Health
literacy
An individual's functional, interactive and critical
abilities to understand and use healthcare
information to make appropriate health decisions
Nutbeam, 2000, 2008; WHO,
1996
Well-being Harmonious life quality in both psychological and
economic aspects for human function and
development
Nieboer et al., 2005; Ormel et
al., 1999
Human capital The attributes of individuals in terms of
knowledge, skills, competencies, and attitudes
conducive to personal development and societal
well-being
OECD, 2001; Stroombergen,
Rose & Nana, 2002
623
Table 2 Demographics of a sample representative of the Singaporean residents (Study 1)
Sample Size % Number of
respondents
Age Group
20-29 25.6 128
30-39 26.8 134
40-49 27 135
50-59 20.6 103
Race
Chinese 66.4 332
Malay 18 90
Indian 12.6 63
Others 3 15
Sex Male 42.4 212
Female 57.6 288
Monthly Household Income
S$1999 and below 9.6 48
S$2000 - S$3999 22 110
S$4000 - S$5999 28.4 142
S$6000 - S$8999 17.4 87
S$9000 and above 15.8 79
Prefer not to disclose 6.8 34
Education Level
Below Secondary 5.4 27
Secondary 26.8 134
Post-Secondary (Non-Tertiary) 13.8 69
Diploma and Professional
Qualification 27.6 138
University 26.2 131
Others 0.2 1
TOTAL 100 500
Table 3 Demographics of a sample representative of the Singaporean residents (Study 2)
624
Sample Size % Number of
respondents
Age Group
20-29 27.5 138
30-39 22.4 112
40-49 25.2 126
50-59 25 125
Race
Chinese 72.9 365
Malay 15.2 76
Indian 10.2 51
Others 1.7 9
Sex Male 49.1 246
Female 50.9 255
Monthly Household Income
S$1999 and below 12.8 64
S$2000 - S$3999 23 115
S$4000 - S$5999 14.8 74
S$6000 - S$8999 11.2 56
S$9000 and above 11.2 56
Prefer not to disclose 27.1 136
Education Level
Below Secondary 5 25
Secondary 26.3 132
Post-Secondary (Non-Tertiary) 9.4 47
Diploma and Professional
Qualification 27.5 138
University 31.7 159
Others - -
TOTAL 100 501
Table 4 Measures of Social Outcomes and Gratitude:
Factor Loadings (β), Cronbach’Alpha (α) and Average Variance Extracted (AVE)
625
Factor and Item Β α AVE
Social capital (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak, 2013)
GS-1. I have trustworthy social interaction and cooperation in daily activities with
the people in my community
.72
.88
.52
GS-2. I currently enjoy trustworthy interaction and cooperation with the people in my
community
.75
GS-3. Generally, I trust and cooperate with people in my social networks .65
GS-4. When I interact with people in my community, I feel a common sense of trust
and cooperation.
.75
GS-5. I feel I work with trustworthy and cooperative people in my community .72
Well-being (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak, 2013)
GW-1. I feel I am continually growing and developing as a person. .74
.87
.55
GW-2. I feel good about my whole life .73
GW-3. I generally feel healthy, happy and appreciated. .75
GW-4. I feel confident in my ability to handle most things in my life. .74
Health literacy (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak, 2013)
GH-1. have a basic understanding and communication skills needed to maintain my
health
.72
.90
.57
GH-2. I currently enjoy trustworthy interaction and cooperation with the people in
my community
.77
GH-3. I have the capability to obtain, understand, and process basic health
information and services to make appropriate health decisions
.76
GH-4. I understand I am in control of my health .76
Collective identities (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak, 2013)
GC-1. have a strong sense of belonging to the community or group where I live or
work
.76
.54
GC-2. I have a shared feeling of "we" or "groupness" with the people in my
community or group where I live or work
.82
626
GC-3. I have shared goals, ideas or opinions with the people in my community or
group where I live or work
.68 .76
GC-4. I have similar goals, ideas or views to the people in my community or group
where I live or work
.68
Human capital (Lee, Cornwell, & Babiak, 2013)
GHC-1. I feel I am continually growing and developing as a person .71
.76
.54
GHC-2. I have opportunities to continue developing knowledge, skills, and
competencies
.72
GHC-3. I have the necessary knowledge, skills and competence to develop as a
person
.83
GHC-4. I am continually making efforts to improve my social and economic well-
being
.80
GHC-5. I am committed to improve my social and economic well-being .77
Gratitude (Adapted from McCullough et al., 2002 & Thomas & Watkins, 2003)
GR-1. I have so much in life to be thankful for .90
.84 .59 GR-2. I am thankful to a wide variety of people .96
GR-3. If I had to list everything that I felt thankful for, it would be a very long list .77
Table 5 Correlations among the constructs of social outcomes and gratitude
1 2 3 4 5 6
1. Social capital 1.00
2. Collective identity .99 1.00
3. Health literacy .39 .66 1.00
4. Well-being .52 .40 .97 1.00
5. Human capital .56 .28 .96 .96 1.00
6. Gratitude .39 .28 .37 .37 .40 1.00
Figure 1. A conceptual framework of the reciprocity mechanism in sport-based
social initiative
627
Figure 2. Structural relationships among gratitude, social outcomes and prosocial behaviors in sport-
based social initiative (Study 1: N=500, Chi-Square/df = 287.811/74=3.890, CFI=.945, TLI=.923, IFI=.946,
RFI=.899, NFI=.928, RMSEA=.076; Study 2: N=501, Chi-Square/df = 209.545/74=2.832, CFI=.964,
Antecedents:
awareness of,
exposures to, and
participation in
activities related
to sport-based
social initiative
Prosocial
behaviours:
donation,
volunteer,
community
outreach,
citizenship
behavior
Social outcomes:
Social capital,
well-being,
health, collective
identities,
human capital
Gratitude
628
TLI=.948, IFI=.964, RFI=.922, NFI=.945, RMSEA=.061) * The top coefficients are for Study 1 in October
2014, the bottom ones for Study 2 in February 2015.
Appendix 1. An example of measurement of donation behavioral intention using contingent valuation
method (CVM)
Frequency of
participation
in sport
activities
Gratitude
Social
capital
(r2=.28/.20)
Health
literacy
(r2=.26/.29)
Willingness
to donate
to NFA
Foundation
.48, p<.001
.41, p<.001
.14, p<.001
.08, p=.064
.21, p<.001
.17, p=.009
.19, p<.001
.13, p=.004
.10, p=.1995
.09, p=.122
-.17, p=.193
-.11, p=.131
.46, p<.001
.50, p<.001
.14, p<.001
.14, p<.001
629
The National Football Academy (NFA) was launched with the aim of developing Singapore’s
young footballers. NFA supports young footballers to play for Singapore in the international
games for the glory of Singapore, representing Singapore as an ambassador. NFA also provides
the young footballers with meaningful exposures to local communities of Singapore through the
Lion City Cup (LCC). Families, friends, colleagues enjoyed civic pride and community bonds,
gathering and cheering on their heroes at the 23rd, 24th and 25th LCC in June 2011, 2012 and
2013. Many fans agree that they were inspired by positive image and excellent performance and
that they experienced enhanced national pride and identity as Singaporean. Further, NFA builds
up community programs for young footballers to participate in community outreach projects and
make voluntary contributions to communities. These activities develop educational values,
revealing new possibilities, transforming challenges and adversity into joy and success for
children, youths and communities through inspiration and role modelling from sporting heroes in
Singapore.
Hypothetically suppose that NFA Foundation is established as a non-profit to ensure that NFA is
properly managed to benefit communities, society and Singapore for the values as described: 1)
civic pride, 2) community bonds, 3) national pride and identity, 4) inspiration and role modelling
from sporting heroes. Without individual contributions, NFA Foundation cannot play its
intended beneficial roles to society.
Based on the scenario above and considering all the positive benefits and contributions that NFA
makes to Singaporean society, how much would you be willing to pay as a monthly donation to
the NFA Foundation?
Please circle one answer for each amount level to show your certainty of willingness to
donate.
The amount Level of your certainty
S$ 1 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 2 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 5 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 10 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 20 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
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S$ 50 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 100 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 200 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 500 Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
S$ 1,000 and over Definitely Yes Probably Yes Don’t know Probably No Definitely No
631
Extending the Big Thinking of Bob
Lusch
Track Chair:
Mark Peterson, University of Wyoming, USA
Contributors:
Michaela Haase, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Pawan Jain, University of Wyoming, USA
Charles Ingene, University of Oklahoma, USA
Helge Löbler, University of Leipzig, Germany
Gene Laczniak, Marquette University, USA
Abstract
Robert F. (Bob) Lusch spoke in a plenary session at the 2015 Macromarketing Conference
in Chicago where he shared four ideas he felt will be important for macromarketing scholars in
the future. He highlighted that humans have an innate propensity for 1) engaging in exchange
with each other, 2) creating technology, 3) making choices that have unseen costs (aka
externalities), and 4) developing institutions to coordinate exchanges and other interactions.
632
Bob’s speech, and four essay commentaries, are in the September 2017 issue of the Journal of
Macromarketing.
The panelists in this special session will offer a diverse set of perspectives on how to
extend the “big thinking” of Bob Lusch. The panel will bring expertise in marketing systems,
retailing, technology, sustainable new product development, and ethics. How can marketing
scholars attain a big-picture focus in their research? What will macromarketers in the future have
to say about exchange, technology, externalities and institutions?
The first four decades of the internet has equipped us with tools to substantially reduce the
cost of searching, collaborating, and exchanging information. It has also lowered the barriers to
entry for new retailing, entertainment, media, and several other industries. Though sensor
technology, artificial intelligence is affecting every aspect of our daily lives—from autonomous
cars to smart cities to digital wallets.
While the internet has several positive changes, it has severe limitations for business and
economic activity. One of the big issues is establishing trust in an online environment. We cannot
reliably establish identity of counterparties to freely exchange money without the validation from
an intermediary, such as a bank or government agencies. This results in a bigger problem as these
financial institutions constantly collect our data for personal gains. The blockchain technology
can remove the need for financial intermediation by automating the trust protocol. Blockchain is
the kind of technology that would have intrigued Bob Lusch.
Lusch taught accounting courses at the University of Oklahoma in his first job after
receiving a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. He produced numerous articles on profit
analysis and financial controls. Lusch would have understood the implications of blockchain
technoolgy to exchanges and institutions, such as financial markets.
The financial services industry is arguably the most centralized industry in the world and
is always behind in participating in the technological innovations. Financial institutions not only
run on the outdated technology but are also governed by outdated regulations. These issues make
this industry insecure and opaque. Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology can foster
competition in the industry and also increase the speed of transactions. With a distributed ledger,
the technology establishes the trust network and hence, the transactions can be settled
633
instantaneously. Early reports suggest that firms using blockchain have a weekly higher return for
their stock price over smart contracts introduced between 2015-2017. Such reports are
encouraging and represent the result of the kind of cross-disciplinary research that Lusch would
have celebrated.
In addition to blockchain, the panelists will offer their own perspectives on big thinking in
marketing systems, retailing innovations, new product development, as well as the ethical
dimensions related to these topics. One important outcome of the session would be to boost
engagement of the macromarketing community in the upcoming special issue of the Journal of
Macromarketing focused on extending the big thinking of Bob Lusch. Submissions are due by
January 15, 2019 at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmk.
634
Gender,
Intersectionalities, and
Macromarketing III
Track Chair: Wendy Hein
Co-Chair(s): Josephine Previte
635
Male Compensatory Consumption
in American History
Terrence H. Witkowski84, California State University, Long Beach, USA
Extended Abstract
According to the overcompensation thesis, men with gender insecurities will demonstrate their
masculinity in extreme ways, such as through acts of aggression, risk taking, misogyny, and
intense homophobia. Over a century ago, psychoanalysts Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud
established a foundation for the thesis when they developed their theories of “masculine protest”
to feelings of inferiority and “reaction formation” to allegations that one possesses an undesirable
trait. Willer et al. (2013, 982) suggest two additional lines of theory support this thesis:
First, masculinity is both more narrowly defined (making masculinity more easily
threatened) and socially valued (making men more motivated to recover it) than
femininity. Second, theories of identity, which argue that individuals tend to react to
feedback that threatens valued identities with overcompensation, enacting attitudes and
behaviors associated with the identity to a more extreme extent than they would have in
the absence of threats.
To test the overcompensation thesis, Willer et al. (2013) collected evidence from three laboratory
experiments and, to gain external validity, an additional large-scale (N = 2210) field study. Men
whose masculinity was threatened expressed greater support for war, showed more homophobia
and pro dominance attitudes, and endorsed beliefs in male superiority. In one of the experiments,
male subjects whose gender identity was questioned also reported greater interest in purchasing
an SUV and being willing to pay more for it compared to men whose identity was not questioned.
Female participants whose gender identity was threatened showed no difference in SUV
636
desirability and willingness to pay or, for that matter, on any other dependent variable, from
women whose gender identity was not threatened.
This SUV finding suggests that in compensation for their sensed economic and social
emasculation, men might turn to their possessions and consumption activities for self-definition.
Holt and Thompson (2004, p. 426) dubbed this consuming aspect of male overcompensation the
“compensatory consumption thesis” and explained it as follows:
men have invested more and more of their identity work into consumption, where they
have more degrees of freedom to shroud themselves in the symbolic cloaks of autonomy.
Men use the plasticity of consumer identity construction to forge atavistic masculine
identities based upon an imagined life of self-reliant, premodern men who lived outside
the confines of cities, families, and work bureaucracies.
Holt and Thompson (2004) conducted interviews with fifteen white, married men from both
working- and middle-class backgrounds in smaller midwestern and eastern American cities, but
presented interpretive findings from just two of the informants. Based on this data, the authors
concluded, “the compensatory consumption thesis fails to capture some of the most powerful
masculine identifications that men forge through their consumption (p. 426).” Instead, Holt and
Thompson postulated the “man-of-action hero,” an identity pursued through a variety of
consumption practices depending upon social class. However, the Holt and Thompson data set
was rather limited, raising some doubts about its representativeness, and their interpretation did
not have the later findings of Willer et al. (2013) to take into consideration.
This paper explores male compensatory consumption as an important thesis about how
gendered norms and behavior intersect with the marketplace. Though such consumption can be
relatively benign, and even beneficial for health and happiness in many cases, some male
reactions might be harmful to public safety, to the environment, and to social accord. In a
twenty-first century American context, examples of problematic male compensatory behaviors
could include acquiring and carrying firearms, driving big and powerful but energy inefficient,
pollution prone vehicles, engaging in defiant and possibly offensive political acts such as buying
and displaying Confederate flags and crude bumper stickers, and joining extremist organizations
hostile to women, certain religious groups, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBT people
(Kimmel 2013). Given the gravity of these potential consequences, the compensatory
637
consumption thesis begs further empirical support and its concepts and mechanisms need further
explication.
To these ends, the present research has gathered and assessed historical evidence for male
compensatory consumption from four separate eras: 1) around the turn of the 20th century, 2)
during the 1930s, 3) during the 1950s, and 4) since the 1980s. An historical approach is
defensible because gendered norms and behavior have a temporal dimension. What has occurred
in the past influences how people think, feel, and do in the present and into the future. Historians
assume that time is fateful. Past actions and experiences, once lived, cannot be reversed. They
also believe time is heterogeneous. That is, entities in the social world and the cultural meanings
they accrue change fundamentally over the long haul (see Sewell 2005, pp. 7-9). Thus, historical
research can show how over time shifting contexts and important events make a difference in
human thought and social action. How masculinity is threatened and how men compensate
through consumption may exhibit continuities over time, but they will not be the same from one
period to another.
Following a discussion of historical research methods, subsequent sections will provide
accounts of each period beginning with a description of the social forces threatening masculinity
at the time and the kinds of the men most affected, followed by evidence of forms of
consumption consistent with the overcompensation hypothesis. The final section evaluates the
historical findings across the four periods in order to identify continuities and change in the
meaning of American masculinity, and also some similarities and differences in the nature of the
threats and the reactions to them. This analysis will help clarify constructs and plausible
relationships relevant to gender dynamics, macromarketing, and society.
638
Discrimination Against Women
and Girls – Prevention Through
Education?
Fritze, M. P.85 86, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Giugni, L., University of Cambridge, GenPol, UK
Di Nuzzo, F, GenPol, UK
Extended Abstract
Violence against women and girls is one of the largest human rights violations and manifestations
of social inequality worldwide (Watt & Zimmerman, 2002). Recent and highly mediatized
episodes, including the revelations of the abuses long perpetrated by American film producer
Harvey Weinstein, are only the tip of the iceberg. Gender-based violence is multi-faceted and
pervasive, and affects developing countries as well as western, democratic, educated and
industrialized (WEIRD) populations (United Nations, 2015). Defined by the UN (1993) as ‘any
act of violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or
suffering to women in their public or private life’, this is a complex phenomenon and one that is
often hard to investigate and prosecute. Consequently, there is a dearth of empirical research on
its roots, scope of consequences and possible counteractions.
Incorporating the broad definition of the problem - and recognizing its severity - this
research project aims to explore how gender-based violence, meant as a manifestation of
historically unequal power relations between men and women, can be counteracted by
85 Corresponding author 86 [email protected]
639
educational interventions. To this aim, we investigate how gender-based violence emerges in its
multiple facets through daily interactions, as well as the ways in which women and girls –
directly or indirectly – are often silenced by social norms and authorities that fail to take
appropriate action. Our inquiry is designed to reveal how long-entrenched, damaging gendered
stereotypes contribute to reproducing and justifying abusive behaviors. In essence, this research is
guided by the question: How can prevention and education change the norm of discrimination
against women still so evident in supposedly-developed western cultures?
While many initiatives are being addressed to women and girls, the role of men often goes
understudied. Based on recent research related to raising awareness in order to counteract abusive
behavior against women (Hess & Flores, 2016) we propose that gender inequality is so structural,
that men might not even be aware of discriminatory behaviors. However, when they become
aware, they take action of change. Specifically, we seek to explore effective educational
interventions that lead men to understand violence and discrimination against women and take
action against it.
In order to address this question, we build on prior research that uses economic theory to
explain gender-related disparities and tensions (e.g. Baumeister et al., 2004: social exchange
theory; Frederickson & Roberts 1997: objectification theory). Furthermore, we connect this
approach with a social cognition perspective, meant to shed light on the ways in which effective
educational policies can help to prevent gender-based discrimination and abuse (Higgins, 2000;
Hamilton et al., 1994). In our context education relates to interventions for raising awareness
against gender discrimination.
In the field of gender-based violence, availability of, and access to relevant data are key
challenges for impactful research. In order to meet our ambitions, we arranged an
interdisciplinary and collaborative research team, which includes academic and non-academic
partners. The dialogue and collaboration across this network ensure not only the combination of
innovative and complementary perspectives, but also the access to relevant data. Our project
partner GenPol is a Cambridge-based think tank consultancy specifically researching matters of
gender, including gender-based violence prevention strategies, and advocating for gender equality
within the wider society. We make a start at testing our predictions by conducting a workshop
(May 2018) targeted at men aged 25 to 34, working in corporate business and academia. The
workshop will be led by GenPol associates, all experienced trainers on matters of toxic
640
masculinities and male participation in gender equality initiatives. We purposefully start from
those men who are because of their professional environment more exposed to gender equality
debates, e.g. women in positions of power. We build our analysis on qualitative data gained from
ethnographic observations as well as interviews conducted during the workshop. The results of
the data collection and consequent analysis will be presented at the Macromarketing Conference
2018.
In doing so, our research project addresses a crucial intellectual lacuna. Even though
violence against women is often dealt with on newspaper headlines and has long attracted the
interest of gender and relationship studies (e.g. Miller et al., 2010; Renner & Whitney, 2012;
Anderson, 2013; De Koker et al., 2014), its roots and potential prevention remains largely
understudied.
References
Anderson, K. L. (2013). Why Do We Fail to Ask “Why” About Gender and Intimate Partner
Violence? Journal of Marriage and family, 75(2), 314-318.
Baumeister, Roy F. and Kathleen D. Vohs (2004), Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource
for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions, Personality and Social Psychology Review,
8(4) 339-363.
De Koker, P., Mathews, C., Zuch, M., Bastien, S., & Mason-Jones, A. J. (2014). A Systematic
Review of Interventions for Preventing Adolescent Intimate Partner Violence. Journal of
Adolescent Health, 54(1), 3-13.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T. A. (1997). Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding
Women's Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks. Psychology of women quarterly, 21(2),
173-206.
Hamilton, D. L., Stroessner, S. J., & Driscoll, D. M. (1994). Social cognition and the study of
stereotyping. In P. G. Devine, D. L. Hamilton, & T. M. Ostrom (Eds.), Social cognition:
Impact on social psychology (pp. 291-321). San Diego, CA, US: Academic Press
Hess, A., & Flores, C. (2016). Simply more than swiping left: A critical analysis of toxic
masculine performances on Tinder Nightmares. New Media & Society
641
Higgins, Torry E. (2000). Social cognition: Learning about what matters in the social world.
European Journal of Social Psychology, 30(1), 3-39.
Miller, E., Decker, M. R., Raj, A., Reed, E., Marable, D., & Silverman, J. G. (2010). Intimate
Partner Violence and Health Care-Seeking Patterns among Female Users of Urban Adolescent
Clinics. Maternal and child health journal, 14(6), 910-917.
Renner, L. M., & Whitney, S. D. (2012). Risk Factors for Unidirectional and Bidirectional
Intimate Partner Violence Among Young Adults. Child abuse & neglect, 36(1), 40-52.
United Nations, 1993, Declaration On the Elimination of Violence Against Women:
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm
United Nations, 2015, The World's Women 2015 – Trends and Statistics (Chapter 6: Violence
Against Women): http://unstats.un.org/unsd/gender/worldswomen.html
Watts, C., & Zimmerman, C. (2002). Violence Against Women: Global Scope and Magnitude.
The lancet, 359(9313), 1232-1237.
642
Exploring Gender Stereotypes and
Gender Role Expectations in
Clothing Consumption: A
Sustainability Marketing
Perspective
Stephan Wallaschkowski, Leuphana University of Lüneburg and Bochum
University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Elena Niehuis, Leuphana University of Lüneburg and Bochum University of
Applied Sciences, Germany
Sigrid Bekmeier-Feuerhahn, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
Susanne Stark, Bochum University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Abstract: The textile industry causes grave socio-ecological problems. Macromarketing is
therefore increasingly concerned with sustainable clothing consumption. However, although
marketing research unveils that measures for altering consumer behavior must be segment-
specific to succeed, and despite the fact that men and women differ remarkably in their
consumption patterns, gender is mostly disregarded in this area yet. Gender studies reveal that
biological arguments are insufficient to explain gendered behavior. It also stems from common
conceptions in terms of typical ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics. Such stereotypes are
crucial personal and social norms for peoples’ actions and may prevent sustainable consumption
643
patterns if not suitable for the individual gender role. To explore this issue for attire we conducted
focus groups with male and female consumers from Germany. Results indicate that gender
stereotypes do indeed impose distinct sustainability barriers on the sexes. Accordingly, a gender-
sensitive approach to the promotion of sustainable apparel consumption is needed. Moreover, our
results show that a mitigation of classic gender clichés does not only support gender equality but
also contributes to the dissemination of sustainable consumption practices. A hitherto unnoticed
challenge in this regard though, is a current shift in the male role model, which may have severe
consequences for sustainability.
Keywords: sustainability marketing, sustainable clothing consumption, gender, stereotypes,
gender role expectations, focus groups
Track: Gender, Intersectionalities, and Macromarketing
644
Sustainable & Ethical
Consumption VI
Track Chair: Sabrina V. Helm
645
The Two Faces of ‘ethical labels’
MinHye Lee, University of Winchester, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to critically evaluate the use of ‘ethical labels’ in branding
and explore the authentic role of ethical branding in society.
Design/methodology/approach – The study adopts an ethnographic approach with 30 semi-
structured in-depth interviews and 6 months of participant observation with a self-defined ethically
conscious consumer group in South Korea.
Findings – The study finds that ethically conscious consumers do not necessarily consider ethical
labels as ethical brands. In particular, they rather show a negative view towards large corporations’
ethical labels because they are considered inauthentic. The participants found symbolic
incongruence with large corporations’ ethical practices. The underlying logic behind these views
is closely associated with their understandings and interpretations of ethics as well as their political
stance.
Practical implications – Marketing managers should be careful with the adoption of ethical labels
or certificates as it could only be seen as jumping into the ethical bandwagon. Moreover the role of
ethically conscious consumer groups in branding is significant as they voluntarily and proactively
disseminate their ethical ethos and beliefs to society.
Originality/value – Even though previous studies find that consumers show positive attitudes
toward ethical branding activities, this study demonstrates that brands with ethical labels
(especially the case of large corporations) are not always positively perceived among ethically
conscious consumers. The contribution of this study is to understand the authentic role of ethical
branding in society by looking at the area of brand avoidance within the context of ethical
consumption.
646
Keywords: Brand avoidance, Identity avoidance, Ethical consumption, Ethical labels, South Korea
Paper type: Research paper
1. Introduction
Today consumers become more socially conscious and ethically concerned. Consumers purchase
goods and services not only to fulfil their needs and wants but also to show their support to solve a
diverse range of political, social, and ethical problems (Wesley, Lee, and Kim 2012). For instance,
some consumers may deliberately choose products from the brands that meet certain ethical
standards (i.e. buycott) or they reject specific brands which show unethical behaviours or harm
public good (i.e. boycott). In short, consumers make a conscious choice for products selectively
based on personal and moral beliefs and values; that is called ‘ethical consumerism’ (Crane and
Matten 2004).
Numerous companies proactively consider adding ethical values to their brands. Ethics is a
complex subject, and there is no universal agreement on what ethical branding is (Szmigin and
Carrigan 2005). In general, ethical branding is related to certain moral principles that define right
or wrong behaviour in branding decisions (Fan 2005). Among various elements in branding such
as logos, symbols, slogans, etc., this study focuses on the ‘label’ which manifestly demonstrates
the core identity of the company (De Chernatony and McDonald 2003; Goodyear 1996). Label is
one of the key factors which affect consumer choices.
In these days, it becomes much easier to find products with ethical labels in the marketplace such
as organically certified goods, Fair Trade certified coffee, energy-saving light bulbs, etc. This is
one way how brands represent ethical values in branding decisions as a subset of marketing even
though a brand itself is neither good nor bad (Fan 2005). It is often assumed that goods with ethical
labels are evaluated as moral and socially responsible that could possibly accommodate a positive
connotation. However ethical branding is often criticised as a marketing tool or a creation of
additional segments rather than making actual contributions to society. Most of ethical labels do
not actually explain what happens behind the scene but merely display information (or misleading
information) in order to build a socially responsible corporate image (Fan 2005).
This study aims to critically evaluate the use of ‘ethical labels’ in branding by exploring
perspectives from a self-defined ethically conscious consumer group in South Korea. In particular,
647
this study explores how ethically conscious consumers perceive ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’
ethical labels, and how these perceptions impact on their consumption practices. As ethically
conscious consumers endeavour to create and implement a sense of ethical identity in their
everyday consumption, this study contributes to examine the ideal role of consumption and
marketing in flourishing ethical consumption. From this, this study sheds light on the authentic role
of ethical branding in society.
2. Ethical consumption from a socio-cultural perspective
Ethical consumption has been a significant topic in the current marketplace. There are numerous
studies found in the field of ethical consumption for instance, studies that identify ethical values
and motives for ethical product choices (Honkanen, Verplanken, and Olsen 2006); studies that
focus on ethical consumer decision making (Shaw et al. 2005); studies that investigate consumers’
thoughts about ethical products (Aaker, Vohs and Mogilner 2010; Auger and Devinney 2007;
Carrington, Neville, and Whitwell 2010; Luo and Battacharya 2006; Trudel and Cotte 2009) and
studies that focus on the attitude-behaviour pitfalls (McEachern and Carrigan 2012).
Despite the breadth of interest, it is argued that previous studies are limited to a utilitarian
framework in which consumption is to accomplish a functional or practical task (Strahilevitz and
Myers 1998). It implies that the consumer is a rational decision maker who is cognitively driven,
instrumental, and goal-oriented (Foxall 1983; Solomon 1996). However consumption is driven not
only by functions but also by symbolic values (Levy 1959). Consumption is a social, cultural, and
economic process of choosing goods because consumers take consumption as a project of forming
and expressing identity (Zukin and Maquire 2004). Rochberg-Halton (1984, p. 335) argues that
“Valued material possessions act as signs of the self that are essential in their own right for its
continued cultivation, and hence the world of meaning that we create for ourselves, and that creates
ourselves, extends literally into the objective surroundings.”
By the same token, ethical consumers present their ethical ethos and beliefs through various forms
and degrees of consumption practices. Some consumers subtly and individually reveal their ethical
identity through the choice or avoidance of particular products or brands because material
possessions represent an extended self (Belk 1988). Other consumers conduct more radical or
manifest forms of collective consumption activities such as anti-branding or anti-globalisation
(Klein 1999) in order to present political and ideological commitments.
648
In this vein, ethical consumption should not be limited to the aspect of a mere choice of ethical
products but it emphasises value-expressive and symbolic meaning making processes. Shaw and
Riach (2011, p. 1062) also argue that, “ethical consumption is situated in a rather complex world
view where ‘choice’ becomes not simply a market ideal but a key tenet in how ethical consumers
define, mould and create themselves and others.”
3. Brand avoidance
Walz, Hingston, and Andehn (2014) claim that buying a product from a brand becomes a purchase
of the message the brand transmits. Then the choice or avoidance of a particular brand plays a role
of signaling consumers’ identities because consumers construct and present meanings and values
through consumption practices (Belk 1988; Dittmar 1992). Within the field of consumer-brand
relationships, Fournier and Alvarez (2013) contend that negative brand relationships are in fact
more common than positive relationships. Therefore understanding the negative aspects associated
with brands has become important for marketing managers and researchers. Consumer negativity
towards brands could be seen in various forms in research such as brand hate (Hegner, Fetscherin,
and Delzen 2017; Zarantonello et al. 2016), negative consumer-brand relationships (Fournier and
Alvarez 2013; Park, Eisingerich, and Park 2013), anti-consumption and anti-brand actions (Kucuk
2008; Romani, Grappi, and Dalli 2012), and brand avoidance (Lee, Conroy, and Motion 2009; Lee,
Motion and Conroy 2009).
There are various concepts and terminologies in the field of consumer negativity towards brands
but this study focuses mainly on brand avoidance. Brand avoidance is different from ‘brand hate’
in terms of its emotional degree, and it is also different from ‘anti-brand activists’ because it does
not permanently employ a principle of rejecting the opposed brand (Sandikci and Ekici 2009).
Brand avoidance is more about reducing the consumption of specific brands (Iyer and Muncy
2009). Brand avoidance is defined as the “phenomenon whereby consumers deliberately choose to
keep away from or reject a brand” (Lee, Motion, and Conroy 2009, p. 422). As brand avoidance is
the deliberate and conscious act of refusing a particular brand, it is likely that consumers may have
specific reasons to avoid a particular brand. For instance, brand avoidance is seen due to a
consequence of inauthentic brand meaning (Thomson and Johnson 2006). Likewise as ethically
conscious consumers prioritise their ethical ethos and beliefs in their consumption practices, they
deliberately reject a particular brand which is incompatible with them.
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Lee, Motion, and Conroy (2009) identify four types of brand avoidance each of which has different
reasons. First of all, Experiential Avoidance is seen by the poor performance of the product,
inconvenience associated with acquiring the product, and a negative store environment. Second,
Deficit-Value Avoidance occurs due to the unacceptable cost to benefit trade-off. For instance,
consumers may avoid unfamiliar brands due to the high risk or consumers avoid aesthetically
insufficient brands due to the unattractiveness. Third, Identity Avoidance occurs when consumers
find the brand incongruent with the desired or actual self-concept due to negative reference groups,
inauthenticity, and deindividuation. Finally, Moral Avoidance is linked with the ideological
incompatibility between the consumer and the product. The political and socio-economic sets of
beliefs such as anti-hegemony or country effects are the main reasons behind the moral avoidance
(Lee, Conroy, and Motion 2009).
Rindell, Strandvik, and Wilen (2013) explain ethical consumers’ brand avoidance focusing on
moral avoidance identifying four categories: manifest brand avoidance, ambiguous brand
avoidance, transient brand avoidance, and vague brand avoidance. However it is significant to
acknowledge that ethical consumption is value-driven in which consumers present who they are
and what they are interested in. In other words ethical consumption is a socio-cultural expression
of an ethical consumer identity (Barnett et al. 2005) which could possibly go beyond ethics and
morality. Then the aspect of symbolic identity fulfilment in consumption should not be ignored.
4. Research method
This study explores how ethically conscious consumers critically evaluate ethical labels reflecting
their own understandings and interpretations of ethical consumption. Thus, the study takes an
interpretative approach which aims to ‘understand’ a particular situation or phenomenon (Elliott
and Timulak 2005; Punch and Oancea 2014). The study employs an ethnographic approach using
qualitative research methods: participant observation and semi-structured interviews with a self-
defined ethically conscious consumer group, BORA, in South Korea.
The six months of participant observation was conducted from January 2012 to June 2012. I as the
present researcher and an observer participated in various types of activities and events practiced
by BORA. They were largely divided into two types: pre-planned activities and naturally occurred
activities, for instance, small and large-scale meetings, festivals, after festivals, external events,
orientation workshop and recruit interviews, etc. During the observation, I held a mixture of insider
650
and outsider status. I directly participated in most of the group activities so that I could read the
very detailed cultural codes involving the ideologies, language and styles of the participant group.
I revealed myself as a researcher in order to avoid the taken-for-granted actions and attitudes to
understand the ethical consumers’ social world (see Latour and Woolgar [1979] on “making the
familiar strange”).
Additionally, 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted in order to elicit and examine
the participants’ understandings and evaluations of ethical consumption in as great detail as
possible. In Vertical-Collectivist (VC) societies, such as Korea, Japan and India, people put
emphasis on in-group goals rather than personal goals, and emphasise compliance with authority
figures (Shavitt and Cho 2016). Therefore individual interviews allowed each participant to present
one’s honest thoughts or feelings about ethical consumption. Each interview which lasted around
an hour was conducted in Korean in order to keep the interviewees’ original meanings of words or
concepts. All the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed.
Taking guidance from Basit’s (2003) and Easterby-Smith, Thorpe and Lowe’s (2002) study, the
data were analysed by using thematic analysis as this study focuses on understanding the meanings
of the collected data identifying and describing themes or patterns in great detail (Boyatzis 1998;
Joffe and Yardley 2004).
The overall analysis was done manually rather than using computer assisted qualitative data
analysis software (CAQDAS) (e.g. NVivo) because of the linguistic characteristics. The data were
collected, transcribed and analysed in South Korean as it was important to maintain the original
quality and subtle nuances in which the participants constructed. There were very few studies using
CAQDAS in Korea as well (KOSSDA 2010) because the central analytic task of textual analysis
to decode the meaning of the text cannot be fulfilled by CAQDAS (Joffe and Yardley 2004).
BORA Group
BORA is an ethical consumer group developed and supported by a non-profit organisation, SEEDS,
which focuses mainly on creating a sustainable and innovative model of social firms and producing
the civil platforms of the sustainable environments for young social entrepreneurs (SEEDS 2013).
BORA is composed of self-defined ethically conscious consumers, creating, sharing and
disseminating ethical ethos and beliefs through various types of consumption-related practices.
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There were several ethical consumer groups in South Korea such as campaign groups which were
formed and run by conglomerates (under the mission of Corporate Social Responsibility) or activist
groups such as the environmentalist or Greenpeace. However some of the participants in these
groups joined the group with the personal purposes such as volunteering as a way of enhancing
their employability (Holdsworth 2010) rather than having an authentic or genuine interest in ethical
consumption. However BORA was an independent entity which had no connections with any other
organisations such as profit-oriented firms, political parties or religious communities but it was
more like a subcultural group comprised of ethically minded people.
South Korean context
South Korea is one of the fastest growing consumer markets in Asia but the field of ethical
consumption is relatively under-developed until early 2000s (Cho and Krasser 2011). In 2012,
when the new mayor of Seoul, Won-Soon Park was elected, one of the key pledges was to make
Seoul as a Fair Trade city. Since 2012, numerous new policies were developed that helped South
Koreans have more occasions to join ethical consumption. The data collection was conducted in
2012 so the infant era of ethical consumption is an important feature in this study. Relatively few
researchers have yet examined and developed studies on socially responsible purchasing in South
Korea (Wesley, Lee, and Kim 2012).
5. Findings and Discussion
5.1 Authentic vs. Inauthentic ethical brands
Findings indicate that ethically conscious consumers do not consider all ethical brands the same
but they find that there are authentic and inauthentic ethical brands in the marketplace. The
participants had a negative view towards franchises’ ethical labels, considering them as inauthentic
ethical brands. Within the context of brand negativity, numerous researchers investigated the global
brand ‘Starbucks’ (see Chiu and Hong 2006; Thompson and Arsel 2004). In this study, the
participants also focused on Starbucks’s business activities. They argued that Starbucks sells Fair
Trade coffees only with the packaged bean-types rather than the in-store drinks-types. The
packaged bean-types account for a relatively small portion of Starbucks’s sales and the majority of
Starbucks’s sales come from the sales of the in-store drinks.
Along with this, one participant said,
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“I know that Starbucks deal with some Fair Trade coffees but only in limited ranges. As
Starbucks do not offer Fair Trade coffees for their in-store drinks and only sell them as
packaged goods, I try not to go there.” (H. S. Sung)
Another participant added to this,
“I normally do not go to Starbucks and I have a quite negative brand perception towards
Starbucks. Starbucks do not spend the gained profits for consumers or developing ethical
stuffs. I don’t want to use the place which does not put the ethical aspect first… I like
small or local companies which keep their beliefs…” (S. Y. Park)
The participants considered Starbucks’s ethical strategy as a mere marketing tool to boost a positive
brand image and ultimately to take more profits with predatory intentions. The participants found
that the Starbucks’s ethical promise was incongruent with the desired or actual ethical identity they
pursued because of its market dominance, rapacious excesses, and cultural homogenization (Klein
1999).
Numerous studies also found that consumers are cynical about Starbucks’s marketing tactics as
Fair Trade coffee makes up less than 1% of its wholesale purchases (Roosevelt 2004). Chatzidakis,
Maclaran, and Bradshaw’s (2012) study also problematised the use of the Fair Trade movement
because some companies use corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a tool of corporate PR rather
than making an actual and specific contribution to society.
5.2 Labels and Certificates
The participants criticised not only the volume of Fair Trade products Starbucks dealt with but also
the aspect of using ethical labels or certificates.
“I believe that ethical consumption is not just about the things that we see… for instance
the Fair Trade certification symbol does not always mean something positive.” (K. Y.
Jung)
Eden, Bear and Walker (2008) claim that recent consumer studies find that many people distrust
numerous logos used by large corporations. Guthman (1998, 2007) extensively discusses the
certificates with various standards developed and used by third parties in organic agriculture in
California. The main issue is that certification agencies charge fees for the use of ethical certificates,
and it makes both the producer and the consumer feel pressured to pay extra costs. In other words,
653
‘ethical standards’ ironically create a barrier to the spread of ethical production and consumption
(Clarke 2008).
Moreover some large corporations use their own ethical standards based on their own criteria.
Starbucks’s self-certified coffees do not have to pass any external evaluation but most of them are
only evaluated through the company’s own criteria and in-house standards (Kessler, 2015). Some
people may argue that Starbucks’s Fair Trade coffee selling makes more contribution to the global
coffee industry compared to local Fair Trade only coffee shops. However the participants didn’t
focus on the economic contribution in which large corporations made to society but they put more
emphasis on ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ which is incompatible with the mainstream hegemonic
capitalism. Haidt (2012) contends that the two ends of the political spectrum consider ethics
important but they rely upon each foundation in different ways, or to different degrees. For instance,
regarding ‘Fairness’, the politically left concerns about ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’, but the right
focuses on ‘proportionality’, that is, people should be rewarded in proportion to what they
contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes. In accordance with Haidt’s (2012) view, the
participants were more inclined to the politically left. It implied that the way how the participants
perceived and understood ethics and morality led to the formation of their ideological and political
stance. This was in line with Thompson and Arsel’s (2004) study which delved deeply into the anti-
Starbucks phenomenon, dealing with the ideological and political stance.
Clarke et al. (2007) find that people who are active in ethical consumption consider themselves
less as consumers and more as activists, campaigners, Christians, etc. The participants also showed
the characteristics of ‘the citizen-consumer’ who reveals one’s consumer personality in everyday
purchases at the grocery store and shopping mall, and presents one’s citizen personality through
political debates, polls, and reading the newspaper (Devinney, Auger, and Eckhardt 2010). The
participants did not reveal themselves as extreme activists but they subtly and quietly revealed their
identities and ideologies in their daily consumption. Ideologies include beliefs and values that
challenge the dominant order and bring social change (Sandikci and Ekici 2009).
The participants claimed that large corporations do not clearly explain ethical labels or certificates
to consumers but they just display them on the products. Then the problem is consumers do not
really know about any behind stories about the labels or certificates. Thompson and Coskuner-Balli
(2007, p. 136) argue that, “the practices of purchasing the appropriation of ethical alternatives, such
as Fair Trade lines by transnational companies including Nestle, Kraft and Cadbury’s can be
654
criticised as merely feeding the very system it claims to be seeking to reform.” Likewise, the
participants believed that ethical consumption should not be limited to the aspect of purchasing
ethically labelled goods. They believed that there is no perfect or definite form of ethical
consumption; it is the means rather than the ends.
“You know I face some situations which do not allow me to purchase ethically produced
goods. (…) I may try to find some ethical coffee shops, but I sometimes have difficulties
finding them. In that situation, I just go to Starbucks or any other coffee shops, but I try to
do something ethical even in that situation such as using mugs rather than plastic cups.”
(H. S. Sung)
If Sung had to go to Starbucks, she at least brought her own tumbler in order to do some ethical
behaviour which can decrease guilt. The participants showed compromised forms of consumption
practices based on the situations they faced. As consumers have multiple identities which belong
to a particular sub-culture and/or fit with the mainstream culture, their ethical consumption
practices were shown as somewhat compromised and negotiated forms. They felt a certain degree
of tension but they found themselves empowered when conducting their own ways of ethical
consumption practices. They believed that ethical consumption is not something one can achieve
but it is something one can come closer to achieve.
Apart from ethical labels or certificates, they argued that both the producer and the consumer should
focus on the role of narratives in explaining and understanding the nature of ethical consumption.
Large corporations do not focus very much the role of narratives and explanations about ethical
labels or certificates. Most of the franchised coffee shops have commercialised atmosphere in
which the products are neatly displayed with ethical labels, and the services are quick and simple.
Customers do not have any chances to have a deep conversation about ethical consumption but the
quick transaction could only be made. This kind of store environment which is considered positive
in the mainstream marketplace did not fit with the participants’ identities. The participants’ brand
avoidance of large corporations’ ethical labels was closely linked with ‘identity avoidance’ (Lee,
Motion, and Conroy 2009) as they found the franchises’ identities incompatible with what they
pursued. Similar with Thomson and Arsel’s (2004) study, the participants considered the coffee
shop as a social space rather than a place of transaction. They considered the role of narrative
important in ethical consumption so the ideal place for them is a space which allows them to talk
about the behind stories of the commodity with others, and share hided images such as poor labour
655
conditions (Clarke 2008). They preferred places where provide narrative storylines about the
complex issues in modern society such as inequality and exploitation (Littler 2005).
6. Conclusion and Research Implications
Previous studies demonstrate that consumers tend to have a positive view towards ethical branding
activities (Connolly and Prothero 2008; Newholm and Shaw 2007). However this study finds that
self-defined ethically conscious consumers are critical about large corporations’ ethical labels
because ethical labels are not equal to ethical brands. The negative view towards large corporations’
ethical labels influences on different degrees of deliberate rejection of a brand which is in line with
the brand avoidance phenomenon. It is also suggested that just because consumers want their
brands to be ethical, however, doesn’t mean they want brands banging on about it non-stop (Balch
2015). The underlying reason for the negative view towards large corporations’ ethical labels was
closely linked with the understanding and interpretation of ethics as well as the political ethos. It
implies a close relationship between political views and ethical branding perception.
Even though there has been a growing interest in the area of ethics in business and marketing, very
little attention has been paid to branding (Fan 2005). As ethically conscious consumers play the
role of active agents who produce value-driven practices to society, the reflection of brand
avoidance in daily consumption is tied to the greater macro-structures, demonstrating the authentic
role of consumer in society (Papaoikonomou and Alarcon 2017). This implies the significance of
the critical view towards ethical labels because they could possibly hinder ethical consumption by
playing an inauthentic role of marketing in society. In other words this study indicates the authentic
role of ethical branding which is the means of optimising overall social benefit through the entire
marketing process (Bartels and Jenkins 1977).
6.1 Theoretical implications
The study adds new findings that enrich the field of negativity towards brands in the context of
ethical consumption. Even though Rindell, Strandvik, and Wilen (2013) show an in-depth study of
ethical consumers’ brand avoidance, it is developed based on ‘moral avoidance’ in Lee, Motion,
and Conroy’s (2009) theoretical model. Ethical consumption is often associated with morality but
the aspect of identity should not be ignored because ethical consumption is understood as an
expression of ethical identity, ethos and beliefs through consumption practices. This study
examines ethically conscious consumers’ brand avoidance in relation to ‘identity avoidance’ which
656
focuses on the inability of a brand to fulfil an individual’s symbolic identity requirements (Lee,
Conroy, and Motion 2009). Moreover the study offers the reasons and underlying logic behind
ethically conscious consumers’ brand avoidance especially dealing with the socio-cultural and
political aspects of ethical consumption in South Korea.
The study finds that ethically conscious consumers avoid large corporations’ ethical labels because
they are considered inauthentic. They believe that large corporations simply display ethical labels
or certificates without offering clear explanations about their ethical activities. Ethically conscious
consumers put more emphasis on having personal interactions and information exchange in their
ethical consumption practices rather than making transactions of the ethically labelled goods. It is
often argued that ethical issues can get “lost” in the environment of large organisations (Shaw and
Clarke 1999). Large corporations tend to jump into the ethical bandwagon, having too much focus
on the development of corporate reputation through ethical labelling and advertising (Fan 2005).
The participants find that they do not fit with the large corporations’ nature of pursuing mainstream
capitalism. The participants pursue anti-hegemony which is lined with the left-wing oriented
political stance in South Korea.
As Rindell, Strandvik, and Wilen (2013) call for the need of more in-depth studies of investigating
reasons and logic behind ethical brand avoidance, this study is novel in terms of expanding
previously well-recognised brand avoidance studies especially within the ethical consumption
context. The study contributes to expand brand avoidance research especially in the field of ethical
consumption within the South Korean context.
6.2 Practical implications
The study also delivers important messages to marketers. First of all, marketers need to be careful
with the use of ethical labels because it may not be perceived as a positive element in branding.
Ethical branding is closely associated with the corporate reputation and this means, if it is well
used, it could enhance the reputation but if it goes wrong, it could bring a fatal damage in the total
intangible asset (Fan 2005). As revealed in this study, consumers with strong ethical ethos and
beliefs in consumption tend to care about the authentic role of ethical brands which can lead
consumers to bring some changes in their consumption practices. Then the terminology or
connotation of ‘ethical’ in the labels should be carefully adopted as ethical labels do not always
657
mean ethical brands. The indiscriminate use of ethical labels could rather make ethically conscious
consumers have the negative view towards brands which could possibly create brand avoidance.
Second, the role of ethically conscious consumer groups is important in branding as they
proactively show critical views toward ethical branding. A survey conducted by the Marketing
Forum/Consumer Association revealed a high degree of consumer scepticism and cynicism to
branding, saying that 78 per cent consumers agreed with the statement that “Companies like to
pretend their brands are really different, but actually there’s rarely any substantial difference
between them” (Mitchell 2001). Ethically conscious consumers tend to proactively disseminate
their ethical ethos and beliefs to society, and voluntarily educate others. A recent study also finds
that there is growing evidence that consumers share negative marketplace experiences in order to
help other community members (Jayasimha, Chaudhary, and Chauhan 2017). Similar with the
tendencies of brand communities (e.g. HOG) which are inclined to talk about the brand and more
resistant to negative information (Batra, Ahuvia and Bagozzi 2012), consumers who have negative
feelings toward brands also gather and actively take action against the targets of their hate
(Hollenbeck and Zinkhan 2010). A few psychological studies find that negative information is more
memorable and more likely to be shared than positive information (Pratto and John 1991).
Finally, the store environment is another important factor in ethical branding. In particular ethically
conscious consumers consider the role of narrative important during their purchases of products or
services. They avoid the place with the mere display of information making a simple transaction
but they prefer to have a conversation about ethics during their purchases. This is another reason
why ethically conscious consumers do not fond of franchises’ store environments which do not
allow customers to have in-depth conversations about ethical labels. As seen from the findings, the
participants wanted to have opportunities to talk about ethical issues through the objects or the
products with the owner of the store, or the people who visit the place. Therefore marketing
managers may consider designing the stores which enable visitors to have spontaneous
conversations about ethical consumption.
7. Limitations and Avenues for Future Research
This study finds that the qualitative approach delved deeply into the ethically conscious consumers’
social world drawing attention to some sensitive and cautious issues (i.e. politics and ethics). As
the nature of the world is formed as experiential, personal, subjective and socially constructed,
658
different people may construct meanings in different ways, even in relation to the same
phenomenon (Wellington et al. 2005). Crotty (1998, p. 8) argues that, “there is no meaning without
a human mind because meaning is constructed by human beings as we engage with the world we
are interpreting.” In this study, the participants’ identities and culture were subtly embedded in
their activities or conversations so the use of observation and in-depth interviews was useful in
terms of investigating a very inner side of the social world. Rindell, Strandvik, and Wilen (2013)
also claim that qualitative in-depth research on consumer experiences would be suitable in this kind
of study rather than employing quantitative designs.
However this study also includes some limitations. This study was conducted based on the views
from a single, relatively small sized consumer group in South Korea. Moreover as the study was
conducted during the ‘emerging’ period of ethical consumption, the findings are particularly
helpful to understand the infant stage of ethical consumption (Welford 2004). If this study could
be applicable to some other similar contexts such as collective culture-based contexts, or places
which are in an infant stage of ethical consumption, more rich and fruitful discussions could support
the findings of this study.
This study also suggests some potential further research areas. First of all, the findings in this study
demonstrate the close relationship between political stance and ethical consumption. Ethically
conscious consumers consider their ethical ethos and beliefs in their consumption practices in order
to bring out social and environmental changes (Carrington, Neville, and Whitwell 2010). In
particular, they critically evaluate ethical labels in the marketplace and show the form of resistance
to the inauthentic ethical brands. They play an active role in the social macrostructures, particularly
showing the anti-hegemonic ideology and the left-wing orientated political stance in South Korea.
As they show a kind of micro-versions of participatory democracies, broader qualitative and/or
quantitative study needs to be conducted with the politically left- and right-wing supporters to
examine their ethical branding perception.
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A (re)Structuration of Sustainable
Consumption Values to the Macro
Level: Consumers of the Tiny
House Movement
Matthew Lunde, Laramie, USA
I would say at some point the values in life were originally about a better life for me,
right, and at some point that idea became about things, so that a better life meant more
things for me to enjoy. [I would say,] these are all still a beautiful concept. It's just not
about me and my stuff, it's about a better life for all of us. Now, the hope of tomorrow—
the hope of a success in terms of life goals and making the world a better place is for
everyone. (Molly, age 28)
Research shows that some consumers derive value from their material possessions
because they are attached to possessions (Bagozzi 2013; Kleine and Baker 2004; Kleine, Kleine,
and Allen 1995; Kleine, Kleine, and Kernan 1993). Many consumers aspire to the “bigger is
better” mentality of home living and the “more stuff is better” mentality of possession attachment
(Mitchell 2014). However, in the past decade, consumers’ values and practices are evolving, as
indicated by research that illustrates how numerous consumer groups are reorienting their
consumption practices away from possessions (Cherrier and Murray 2007; Lastrovicka and
Fernadez 2005) to more sustainable options. Some consumers derive sustainable values from
rebelling against consumption, as in anti-consumption (Cherrier 2009). Other consumers derive
value by living minimal, frugal lifestyles (Lastovicka et al 1999). Finally, others attempt to live a
voluntarily simplistic life (Leonard-Barton 1981). At the macro level (Layton 2007), what these
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consumers are doing is deriving sustainable value from a different social-structural system of
consumption practices.
While many researchers have studied material possession attachment, dispossession
practices, and value creation, no current studies explore consumers restructuring their values
toward sustainable consumption practices, and how this impacts the larger macro-level system.
Soyez (2012) concluded that values can affect pro-environmental consumer actions. Therefore,
this can lead to a shift in values related to sustainable consumption. According to Dolan (2002),
sustainable consumption is “the use of goods and services that respond to basic needs and bring a
better quality of life, while minimizing the use of natural resources, toxic materials and emissions
of waste and pollutants over the life cycle, so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations”
(p. 172). If shifting consumption practices can lead to shift in values, can a shift in values lead to
sustainable consumers and a sustainable macro-society? The lack of attention to this area at the
macro level limits our understanding of how consumers restructure sustainable consumption
value in new practices from a systematic, macro-level perspective. The study addresses this
research gap.
The purpose of the study is to investigate two research questions: 1) how does
dispossession and the rules and resources of structure restructure sustainable consumption values
in future consumption practices? and 2) what implications does this have at the macro-societal
level? I explore the values that emerge in consumers’ future consumption practices, using the
Tiny House Movement as a context (Mitchell 2009). To live in a tiny house that is about one-
tenth the average size of an American home (under 400 square feet), many consumers must
dispose over 75 percent of their possessions (Mitchell 2009; 2014). The tiny house acts as a
structure, hindering their possession attachment, yet it provides opportunities for owners to
restructure their new consumption practices. Through dispossession and the rules and resources
of their new structure, tiny house consumers restructure values from their old possessions to their
new consumption practices. This dual interplay between dispossession and their new structure
creates a new social system of sustainable consumption practices.
I use Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory to explore phenomenon. Structuration is a
theory that explores the dual interplay between action (agency) and structure (rules and resources
of the environment) (Giddens 1984). Rules and resources are used to organize interaction to
reproduce or transform consumers’ social structures. This research contributes a more
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comprehensive picture of literature focused on marketplace cultures (Arnould and Thompson
2005). Understanding how consumers’ actions and the rules and resources of their structure
restructure value in new sustainable consumption practices is paramount for macromarketers
examining any evolving or new consumer group or movement.
According to Hunt (1981), macromarketing is “the study of (a) marketing systems, (b) the
impact and consequences of marketing systems on society, and (c) the impact and consequences
of society on marketing systems” (p. 7). As highlighted in the definition, macromarketing is also
about the interplay between consumers’ actions and the societal system. Layton (2007) defined a
marketing system as a social system where marketing exchange takes place at a systematic,
societal level. And as Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne, and Mittelstaedt (2006), these market systems of
macromarketing “emphasize social, cultural, or policy orientations…placing more emphasis on
systems of transactions than on individual exchanges” (p. 132). Therefore, illustrated in the
outlined definitions, macromarketing is a quality way to study how consumers of the Tiny House
Movement shift their values because of the interplay between their actions and the macro-level
system, and how this shift impacts society and current/ future marketing systems. Next, I
examine the theoretical foundation for this study: Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration. Then,
I present the qualitative methodology, ethnography, using the Tiny House Movement as a
context. I conclude with the findings, discussion, implications, and future research opportunities.
Theoretical Foundations
Value and Consumption
Consumer value is “people’s valuation on the consumption or possession of products” (Lai 1995).
Consumers value what they consume (Richins and Dawson 1992). Consumer values derive from
cultural, personal, or consumption values (Clawson and Vinson 1978). Many researchers have
studied value in consumption (Appadurai 1986; Belk 1996; Caprariello and Reis 2010; Hwang
and Griffiths 2017; Richins 1994; among others). In the socio-cultural environment, consumers’
values “represent widely shared beliefs about what is desirable” (Lai 1995; p. 383). An example
in the United States (U.S.) would be the “American Dream”—where consumers derive value
from home ownership and social status related to their possessions (Cullen 2004). Consumers
derive cultural values from their personal values and consumption values (Schwartz 1999).
Consumption value is the value consumers receive while consuming products or services
(Wikstrom 1996), or experiences (Caprariello and Reis 2010). Consumption values determine
“why we buy what we buy” or consume (Sheth, Newman, and Gross 1991, p. 159).
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Appadurai (1986) theorized that exchange is the foundation of value as possessions move
between “different regimes of value in space and time (p. 4). That is, value “is temporally and
culturally constructed through paths and diversions of the social relations, power contests, and
value regimes associated with them” (Ture 2014, p. 55). Therefore, I propose that their tiny
house and dispossession practices restructure value. I explore the value derived from their future
of consumption practices. This in turn, impacts the values of the Tiny House Movement,
influencing macro-level systems in society.
Material possession attachment is a “multi-faceted property of the relationship between an
individual or group of individuals and a specific material object…” (Kleine and Baker 2004, p.
1). Consumers’ material possessions communicate values (Ball and Tasaki 1992; Roster 2014).
However, as consumer attachment value evolves, possessions come and go. The art of letting go
is through the value of dispossession (Roster 2014; Ture 2014). Dispossession is the act of
disposing of one’s possessions, at the physical (Jacoby, Berning, and Dietvorst 1977), cultural
(Lastovicka and Fernandez 2005), and psychological levels (Cherrier and Murray 2007). As
consumers’ value for possessions change, they create value through the voluntary dispossession
of possessions (Lastovicka and Fernandez 2005). As consumers’ values change, consumers
voluntarily decide they need to dispose of some their excess possessions, known as “voluntary
simplicity” (Craig-Lees and Hill 2002; Leonard-Barton 1981). What current attachment and
disposition literature does not answer is how consumers restructure value in their future
sustainable consumption practices because of a shift in values, and how to implicate those
findings at the macro-level.
Sustainable Consumption and Value
Sustainability has been a major topic of study in marketing literature. As defined by the
Brundtland Commission, sustainability is “meeting the needs of the present generation without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987).
Additionally, it encompasses a wide array of areas, including the triple bottom line of the
environment, economy, and society (Elkington 1994). Every day, consumers make decisions to
be sustainable or not. Many of these decisions come from external ideas, marketing trends, and
macro goals, based on a shift of their values (Soyez 2012). According to Dolan (2002),
sustainable consumption is “the use of goods and services that respond to basic needs and bring a
better quality of life, while minimizing the use of natural resources, toxic materials and emissions
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of waste and pollutants over the life cycle, so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations”
(p. 172).
Sherry (1998) emphasized that social systems have the potential to transform
marketplaces and society through the structure of place. The physical place has the potential to
embody symbolic [and sustainable] properties that enhance the consumer’s experience and
actions. Many of those systems and sustainable features do not work by themselves. Dolan
(2002) continued that “once we see [sustainable] consumer practices as social practices
embedded in social relations, we open up the complexity and possibility of moving toward
consuming more sustainably” (p. 176). Sustainable consumption practices can be influenced
through consumers’ social systems; their social systems are influenced by their values.
Structuration and a New Social System of Sustainable Consumption
This study uses Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory as a framework: a micro- and macro-
level theory to illustrate how individual actions can reshape macro-level social structures, while
simultaneously, showing macro-level social structures can reshape individual actions (Elliott
2014). For sustainable consumption to be successful, it needs to have the momentum at both the
consumer and societal levels (Dolan 2002). Structuration is the “dual processes in which rules
and resources are used to organize interaction across time and space and, by this case, to
reproduce or transform these rules and resources” (Turner 2013, p. 616). For example, through
our actions (i.e. agency), we shape our everyday life. However, at the same time, our homes,
jobs, friends, communities, and cultures (i.e. rules and resources) shape our actions. Our micro-
and macro-level environments simultaneously influence and shape our lives. In this study, I use
structuration theory to model this sociological ambiguity through the duality of structure (i.e. tiny
house) and agency (i.e. dispossession), illustrating how this duality restructures values in a social
system toward sustainable consumption practices (Giddens 1984). Figure 1 illustrates
structuration theory.
Actors, in this study, are consumers (i.e. tiny house owners) who reconstruct their
everyday life through the structures in which they live, their social lives, and their values (Segre
2013). These actors use rules and resources to sustain and reproduce structures. Rules are the
“generalizable procedures” in how consumers live, and resources are the “facilities that actors use
to get things done” (Turner, 2013, p. 614). Giddens (1984) plays on the notion of “duality of
structure,” the idea that that “social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet at
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the same time are the very medium of this constitution” (Elliott 2013, p. 59). Duality of structure
is derived from two dimensions: structure and agency.
The recursive duality of structure and agency emphasizes the micro and macro structures
working interactively together. This micro-macro interaction forms social practices that shape
the routines (i.e. future consumption practices) of actors. Routinization restructures actors’ lives
into a new structure with new rules and resources (Turner 2014). Routinization is a result of a
restructured routine (of sustainable consumption practices), coined by Giddens (1984) as
“ontological security.” Ontological security is a “feeling of trust…that the social and natural
world is actually the same that appears to the actors,” which structures a new “institution” of
daily life for actors at both the micro, individual level, and the macro, cultural level, restructuring
value in the a new social system (p. 115).
The Tiny House Movement Context
For this study, I use tiny house owners, who are part of the Tiny House Movement
(Mitchell 2014). The Tiny House Movement has grown in recent years in the U.S. and around
the world, with more than 65 builders in the U.S. alone, building thousands of tiny houses per
year (Tiny House Builders 2017). During the past decade, consumers have demanded more
sustainable products, houses, and business practices (Peterson and Lunde 2016). Hurricane
Katrina in 2005 (Heavens 2007) and the Great Recession in the late 2000s (Brenoff 2012)
sparked a substantial increase in tiny house consumers and a demand for more tiny house
builders. The cultural act of moving to much smaller houses has created the “Tiny House
Movement” (Mitchell 2014). This movement has grown substantially because of lifestyle TV
shows, such as HGTV’s Tiny House Hunters, Tiny Luxury, Tiny Paradise, and Tiny House Big
Living (HGTV.com 2017). Tiny house owners are not trying to abandon the ‘American Dream’
of home ownership (Cullen 2004). Instead, they are re-envisioning the American Dream. This in
turn has many implications at the macro level.
In this study, Tiny House Movement consumers’ new “tiny houses” become the structure,
and the action of material dispossession becomes the “agent,” restructuring their values. Their
house as the “structure” creates a macro-level social system providing routinization to their
restructured sustainable consumption practices. There is a duality of structure and agency: the
tiny house structures value in their consumption practices from a macro level, while concurrently,
dispossession also restructures values from a micro level. The values derived leads to
routinization and ontological security of sustainable practices. In sum, tiny house consumers
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choose to go against the structure of an unsustainable macro society. As a result, their values
shift in their future consumption practices. The tiny house consumers create a routine of
sustainable consumption practices and values. This leads to a change a shift in values at the
macro-societal level through the Tiny House Movement.
A tiny house, by definition, is a small house that ranges in size from 100 to 400 square
feet (Mitchell 2009). The average house size in 2016 was 2,467 square feet, compared to a tiny
house at 186 square feet. As most tiny houses are under 400 square feet, owners voluntarily
dispose of about 75 percent of their possessions (Mitchell 2014). Through dispossession (i.e.
agency) and a new tiny house (i.e. structure), these new routinized patterns restructure
consumers’ old rules and resources (i.e. values) of possession attachment toward new sustainable
practices and values. The tiny house context provides an extreme example illustrating very
sustainable consumers practices through the action of dispossession, these consumers restructure
values toward sustainable consumption practices. I explore how the dual interplay between
macro and micro influences through new rules and resources restructure future consumption
values.
Methodology
Data collection for this ethnographic study occurred over 18 months. Ethnography is
where the researcher “describes and interprets the shared and learned patterns of values,
behaviors, beliefs, and language of a culture-sharing group” (Creswell 2013, p. 90). I followed a
meso-level approach to ethnographic research, laid out by Arnould and Price (2006) to
understand the “conduct of everyday consumers’ lives in consumer centric markets” (p. 251).
The goal was to understand the “thick descriptions” (Fetterman 2010) of tiny house consumers to
understand how participants’ values were restructured.
I interviewed 50 tiny house owners. The 50 semi-structured interviews ranged from 39 to
90 minutes, with an average length of approximately 56 minutes. Interviews took place either in
person, through Skype, or through a phone call. Sampling reached saturation at 50 interviews,
when similar thoughts and themes started to emerge (Merriam 2009). All interviews were audio-
recorded and then transcribed into 834 single-spaced typed pages. To protect their identities,
participants are assigned pseudonyms. As shown in Table 1, the 50 participants are from 22
different U.S. states. Thirty-three participants are females, while 17 are males. Forty-four
participants live in tiny houses, while six are in the process of downsizing to move in to their tiny
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house. Participants’ ages range from 18 to 68, (average of 41.3). After each quote, the
participant’s pseudonym and age are given.
I analyzed the data manually using a hermeneutical qualitative approach (Campbell and
Lassiter 2015; Thompson 1997), which “allows for analytical categories and themes to emerge,
evolve, and expand” (Saatcioglu and Corus 2014, p. 125). Following, I conducted a
hermeneutical, iterative data analysis to help identify how the interplay of macro- and micro-level
influences allows tiny house owners to let go of their possessions (Thompson 1997), thereby
restructuring values in future consumption practices. Through the first reading, data was coded
into over 100 different codes. Second, the codes were analyzed and synthesized to develop
emergent themes (Fischer and Otnes 2006). Finally, the themes were analyzed to understand the
participants’ cultural experiences (Bazeley 2013) at a macro level.
Findings
Using structuration theory as a theoretical framework, tiny house owners of the Tiny
House Movement use rules and resources (i.e. physical tiny house size, their community, and
technology, among others.) to detach unsustainable values from their possessions to create a new
macro-level social system of sustainable consumption values. By transforming their rules and
resources of their new social system, consumers shift their consumption practices shaped by their
restructured values. There is a duality of structure and agency: the tiny house restructures value
toward sustainable consumption practices, while concurrently, dispossession restructures their
values to be more sustainable. Four restructured consumption values emerge: from quantity to
quality, from material to experiential, from owning to sharing, and from unsustainable to
sustainable. These four themes restructure participants’ sustainable consumption values from the
micro-level “me” to the macro-level “us.”
From Quantity to Quality
The first theme to emerge is “from quantity to quality.” Many participants described a
change in the types of material possessions they wanted to possess. They stated they had to
dispose about 75 percent of their possessions to live in their tiny houses. Every possession
started to become much more valuable. From an individual, micro level, disposal of her
possessions really made Kathleen (age 54) think about not only the quality of her possessions, but
instead the quality of her life.
Kathleen: It's more about the value of the quality of stuff not just having a lot of it for the
sake of it. If you know how about society tells us what to like, I think if we really go
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deeper than that, I think it's what we truly want our lives to be like…I think because it's
been so counter to the mainstream that I just had to go ahead and do it and just screw it.
Doesn't matter what they say just do what you think is right. Going counter to everything
that I've been taught. I grew up in a materialistic family; I lived in huge house growing
up…I have the benefit of what I put in, but it's been a hard fight. It's been a hard fought
success. I did it, there’s that sense of satisfaction...
Kathleen’s narrative shows that “quality over quantity” extends from just material
possessions to deeper held personal and cultural values about life. As reflected by Kathleen, and
by many others, quality over quantity also means having higher quality encounters, friends, goals,
ideas, and beliefs. The “rules” of the tiny house forced them to dispose many of their
possessions; however, it restructured their value of possessions to quality items. From a macro
level, participants spoke about how dispossession lead to higher quality items and relationships.
Their values in higher quality extended to all parts of their life. Ali (age 39) reflected on how her
consumption values were restructured in her tiny home:
Ali: I need to buy less [possessions] so I can up the quality…I did the quality in this house
because I could. If I had 3,000 square feet in this house, I would never had got that
marble not in a million years. But since it was just a small bathroom I said, “Let’s do
marble” and it is beautiful. It worked out awesome. You can get better quality when you
have less to buy…Higher quality is now important in all aspects of my life…to my
friends, family, work, and goals…it’s funny how that happens!
Kathleen and Ali’s passages illustrate the interplay between dispossession and
consumption reorientation leading to “quality over quantity.” Quality over quantity comes from
the act of the participants disposing of their possessions and from rules and resources that they
possess while living in their tiny houses. Higher quality entered in many other aspects of their
lives—in their relationships, their work, and their goals.
From Material to Experiential
The second theme to emerge is “from material to experiential.” Many participants
expressed that when they lived in their larger houses, they valued the size of their house, the
number of clothes they owned, and the possessions they never used. Yet, many felt they were
missing out on experiences. Instead of socializing with friends, traveling, attending cultural
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events, and experiencing life, they spent their time working in order to own material possessions
they had no time to enjoy. For example, Alexandra (age 44), spoke fondly about having a life of
experiences. She recounted that even though many Americans value material possessions,
dispossession quickly pushed her to valuing experiences. Dispossession and the size of her tiny
house restructured her values in her new consumption practices.
Alexandria: I think as Americans we say…“Do you have a big house, do you have the
extensive car, do you have a boat…do you have this that and the other? However, I am
not following the American Dream anymore of more stuff is better”… I don’t want to at
the end of my life say “Did my material things have a point? Do I care to point at them?”
Or do I want to say “look at all the experiences I’ve done! Look at who I have shared this
with!” My tiny house pushes me to get out and experience the world. Because I have
more money now living tiny, I can do those experiences…I want experiences not things!
Alexandria’s recollections, among others, of disposing much of her possessions
restructured her values from material- to experiential-based. The interplay between structure and
agency illustrates how their tiny house, along with their dispossession practices, shifted her daily
routines toward sustainable experiential practices, leading to ontological security. With
Alexandria, the macro forces of society made her feel that she needed material possessions for
social status and cultural social identity. However, through dispossession and tiny house living,
that value changed.
From Owning to Sharing
The third theme to emerge is “from owning to sharing.” The tiny house as a “structure”
physically constrained the number of material possessions participants could own, yet
simultaneously, the tiny house and dispossession as an “agent” invoked sharing and using
communal spaces. For instance, many valued sharing their possessions with others, through
donating, selling, or gift giving, among others. Iris’ (age 38) passage reveals, through giving
books to her local library, how her value for sharing and donating was restructured and inspired
from her dispossession practices. This passage illustrates that the value in someone else using her
possessions outweighs keeping over 400 books:
Iris: I ended up giving over 400 books away to my local library…One of the things I
found that was incredibly important that helped people to process is that you know who is
going to use your stuff and you know that someone else could find value out of it. It
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makes it so much easier to let it go, so when I can walk into my local library and know
and watch the people coming through and go: “hmm that’s kind of cool, someone’s going
to read one of my books”; it made it easier to part with them. I will even go up to
someone and tell them that they are reading a book that was mine!
Whereas Iris spoke about disposing led to sharing, Martin (age 45), revealed that to him,
dispossession restructured his values from owning many possessions to using community
communal facilities. Instead of needing a theater and a gym his house, the interplay between his
tiny house and the dispossession of his possessions shifted his behaviors to value parks, movie
theaters, gyms, libraries a lot more. He even noted that he does not miss anything he had to get
rid of because his community has everything he needs. Communal spaces also inspired Martin
get out more, be more social, and meet new friends:
Martin: The best part of tiny house living is if you want to go see a new movie, go see a
movie…you can afford to go see a new movie because you don’t have that, say, $2,000
mortgage every month. So, you could go to that and go out to the movies or if you
wanted to go for a park or something along those lines you can go and do it because
you’re not working constantly…I also use downtown areas more. I don’t have a theater
anymore, so I go to the movies more. I had to give up most of my book collection, so
visit my library more. I don’t have room for gym in my tiny house, so I bought a gym
membership…I realize my community everything I lost! I even have more friends too—
since I am more social now!
The size (i.e. “structure”) of the participants’ tiny house led to their need to dispose (i.e.
“agency”) of many of their possessions. However, this process restructured their values from
wanting and needing to own everything to sharing their possessions and their community
facilities. These passages reveal the dual interplay of structuration between structure and agency
and between macro and micro processes (Giddens 1984).
From Unsustainable to Sustainable
The final and core theme to emerge is “from unsustainable to sustainable.” Many of the
participants revealed that becoming more sustainable derived from both disposing of their
possessions and living in their tiny houses. The dispossession process led participants think
about sustainability, leading many to recycle, share, donate, or repurpose. Once moving in to
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their tiny houses, participants reflected on how their tiny house restructured their values toward
sustainability. Jim (age 31) claimed that through dispossession and living in a tiny house, being
sustainable spurred many new experiences and opportunities:
Jim: …Sustainability is like a systems approach and a lot of the current systems whether it
is housing or food or electricity or whatever just aren’t sustainable. So the more you can
be less beholding to those systems the easier sustainability is. I think tiny houses and
sustainable consumption are great, real nuggets that will kind of separate yourself from an
unsustainable system. They let you make your own choices, buy sustainable products if
you need them, and just experience life… with the people I love as much as possible...
Finally, Molly (age 28) revealed that she did not have many possessions to begin with;
however, she still disposed of the few items she owned. All her life, she had been a sustainable
consumer. She chose to move into a tiny house because she wanted to live the more sustainably.
By living in her tiny house, she can “care for the Earth.” She emphasized that living sustainably
is the most valuable decision she could make as a consumer:
Molly: I believe that it is my responsibility to care for the Earth. I think that we are put
on the planet not just to do meaningless things in our lives but to make an impact on the
world; and part of that means taking care of the Earth, and it means making the land better
for the next generation, and I feel like tiny house living really helps do that. Like recycled
materials or using sustainable resources, it just seems to make a lot of sense to me. And, I
think it’s a really radical way to show the world, but especially America, that bigger isn't
always better, and how we change our definition of success also plays a part…Generation
X and Baby Boomers think their idea of success was bigger and better things. And I think
Millennials today don't see that as a form of success, so why would we keep building
giant homes? My tiny house not only informs me to be sustainable, but it teaches [others]
to also be sustainable…
Jim and Molly’s interview quotes, among many others participants’, highlight that they
used to be unsustainable; however, after disposing many of their possessions and moving into
their tiny houses, their values shifted their consumption practices from unsustainable to
sustainable. By going through the dispossession process, participants began to value
sustainability for themselves and for others at the macro-societal, systematic level. The
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reflexivity of material dispossession and the rules and resources of tiny house living restructured
many of the participants’ values from unsustainable to sustainable.
Discussion and Implications
This study unpacks values that emerge and are restructured toward sustainable
consumption practices because of dispossession. The findings reveal four restructured values and
practices occurring simultaneously at both the micro and macro levels. This restructuration leads
to the overarching value: from “Me” to “Us.” As highlighted earlier, many consumers attach
value to their material possessions. These possessions provide personal attachment (Kleine and
Baker 2004) and social status attachment (Bagozzi 2013; Kleine, Kleine, and Kernan 1993).
These values center on the participants’ individual value: “Me.” Values related to quality,
experiences, sharing, and sustainability are many values that participants strived for before
moving into their tiny house; however, through the action of disposing of over 75 percent of their
possessions (Mitchell 2014) and the rules and resources their new tiny house restructures their
consumption values from “Me” to Us.” As the opening quote illustrates, it is not only about a
better life for Molly, but for everyone.
The overarching theme is from “Me” to “Us.” The findings reveal that participants
restructure their values from a mentality of “my possessions,” “my stuff,” “what my stuff can do
for me,” and “how do my possession show my value to others,” among others, to “Us.” In the
first theme, participants’ values shifted from valuing the quantity of their possessions to valuing
the quality of new possessions. In the second theme, many participants’ values shifted from
valuing their material possessions to valuing experiences. In the third theme, participants’ values
shifted from valuing owning their possessions to valuing being able to share their possessions
with others and become more social through using community facilities. In the final theme,
participants’ values ultimately shifted from valuing unsustainable practices to valuing
sustainability in their own lives and for future generations. All these themes emerge as moving
from the micro level to the macro level, toward legitimizing sustainable consumption practices.
I found structuration theory to be a particularly salient framework for understanding how
tiny house consumers use social structures to restructure value toward sustainable consumption
practices. According to Giddens, this occurs because of the “duality of structure and agency”
(Elliott 2013). This new everyday life restructures their social lives, their relationships with
others, and their values with their possessions (Segre 2013). These participants use rules and
resources of the tiny house to sustain and reproduce structures of sustainable consumption. Some
679
of these restructured values toward sustainable practices were unexpected, while others were
expected. For example, Molly (age 28) expected to become more sustainable after disposing of
most of her possessions and moving into her tiny house, whereas Jim’s (age 31) value of
sustainability emerged as more of a surprise.
The findings also reveal an important premise that Giddens (1984) stressed in his theory:
duality of structure and agency does not emphasize the micro or macro structure. Instead, these
two forces work interactively together. Participants’ values shifted away from possession
attachment toward sustainable consumption practices through both the micro-level and
simultaneously through the macro-level. Restructured values emerge because of the reflexivity of
dispossession (i.e. “agency”) and tiny house living (i.e. “structure”). Values are restructured
reflexively through the routinization and ontological security of living in a tiny house with fewer
possessions. These restructured values toward sustainable consumption became routines in the
participants’ everyday lives (through routinization and ontological security). Ontological security
is a “feeling of trust…that the social and natural world is actually the same that appears to the
actors during their everyday activities” (Giddens 1984, p. 115). With these participants, this new
ontological security restructured new values away from possession attachment, through both the
micro and the macro level, restructuring value in their new social system of sustainable
consumption. In sum, the overarching value, from “Me” to “Us” emerges from the findings
participants restructure their social system.
From a macro, systematic level perspective, these findings have implications for
consumers at the social-movement level shifting their macro-level values toward sustainable
consumption practices. Whereas past literature illustrates that there are challenges to getting
consumers to be sustainable (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002), this study shows that when
consumers shift their micro- and macro-level values and subsequent routines toward
sustainability, sustainable consumption becomes routine in their lives. As structuration theory
(Giddens 1984) and macromarketing (Layton 2007) are about the interplay between consumers
and society, these findings push the sustainable consumption literature and values literature. The
structure of the tiny house, along with their dispossession practices shifted consumers’ values to
the macro-level and toward sustainability.
This study extends Giddens’ structuration theory. First, this study extends structuration to
marketing literature. In recent years, only one study has used structuration theory. Humphreys’
(2014) study questioned how sustainability is structured to “evaluate the shift in norms regarding
680
environmental responsibility in the United States” (p. 265). However, Humphreys did not use
structuration theory to examine the actions of consumers but to understand the structuring effects
of discourse. This current study is the first empirical study in marketing to use structuration to
examine the interplay of consumers’ actions.
Second, this study extends structuration theory to values research. Whereas past research
has explored values extensively from a consumer standpoint or from a cultural standpoint, this
study demonstrates that values are dynamic and change based on both structure and action
working together simultaneously (Ture 2014). Values are shaped by consumers and by their
social structure. Through structuration, this research illustrates how values are restructured
through action. When consumers dispose of their possessions, their values shift. Their new
social structure informs their actions, which inform their consumption values, yet at the same
time, their actions and values inform their new social structure. As consumers’ actions and
structures evolve, their values are restructured. Through routinization, their new values provide
ontological security.
Third, this study can be extended to studying other marketplace cultures (Arnold and
Thompson 2005), such as in anti-consumption (Cherrier 2009), minimal and frugal lifestyles of
no possessions (Lastovicka et al 1999) and voluntary simplicity (Leonard-Barton 1981, p. 9).
Researchers should explore how values are restructured toward sustainable consumption when
consumers rebel against consumption, consumers choose to spend little money, and consumers
strive for simplicity. Because of their values, these consumers would demand different products
and services. By understanding how values are restructured in different consumer groups,
marketers can learn about new shifts in consumer decision-making.
Finally, this study extends structuration theory to the macro-systems level. Previously,
structuration theory has been empirically examined from the dyad of actor and structure
(Algesheimer and Garu 2008; Spaargaren and Van Vliet 2000). However, this study pushes
structuration a step further: to macromarketing (Layton 2007). Society is composed of
individuals and collective structures. These collective structures form market social systems
(Layton 2007). The marketplace social system of the Tiny House Movement influence society;
simultaneously, tiny house consumers influence the market social systems. Additionally, it
extends the macromarketing literature through exploring how social practices influence
sustainable actions that lead to macro-systematic shifts in sustainable consumption. It is
necessary to investigate the societal relationships and individuals’ restructured values of
681
sustainable consumption practices between the micro- and macro-levels. The Tiny House
Movement is shifting values of how society views attachment, dispossession, and sustainable
consumption. Through structuration, sustainability becomes routinized through ontological
security and legitimized systematically in this group of people: The Tiny House Movement.
Limitations and Future Research
By using Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, this study explores value restructuration
toward sustainable consumption in consumers of the Tiny House Movement. However, tiny
house consumers are just one context. Future researchers could explore different contexts. For
example, how does value restructuration occur in consumers who are forced to live in smaller
places, such as in micro apartments in London, Tokyo, New York, or Singapore? In this case,
their action to dispose their possessions is not voluntary (as opposed to tiny house owners) but
based on a change in their structure. Other future researchers could explore consumers who are
forced to dispose of their possessions because they are getting older and need to move into a
nursing home, because they are in prison, because they are moving to a new country, or because
they lost their job and are now poor. Researchers could also explore consumers who did not go
through the action of disposing of their possessions but rather had it done for them, through for
example, natural disasters. By exploring other structural contexts, with different rules and
resources, the findings of this study could become more generalizable to different consumer
segments, lifestyles, and cultures.
A second limitation of this study is that it used consumers who all live in the U.S. As
documented in research about the American Dream, many U.S. consumers have an underlying
cultural motivation to achieve the materialistic American Dream (Cullen 2004). The Tiny House
Movement is not just prevalent in the United States, but also in other countries, such as New
Zealand and the United Kingdom (Mitchell 2014). To generalize the findings of this study at the
societal level to different “macro-systems” around the world, future researchers should explore
how consumers in other countries restructure value toward sustainable consumption practices
because of dispossession.
Finally, a limitation is that this study does not push “legitimation” (Gollnhofer 2016).
That is, the findings show that participants are shifting their values toward sustainable
consumption at the macro-societal level. However, future macromarketers could explore how
consumers legitimize their new consumption practices, especially where materialism is still the
norm (Cullen 2004). Do these sustainable consumption practices last? If they do, how can
682
macromarketers shift the sustainable values of consumers not moving into tiny houses? Or, if
they do not last, how does legitimation of sustainable values and practices occur? Though
exploring consumers’ dispossession actions to live in tiny houses, this study finds that
dispossession restructures values toward sustainable consumption practices. Overall, the findings
reveal that dispossession creates a shift in values toward sustainable consumption from the micro-
level “Me” to the macromarketing systems level “Us.”
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Table 1. Demographic Information of Research Study Participants
Participants* (Pseudonym)
Age** Gender State of Residence
Professional Background
Live in or Going to Live in
Emma 62 F Minnesota Self-employed Live in Daniel 30 M Minnesota Business Owner Live in Rachel 28 F Minnesota Self-employed Live in Jim 31 M Wyoming Educator Live in Suzanne 26 F Wyoming Student Live in Iris 38 F Georgia Military Live in Christian 33 M Vermont Author/Designer Live in Karly 27 F Oregon Designer Live in Amber 59 F Virginia Author/Designer Live in Peter 63 M Virginia Designer Live in Sondra 56 F North Carolina Retired Live in Alexandria 44 F West Virginia Management Live in Erik 62 M Hawaii Retired Live in Molly 28 F Tennessee Religion Live in Cassie 58 F Georgia Retired Live in Courtney 20 F Ohio Student Live in Erin 57 F Kansas Retired Live in Gina 57 F Florida CEO Live in Janet 48 F Minnesota Business Owner Live in Lorie 44 F Maine Journalism/PR Live in Megan 28 F Florida Management Live in Adam 58 M Ohio Retired Live in Paula 62 F Massachusetts Educator Live in David 32 M Texas Research Live in Lee 28 M Georgia Technician Live in Kathleen 54 F Hawaii Management Live in Seth 59 M Ohio Service Provider Live in Ali 39 F Texas Real estate Live in Barbara 58 F South Carolina Chef Going to live in Josh 36 M Florida Technician Live in Angie 35 F Florida Management Live in Karl 35 M Washington Journalism/PR Live in Emily 25 F Washington Journalism/PR Live in Carolyn 32 F Colorado Management Going to live in Martin 45 M Vermont Service Provider Live in Jennifer 51 F Florida Service Provider Live in Michael 38 M North Carolina Engineer Going to live in Carrie 56 F Florida Management Live in Diego 62 M Indiana Management Live in Anna 56 F Georgia Management Going to live in Candace 29 F Illinois Service Provider Live in Nick 25 M South Carolina Firefighter Going to live in Julie 64 F Florida Real estate Live in Ruth 18 F Texas Student Going to live in Samantha 27 F Texas Management Live in Robert 29 M Texas Management Live in Brittany 24 F Tennessee Service Provider Live in Jared 44 M Colorado Service Provider Live in Tina 29 F Wyoming Service Provider Live in Chelsea 20 F Oklahoma Student Live in
*N = 50, from 22 US states **Average age = 41 years
688
Figure 1. The Processes in Structuration Theory
Actor/Agent (Consumer)
Restructured
Practices (Restructure
of “value”)
Structure (Rules &
Resources)
Human
Action (Dispossessio
n)
Structural
Action (Consumptio
n
Reorientation
)
Micro-level Routinization
Macro-level Routinization
Micro-level
Ontological
Security
Micro-level
Ontological
Security
Micro/Individual Macro/Structural
689
Sustainable consumption among
the new middle class in an
emerging market: A social
cognitive perspective
Lindsey DeFraites, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Supervisors:
Dr Micael-Lee Johnstone
Dr Janine Williams
Market liberalization in emerging markets (EMs) has created a growing group of powerful
consumers called the new middle class (NMC). Material consumption among the NMC in EMs is
increasing and it is widely predicted to surpass the overconsumption of developed market (DM)
consumers in the near future. Consumption predictions such as this make the future of EM
consumption both appealing to marketers and concerning to policy makers.
NMC EM consumers use the symbolic consumption of material goods through “conspicuous
consumption” (Veblen 1899/2007) and status consumption (Eastman, Goldsmith, and Flynn
1999; Nguyen and Tambyah 2011; Ustuner and Holt 2010) as a symbol of their new social status
and social mobility. However, similar to their DM counterparts, EM consumers do not engage in
enough sustainable consumption behaviours (SCBs) (e.g. Carrete et al. 2012; Liu et al. 2012).
During this time of change in EMs, NMC consumers simultaneously gain new purchasing power,
enjoy new consumption opportunities, and encounter sustainability messages warning of the
dangers of overconsumption. This simultaneous occurrence makes their consumption experiences
different from DM consumers, who gained purchasing power and consumption opportunities
690
following the Industrial Revolution, many years before their exposure to sustainability
messaging. Thus, NMC consumers have unique consumption experiences with potentially
significant implications, but they remain understudied (Kravets and Sandikci 2014). This research
seeks to broaden the understanding of material and sustainable consumption among NMC
consumers in Asian EMs during this transitional period.
Research has not yet determined whether SCBs are maintained, increased, or eliminated post-
transition. Additionally, although research suggests that some DM consumers can achieve
positive symbolic meanings and convey status information to others by using SCBs as
“conspicuous conservation” (Griskevicius, Tybur, and Van den Bergh 2010; Sexton and Sexton
2014), the symbolic meanings of SCBs for EM consumers are still unknown.
Across markets, attempts to predict consumer engagement with SCBs often rely on theories that
connect personal factors, such as attitudes and beliefs, to intentions and behaviour (Hassan, Shiu,
and Shaw 2016). However, this connection has not been fully successful in explaining the lack of
consumer engagement with SCBs (Vermeir and Verbeke 2006). This research uses social
cognitive theory (SCT) (Bandura 1986), which explains behaviour as a reciprocal outcome of
personal, environmental, and behavioural factors, to investigate EM consumer engagement with
sustainable consumption as more than the result of personal factors alone.
Thus, the objectives of this research are: to explore how NMC EM consumers experience
sustainable consumption, to determine the symbolic meanings that NMC consumers assign to
SCBs, to examine how, where, and from whom NMC EM consumers build their perceptions of
sustainable consumption, and to explore how sustainable consumption fits into NMC EM
consumers' visions of their future and future consumption.
To address the research objectives, primary data will be collected from approximately 25 NMC
consumers in Sri Lanka. Following a phenomenological methodology in which the phenomenon
of interest is studied together with its context to explore lived experience (Smith 2017), each of
the participants will engage in a semi-structured interview with the researcher. Additionally, each
participant will keep a mobile diary, responding to researcher prompts about their consumption,
their transport, their household routines, and their observations about their physical environments.
This research will produce a greater understanding of NMC perspectives on sustainability and
sustainable consumption, which will assist marketers and policy makers in creating, promoting,
691
and supporting positive and engaging sustainability strategies, policies, and interventions. As the
size of the NMC grows in strength and significance, this research will help to determine the role
that sustainable consumption will have, if any, in the future of the EMs—whether EM consumers
will continue on the path of overconsumption paved by the DMs, or choose to forge their own.
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in the emerging markets,” Journal of Marketing, 78 (July), 125-140.
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consumption: Green purchasing behaviours of urban residents in China,” Sustainable
Development, 20, 293-308.
Nguyen, Thi Tuyet Mai and Siok Kuan Tambyah (2011), “Antecedents and consequences of
status consumption among urban Vietnamese consumers,” Organizations and Markets in
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692
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693
Markets, Marketing
Systems, and Elements of
Culture II
Track Chair: Ingrid Becker
Co-Chair(s): Michaela Haase
694
How institutional actors shape
exchange systems in a food sharing
context: an Indo-US perspective
Dr Priyanka, Iowa State University, USA
Dr Samantha Cross, Iowa State University, USA
Our research provides a comparative analysis of food sharing in India and the U.S., focusing on
how institutional actors influence exchange. To better understand the religious, social, political
and economic trajectories and antecedents of food sharing in India (the largest democracy) and
the U.S. (the oldest democracy), we compare and discuss institutional co-existence, alliances and
influences on food sharing-based exchange within these countries. Our research questions ask:
1) What are the historical trajectories of institutional food sharing-based exchange systems in
India and the U.S.?
2) How do institutional actors impact and shape diverse forms of exchange in a food sharing
context?
In our conceptual review, we analyse scholarly research on institutional theory, the historical
antecedents of food sharing, as well as media accounts of recent developments in food sharing in
India and the U.S. We develop a theoretical framework juxtaposing the diverse institutional
linkages and underpinnings of food sharing in exchange systems across India and the U.S.
To date, research linking food sharing with exchange across diverse economies is limited. Our
paper builds on Pandya and Dholakia's (1992) holistic typology of exchange, encompassing
redistributive and reciprocal exchange as well as the emergence of autarchic and de-growth-based
exchange systems (Polanyi 1957; Lloveras, Quinn and Parker 2016; Fournier 2008). This
695
resonates with Layton's (2011) proposition of a marketing system being influenced by the
institutional environment in which it is located. We contribute further to macro-marketing
scholarship in the field of alternative economies (Campana et al. 2015) by establishing linkages
between religious and social institutions and de-growth-based exchange at the grass roots. Our
findings on the role of religious institutions promoting redistributive food sharing support Klein
et al.’s (2017) theoretical proposition, whereby religion-motivated enterprises can channel
religious tenets to promote aid and service to the needy. Thus, our comparative analysis of food
sharing in India and the U.S., paves the way for further theory building in the exchange literature
and informs policy especially in the context of CSR and alternative economies.
Institutional Linkages and Propositions
Exchange in the context of food sharing in India and the U.S. is impacted by a confluence of
institutional linkages. Food sharing in India is characterized by the co-existence of religious
actors perpetuating redistributive food exchange for centuries, and modern institutional actors
joining the fray. The normative institutionalization of food-sharing through religious institutions
has a more recent history in the U.S., yet religious institutions in the U.S. have gained further
momentum with their food-sharing initiatives due to the rise in volunteerism and the extensive
outreach of the non-profit sector. Our work also demonstrates the influence of the political
economy and historical dynamics of a market system on marketing meanings and ideological
inflections in the food sharing realm (Kravets 2012). We offer the following theoretical
propositions for facilitating food-sharing in both developed and developing countries:
TP1: Religious institutions play a catalysing role in the normative institutionalization of the
redistributive exchange of food
TP2) The redistributive exchange of food can be strengthened through regulative
institutionalization
TP3: Social, religious and government actors can promote food sharing through diverse
forms of exchange in alternative economies
TP4) Diverse government, non-profit and corporate institutions can promote the
redistributive exchange of food through the reconfiguration of normative and regulative
institutions.
We also offer the following societal propositions for assisting policy makers to discern the
trajectories towards which diverse institutional actors engaging in food sharing are heading.
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SP1: Redistributive and market-based exchange of food are gaining further momentum as a
result of institutional isomorphism and volunteerism
SP2: Religious pastoralism and the food justice movement are giving rise to degrowth-based
and reciprocal exchange of food in India and the U.S.
SP3: The institutional longevity of the redistributive exchange of food can be enhanced by
religious institutions through ancient tenets as well as modern multi-stakeholder
partnerships
SP4a: Populism can bring about the regulative institutionalization of the redistributive
exchange of food in emerging economies such as India
SP4b: The participation of the retail sector in welfare programs is strengthening market
exchange of food in developed countries such as the U.S.
Conclusion
Our analysis reinforces that exchange goes beyond the dyadic and transactional to the altruistic
and collective, involving a wider network of actors, including consumers, retailers, governments,
NGOs, corporations and volunteers. These diverse actors co-exist through autarchic, degrowth-
based, redistributive, reciprocal and market exchange systems. These co-existing forms of
exchange, in turn, lead to increased societal health, positively impacting consumers in subsistence
marketplaces, in both developed and developing countries.
697
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modality of economic production. Yale Law Journal, 273-358.
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Kravets, Olga (2012), Russia’s “Pure Spirit” Vodka Branding and Its Politics. Journal of
Macromarketing, 32 (4), 361-376.
Layton, Roger A. (2011), Towards a theory of marketing systems. EuropeanJjournal of Marketing,
45(1/2), 259-276.
Lloveras, Javier, Cathy Parker and Lee Quinn (2016), Reclaiming Sustainable Space: A Study of
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Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
698
The Impact of Cultural Values on
Students’ Preferences for Slogans
of Higher-Education Institutions
Andriy Kovalenko, Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology, New Zealand
Background
Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been traditionally considered as contributors to the public
good (Marginson 2018). They are expected to benefit not only individuals, but also society in
general (Pucciarelli and Kaplan 2016). Some authors argue that because higher education (HE) is
the public good, it should not be promoted in general (e.g. Gibbs and Murphy 2009), let alone as a
means for improving the individual’s educational capital (Gibbs 2002). However, in countries like
the US, HEIs have been recruiting students with the help of marketing for many decades (Kotler
and Levy 1969). Reliance on this strategy contributed to the transformation of universities into
service providers that treat students as customers (Hemsley-Brown and Oplatka 2006).
If students are considered as customers in terms of Economic Market theory, then they have the
right to have the product that corresponds to their expectations (Nedbalová, Greenacre, and Schulz
2014). The growing power of students in determining what and how they study, in combination
with the deregulation and privatisation of the HE industry in many countries (Pucciarelli and
Kaplan 2016), raises concerns about the overall quality of education (Brown, Kurzweil and
Pritchett 2017). In addition, the customer-based approach restricts the access to education by
financially disadvantaged people (Gibbs 2002). The customer orientation of HEIs may also alienate
their non-student stakeholders who, unlike students, maintain long-term relationships with
universities (Temple and Shattock 2007).
699
Despite obvious disadvantages of treating students as customers, many HEIs have to adhere to this
strategy outside the tuition-free environment of some European countries. Although the customer
orientation cannot be fully abolished, its negative implications can be mitigated by the
establishment of ‘the community of learners’ in which each individual is linked to others through
a network of relationships, thereby contributing to social well-being (Gibbs 2002).
The role of slogans in marketing for higher education
Image and reputation of a HEI are among the most important factors that influence not only
students’ loyalty (Nguyen and LeBlanc 2001), but also relationships with non-student stakeholders
(Ivy 2001). Many HEIs use websites to communicate information about their image to stakeholders
(Klassen 2002). Some of these websites have slogans on the start page. Only in the US, HEIs use
several thousand slogans (Higher Education Tagline Repository 2018). The popularity of slogans
can be explained by the fact that they can influence perception and evaluation of brands (Rosengren
and Dahlén 2006), and facilitate continuity from one marketing campaign to another (Reece, Van
den Bergh and Li 1994). The latter quality of slogans can be especially valuable for the
establishment of long-term relationships with stakeholders.
Slogans are short statements that summarise the essence of advertised products in a memorable
manner (AMA Dictionary 2017). To develop a memorable slogan, HEIs must identify the key
competencies that can help them stand out amongst competitors. Competences should be not only
unique, but also meaningful for college stakeholders. Phrasing unique propositions can be quite
challenging because they must be associated with such ‘complex multidimensional constructs’ as
institutional brands, the meaning of which is an outcome of negotiation of different stakeholders
(Conejo and Wooliscroft 2015, p. 297).
Although students represent only one group of stakeholders, their tuition fees are one of the main
sources of funding for many HEIs (Favaloro 2015). Bradshaw and Tadajewski (2011) concur with
this assumption by noting that without financial contributions of students, HEIs have to resort to
staff cutbacks. This suggests that students’ preferences for slogans should be regularly examined
by college managers.
Far from being a homogenous group, students can be segmented as international, mature and high-
school leavers (Soutar and Turner 2002). In turn, people in each segment can adhere to different
cultural values. Although culture is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, most researchers in the field
700
of marketing measure cross-cultural variability in terms of the individualism-collectivism
dimension (Hornikx and O’Keefe’s 2009). For example, Han and Shavitt (1994) found that
advertisements emphasising individualistic values were more persuasive among the people from
individualistic societies, and vice-versa. In addition, the individualism-collectivism framework was
found to be useful for the development of persuasive messages (Zhang and Shavitt 2003). It appears
that slogans, as a part of persuasive communication, can be also studied within this framework.
Many slogans of Western educational institutions refer to individualistic values (e.g. ‘Choosing to
be great’ by Boston University), while slogans like ‘May our knowledge become brilliant’ (‘our’,
not ‘your’ knowledge) is a recurring theme in slogans of several Indian universities (e.g. Andhra
University). It is logical to assume that slogans referring to the principles of individualistic culture
may have different value for students from individualistic and collectivist societies. The impact of
cultural values on preferences for slogans has not been examined yet. Understanding this topic in
the context of higher education marketing can facilitate decision-making of key stakeholders and,
thereby, contribute to the effectiveness of slogans.
Method
295 students of one of Institutes of Technology/Polytechnics (ITP) in New Zealand were asked to
rank five most preferred slogans out of 14 options selected from the pool of 61 slogans of Australian
and New Zealand ITPs. Seven slogans referred to such individualistic values as personal success
and independence (e.g. ‘Your time to learn’), while the rest of them were about the value of being
a part of community (e.g. ‘Your people, your place’). Overall, culture was considered as a variable,
a part of the environment and its ‘determining force’ (Smircich 1983, p. 347). Participants
identified themselves as New Zealand European (NZE), Māori, Indian and Filipino. Other
ethnicities were not included in data analysis due to their low number. Only NZE participants were
considered as adherents of individualistic culture. This categorisation was supported by assessing
cultural values of participants with Herche’s (1994) Multi-Item Measures of Values. The test
confirmed that Māori, Indian and Filipino participants considered collectivist values more
important than students of NZE descent.
Findings
As predicted, students from collectivist societies selected more slogans appealing to collectivist
values than students with the individualistic cultural background (U = 4419, p =.002, r =. 21). In
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turn, NZE students (individualistic culture) selected more slogans appealing to individualistic
values than students from collectivist societies (U = 4244.5, p < .001, r = .24). Hypothesis was also
supported in the case of particular ethnicities: Punjabi, Filipino (Ilonggo and Cebuano) and
Malayali students selected more slogans referring to collectivist values than NZE students. Only
Māori students (collectivist culture) did not differ significantly from their NZE counterparts in
terms of their preferences for collectivist slogans. This could happen because unlike other
ethnicities considered in the study, Māori is always under the influence of individualistic values
prevalent in New Zealand society.
Future research
Classification of cultures as collectivist and individualistic is only one of cultural dimensions
identified by Hofstede (1984). Other aspects in which one culture differs from another should be
accounted for in a study of how cultural values affect perception of slogans.
Enrolled students, the key focus of this study, represent only one group of college stakeholders.
Slogans preferences of prospective students, alumni, college staff and local community members
can be examined in future research. Because prospective students are one of the main target
audiences for universities’ promotional activities, studying of how they process college slogans can
be addressed in the first case.
Implications
The finding about the preference for slogans that reflect students’ cultural background may help
college management to develop slogans that have more value for their target audiences. Slogans
with either collectivist or individualistic appeals should be targeted at corresponding audiences.
The number of slogans, however, should be kept to a minimum to avoid confusion and clutter. If
most international students are from collectivist societies, collectivist slogans can be presented on
webpages for international students and vice-versa. All other stakeholders may observe the
corporate slogan on the institutional start page. Thereby, the number of slogans used by a HEI can
be limited to three only. Tailoring slogan messages in accordance with expectations of target
audiences will require a higher creative and financial input, but as a result, HEIs may establish a
better bond with their key stakeholders.
References:
702
AMA Dictionary (2017). URL https://www.ama.org/resources/pages/dictionary.aspx
Bradshaw, Alan, and Mark Tadajewski (2011), “Macromarketing roundtable commentary—the
export of marketing education”, Journal of Macromarketing, 31(3), 312-321.
Brown, Jessie, Martin Kurzweil, and Wendell Pritchett (2017), “Quality assurance in US higher
education: the current landscape and principles for reform”, Ithaka S+R, URL
http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SR_Report_Quality_Assurance_
US_Higher_Education_06082017.pdf
Conejo, Francisco, and Ben Wooliscroft (2015), "Brands defined as semiotic marketing systems,"
Journal of Macromarketing, 35(30), 287-301.
Favaloro, Chrissa (2015), “Marketing in the Australian higher education sector”, Journal of
Higher Education Policy and Management, 37(5), 490-506.
Gibbs, Paul (2002) “From the invisible hand to the invisible handshake: marketing higher
education”, Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 7(3), 325-338.
Gibbs, Paul, and Patrick Murphy (2009), “Implementation of ethical higher education
marketing”, Tertiary Education and Management, 15(4), 341-354.
Han, Sang-Pil and Sharon Shavitt (1994), “Persuasion and culture: Advertising appeals in
individualistic and collectivistic societies,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
30(4), 326-350.
Hemsley-Brown, Jane, and Izhar Oplatka (2006), “Universities in a competitive global
marketplace: A systematic review of the literature on higher education marketing”,
International Journal of Public Sector Management, 19(4), 316-338.
Herche, Joel (1994), “Measuring Social Values: A Multi-Item Adaptation to the List of Values
(MILOV),” Working Paper Report Number 94-101. Cambridge, MA: Marketing Science
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repository
703
Hofstede, Geert (1984), “Cultural dimensions in management and planning”, Asia Pacific Journal
of Management, 1(2), 81-99.
Hornikx, Jos and O'Keefe (2009), “Adapting consumer advertising appeals to cultural values”,
Communication Yearbook, (33), 39-71.
Ivy, Jonathan (2001), “Higher education institution image: a correspondence analysis approach”,
International Journal of Educational Management 15 (6), 276-282.
Klassen, Michael (2002), “Relationship marketing on the Internet: the case of top-and lower-
ranked US universities and colleges”, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 9(2), 81-
85.
Kotler, Philip, and Sidney J. Levy (1969), “Broadening the concept of marketing”, The Journal of
Marketing (33), 10-15.
Marginson, Simon (2018) “Public/private in higher education: A synthesis of economic and
political approaches”, Studies in Higher Education, 43(2), 322-337.
Nedbalová, Eva, Luke Greenacre, and John Schulz (2014), “UK higher education viewed through
the marketization and marketing lenses”, Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 24(2),
178-195.
Nguyen, Nha, and Gaston LeBlanc (2001), “Image and reputation of higher education institutions
in students’ retention decisions”, International Journal of Educational Management 15 (6),
303-311.
Pucciarelli, Francesca, and Andreas Kaplan (2016), “Competition and strategy in higher
education: Managing complexity and uncertainty”, Business Horizons, 59(3), 311-320.
Reece, Bonnie, Bruce G. Van den Bergh, and Hairong Li (1994), “What makes a slogan
memorable and who remembers it”, Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising 16
(2), 41-57.
Rosengren, Sara, and Micael Dahlén (2006), “Brand–slogan matching in a cluttered
environment”, Journal of Marketing Communications 12 (4), 263-279.
704
Smircich, Linda (1983), "Concepts of culture and organizational analysis", Administrative
science quarterly, (28), 339-358.
Soutar, Geoffrey and Julia Turner (2002), “Students’ preferences for university: a conjoint
analysis”, The International Journal of Educational Management, 16 (1), 40-45.
Temple and Shattock (2007), “What does" branding" mean in higher education?” In Stensaker
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EAIR Series Research, Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 73-82.
Zhang, Jing, and Sharon Shavitt (2003). “Cultural Values in Advertisements to the Chinese X-
Generation--Promoting Modernity and Individualism”, Journal of Advertising, 32 (1), 23-
33.
705
Architectural Culture in Financial
Marketing Systems
Angela Bargenda87, ESCE International Business School, France
This study seeks to demonstrate the pertinence of corporate architecture in the interactive dynamics
between marketing and society. Theoretically located at the intersection of micromarketing and
macromarketing research streams, architectural discourse is critically discussed as an expressive
system. It is argued that the dialectical nature of architecture, both as a corporate phenomenon and
social material construct, offers new opportunities for brands to connect with society at large. In
addition to the infrastructural impact of architecture on the environment, the aesthetic and
ecological footprints of buildings in the social context generate meaning and values. Drawing on a
multidisciplinary framework of marketing and non-marketing scholarship, references from
aesthetics, architectural theory and art history are included. The purpose is to present a new
approach to corporate architecture envisaged as a cultural phenomenon.
Corporate Architecture in Macromarketing Systems
Architecture can be viewed as part of an exchange mechanism, where the presence of corporate
buildings involves an economic quid pro quo with other participants of a marketing system, defined
as:
“a network of individuals, groups, and/or entities linked directly or indirectly through
sequential or shared participation in economic exchange that creates, assembles,
706
transforms, and makes available assortments of products, both tangible and intangible,
provided in response to customer demand” (Layton 2007, p. 230).
The success of such marketing exchange can be determined by its impact on the “quality of life of
the relevant community” (Layton 2007, p. 227; Kilbourne, McDonagh and Prothero 1997). As part
of the social, political, and economic frameworks that underpin the infrastructure of exchange
mechanisms (Dixon 2002), macromarketing systems invariably operate within societal systems,
given that the “impact and consequences of marketing systems on society, and the impact and
consequences of society on marketing systems” are interrelated (Hunt 1981, p. 7).
Arguably, architectural expression used as a marketing conduit has significant consequences on
social interaction, and systemically interlocks with consumer behavior and the development of
urban infrastructure. It therefore integrates the core determinants of macromarketing systems as
location in time and space, physical environment, infrastructure and communication, as well as
cultural context (Layton 2007, p. 238).
The present enquiry focuses on architecture as a cultural phenomenon, as architectonic sign
systems materialize the cultural heritage of people and places. In culturally constituted systems,
organizational settings and societal phenomena produce shared meanings that evolve
synchronically with the Zeitgeist. Goldberger (2009, p. 174) notes that “every building exists within
a social and cultural context, and receives much of its meaning from it […].” Thus, the
interrelatedness of the brand, consumers and society in a spatio-temporal paradigm situates
corporate architecture in a larger context, inclusive of societal and environmental factors. Corporate
architecture not only makes a special symbolic statement about brand values, but also materializes
the spatial engagement of the brand with urban surroundings. In doing so, it significantly shapes
urban landscapes and provokes systemic change, as identity construction evolves as process and
dialogue, where physical substance is transformed into meaningful substance (Heilbrunn 2015). As
a culturally-determined conduit, architecture reflects our economy, culture and society (McGoun
2004, p. 1105).
Therefore, architects and architecture assume a pivotal role in constructing meanings, social
spaces and organizations, as they articulate both material and interpretive forms (Dale and Burrell
2008, p. 32). Architecture is not limited to providing a neutral container, but represents sense-
707
giving materializations of “brandscapes” (Klingmann 2007), including brand features, attributes
and lifestyle values. The spatial configurations of corporations visually narrate corporate stories,
which are impacted by the “spirit of age and the national character” (Pevsner 1956, p. 16). In view
of the multidimensionality of architecture, built form invariably translates the “real nature” of its
period (Giedion 1967, p. 19).
In integrative marketing paradigms, architectural expression offers new branding opportunities,
while positively impacting on social well-being, urban environment, quality of life, and ecological
sustainability.
708
References
Dale, Karen and Gibson Burrell (2008), The Spaces of Organization and the Organisation of Space:
Power, Identity and Materiality at Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dixon, Donald F. (2002), “Emerging Macromarketing Concepts: From Socrates to Alfred
Marshall,” Journal of Business Research, 55 (9), 737-745.
Giedion, Siegfried (1967), Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hunt, Shelby D. (1981), “Macromarketing as a Multidimensional Concept,” Journal of
Macromarketing, 1 (1), 7-8.
Heilbrunn, Benoît (2015), Market Mediations: Semiotic Investigations on Consumers, Objects and
Brands. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kilbourne, William, Pierre McDonagh, and Andrea Prothero (1997), “Sustainable Consumption
and the Quality of Life: A Macromarketing Challenge to the Dominant Social Paradigm,”
Journal of Macromarketing, 17 (1), 4-24.
Klingmann, Anna (2007), Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
Layton, Roger A. (2007), “Marketing Systems - A Core Macromarketing Concept,” Journal of
Macromarketing, 27 (3), 227-242.
McGoun, Elton G. (2004), “Form, Function, and Finance: Architecture and Finance Theory,”
Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 15 (8), 1085-1107.
Pevsner, Nikolaus (1956), The Englishness of English Art. London: Architectural Press.
709
Marketing &
Development II
Track Chair: Andres Barrios
710
A Study of Brand Loyalty in e-
retail industry
Veena Tewari Nandi, Majan University College, Oman
Abstract:
E-retailing is in a state of both expansion and consolidation. Presently, a considerable number of consumer base is
buying digitally and the worldwide e-retailing is on the rise. Major international players like Amazon and Alibaba
are widening their reach and have created exclusive brand images in the e-retail industry. Several researchers have
attempted to study and explore the factors driving brand loyalty in e-retailing, but brand relationship and customer
relationship quality have no received considerable empirical attention in these studies. The objective of the present
study is to understand the relevance of brand loyalty in e-retail space and determine the relevant factors influencing
brand loyalty in the e-retailing especially in establishing relationship quality.
The research employs mixed methods comprising of questionnaires and interviews with major players in the Indian
e-retail industry. The findings indicate that relationship quality is strengthened through trust and satisfaction. This
relationship quality, particularly brand relationship quality (BRQ) and customer relationship quality (CRQ) plays an
important role of towards creating brand loyalty in retail industry. Further, the results support the research proposition
that a macro-social marketing philosophy, which combines systems thinking and systems theory, can explain the
drivers of branding and supports such studies. Through a macro-social marketing philosophy, it can be understood
that customer value can be created through effective product and/or service delivery, which are the parameter that
separates the e-retailers. In fact in today’s world, consistent fulfilment is not only an expectation, but a “hygiene"
factor and technology can play an important role in creating a differentiated fulfilment. Such strategies delight
customers and long term brand loyalty. Service design and unrelenting focus on the customers focused strategies
around innovation, quality and service improvement can build untested relationships in e-retail settings. This research
711
will help the online players to tap the factors that lead to brand loyalty. It will help them in designing marketing
communications that bolster the loyalty of a customer toward a brand.
Keywords: CTR, Competitive Advantage, e-Commerce, Digital, Macro-marketing, PSPP,
Webinar
References:
KENNEDY, A., 2016. Macro-social Marketing. Journal of Macromarketing, 36(3), pp. 354-365.
HUANG, S., FANG, S., FANG, S. and HUANG, C., 2016. The influences of brand benefits on
brand loyalty: Intermediate mechanisms. Australian Journal of Management, 41(1), pp. 141.
KENNEDY, A., 2017. Macro-Social Marketing Research. Journal of Macromarketing, 37(4), pp.
347-355.
O'CASS, A. and CARLSON, J., 2012. An e-retailing assessment of perceived website-service
innovativeness: Implications for website quality evaluations, trust, loyalty and word of mouth.
Australasian Marketing Journal, 20(1), pp. 28-36.
KOLESAR, M.B. and GALBRAITH, R.W., 2000. A services-marketing perspective on e-
retailing: implications for e-retailers and directions for further research. Internet Research, 10(5),
pp. 424-438.
NARAYANAN, S., 2016. Expertspeak: How to Win the E-retail Race. Progressive Grocer India.
EMarketer Editors, 2017. A brief overview of Global Ecommerce Market
SANCHEZ TORRES, J.A. and ARROYO-CAÑADA, F., 2017. Building brand loyalty in e-
commerce of fashion lingerie. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, 21(1), pp. 103-
114.
FRASQUET, M., MOLLÁ DESCALS, A. and RUIZ-MOLINA, M., 2017. Understanding loyalty
in multichannel retailing: the role of brand trust and brand attachment. International Journal of
Retail & Distribution Management, 45(6), pp. 608-625.
712
Digitization & globalization for the
little players: the view from Thai
SMEs
Mark Speece88, American University of Kuwait, Kuwait
Leela Tiangsoongnern, Dhurakij Pundit University, Thailand
Jitnisa Roenjun, Dhurakij Pundit University, Thailand
acknowledgement: this research is part of a project funded by the Economic Research Institute for
ASEAN (ERIA) on Digital Economy, Innovation, and East Asia’s Competitiveness in GVCs
(Phase I): e-Commerce in ASEAN and East Asia.
bios
Mark Speece is Associate Professor of Marketing at the American University of Kuwait. He is
also an adjunct in the PhD program at Dhurakij Pundit University, College of Innovative Business
and Accountancy, Bangkok. Earlier, he spent 16 years at universities in Thailand, Singapore, and
Hong Kong. His PhD in marketing is from University of Washington, and he also has a PhD in
Middle East economic geography from University of Arizona. Much of his research for over two
decades has been on customer perceptions of internet technologies and services.
Leela Tiangsoongnern is Assistant Professor of Marketing, Deputy Dean, and Director of the
MBA and PhD Programs, at Dhurakij Pundit University, College of Innovative Business and
Accountancy International Programs, in Bangkok. Prior to her academic career, she worked in
marketing in several export and import business, including gemstones and jewelry, logistics, and
consumer products. Her PhD in marketing is from Murdoch University, Australia. Much of her
713
research is on integrated marketing communications, consumer trust, and consumer purchasing
behavior in e-commerce.
Jitnisa Roenjun was owner / operator of small businesses in Bangkok for over two decades, and
also a freelance contractor working on sales, distribution, and marketing research fieldwork. She
recently sold her businesses and is currently a PhD student in Business Administration at Dhurakij
Pundit University College of Innovative Business and Accountancy, International Program,
Bangkok. Her dissertation research is on spirituality and leadership among women small business
owners in Thailand. Her MBA is from Sripatum University, Bangkok.
Digitization & globalization for the little players: the view from Thai SMEs
East and Southeast Asia are rapidly moving toward deeper economic integration, and
information technology will play a major role in this. The ASEAN Economic Community
Blueprint 2025 explicitly aims “to propel ASEAN towards a digitally-enabled economy” (ASEAN
2015, p. 23). Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for the vast majority of businesses in
ASEAN, and the Blueprint notes that, “e-commerce has significantly lowered barriers to entry and
operating costs for businesses, and is particularly beneficial for MSMEs” (ASEAN 2015, p. 24).
This is the theory. Regarding practice, the Blueprint also discusses the need to work with SMEs to
upgrade competitiveness, including efforts to reduce the ‘digital gap’.
This reference to the digital gap indicates recognition that the ability of SMEs to actually
take advantage of the digital economy can sometimes be problematic. The World Bank, for
example, examines three key advantages of the internet which can contribute to economic
development: inclusion, efficiency, innovation (WB 2016). Inclusion is primarily about access –
small local players in the off-line economy can lack access to customers and suppliers compared
to big companies which operate internationally. Efficiency is about ability to organize processes
to gain economies of scale, cut unnecessary tasks and waste, and gain real-time information for
better decisions. Innovation is essentially in the business model to take advantage of online
platforms that allow pairing buyers-sellers and carrying out transactions with very little marginal
cost.
While the World Bank is generally quite optimistic about benefits of the digital economy,
it does point out some dangers (WB 2016). A few of the key issues include the possibility that
wider dissemination of information can lead to control, if sources of information are concentrated
714
and accountability is weak. (Among other things, users must be able to trust the accuracy of
information.) In addition, as automation makes things more efficient, a possible outcome is
inequality if not everyone has the skills to move to some of the jobs and roles displaced by the
internet. There is also potential for economic concentration, because big players may be better able
to take advantage of, among other things, efficiency benefits, and as well, have more resources to
invest in R&D and other forms of innovation.
This is only a very brief introduction to some of the issues that may worry SMEs; but it
does suggest that governments must be careful to make sure that the spreading digital economy
actually does spread benefits widely. Just as globalization itself has often benefited only some
players, so digitization of the global economy may not benefit SMEs very much without careful
regulation. We explore these issues in Thailand, which is a useful example to examine in ASEAN
regarding its ability to be competitive in the digital age. The World Economic Forum (WEF 2017)
classifies Thailand as a ‘Stage2’ economy, one that is ‘efficiency driven’. As such, it is exactly in
the middle classification, and somewhere in the middle among ASEAN economies (more of which
have lower classifications than higher).
This project aims to understand such issues from the viewpoint of Thai SMEs. Key issues
have been identified by approaching the literature from two directions. First, we simply look at
what SMEs need to be competitive in international trade which is internet based (e.g., ITC 2016a,
2016b). Basically, this is a globalization issue, put into a digitization context. Second, we will
examine the factors currently noted in the literature that encourage or hinder the adoption of e-
commerce by SMEs. This is basically about digitization of the economy, from an economic
integration standpoint. These sets of globalization and digitization issues are both important in
looking at the impact of e-ASEAN on SMEs.
Frequently, discussions of both globalization and digitization issues focus on the benefits.
There certainly are benefits, but they do not come automatically. Problems do receive some
attention, but the discussion is more scattered, and the optimistic proponents of both globalization
and digitization have tended to dominate the discussion. Figure 1 suggests that in this intersection
of globalization and digitization, the odds are against favorable outcomes without careful attention
to policy and regulation. If the theory works as it is supposed to and problems do not arise,
conditions will be great for SMEs. However, it is more likely that, without good policy, SMEs will
face difficulty.
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Potential problems with globalization
Globalization undeniably brings benefits in the broad sense that overall global incomes
improve. On the other hand, also undeniably, a number of serious problems remain which have
not been adequately addressed. The Asian Development Bank Institute sees a number of problems
for ASEAN. ADBI’s Chapter 3: Key 2030 Challenges (ADBI 2014, pp. 81 ff) consists of four
sections covering ‘enhancing macroeconomic and financial stability’, ‘supporting equitable
growth’ ‘promoting competitiveness and innovation’, and ‘protecting the environment’.
Evidence is mixed on benefits vs. detrimental impact of globalization on macroeconomic
stability. Beck’s (2014) introduction to a special issue of Journal of Financial Stability essentially
implies that this depends on whether the global economy is going well, or having problems.
Developing countries do benefit, especially as their companies improve corporate governance (e.g.,
De Nicolò & Juvenal 2014). However, banks in developed countries benefit more than those in
developing countries, and crises may have a bigger impact on developing countries (e.g., Ghosh
2016). Interlinkages can open the financial sector in developing economies to greater volatility
(e.g., Bremus & Buch 2015). Certainly integrated financial systems are more open to shocks and
contagion (e.g., Kanno 2015).
These differences in macroeconomic impacts illustrate ADBI’s (2014) second challenge,
‘supporting equitable growth’. Everyone does not necessarily benefit equally from globalization,
and some are worse off. Asteriou et al (2014), for example, show that more open trade has
somewhat of an equalizing effect, but that financial globalization through FDI has contributed
substantially to inequality. Kratou (2016) shows that lower income people in developed countries
benefit somewhat, but low income people in developing countries often do not. Vivarelli (2014)
notes that technology transfer from developed to developing countries usually allows developing
country firms to upgrade and become more productive than before. However, the developed
country company rarely transfers its most advanced technology. Thus, a gap remains, and because
developed country firms usually have far more R&D capability, the never-closed gap widens again.
These gaps clearly affect ADBI’s (2014) third challenge, ‘promoting competitiveness and
innovation’. Among other things, closing the technology and/or the R&D gap requires higher
education. Babones (2010), e.g., shows that increasing globalization (measured by more trade
interaction) has a positive impact on the value of education in developed countries, but a negative
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impact in developing countries. One possible cause he notes is that developing economies may not
be able to absorb very many highly educated people in the workforce. But whatever the
explanation, if the educated workforce is not being utilized, the country is at a disadvantage.
Another problem is costs imposed when operating internationally. ITC (2016a) reports that
small firms are far more likely to report difficulty in meeting the international standards required
in international trade. This is not about particular product specifications, although meeting non-
uniform product standards in many different markets is costly for a small operator. Rather,
knowing and then conforming to all of the technical details of regulation and reporting basically
imposes a fixed cost. This may be small relative to revenues of a large company, but the costs can
seem big for a small company.
To some extent, globalization has helped developed countries improve their environments.
Research has mostly supported the ‘pollution haven hypothesis’, that developed countries move
polluting manufacturing offshore to places with lower environmental standards (e.g., Millimet &
Roy 2016; Li & Yue 2017). In some cases there are CSR benefits at home to being seen as
environmentally conscious (e.g., Poelhekke & Ploeg 2015), so the hypothesis does not always hold.
However, a number of studies have shown that offshoring plays a role in domestic environmental
cleanup (e.g., Manderson & Kneller 2012; Michel 2013; Brunel 2016; Antonietti et al 2017).
Similarly, not all pollution problems in the developing world are because of foreign investment,
but research shows that some of it is (e.g. Sun et al 2017). Sometimes developing countries may
accept such problems to gain near-term economic growth, but this usually ends up bring higher
costs later on.
Potential problems with digitalization
The World Bank’s three key digitization advantages which can contribute to economic
development, noted above, are inclusion, efficiency, innovation (WB 2016). Inclusion is about
access to and inclusion in international supply chains. Kumar et al (2017) show that SMEs are not
very active in building supply chain linkages. They face resource constraints in moving beyond
local operations into global markets. As with compliance with international standards,
implementing IT solutions has (mostly fixed) costs. Small savings per transaction add up to
substantial benefits for big volume operators, but small operators may not recover IT investment
costs. From the beginning of digitalization, SMEs have assessed cost / benefit rather than simply
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adopting, and did not adopt if the payoff seemed insufficient to justify the cost (Levy et al 2001;
Zheng et al 2004).
In Thailand, for example, this was evident even before globalization became an issue for
many small suppliers. They were reluctant or unwilling to implement intranets to link with large
in-country retailers even in the very early days of supply chain digital integration (Speece &
Chalitapanukul 1999). Generally, most SMEs do not plunge deeply into e-commerce all at once.
Subba et al (2003), for example, discuss stages of e-commerce implementation, starting with a
simple presence online to supply information, then a portal to exchange information, then ability
to conduct transactions, and finally full integration into supply chains. At each stage there are
benefits and barriers; one recurring barrier for SMEs is that there are costs to do each stage. The
stages get more technologically complex, thus cost is not entirely money for the technology, it also
includes the need for more specialized, and expensive, expertise within the company.
The four key areas the International Trade Centre discusses for helping SMEs develop e-
commerce [establishing the business online, setting up international payment systems (often e-
payment), cross border delivery, after sales service] roughly correspond to the stages SMEs go
through as they get more engaged, even though ITC does not talk about stages (ITC 2016a).
Cloud technologies may change cost structures for IT. SMEs can gain access to many
benefits of expensive IT systems by renting access as needed rather than investing in their own
system (e.g., Wang et al 2016). Carcary et al (2014) points out, however, that cloud usage by SMEs
faces other barriers, not least of which include a number of issues related to trust. Trust has always
been an important issue in online contexts (e.g., Becerra & Korgaonkar 2009; Alam & Yasin 2010;
Habibi et al 2014; Ogonowski et al 2014), including in Thailand (e.g., Rotchanakitumnuai &
Speece 2003, 2004, 2009; Kananukul et al 2015; Pongpaew et al 2017).
A further problem is that customers tend to think in terms of interaction with the company,
rather than about interacting through a specific channel. Part of the trust issues just noted are
because customers may not see any ‘human presence’ using purely internet channels. Partly, their
interactions with the company are chosen based on what is convenient and effective at the time,
more than from any particular preference for a particular mode of interaction. Many companies
use multiple channels to interact with customers.
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Sometimes companies tend to think in terms of separate channels for different customer
segments. Notable in our context, such thinking might lead to online channels that are separate
from off-line channels (the old clicks vs. bricks discussion). However, even customers who like
online channels do not necessarily like them exclusively. Rather, they want them to be integrated.
Companies that are able to integrate channels well gain some advantage (e.g., Herhausen et al.,
2015; Cao and Li, 2015). Research in Thailand has shown this, for example in terms of interactions
with banks by interpersonal, internet channels, or both (Chiarakul et al 2007), and in terms of
marketing communications on social media vs. other channels (e.g., Pongpaew et al 2017).
Methodology
Based on this brief review of potential problems with globalization and digitization, we
identified a set of key potential barriers that may inhibit Thai SMEs from taking advantage of either
of these trends. These include:
• technology, R&D (who benefits?)
• competition policy (will big firms be able to dominate?)
• legal framework (commercial law, network access)
• incentives, investment subsidies for adoption
• financial issues, payment, tax framework
• developing know-how to compete in e-ASEAN
Four questions were developed for each of these six issues (three questions for the
incentives issue). In addition, six questions were used to represent feelings about whether SMEs
felt that current government policy was good or bad for their companies. Four questions asked
whether the respondents felt that their companies were competitive on several criteria. The
questions all appear in the following tables. The original draft was in English, closely following
things pointed out in the literature. The questions were translated into Thai by one of the Thai
authors of this paper, and checked and slightly modified by the other Thai author. A list of 1000
SMEs was obtained from the Thai Small Business Association, randomly drawn from their files.
The TSBA data base is not generally considered particularly high quality because there is
considerable turnover of companies in it. An email was sent inviting the businesses to respond to
the questionnaire online, with the link provided.
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The first wave response rate by the time this paper was due is only 2.7 percent, resulting in
27 completed surveys, although follow-up reminders will be sent and the data updated later. Fan
and Yan (2010) and Van Mol (2017) note that web-based surveys usually have lower response rates
than other types of survey, and offer advice on improving response rates. However, the same
discussion of low response problems for web surveys at the beginning of the decade and very
recently suggests that the problem has not yet been completely solved. Van Mol (2017) reports a
first wave response rate of only 6.2 percent, working from a fairly high quality list (student emails
at the university). Follow-ups did eventually improve the rate.
Results
The questions about the six dimensions of potential concerns all ask the overview question: “How
important are these issues to your business so that you can compete well as ASEAN develops
ASEAN-wide e-commerce?” All six dimensions had Cronbach alpha > 0.7, indicating that the
questions represented the issue fairly well. Overall, there was not very strong differentiation of
importance across the different dimensions. Keeping up with technology got slightly higher
importance ratings (mean 4.55) than others (Table 1.1), but the other six dimensions were all above
4 also, ranging from 4.27 to 4.41.
The relative uniformity of answers across all six dimensions masks a bi-modal distribution
of answers. Cluster analysis using all 23 of these issues shows two very distinct groups. They
divide from each other at a very high distance in the dendogram, and with little differentiation
otherwise (Figure 2). These two groups represent very strong agreement about the importance of
all items across the six dimensions, vs. only weak agreement. (Nether group disagrees on average
that the items are important.) Even with relatively small sample size, the differences in means of
the dimensions are mostly significant.
The seven questions about government policy were preceded by the general question:
“Please indicate whether you think current government policy is good for your business or bad for
your business in terms of your ability to compete well in ASEAN-wide e-commerce.” There was
mild agreement with these statements, again with not very strong differentiation in the overall
results, which ranged from 3.48 to 3.88. Government technology policy was considered slightly
more beneficial, and government support for upgrading small firm e-commerce ability was the least
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strong. However, there was substantially more variance on these questions than on the importance
items.
Table 3 indicates self-perceptions about competitiveness. Overall, the companies consider
themselves about average compared to other firms.
Figure 3 demonstrates the different perceptions among the two groups defined in the cluster
analysis. One group very strongly agrees about the importance of all six dimensions. The second
group agrees only mildly. The two clusters were defined by looking at importance of the various
digital economy items, but the dichotomy carries over into perceptions about government policy,
and the companies’ own competitiveness. The strong agreement group also believes that
government policy is very beneficial, and they feel they are somewhat more competitive than
average. The other group believes that government policy hurts them somewhat. These companies
tend to feel that they are somewhat less competitive than average.
A regression confirms the differential impact of cluster membership based on perceptions
of importance about the digital economy items (Table 4). Using a dummy variable (0 = high
importance group, 1 = lower importance group), the mean government policy benefits are
significantly lower for the lower importance group (beta = -1.59, sig = .000). Perceptions about
competitiveness do not influence perceptions about the usefulness of government policies for the
high importance group (sig = .816). However, for the lower importance group, the more
competitive they feel they are, the more they feel government policy is beneficial (beta = .735, sig
= .017).
Conclusion
Globalization and digitalization are two dominant trends in the modern world which will
have a major impact on SMEs. In theory, SMEs should benefit from both trends, but in practice,
that has not always been the case. A small pilot survey among Thai SMEs shows that they think a
very wide range of issues are important if they are to be competitive in e-ASEAN. Thinking splits
into two distinct groups. One feels all of the issues are highly important; these tend to be SMEs
who view themselves as somewhat more competitive than average. The second group views the
issues as important, but not to the extent evident among the first group. These SMEs view
themselves as somewhat less competitive than average. The more competitive companies see
721
government policies as quite beneficial, but the less competitive ones feel that government policy
harms them somewhat.
This data suggests that policy must be adapted to different groups of SMEs; one size does
not fit all. Possibly the more competitive companies appreciate government policy more because
they are more able to make use of it in their companies. The positive relationship between
perceived competitiveness and usefulness of government policy does exist for the less competitive
companies. Perhaps after a certain competitiveness threshold, companies are simply able to tap
government policy more effectively.
At any rate, the very high importance of nearly everything regarding globalization and
digitalization issues suggests that government policy must address the whole range of potential
problems for SMEs. SMEs do not consider any of them inconsequential.
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Figure 1: Positive theory vs. actual problems
Table 1.1: technology & R&D issues
issue: technology, R&D (who benefits?) mean std dev
q1. keeping up with internet technology 4.80 .500
q2. our own R&D for our new digital products / services 4.40 1.118
q3. our own R&D to improve our online systems 4.52 .770
q4. government support to help small firms keep up with technology 4.48 1.084
mean technology, R&D items (Cronbach alpha = .718) 4.55 .665
scale: 1 = not at all important, to 5 = very important
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Table 1.2: competition policy
issue: competition policy (will big firms be able to dominate?) mean std dev
q5. equal access to online markets for small companies 4.48 1.159
q6. equal access to delivery logistics for small companies 4.44 1.044
q7. ways to participate even if not join a big foreign online platform 3.64 1.186
q8. government support to help small firms in these access issues 4.52 1.084
mean competition policy items (Cronbach alpha = .908) 4.27 .991
scale: 1 = not at all important, to 5 = very important
Table 1.3: legal framework
issue: legal framework (commercial law, network access) mean std dev
q9. e-commerce laws treat small firms fairly compared to big firms 4.20 1.154
q10. e-commerce laws restrict dominance by big firms 4.44 .768
q11. laws make sure small firms get a share of online markets 4.16 1.213
q12. laws guarantee small firms access to internet channels 4.44 .916
mean legal framework items (Cronbach alpha = .891) 4.31 .893
scale: 1 = not at all important, to 5 = very important
Table 1.4: incentives
issue: incentives, investment subsidies for adoption mean std dev
q13. government incentives for online export 4.48 1.084
q14. government incentives for developing better online capability 4.44 1.083
q15. government incentives for finding reliable online suppliers 4.28 1.173
mean incentives items (Cronbach alpha = .955) 4.40 1.067
scale: 1 = not at all important, to 5 = very important
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Table 1.5: financial issues
issue: financial issues, payment, tax framework mean std dev
q16. reliable online payment systems 4.56 .869
q17. reliable ways to pay if customers do not want to pay online 4.16 .986
q18. clear tax laws for online business within ASEAN 4.52 1.084
q19. clear & efficient customs regulations 4.40 .957
mean financial items (Cronbach alpha = .890) 4.41 .847
scale: 1 = not at all important, to 5 = very important
Table 1.6: developing competitive know-how
issue: developing know-how to compete in e-ASEAN mean std dev
q20. good knowledge of foreign markets & how to compete in them 4.48 1.159
q21. good knowledge of foreign suppliers and how to access them 4.28 1.208
q22. government aid in building marketing & supply chain
knowhow 4.32 1.180
q23. online govt databases about ASEAN markets & suppliers 4.20 1.290
mean developing know-how items (Cronbach alpha = .970) 4.32 1.160
scale: 1 = not at all important, to 5 = very important
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Figure 2: dendogram of cluster analysis on 23 issues
Table 2: attitudes about government policy
attitudes about government policy mean std dev
24. government technology policy regarding e-commerce 3.88 1.332
25. government competition policy about international e-commerce 3.76 1.451
26. the laws governing international e-commerce 3.72 1.369
27. government incentive to small firms involved in e-commerce 3.68 1.435
28. tax law regarding international e-commerce 3.56 1.502
29. laws governing e-commerce payments 3.52 1.503
30. government support for upgrading small firm e-commerce ability 3.48 1.417
mean government policy items (Cronbach alpha = .985) 3.65 1.370
scale: 1 = current policy is very bad for my firm, 3 = policy neither helps nor hurts; 5 = current
policy is very good for my firm
730
Table 3: SME competitiveness
issue: competitiveness mean std dev
q31. For competing in e-commerce in Thailand, we are 3.08 1.059
q32. For our ability to compete in ASEAN-wide e-commerce, we are 2.88 1.092
q33. our online capability is 3.12 1.129
q34. our international experience is 2.80 1.118
mean competitiveness items (Cronbach alpha = .930) 2.97 .995
scale: 1 = very weak compared to other firms; 3 = about average compared to other firms; 5 =
very strong compared to other firms
Figure 3: two clusters, importance of issues, attitude toward policy, assessment of
competitiveness
very high mean importance
on six sets of issues
moderate mean importance
on six sets of issues policies
beneficial
policies not
beneficial
somewhat more
competitive
somewhat less
competitive
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Table 4: belief about competitiveness and degree of importance of attitudes
unstandardized
coefficients
standardized
coefficients
B std.
error beta t sig.
(constant) 4.937 .594 8.316 .000
cluster
membership
-4.268 .851 -1.588 -5.014 .000
meanCompete -.039 .165 -.028 -.235 .816
interaction .756 .292 .735 2.585 .017
R-sq .851 regression significance .000
Dependent Variable: mean government policy items
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Foreign Exchange Control in
Venezuela: Antecedents, evolution
and impact on the market
Silvana Dakduk, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
Andrés Barrios89, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
The Macromarketing initiative analyzes the study of marketing systems’ formation and its impact
on society (Hunt 1977). A marketing system has been defines as a network of entities embedded
in a social matrix and linked through sequential or shared participation in economic exchange
(Layton 2007). Studies in various, evolving geo-political contexts have demonstrated that policy
changes and reforms to marketing systems can be catalysts for positive social changes (e.g.,
Barrios et al. 2017). However, the opposite can also occur, with policy changes acting as catalyst
of negative changes. This study employs a multi-method approach to analyze the negative effect
of Foreign Exchange Control (FEC) on Venezuela’s marketing systems.
In 2003 Hugo Chavez, former president of Venezuela, inspired by an ideology called “Socialism
of the 21st Century” in which the governmental management policy relied on strict controls in
different economic areas (Veltmeyer & Delgado, 2018), established a FEC restricting all foreign
currency transactions. This control was exercised by the Currency Administration Commission
(Comisión de Administración de Divisas - CADIVI), an institution created to decide on the foreign
currency exchange rates, and the maximum ammount of dollars a company or person could buy.
To access dollars at this official rate, a person had to register at CADIVI, and present all relevant
documents to prove she/he was about to leave the country. This procedure lasted approximately 15
733
business days, and could be carried out through any bank in the country. For companies, the
delivery of currencies worked in a similar way. Companies had to dispatch the necessary
documents to show the type of goods or services that they had to acquire abroad. Then, the
government granted them (individuals and companies) the amount of dollars approved and the
corresponding exchange rates.
CADIVI initiated operations with an exchange rate of 1,600 Bs. per US dollar (Bs as in Bolívares,
the Venezuelan local currency). Venezuelan citizens (or foreigners residing in Venezuela) could
request a maximum of US$ 600 dollars in cash, US$ 5,000 dollars via credit card (to be used
abroad only), or US$ 3,000 dollars via electronic transactions, per year.
Since the CADIVI system was created, a currency black market with high exchange rates emerged,
bringing different negative consequences to the Venezuelan economy (see Table 1 for a brief
historic view of currency exchange rates). The fraudulent acquisition of foreign currency at the
official rate, and its further trade in the black market became a regular business. For instance, many
people falsified travel documents to access these ‘preferential’ dollars to then trade them in the
black market. Another fraudulent mechanism was to travel to nearby destinations such as Panama,
Ecuador or Colombia, in which there were shops dedicated to making fictitious transactions with
credit cards, in order to access these ‘official’ dollars. This activity was known in the region as
"Raspar el cupo" (something that would translate to “scrape the quota”), which allowed to get
dollars in cash to be traded on the black market for a higher amount. This practice quickly spread
to many countries in the region, and across Europe. A similar situation occured with companies,
where they would increase the prices of services and goods, in order to have a surplus of official
dollars that could be negotiated in the black market.
Table 1. Comparison of the currency fluctuation between the official and the black market
exchange rate in Venezuela (between years 2003 – 2018).
Year Institutions that regulate exchange control (x1000) Black
Market CADIVI /
CENCOEX
SITME
SICAD
1
SICAD
2
SIMADI
DIPRO
DICOM
2003 1.60 - - - - - - 2.30
2004 1.92 - - - - - - 2.30
2005 2.15 - - - - - - 4.30
2006 2.15 - - - - - - 4.30
2007 2.15 - - - - - - 4.30
734
Year Institutions that regulate exchange control (x1000) Black
Market CADIVI /
CENCOEX
SITME
SICAD
1
SICAD
2
SIMADI
DIPRO
DICOM
2008 2.15 - - - - - - 6.50
2009 2.15 - - - - - - 8.50
2010 4.30 5.30 - - - - - 8.50
2011 4.30 5.30 - - - - - 8.50
2012 4.30 5.30 - - - - - 10.00
2013 6.30 - - - . - - 37.75
2014 11 - 11 50 . - - 90.71
2015 - - 12 57.65 199.85 - - 519.76
2016 - - - - 673.66 10.00 - 1,363.30
2017 - - - - 727.34 10.00 3,345 83,560.21
2018 - - - - - 10.00 73,315.90 625,345.11
The government’s response was to strengthen the control of the local economy, by reducing the
amount of dollars to be exchanged and by devaluating the Venezuelan currency. However, this has
provoked a downward spiral in which the black market’s rates increased at a higher pace. Over the
last 15 years, seven currency exchange systems have been developed by the government. This
situation weakened the national economy in myriad ways, including:
The continuous and sustained creation of mechanisms of exchange regulation weakened the
national industrial production. With an overvalued currency for Venezuelan companies, it was
impossible to compete with cheaper imports and thus, it was more attractive to sell the
currencies in the black market than to actually produce. Between 1998 and 2014 ,the average
production per capita increased only 0.7% per year (Estupiñan, 2014).
The coexistence of several exchange rates has caused a general distortion in the price system.
While the authorities restrict the sale of official dollars, the price of the black market dollar has
increased, and has become the benchmark for price fixing in the market. The government keeps
making decisions based on an official dollar that is practically inaccessible for companies and
individuals. One consequence of this situation is the reduction of "legal tourism". If a tourist
makes transactions with his/her credit card, he/she must pay the official rate, but all products
are estimated at a black market exchange rate. These means that the consumer ends up paying
a thousand times more for a product in Venezuela.
Given that basic supplies had priority for the allocation of preferential dollars, the government
regulated their prices and must be sold at preferential prices. Currently, companies do not have
735
this privilege and must sell at the black market price, basic products purchased with preferential
dollars are sold by the goverment in public or private retails, which establishes unequal
competition between the State and traditional retail.
The combination of the noticeable drop in Venezuelan industrial production and the artificial
increased prices in the market led to a rationing of essential goods, which are regulated by the
government. To date, Venezuela’s citizens can only buy products at preferential prices
according to their ID number, and this can be made only once a week.
Finally, the spiral of economic regulations has created a chain of events with implications
in different areas that have affected the well being of Venezuela´s citizen. This is reflected
in the high cost of the products, difficulty of access to basic products, long lines and
complex mechanisms in the black market for the essential abstention of food, medicines
and any other product or service (Corrales and Hidalgo, 2017; Lampa, 2017).
References
Barrios, A., de Valck, K., Shultz, C. J., Sibai, O., Husemann, K. C., Maxwell-Smith, M., &
Luedicke, M. K. (2016). Marketing as a means to transformative social conflict resolution:
lessons from transitioning war economies and the Colombian coffee marketing system. Journal of
Public Policy & Marketing, 35(2), 185-197.
Corrales, J., & Hidalgo, M. (2017). The quality of the Venezuelan democracy under Hugo
Chávez (1999-2013). Partecipazione E Conflitto, 10(1), 89–118.
https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v10i1p89
Estupiñan, J. (2014). Perfil económico de Venezuela. Retrieved from
https://www.legiscomex.com/Documentos/perfil-comercial-venezuela-2013-ccv-actualizacion
Hunt, S. D. (1977). The three dichotomies model of marketing: an elaboration of issues.
Macromarketing: Distributive processes from a societal perspective, 52-6.
736
Lampa, R. (2017). Crisis in Venezuela, or the Bolivarian Dilemma: To Revolutionize or to
Perish? A Kaleckian Interpretation. Review of Radical Political Economics, 4587(49), 198–218.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613415623259
Layton, R.A. (2007). Marketing systems: a core macro-marketing concept. Journal of
Macromarketing, 27(2), 193-213.
Veltmeyer, H., & Delgado, R. (2018). Rethinking development from a Latin American
perspective. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2018.1409616
737
Macromarketing and
Health
Track Chair: Jayne Krisjanous
Co-Chair(s): Djavlonbek Kadirov
738
Sports-supplement consumption in
young adults: Addressing
consumer-vulnerability
Renu Emile, Jindal Global Business School, India
Jatin Sahni, Jindal Global Business School, India
A number of studies examine the consumption of dietary supplements, however, there is very
little in the area of sports-supplements which has emerged as an entire sub-specialty of its own
within nutrition science. Sports supplements encompass a range of products, including protein
and weight-gainer powders, creatine, glutamine, smilax, sulfo-polysaccharides, and like dietary
supplements, are offered in various shapes and sizes such as ready-made drinks, bars, tablets,
capsules, in gel and powder form (Kreider 1999). The few studies that examine sports-
supplement consumption usually do so in the form of surveys that collect select-information on
pre-determined or specific categories and aspects. Consequently, a consumer-driven
understanding of sports supplement consumption is lacking in the literature. This study addresses
this particular gap and raises the following questions: What key aspects are significant in sports-
supplement consumption? Are there any associated vulnerabilities? If so, in what ways and how
are informants rendered vulnerable? We focus on sports-supplement consumption in a
developing country context, that is, India.
The literature approaches consumer-vulnerability in many different ways, for example, in terms
of individual characteristics, states and external conditions (Baker et al. 2005); susceptibility to
harm (Brenkert1998); insufficient or lack of information, knowledge, skills, or experience leading
to disadvantage in the marketplace (Ringold 2005); or, as a sum of systemic vulnerability that is
true for the whole class, and transient vulnerability, that varies from individual to individual
739
(Commuri and Ekici 2008). We examine whether and how vulnerability in the particular context
of the study aligns with current conceptualizations.
We conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with sixteen informants aged 17-25 in the
Delhi NCR region. Preliminary findings of the study highlight three themes in sports-supplement
consumption: (a) Motivations - these relate to health and physical form, related regular activity at
the gym, and the need to compensate for inadequate diet, as also convenience; (b) Brand
preferences and key influences - informants tend to speak of global versus local (India-
manufactured) brands, their particular choice, product-compositions and so forth; they also talk
about key sources of influence such as websites, online blogs, personal trainers, and friends and
family; and (c) Dosage and access - here informants discuss their own understandings of dosage,
and accordingly self-prescribe, they also talk about procurement, authenticity-related and
standardization and regulation-related aspects.
Informants associate risks with sports-supplement consumption all through, however, the
uniformity of the nature and level of risk/s varies across the informant set. As there appears to be
no standard measure to evaluate sports-supplement brands nor is the sports-supplement market in
India sufficiently regulated, informants tend to rely on their own self-knowledge and perceptions,
and manage risks at their own individual level. Such self-management renders them even more
vulnerable in terms of potential impact on health and personal well-being, and marketplace
interactions. This study takes a larger, systemic view to address such vulnerability and identifies
gaps and disjunctures within the sports supplement market. It draws upon theorizations of
market-systems as comprising “a network of individuals, groups, and/or shared entities linked
directly or indirectly through sequential or shared participation in economic exchange that
creates, assembles, transforms, and makes available assortments of products, both tangible and
intangible, provided in response to customer demand” (Layton 2007 p. 230) to do so. Although
the literature touches upon the idea of risk, it has so far not included risk within the scope and
conceptualization of consumer-vulnerability, and as linked to or embedded within the larger
marketing system. Based on our findings, we argue for including risk in understandings of
consumer-vulnerability within the larger marketing system. We draw implications for practice
and policy.
740
References
Baker, Stacey M., James W. Gentry, and Terri Rittenburg (2005), “Building understanding of the
domain of consumer vulnerability,” Journal of Macromarketing, 25 (2), 128-139.
Brenkert, George G. (1998), “Marketing and the vulnerable,” Business Ethics Quarterly, Ruffin
Series, 1, 7–20.
Commuri Suraj, and Ahmet Ekici (2008), “An enlargement of the notion of consumer
vulnerability,” Journal of Macromarketing, 28, 183-6.
Kreider, Richard B. (1999), “Dietary supplements and the promotion of muscle growth with
resistance exercise,” Sports Med., 27 (2): 97-110.
Layton, Roger (2007), “Marketing systems - A core macromarketing concept,” Journal of
Macromarketing, 27 (3), 227-242.
Ringold, Debra Jones (1995), “Social criticisms of target marketing process or product?”
American Behavioral Scientist, 38 (4): 578-592.
741
Good Faith as the Demand for
Sincerity in Marketing Systems:
The Case of Surrogacy Markets in
India
Djavlonbek Kadirov, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Sujit Jagadale, Institute of Rural Management Anand, India
Nilufar Allayarova, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
From the micro-perspective (e.g. legal studies), good faith is seen as the fundamental requirement
for the soundness of a contractual agreement. Good faith is a legal duty of the parties entering
into a contractual agreement. Also, it denotes mutual expectation that parties will avoid duplicity,
double heartedness, ill will, and opportunistic behaviour during contract period. In general, good
faith means genuine commitment to the spirit of relationship. Summers (1981) defines good faith
as “honesty in fact in the conduct or transaction concerned” (p.836). The duty of good faith is not
simply a moral requirement, as it is a minimum prerequisite for a contract’s validity (Summers
1981). Braucher (cited in Summers 1981) defined good faith as "faithfulness to an agreed
common purpose and consistency with the justified expectations of the other party
[and]…community standards of decency, fairness or reasonableness" (p. 826).
Kadirov (2015) argued that good faith is a criterion of genuine marketing action, since what
distinguishes (real) “marketing” from “non-marketing” is sincerity (Gaski 2012). The lack of
good faith is not a problem of information, skills or knowledge deficiency. Rather, it is a
deficiency of sincerity in an exchange relationship and the lack of consumer advocacy (Urban
742
2005). Specifically, credence goods contexts can turn into markets with imbalance of power,
information asymmetry, and cultural manipulation if service providers unabashedly pursue self-
interest.
We explore the rise and evolution of surrogacy services in India. Our qualitative investigation
indicates that both surrogate mothers and the clients enter this unique type of relationship in good
faith which is mediated by surrogacy service agents (i.e. surrogacy clinics and centres). Observed
disappointments are often an indication of commonly accepted communal standards of decency,
fairness and honesty. Such expectations represent the demand on the marketing-system-as-a-
whole rather than a specific service provider.
References
Jagadale S. & Kadirov D. (2017). Externalizing Pain: The Rise of the Commercial Surrogacy
Marketing System in India. 2017 Macromarketing Conference, Queenstown, NZ.
Gaski, J. F. (2012), “To Serve Man: A Marketing Manifesto (and an Article that Should Not
Have Been Necessary)” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 32(1), 6-17.
Kadirov D. (2015). Marketing for Society: The Concept of Good Faith. The 2015
Macromarketing Conference, Loyola University, Chicago, USA
Urban, G. L. (2005), “Customer Advocacy: A New Era in Marketing?” Journal of Public Policy
& Marketing, 24(1), 155-159.
Summers, R. S. (1981), “General Duty of Good Faith-Its Recognition and Conceptualization,”
Cornell Law Review, 67, 810-840.
743
Supporting WHO Global Action
Plan for Seasonal Influenza
Vaccinations: The Development of
a Social Marketing Systems
Methodology
Christine Domegan, NUI Galway, Ireland
Dmitry Brychkov, NUI Galway, Ireland
Patricia McHugh, NUI Galway, Ireland
Áine McNamara, Health Service Executive, Ireland
Katharine Harkin, Health Service Executive, Ireland
Christine Fitzgerald, NUI Galway, Ireland
Diarmuid O’ Donovan, Health Service Executive, Ireland
ABSTRACT
The WHO Global Action Plans 1 and 2 to increase the uptake of the seasonal influenza vaccine
recommends that all healthcare workers in health services annually receive the vaccination (WHO
2016). Compared to adults working in non-healthcare settings, healthcare workers are at
significantly higher risk of influenza. Achieving a greater uptake of influenza vaccination among
HCW’s is recognised as a vital infection control intervention and occupational health issue, to
744
reduce the risk of influenza transmission between patients and HCW (EASH 2016; Kuster et al.
2011).
Supporting WHO’s GAP, the European WHO Regional Office undertook a case study
approach to evidence-based solutions to increase seasonal influenza uptake among Montenegro
healthcare workers (WHO 2015). The case study, TIP FLU, grounded in behaviour change theories
and health programme planning models, designed seasonal influenza programmes tailored to
specific country and healthcare institutions contexts. Despite WHO’s recommendations and TIP
FLU guidelines, vaccination uptake remains low among healthcare workers and influenza
outbreaks in healthcare settings have occurred annually in most European WHO countries.
This paper argues that flu vaccination for healthcare workers is best pursued from a
macromarketing perspective. For most healthcare workers, flu vaccinations occur in a systems
setting; a hospital. A ‘hospital system’ is a set of elements - e.g. people, structures, organisational
procedures, practices and roles - interconnected to produce their own pattern of behaviours and
choices over time. Hospitals are complex and emergent systems with a diversity of interactions and
connections between doctors, consultants, nurses, patients, management, administrators and
cleaning and catering staff. With the permeation of systems thinking into macromarketing and
social marketing gaining momentum (Laczniak and Murphy 2012; Hillebrand et al. 2015; Layton
2015; Brennan, Previte and Fry 2016 and Kennedy 2016, 2017), a social marketing systems
methodology using Layton’s Mechanisms, Action and Structure offers valuable change potential
for complex societal problems such as healthcare workers flu vaccination.
Mechanisms, Action and Structure (MAS) concentrates on the “complex social networks of
individuals and groups linked through shared participation in the creation and delivery of economic value
through exchange … enhancing the perceived quality of life” (Layton, 2015, p.303-305). As a systems-based
macromarketing theory, MAS signals complex structures, dynamic processes, and interconnected
exchanges are foundational to a sustainable change framework. Duffy (2016) pioneered the first practical
exploration of MAS concepts through a focal case study on the whale shark marketing system of Ningaloo
in Western Australia. Duffy’s (2016, p. 11) findings show the “combined influence of a marketing systems
structure, functioning, the associated action fields and generating social mechanisms that shape and
continue to form a marketing system in an ongoing process”. A year later, Duffy et al. (2017) successfully
applied social mechanism theory, to understand the social upheaval caused by the financial system
collapse in Iceland while Kennedy (2017) examined the issues, actors and social mechanisms involved in
perpetuating fast fashion.
745
Taking a macromarketing perspective, the purpose of this paper is to present a social
marketing system methodology through which increased healthcare worker flu vaccination rates
may be accomplished. The social marketing system methodology developed, adapts a MAS-based
group modelling systems framework, to map value exchanges, stakeholder engagement, system
dynamics and feedback relationships between hospital system elements. Among the range of group
modelling frameworks available, this research uses a systems practice model (Ricigliano 2012)
integrated with MAS, which “fills the gap between the promise of a systems approach for making
social change and putting it into practice” (Omidyar 2017, p.2).
The research context is hospital healthcare workers in Ireland where flu vaccination rates
are as low as 11.3% in some regions, well under the national recommended rate of 40%. The study
answered the research question “What are the forces that account for low rates of seasonal flu
immunization among healthcare workers (nurses) in hospitals? The first exploratory stage consisted
of a literature review and observational study to identify hospital system boundaries and nurse
healthcare worker flu vaccination exchanges (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Nurse Healthcare worker Flu Vaccination Exchanges
746
This was augmented with a second exploratory stage that focused exclusively on the accumulation
of primary data; barriers and enablers from nurse healthcare workers (n = 137) with 300+ barriers
and enablers identified. The third stage, an explanatory one, analysed the dynamic MAS causal
relationships and feedback loops of flu vaccination in the hospital systems setting. The analysis
was socialized and iterated among healthcare workers and members of the core modelling team,
including top public health experts for triangulation and verification purposes. This resulted in a
multi-causal flu vaccination map, depicting 14 underlying forces and the interactions between the
structural, behavioural and stakeholder elements that inhibit and/or enable flu vaccination uptake
for nurse healthcare workers in a hospital setting (Figure 2).
Figure 2 A Systems Map of the Flu Vaccination Forces among Nurse HCW
747
The systems map identifies ‘Fit & Healthy Beliefs’ and ‘Past Experiences’ as the ‘deep
structure’ or core underlying forces that undermine or block the uptake of the annual flu vaccination
among nurses. This final stage also identified seven strategic leverage points (1. peer vaccination
2. flu champions 3. mutual not moral exchanges focus 4. ward/unit context 5. flu literacy 6. new
patterns of self-organisation for engagement and 7. influenza framing) that if engaged, have the
greatest potential to create systemic change and shift the hospital system towards sustainable higher
annual flu vaccination rates with relatively modest resources. Using the seven leverage points to
target all three nurse healthcare worker segments as the basis for a flu vaccination strategy, flu
vaccination rates increased from 15% to 30% by the end of the 2018 winter.
This paper contributes a social marketing system methodology where various stakeholders
with knowledge of a complex problem collectively develop a dynamic model of the situation.
System stakeholders also identify strategic leverage points for change to target the deep structure
of the system for change that pervades all parts of the system and patterns of behaviours. The
involvement of various stakeholders in the system modelling process and the consensus-based
elicitation of these stakeholders’ knowledge, together with their buy in, lies at the core of social
marketing system techniques (Andersen et al. 1997; Bérard 2010). The paper demonstrates to
stakeholders, decision-makers, and policy and programme managers that a sustainable annual flu
vaccination strategy requires a macromarketing perspective capable of accounting for both
individual and systemic factors to increase flu vaccination rates among healthcare workers. The
last contribution of this paper lies in unpacking the multiple and interrelated stakeholder exchanges
for value creation versus value destruction in a social marketing system. Limitations wise, this was an exploratory study to develop a social marketing systems
methodology for a complex societal problem. It focused on one sub-system of HCW – nurses. A
study of all HCW as a system would potentially uncover different dynamics and a different deep
structure. Further construct and operational definitions of key MAS variables, including secondary
social mechanisms and strategic action fields is required for a social marketing systems
methodology. Importantly, the power, tensions and conflicts between stakeholders require further
delineation.
The findings have implications for systems social marketing and macromarketing.
Conceptually, the move towards marketing as a part of different provisioning systems in society
748
allows macromarketing to capture the dynamic complexities inherent in global-to-local social
problems. Conceptualising the system of a social problem empowers the social marketer to design
a strategy, potentially, that can fundamentally re-set the trajectory of the focal system. Central to
this, is defining the focal provisioning system based on desired outcomes - in this case, flu
vaccination rates of 40% (national guidelines) in the short term and flu vaccination rates of 70%
(WHO guidelines) in the long term. The outcomes guide the boundaries drawn around a focal
system and by default, the adjacent systems. Different outcomes will generate different system
perspectives and concpetualisations since system boundaries are relative, non-static and subjective
in nature. All have implications for systems change strategies pursued.
A second substantive implication relates to exchange. Mapping the actual and desired
marketing exchanges in context as part of the social marketing formative research and strategy
stages is central to affecting how the system functions. Mapping exchanges brings the blend of self-
interest, mutuality and morality values of various stakeholders to the fore. Exchange mapping, to
compliment and augment stakeholder mapping and analysis, highlights the macro, meso and micro
tensions, conflicts, power struggles and nuances between the different stakeholders and between
the different segments in the focal system. Exchange mapping brings the multi-level context into
focus for co-ordinated multi-level interventions that deliver co-created win-win scenarios for
transformative versus transactional engagement. From this perspective, framing and negotiation
theories become fertile domains for further exploration.
A final implication relates to the definitional constructs of macro social marketing and
systems social marketing. How is macro social marketing different in nature and substance to
systems social marketing? Does macro social marketing and systems social marketing deal with
dynamics, non-linearity and complexity in different ways? Do they generate social value, social
change or systemic change using dissimilar modalities and methodologies? The authors suggest
complexity and systems theory, including MAS, is relevant to both and perhaps construct
definitional development and methodological advancements will see macro and systems social
marketing converge.
References
Andersen, David F., George P. Richardson, and Jac A.M. Vennix (1997), “Group Model
Building: Adding More Science to the Craft”, System Dynamics Review, 13 (2), 187-201.
749
Bérard, Celine (2010), “Group Model Building Using System Dynamics: an Analysis of
Methodological Frameworks”, The Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, 8 (1), 35-
45.
Brennan, Linda, Josephine Previte, and Marie-Louise Fry (2016), “Social Marketing’s
Consumer Myopia: Applying a Behavioural Ecological Model to Address Wicked Problems,”
Journal of Social Marketing, 6 (3), 219-239.
Duffy, Sarah (2016), “New Perspectives on Marketing Systems: An Investigation of
Growth, Power, Social mechanisms, Structure and History”, doctoral thesis, University of New
South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Duffy, Sarah, Gavin Northey, and Patrick van Esch (2017), "Iceland: How Social
Mechanisms Drove the Financial Collapse and Why It’s a Wicked Problem", Journal of Social
Marketing, 7 (3), 330-346.
European Agency for Safety and Health at work (2016) “Healthy Workplaces for All Ages:
Campaign guide” accessed January 13th, 2017.
Hillebrand, Bas, Paul H. Driessen, and Oliver Koll (2015), “Stakeholder marketing:
theoretical foundations and required capabilities”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,
43, 411-428.
Hovmand, Peter S. (2014) Community Based System Dynamics, New York, NY:
Springer Science+Business Media.
Kuster, Stefan, Prakesh Shah, Brenda Coleman, Po-Po Lam, Agnes Tong, Anne
Wormsbecker and Alison McGee (2011) “Incidence of Influenza in Healthy Adults and Healthcare
Workers: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”. PLoS ONE 6(10): e26239.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026239.
Laczniak, Gene R. and Patrick E. Murphy (2012), “Stakeholder Theory and Marketing:
Moving from a Firm-Centric to a Societal Perspective”, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing,
31 (2), 284-292.
Layton, Roger A. (2015), “Formation, Growth and Adaptive Change in Marketing
Systems”, Journal of Macromarketing, 35 (3), 302-319.
750
Kennedy, Ann-Marie (2016), “Macro-social marketing”, Journal of Macromarketing, 36
(3), 354-365.
Kennedy, Ann-Marie (2017), “Macro-Social Marketing Research: Philosophy,
Methodology and Methods” Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 37(4), 347-355.
Ricigliano, Robert (2012), Making Peace Last. A Toolbox for Sustainable
Peacebuilding, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Omidyar Group (2017), Systems practice. Creative Commons, available online at
https://docs.kumu.io/content/Workbook-012617.pdf (last accessed on 28 July 2017).
Vennix, Jac A.M. (1999), “Group Model-Building: Tackling Messy Problems”, System
Dynamics Review, 15 (4), 379-401.
WHO (2015), “Tailoring Immunisation Programme for Seasonal Influenza (TIP FLU)
A guide for increasing health care workers’ uptake of seasonal influenza vaccination” accessed
July 15th 2017).
WHO (2106), “The ten years of the Global Action Plan for influenza vaccines: Report
to the Director-General from the GAP advisory group” accessed July 15th 2017).
751
Gender,
Intersectionalities, and
Macromarketing IV
Track Chair: Wendy Hein
Co-Chair(s): Josephine Previte
752
Here is a Place for You/Know Your
Place: Understanding Neoliberal
“Biopedagogy” Embedded in
Images of the Female Body in
Fitness Advertising
Carly Drake, University of Calgary, Canada
Scott Radford, University of Calgary, Canada
ABSTRACT
The historically masculine realm of sport has not always been welcoming to women. Today, women have
found a place in sport culture, but contemporary media remind them they may only occupy a certain place
– subordinate to men, and subject to objectification. In this critical reading of fitness advertisements
targeting female recreational endurance runners, we combine poststructuralist feminist theory and a
hermeneutic methodology to investigate if and how advertisements participate in this practice. Given the
body’s salience at the intersection of sport, the marketplace, and media, we focus on the way in which the
body has been depicted. We find that advertisements treat the body as a machine, prescribing and
normalizing an obsession with athletics. They glorify the pursuit of the ideal running body through
athletics, and discount women’s contributions to sport. In this way, advertisements function as a
“biopedagogy” that teach consumers how a suitable body appears and functions.
Keywords:
sport, gender, the body, advertising, hermeneutics
753
Here is a Place for You/Know Your Place: Understanding Neoliberal “Biopedagogy” Embedded in
Images of the Female Body in Fitness Advertising
Sport culture has been acknowledged as inherently masculine (Dunning 1986; Krane et al. 2004),
and women’s challenges entering and thriving within that culture have been well documented (e.g.,
Halbert 1997; Williams 2014). Generally speaking, women’s viability as athletes is often questioned even
when they perform at a high level (Cooky, Messner and Musto 2015), and additional issues illustrate
structural inequalities within sport. For example, despite American legislative efforts promoting gender
equality with respect to sports funding, in some parts of the country women’s athletics still receive less
funding than men’s (Wong 2015). From junior to elite levels in beach volleyball, male athletes’ uniforms
usually consist of long, baggy shorts while women are required to wear “bun huggers,” which resemble
bikini bottoms and have been argued to turn the athletes into sex objects (Keilman 2016).
The media landscape is an additional arena in which female athletes are marginalized. Despite
increases in women’s sports participation and achievements over time, it seems the more women advance
in sport, the more media ignore or belittle them (Kane 2013). Compared to men’s sports, women’s sports
receive less media coverage (Kane and Maxwell 2011; Kane 2013). The few women’s sports stories that
reach consumers are presented in a matter-of-fact, uninspiring manner (Cooky et al. 2015). The coverage
is often characterized as sexist because female athletes are infantilized (Koivula 1999), or their
accomplishments are attributed to their male coaches, a strong male influence, or emotion (Eastman and
Billings 1999, 2001).
The female body is salient at the intersection of sport, the marketplace, and media. Bodies hold
power in public discourse in part because they are “sign vehicles,” carrying markers that send messages to
others through interactions (Goffman 1959; Kosut 2000). Simply by being female, the media may frame a
woman’s athletic career in the context of her being a mother, locating her value in her reproductive
capacities (Cooky et al. 2015). Similarly, her good looks can get more attention than her skills: in 2017, a
cycling magazine was criticized for accidentally captioning a photo of a female cyclist: “Token attractive
woman” (CNN 2017). Sports commentators have also been criticized for referring to adult female athletes
as “girls” because it shows disrespect to women and belittles their accomplishments (Gray 2016). Such
examples illustrate the fact that women may have found a place in sport culture, but media remind them
they may only occupy a certain place – subordinate to men, and subject to objectification.
The status of the female athlete’s body in media mirrors struggles female athletes face in relation
to their bodies. Broadly speaking, they must complete the gendered task of appeasing both a social field
that requires they be slender and delicate, and an athletic one that requires they be muscular and strong
(George 2005). This paradox can be partly attributed to sportswomen’s living between two cultures: the
masculine sport culture, and the larger social culture where women’s bodily femininity is celebrated
754
(Krane et al. 2004). For these women, being too muscular or slender has consequences, such as lowered
self esteem, reduced performance, and social stigmatization (George 2005). Even a female body builder,
for example, who is capable of lifting heavy weights at national and international competitions, can still
feel alienated when strangers perceive her muscular body as fat, and she rarely sees images of bodies like
her own in popular culture, where fitness is equal to thinness (Smith-Dixon 2008).
Numerous regulatory forces, including training partners, coaches, and sport-specific bodily
standards, can both positively and negatively influence women’s body image in this context (McMahon
and DinanThompson 2011). The extant literature covering gender and athletics has paid scant attention to
an additional, market-based regulatory force rooted in consumer culture: advertising. It is crucial to
include advertising in this research landscape. Among women in general, “ideal” female bodies in
advertising lower satisfaction with one’s own attractiveness (Richins 1991). Fitness media images,
specifically, often trivialize women’s athletics and sexualize female athletes (Cranmer et al. 2014).
Women – usually young, thin Caucasians – are shown in submissive positions to men, and posed
unnaturally, often as body parts rather than a whole person (Wasylkiw et al. 2009). High-level female
athletes criticize these ideal forms as reducing female athletes to passive objects, yet still use them as
references in critiquing their own bodies (Thomsen et al. 2004; Kane et al. 2013).
In this research, editorial and advertising images are typically treated as a single unit. However,
advertising merits separate inquiry because it communicates with consumers via objectives and tools (e.g.,
sales and sales pitches) unique to the medium. While advertisements are affiliated with editorial content
by physical proximity alone, they are ultimately crafted by firms external to the publisher, which have
their own interests to communicate. Although a media text, such as a magazine, is worthy of study as a
whole, the particularities of its various components deserve individual critique to avoid overlooking how
they each contribute to a consumer’s reading experience. Therefore, in approaching this topic, our research
question is: How might we understand images of female bodies in advertisements in fitness media? To
answer this question, we critique advertisements in media targeting recreational endurance runners.
This sport is a worthy context in which to explore the research topic because of its social, political,
and economic evolution. Several high-profile events served to welcome women into the sport despite its
roots as a male domain. For example, in 1967, Katherine Switzer illegally ran the Boston Marathon in a
time when women were forbidden from entering, and her statement helped ignite the structural changes
needed to include women in races (Chase 2016). Then, in 1972, the passing of Title IX in the United
States provided equal access to sport and related federal funding in public schools for male and female
students, which helped legitimize women’s athletic pursuits (Kotschwar 2014). Running, as a subculture,
emerged in the 1970s in part because it appealed to those seeking clean and upright living as a means to
feeling and being seen as virtuous citizens (Gillick 1984). The medical and scientific communities
supported this trend, framing running as an exercise for the moral and intellectual as they attempted to
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promote heart health (Bale 1993). These and related developments left a legacy that carries on today: in
2014, females accounted for 10.7 million race finishers in the United States alone and represented 57 per
cent of participants in event fields – up from 25 per cent in 1990 (Running USA 2015).
In the decades since women began participating in recreational endurance running on a mass
scale, research has documented the physical and psychological aspects of the sport. Specifically, the
promise of physical attractiveness is an incentive to run for both sexes (Turner 2008), and running can
boost women’s self esteem and psychological coping skills via perceived bodily improvements and
physical competence (Ogles, Masters and Richardson 1995; Bond and Batey 2005). Yet, not every runner
will possess an “ideal” running body – one that is tall, lean and without discernable curves. Moreover,
runners’ bodies face critique that can, for example, drive “fat” runners to run after dark to avoid judgment
(Chase 2008). Indeed, running media’s editorial content promotes a classed, aged, and gendered ideal of
running (Abbas 2004). While runners typically represent a variety of shapes, sizes, and social locations,
the popular depiction is of a young, white, upwardly mobile male. This ideal has a large audience. With
Runner’s World, the sport’s leading magazine, boasting a readership nearing 700,000 athletes (Rodale
2016), the nature of the advertisements within it (and others like it) is of interest.
Responding to Dholakia’s (2012) call for research adopting a macro-critical perspective, our focus
on print advertisements as a site of sociocultural communication is linked with the role of print media in
consumers’ lives. As running grew in popularity, the sport became an opportunity for commodification
through, for example, running shoes branded with Adidas, Puma, and Nike logos (Bale 1993) – hence the
emergence of advertisements targeting runners, specifically. Magazines are noted for their distinctiveness
as a medium for their ability to incite action among readers, and for the fact that they are often created by
topic enthusiasts who would otherwise be readers (Abrahamson 2007). This argument is complemented
with findings that consumers trust print advertisements more when making purchases than those appearing
in any other media platform (Burstein 2017). Thus, when brands’ advertisements appear in magazines
targeting runners, they are part of an intimate communication between magazine publishers, advertisers,
and consumers. In this way, sampling print advertisements, as opposed to billboards or broadcast
commercials, offers an accessible avenue for exploring firms’ language and use of body-related sign
vehicles. It shows us their DNA, in a way, as it relates to this audience of female recreational endurance
runners who willingly engage with print media in the context of the broader history of their sport.
Theory and Literature
In this section, we employ poststructuralist feminist theory to synthesize relevant literature on (1)
current sociocultural trends rooted in neoliberal ideology; (2) advertising; and (3) female athletes’
experiences with their bodies. We move from a discussion of the macro landscape to a discussion of
consumers’ lives within it to identify the myriad forces that shape sport-related consumption. Proponents
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of poststructuralist feminism (e.g., Butler 1990) understand gender and related concepts as socially
constructed and subjective but nonetheless embedded in society’s institutions and practices. They
deconstruct social problems, such as sexism, through theories of language, discourse, and subjectivity in
relation to social power with the goal of uncovering and remedying the problems for women and men’s
mutual benefit (Weedon 1987).
Broadly speaking, language assigns meaning to entities that otherwise do not have fixed or
inherent meaning (Hall 1997). As individuals use language to interpret their worlds, groups of
interpretations form discourses, which are stories positioned as essential truths that reflect the interests of
dominant groups (Weedon 1987). For example, the notion that women must maintain a young and fit
appearance – contained within one body type by which all others are judged (Grosz 1994) – belongs to a
discourse that values youth and fitness as part of a normative assertion that there is a singular experience
of womanhood. Poststructuralist feminism challenges these essential truths through the notion of
subjectivity. This term refers to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual,
her sense of herself, and her ways of understanding her place in the world (Weedon 1987). Focusing on
the individual’s subjectivity rather than an essential subjectivity offers her power within less-than-ideal
social structures (Elliott and Ritson 1997). This theoretical lens is therefore useful to the present study
because it helps problematize dominant notions of what it means to be a female athlete in consumer
culture.
Our topic is situated within the context of neoliberalism – a political and economic regime that has
unfolded differently across the world but at its core is the promotion of market-based solutions to a wide
range of issues (Lave et al. 2010). Most relevant to the present study is the fact that neoliberalism is also a
series of normative conceptions of agency and responsibility that are rooted in market-centric ideology
and embodied in policies, programs, and institutions (Ward and England 2007). According to this
perspective, individuals are rational, self interested, and able to act on their intentions (Lave et al. 2010).
They can and should take responsibility for their individual wellbeing, which includes their health and
appearance (Schrecker 2016).
Under neoliberalism, the body is a public good, available to be appraised and commented upon by
a variety of interested parties, such as governments and school boards. While public health strategies and
other neoliberal instruments once focused primarily on hygiene issues, today the behavior and appearance
of individual bodies is a higher priority (LeBesco 2011). By extension, the market’s current body-related
lessons define the normal body and self, and identify those who diverge from the norm by using praise and
shame along with expert knowledge to incite conformity (Leahy 2009). To be ill, just as to be poor, is
considered an individual shortcoming, the product of undesirable individual choices (Fudge and Cossman
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2002), rather than the shortcomings of policymakers amid the dissolution of the welfare state (Crawford
1980). Similarly, to be fit is to be attractive, morally worthy, and in service of the state (LeBesco 2011).
Biopedagogy is a product of neoliberalism. This construct refers to the collection of information,
instructions, and directives about how to live, what a body should be, what a good citizen is, and what to
do to be happy and healthy (Fullagar 2009; Leahy 2009). Rooted in Foucault’s (1980) notion of biopower,
biopedagogy belongs to a context in which governments control individuals and populations not through
overt force but through imparting values and knowledge that teach people how to manage their bodies in a
manner that fits with state interests. Because neoliberalism values rationality, responsibility and discipline,
when someone is seen as diverging from these norms in any way, they must be herded back to the norm
(Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford 2006). For this reason, in the context of consumers’ body work,
instructions targeting the body transmit knowledge as well as actively engaging people in self-assessment
and monitoring (Wright 2009). Platforms for biopedagogy are plentiful and diverse, and may include
state-mandated health programming in schools (Rice 2014) or even the plotlines of television shows made
by private companies (Rail and Lafrance 2009).
In this study, we argue that advertisements can be conceptualized as a form of biopedagogy. We
make this argument because advertising is characterized as “the privileged discourse for the circulation of
messages and social cues about the interplay between persons and objects” (Leiss et al. 1990, p. 50). It is
also argued to be responsible for sharing market information (Carey 1960), educating consumers so they
can make consumption choices that are in their best interest (Sandage 1972). In doing so, advertising can
reflect and influence societal change (Hackley 2002; Branchik and Chowdhury 2012), but it can also
propagate misconceptions, stereotypes, and even pseudo-cultures that diverge from commonly held
cultural values (Taylor, Landreth and Bang 2005; Paulson and O’Guinn 2017; Yazdanparast, Naderi,
Spears and Fabrize 2018). In these ways, advertising guides consumers in navigating the marketplace and
social life in a manner that is often, but not always, in step with reality.
Indeed, as “the institution of abundance” (Potter 1954), advertisements hold up a picture of “the
good life” for consumers to strive toward through consumption – or risk cultural alienation (Pollay 1986).
Their template for living includes information on what it means to be a man or a woman, and what
constitutes a desirable body (Schroeder and Borgerson 1998). Reflecting the interplay between marketing
and political systems (Yazdamparast et al. 2018), such templates are aligned with state interests, like
reducing the health and economic effects of obesity, and even protecting national security by ensuring a
pool of individuals is fit for military service (Wright 2009; Halse 2009). Advertisements are therefore part
of a landscape of governmental technologies that mediate between individual anxieties about the body and
broader political and economic goals (Smith Maguire 2008). They operate alongside exercise manuals,
fitness magazines, and lifestyle media in presenting the good life as what appears to be a suggestion, rather
than an order – because in doing so, they are avoiding breaches of individual sovereignty, which would be
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met with consumer opposition (Smith Maguire 2008). The resulting control advertisements can then have
over bodies is one that inadvertently stigmatizes and excluded those whose forms diverge from the ideal –
despite their outward appearance as benevolent nudges toward positive behaviors (Gurrieri, Previte and
Brace-Govan 2012; Gurrieri, Brace-Govan and Previte 2014).
Although fitness texts as a broad category of media have been called “mechanisms of consumer
education” (Smith Maguire 2008, p. 147), the extant macromarketing and consumer culture literatures
have not yet fully explored the link between neoliberalism, biopedagogy, and advertising. Despite this gap
in scholarship, in seeing advertising as consumer education that “lay[s] down the rules of belonging to a
culture” (Evans and Rich 2011, p. 367), the extant literature hints that such an exploration is worthwhile.
For example, research shows that the increased presence of black women as diet spokeswomen illustrates
how these women, once socially permitted to have ample curves, have been required to “shape up” to
show their worth (Thompson 2015). This trend exists alongside social marketing that advocates for weight
management and physical activity for the good of society (Gurrieri et al. 2012, 2014). Similarly,
advertisements for cars and gambling-related products assume that addiction and/or lack of willpower
explain individuals’ failure to comply with standards of physical and fiscal safety (Redshaw and Nicoll
2010). Finally, taking up neoliberalism’s penchant for traditional gender roles, advertisements often
portray women as in charge of the domestic sphere, and preoccupied with their beautification to the extent
that they shirk involvement in public life (Sandlin and Maudlin 2012). To add to this conversation, the role
of advertisements as biopedagogy in the athletic domain is our interest in the present study.
Advertising shares this crowded domain with numerous additional regulatory forces that influence
women’s athletic pursuits. Female athletes join consumers more generally in their attempts at market-
based “body work,” such as exercise and dieting, through which they interact with regulatory forces that
police their efforts with the goal of shaping the body into a socially appealing form (Gimlin 2002;
Thompson and Hirschman 1995). Yet, compared to many consumers’ bodies, the female athlete’s body is
especially vulnerable to critique since it is a vehicle for performance on display in training and
competition (Mosewich et al. 2009). The ideal lean and toned athletic body is a prized achievement, and
chasing it can produce multiple and complex subjectivities (Hanold 2010). For example, runners with
larger bodies resist normative notions of a running body by their very presence, and may note the trials of
losing weight or accepting their natural shape (Chase 2008).
Running for weight loss and/or high performance can come at a great cost, such as illness and
injury (Allen-Collinson and Hockey 2007). Despite these pitfalls, those who can acquire something
resembling the ideal athletic body are proud of the achievement and can enjoy the physical and
psychological benefits of their training inside and outside the sport context (George 2005; Mosewich et al.
2009). Moreover, developing a critical awareness of ideal running and female body discourses lessens
their effects, helping athletes develop a broader view of what constitutes a legitimate running body
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(Hanold 2010). Despite what Kirmayer (2003) insists, the body is not an object inscribed by cultural texts
(Budgeon 2003) “in that there is always a material residue that resists incorporation into dominant
symbolic schema” (McNay 1999, p. 98). Such findings are positive considering poststructuralist
feminism’s emphasis on the constraints of institutional structures.
As mentioned, there has been little research on the role of advertisements in contributing to
visions of body-related norms and values in the sport context. In embarking on this study, poststructuralist
feminism offers an approach to understanding images of the body, beginning with the idea that bodies
have a story – that “every body is marked by the history and specificity of its existence” (Grosz 1994, p.
142). Deleuze (1992, p. 65) writes, “a body affects other bodies, and is affected by other bodies.” In
interpreting media images of bodies, then, Coleman (2008, p. 168) suggests asking, “What knowledges,
understandings and experiences of bodies are produced through images? How do relations constitute
particular kinds of bodies and images?” These relations should be the focus, not the bodies themselves
(Coleman 2008). If advertisements teach consumers how to navigate a given sociocultural moment, the
present study asks what role images of the sporting body play in this process.
Methodological Underpinnings and Research Method
Our investigation takes the form of a critical reading of fitness advertisements collected and
interpreted using hermeneutics, a philosophy and practice of interpretation that involves engagement with
a text to understand a given phenomenon (Moules et al. 2015). Rather than explaining the relationships
between variables in advertisements across time, we instead aim to understand the “inner word” (Grondin
1994) of advertisements. The choice of hermeneutics as a guiding philosophy and practice reflects our
theoretical framework, which rests on the interpretivist assumption of multiple realities. While
hermeneutics acknowledges the impossibility of achieving objective understanding of a topic, we can
engage with these advertisements to facilitate a description of a phenomenon.
Specifically, our sample consists of advertisements from the January/February 2017 issues of
three running magazines that target recreational endurance runners and focus their content on fitness
pursuits: Runner’s World, Women’s Running, and Canadian Running. We selected advertisements
containing the image of at least one female body. The final collection contains 59 total and 56 unique
advertisements. The limited timeframe and small sample aim to illustrate how one issue of each magazine
can contain many instances of a specific phenomenon, not to locate changes across time (Eskes et al.
1998). Indeed, keeping the focus on the ideology shared in the advertisements means we can adopt a
“40,000-foot view” of the medium (Dholakia 2012). This imperative reflects a similar goal within
hermeneutics to gather sufficient data to understand the topic at hand without straining the attention that
can be given to themes and ideas as they emerge (Moules et al. 2015).
Hermeneutics does not dictate a procedure for interpretation, which speaks to the divergent rather
than convergent nature of the task (Moules et al. 2015). Given hermeneutics’ purpose of generating
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understanding, the first author engaged in solitary “readings” of the advertisements. She kept notes in a
research diary as she worked through interpretations of thematic groupings of advertisements, generating
and re-working ideas through reviews of relevant literature and dialogue with the second author (Moules
2002). The resulting interpretations moved in an iterative manner from the specific to the general to the
specific so a comprehensive understanding of the text as a whole, as well as its particular elements, could
emerge (Arnold and Fisher 1994). In this way, the researchers’ understanding gradually moved toward the
meaning of the text to the extent that it is possible given the limitations on finding its ultimate “truth.”
Findings
As mentioned, women may have found a place in sport culture, but contemporary media remind
them they may only occupy a certain place. In this critical reading, we investigate if and how
advertisements in fitness magazines participate in this practice. We find that, through a neoliberal
biopedagogy unique to endurance running but in tune with the female athletic experience more generally,
advertisements in this sample share three related styles of visual and textual communication. First, the
advertisements treat the body as a machine, normalizing an obsession with athletics using scientific
discourse that lends credibility to marketers’ “calls to consume” without explaining scientific principles.
Second, they glorify the pursuit of the ideal running body through athletics, and ensure this body –
although lacking curves – carries markers of traditional femininity. Third, despite their appearance of
supporting women’s pursuits of athletic success, the advertisements discount women’s contributions to the
sport of endurance running. By encouraging preoccupation with the body as part of sporting life, the
advertisements ignore the possibility of achievements that stretch beyond a body’s appearance.
The Sporting Body as Machine: This biopedagogy begins with the idea, typically found in
medical and elite sport discourses (Bale 1993), that the body is a machine. To keep the machine in a
suitable condition, one must run with regularity at a high level of performance. Due to its focus on
rationality, neoliberalism advocates for understanding the world through science and math (Shankar et al.
2006; Lather 2012). As such, the machine must meet standards related to mileage run and calories
consumed, among other metrics. Advertisements highlight the role of science in the maintenance of the
bodily machine with an emphasis on key elements (food or otherwise) to include as opposed to avoid in a
regime. Advertisements suggesting that readers feed their muscles with protein, for example, run counter
to historic trends in advertising that might suggest readers slim down by avoiding certain foods, such as
those high in fat (Barr 1989). These suggestions are made in a black-and-white manner so that while they
technically cannot force a consumer to make a purchase, the implication is that one’s intuition and
emotion surrounding what may or may not be suitable for one’s personal dietary and athletic regime holds
less weight than what sports nutrition science would deem appropriate.
Intuition and emotion are not universally discounted as decision-making tools. Indeed, they have a
place alongside scientific paradigms in, for example, nursing practice, where a nurse’s sense that
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something is going wrong, something needs to be done, or something will solve a problem is a part of the
process of treating a patient (Pearson 2013; Holm and Severinsson 2016). Yet, intuition and emotion have
no place in recreational endurance running, as portrayed in the medium of advertisements. This finding is
notable since feminist theory has steadfastly observed the discursive mapping of social entities into
dualities: male/female, body/mind, reason/emotion, to name a few. Often, these entities come to be
associated with another (masculine/feminine) so that men and women are, in turn, associated with specific
qualities and characteristics.
Men are typically associated with the mind while women are typically associated with the body
(Budgeon 2003; Turner 2008). Since the mind takes a privileged position in discourse and the body takes a
subordinated one, men and women’s associations with these respective entities means men are seen as
superior to women (Grosz 1994; Budgeon 2003; Turner 2008). By extension, given that science and
math’s reason and objectivity are historically mapped as masculine domains and emotion and subjectivity
are historically mapped as feminine ones, the scientific discourse in these advertisements reinforces and
reproduces sport culture’s masculinity (Budgeon 2011). Although permitting women to take up and
possibly benefit from this discourse, images of the female body in these advertisements remind women
that feminine ways of knowing and being are not conducive to fast race times.
An advertisement exemplifying this style of communication comes from Perform, a company that
sells pain relievers (see Appendix). The advertisement shows a woman from above and behind, running in
early morning light. She is running on an empty road next to an empty sidewalk, indicating that she – a
most dedicated runner – is alone outside. The tagline reads, “I will run at first light, at first tilt, under the
stars, under the weather, like I mean it, like the wind. I will not run away from pain.” Five products are
shown in the lower quarter of the page beside text that reads, “Perform hot and cold pain relievers. Find
relief fast so you never have to slow down.” Here, nothing is indicated about the focal subject aside from
her relentless need to run. Her identity, shown through the photo and text, revolves entirely around
running. Facing away from the camera, even her face is a mystery.
Yet, despite the apparent primacy of running in her life, there is little indication of the reason
behind her dedicated athleticism – the physical or psychological benefits, for example, of the endeavor. In
this way, her body is a vessel for performance. In its role as a machine, her body must meet a given
standard of consistency and speed, relying on a product to relieve pain when it emerges so her regime is
never interrupted. The science behind the pain reliever – the ingredients and design that make it so that a
specified number of pills taken within a specified time frame will impact the body in a predictable way –
is the focus of the advertisement. This focus, a logical result of Perform’s imperative to sell its product,
works to exclude any acknowledgement that sometimes a runner should not run through pain, and that
doing so can have lasting physical and mental consequences, such as further injury and burnout. A
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runner’s intuition that her injury is one that cannot be “run through” is not shown here, nor is the emotion
that she may face in recognizing, treating, and recovering from injury.
Elements of this advertisement’s biopedagogy are expanded upon elsewhere. For example, an
advertisement for chocolate milk says that Mirinda Carfrae, a world champion triathlete, has been “built
with chocolate milk.” In doing so the advertisement takes up “the rhetoric of scientism” (Halse 2009, p.
47) outlined above. Chocolate milk is positioned as the “triathlete’s triple threat,” containing the nutrients
needed for refueling, the protein to build muscles, and the prestige of being “backed by science.” The fact
that chocolate milk is “backed by science” invokes “an aura of truth, trustworthiness and transparency”
(Halse 2009, p. 47) but it is not paired with information that communicates how the science of the product
works. Like the body mass index (BMI), a method of assessing an individual’s fitness that has come under
fire for representing health information as objective fact devoid of personal prejudice or subjective value
(Halse 2009), readers are expected to accept the claim that chocolate milk will be good for their athletic
regimes.
Similarly, an advertisement for string cheese features a pair of hands peeling a piece of cheese,
with the owner of the hands gazing upon a woman doing yoga in a park. The caption “real cheese people
bend over backwards for protein” is a nod to her yoga pose. Combined with the imagery, the caption
relegates that female body to the realm of object as opposed to subject. It is not only something to gaze
upon but it is also something to feed in hopes of achieving a desired effect. In reading the sparse copy
detailing the product’s nutritional information, the reader is expected to have enough background
knowledge to understand that the cheese string’s stated eight grams of protein is high for that of a snack
food, and know that they should desire protein for its body-building benefits. Yet, there is no indication of
how protein works in the body aside from keeping “you active things” (the supposed target market)
“fueled and satisfied.”
Discourse defines what is deemed “thinkable” and “sayable” at a given point in time (Foucault
1971). In these advertisements, health comes from a dedication to the sport and the science that supports
it, with little room for other ways of knowing and being within one’s body. In sharing their one-size-fits-
all biopedagogy, advertisers’ tone is benevolent. Much like health policy that frames being fat as a
personal shortcoming, it takes a decidedly upbeat stance, as if advertisers are simply “looking out for
[their] brothers and sisters!” (LeBesco 2011, p. 161). Indeed, in a neoliberal simplification that ignores
the possibility of complexity and multiplicity, becoming and difference (Lather 2012), the persistence of
apparently science-backed products in this sample implies a one-size-fits-all bodily project that mutes
emotion and intuition. Bale (1993, p. 84) argues that elite runners who blindly yield to the will of their
coaches can become “the ultimate pets” because “they no longer think for themselves” – but the same
could be said for runners who blindly yield to the will of fitness advertisements.
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The terms of these advertisements also mute any argument that rest could be worthwhile, a
practice that appeals to existing unhealthy behavior in running culture. Specifically, injury is considered a
run-of-the-mill or inevitable state of being within the sport, and it is frequently the result of overtraining
(Bridel and Rail 2007). “Obligatory runners” run excessive miles per week and never take a day off,
running despite injury or other personal costs to avoid the guilt, depression and other withdrawal-like
symptoms that emerge when not running (Ogles et al. 1995). Yet, with terms like “obesity epidemic”
embedded in medical and sociocultural discourse (Wright 2009), unhealthy behaviors can appear virtuous.
For this reason, runners cannot let their bodily machines break down. The advertisements that make up the
one-size-fits-all biopedagogy of consuming key ingredients and managing pain show that this mentality
has also penetrated advertising discourse.
The Shape of Speed: In this dataset, most of the female bodies on display are young, white, slim,
and able. Because the women are usually depicted mid workout, as per the body-as-machine style of
communication, the images and accompanying text add to that style by indicating that: (1) running is the
way to achieve a desirable shape; and (2) speed requires slimness. As mentioned, in this sport, the ideal
body is tall and lean without discernable curves. Women’s curves consist partly of fat stores, so “running
off” fat stores can indicate athletic prowess. While there is nothing wrong with this shape on its own, its
repeated depiction within this media domain is worthy of interrogation.
Relatedly, even if the female runner’s curve-free body is indistinguishable from a male runner’s
body, female runners in these advertisements stand out as female thanks to “add ons” like hairstyles and
clothing that communicate traditional femininity. This practice comes with a one-two punch of
objectification and disempowerment. First, in contrast to Grosz’s (1999) theory that the body and mind are
inextricably linked, putting the female head in shadow, blurring it, or omitting it altogether are silencing
devices that limit the extent to which a subject can express identity, emotion, and intelligence through the
face (Schroeder and Borgerson 1998). Second, the marking of female runners as female serves as a
reminder of their separation from men, and the sociocultural significance of these markers as feminine and
therefore “less than” masculine (Ehrnberger et al. 2012), negates the worth of the athlete who wears them.
An advertisement exemplifying this style of communication comes from Jaybird, a company that
makes wireless headphones for athletic lifestyles (see Appendix). The advertisement features the tagline
“Power your run” directly next to the image of a female runner striding up a set of rock steps adjacent to a
beach. The lighting is dim, and her face is in shadow. She is barefoot and wearing a tight spandex tank top
as well as spandex tights. Her body’s shape is such that if the spandex tights were not covered in a floral
pattern and she were not wearing her hair in a flowing ponytail, it would be impossible to discern her sex.
She has a flat chest and the angle at which she is positioned means the reader cannot sense any other
curves aside from that of her triceps, which are softly lit by the setting sun. The chiseled triceps, her
perfect form, and the apparent length of her stride say that she will climb the steps with impressive speed.
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She does not need shoes for the task, nor is she sweating, which implies that this task is effortless for her.
Considering her body type is peppered throughout the dataset, she is not only fast, she is the embodiment
of speed – it is implied that to be equally fast, one must look like her.
By contrast, additional advertisements teach readers how to achieve the ideal running body in a
manner that is not conducive to athletic success. Where interpretation is concerned, the absence of
something is often just as telling as the presence of another. Despite the appearance of food in many
advertisements in this dataset, across the 59 unique advertisements there are no images of a woman
consuming food or indicating she will do so. Women are shown adjacent to their possible running fuel, but
at best, the pair of hands in the string cheese advertisement mentioned above are peeling the string cheese
in what could be a prelude to eating it.
Coupled with the lack of eating on display in these advertisements, the persistent appearance of
conventionally thin, attractive women is an implicit call for weight control. These women are not only
perfectly proportioned, they choose perfectly proportioned food products: individually wrapped pieces of
string cheese, single-serving portions of chocolate milk, and petite containers of protein powder that look
nothing like the ones sold to athletes looking to “bulk up” at the gym. The small sizes reference a diet
restricted in calories for the athlete who has the self control and dedication (both virtuous qualities in a
neoliberal setting) required to execute such a regime. Consuming too little could be desirable, while too
much would be problematic: in the current sociocultural landscape, “there is a near-visceral disgust at
those who show their (over) consumption on their fleshy bodies” (Elliott 2007, p. 142).
Despite their emphasis on sport science and key metrics like calories consumed and burned, these
advertisements seem to forget that fuelling is crucial for runners. Running burns many calories per hour
compared to similarly popular exercises, such as walking, swimming, and biking (Shephard 2011). To
ensure the body is ready for a workout or can recover from a workout, it must be fed with sufficient
calories, but runners often underestimate their caloric needs (Ray and Fowler 2004). With a powerful
weight control tool at their disposal, female runners may desire an ideal body and use diet and exercise as
punishment for their failure to conform to body standards (Krane et al. 2001). The resulting female athlete
triad of disordered eating, abnormal absence of menstruation, and osteoporosis often goes unrecognized,
but can cause setbacks in training or even death (Hobart and Smucker 2000; Sullivan 2002; McMahon and
DinanThompson 2011).
In simultaneously advocating for weight control and athletic performance, the advertisements in
this dataset contribute to a broader sociocultural landscape in which health can be sacrificed for physical
attractiveness (Eskes et al. 1998). By analyzing women’s fitness magazines, Eskes and colleagues (1998)
find an account of an exercise regime undertaken by a reader that proved to be so punishing that the
editors advised not following the accompanying diet plan. Provided stories like this, “readers may be led
to believe that life is not complete unless you are fit, and more important, thin and beautiful” (Eskes et al.
765
1998, p. 329). In this dataset, an implication of this approach is, once again, that sport remains a masculine
domain in two ways. First, the advertisements include women in sport culture, but discursively discount
them as serious competitors by encouraging a preoccupation with weight more so than athletic
performance. Second, while the ideal running body is positioned as a standard for women to strive
towards, it is a masculine body because it has been stripped of its curves, possibly in an unhealthy manner,
implying that women need to be shaped like men in order to be fast runners.
From an interpretivist perspective, advertisements can be read in different ways, but marketers’
communication often relies on tropes or stereotypes that aim to ensure an advertisement is read in a
particular way (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002). Sexist typified images like the ideal running body
“undermine a group’s dignity and historical integrity and cast a demeaning light upon their physical and
intellectual habits” (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002, p. 578). By portraying women in a way that
underscores the body as a site of female identity (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002), these advertisements –
once they are read – might limit how consumers understand and live with their bodies (Coleman 2008).
They are physical manifestations of sociocultural understandings and relationships that devalue women
and ensure their bodies are continuously the focus of any attention placed on them (Gill 2007). An ideal
running body may be an indication of success in the neoliberal realm as someone who is rational,
disciplined, and controlled, but it also requires constant monitoring, surveillance, and consumer spending
if it is to conform to standards of attractiveness (Gill 2007).
The presence of the ideal running body in these advertisements makes a peculiar statement
compared to what magazine staffers told Smith Maguire (2008) in her study on fitness discourse. In
planning their editorial content and advertising, these staffers purposely cast readers in psychographic or
demographic terms (e.g., focused on self-improvement, outgoing, young) rather in terms of how they look.
Similarly, the Runner’s World media kit (Rodale, Inc. 2016) describes its readers using only demographic
information. The approach of constructing the reader in this way is a logical marketing strategy: it serves
to accurately target an accessible, interested segment, but also to sell a magazine’s readership to
advertisers (Smith Maguire 2008). Further, to secure this readership, fitness media’s editorial content
wants readers to be able to “see themselves” in the magazine’s content, which is why they share items like
readers’ success stories, wherein an average person describes their fitness journey. Readers’ body types
are not explicitly defined in this goal, but it can be assumed that they may not conform with the ideal.
Therefore, if a magazine wants readers to identify with its content, the ideal running body – for most
runners – cannot serve this goal, and Pollay’s (1986) decades-old characterization of advertising holding
up “the good life” for consumers to strive towards holds strong.
[Don’t] Go for the Gold: The final style of visual and textual bodily communication in this
dataset’s biopedagogy presents a contradiction that builds on and implicates the two styles outlined above.
Namely, on their surface the advertisements appear to support women’s body work and encourage their
766
athletic success, employing feminism-friendly terms that hint at a message of gender equality. However,
their subtext fails to advocate for or participate in any structural change in women’s favour and doubts
what the female body can accomplish by (1) negating women’s athleticism in general but also in relation
to that of men; and (2) ensuring women are reminded of their place in more traditional realms, such as the
home. This style echoes marketing to women that highlights female athletes’ femininity as opposed to
their athleticism as a way of excluding women from sport culture (Grow 2008) and gender portrayals in
social media, where female athletes typically pose and smile in their profile photos, and male athletes are
typically captured looking away from the camera while engaging in physical activity (Emmons and
Mocarski 2014). Findings from this dataset extend such research contributions to the realm of recreational
endurance running, and differ because again, on the surface, the advertisements take a pronounced pro-
women stance.
An advertisement exemplifying this style of communication comes from the Divas Half
Marathon and 5K, a race series for women (see Appendix). In this advertisement, a woman is running
wearing a pink tutu and tiara. The tagline reads, “You say I run like a diva like it’s a bad thing.” The visual
emphasis placed on the woman and the word “diva” promotes a form of traditional hyper-femininity that
contrasts with the fact that the tagline, along with the race it is advertising, are seemingly creating space
for women to have fun and enjoy running. At a glance, this could be a feminist advertisement. The tagline
and woman’s clothing queer the concept of athlete as masculine (she is both a diva and an athlete). And a
women’s-only race could function as a forum for female runners to engage and organize with one another
for their mutual benefit.
However, the purpose of the race and the accompanying princess attire are not provided.
Moreover, the woman’s casual, bored demeanor hints that the women’s-only race is not for “serious”
athletes. She appears disengaged. Her stride is small, and her feet are barely lifting off the ground. As a
result, the race seems more like a place to contain women than to support them. This finding is
reminiscent of early twentieth century sport-related ideology that contained women in non-competitive
and/or beauty-enhancing sports, wherein their flexibility and gracefulness could be on display (Brace-
Govan 2010).
Elsewhere in the dataset, this message is compounded by women’s placement behind men in
photos, giving them the appearance of being unthreatening: physically smaller and/or slower than their
companions. In an advertisement for Brooks running shoes, a woman is climbing up the lace of a giant
running shoe, out of a chaotic scene at home where her children have made a mess. She may be taking a
break to go for a run, but perhaps she needs to return home to her responsibilities later. On the opposite
page, a man is involved in a similar scene, but his chaotic home scene is swapped for a chaotic boardroom
scene. Combined, the advertisements reference traditional gender roles. In fitness media, the body is
described as one’s most valuable commodity (Eskes et al. 1998), but here women are also reminded of the
767
responsibilities that await them post-workout. These responsibilities are the same ones cited as an
explanation for why fewer women than men fall into obligatory running habits (Ogles et al. 1995).
The contrast between strength and weakness, progress and tradition in these advertisements is
reminiscent of postfeminism, a sentiment often intertwined with neoliberal ideology in contemporary
media like television and advertising but under-researched in the context of fitness advertising. In
postfeminism, women can be portrayed in a traditional or objectified manner, but the portrayals are framed
within a discourse of fun, freedom, and female agency (Gill 2009, 154). In this way, the content
communicates the importance of a fit and attractive form, and simultaneously promotes self-centered
practices that do not achieve any collective goals, despite their framing in feminist terms (Gill 2007). Like
neoliberalism, postfeminist sentiment emphasizes a narrative of free choice and autonomy, which, when
considered in the context of body work, ignores the constraints that influence its availability and
regulation (Gill 2007; Gurrieri et al. 2014).
Further, the light-hearted nature of these advertisements resembles the neoliberal axiom that
choice equals freedom, and therefore empowerment (Shankar et al. 2006). The female runners appear to
be empowered because they choose to exercise and step outside what is expected of women, but a
poststructuralist perspective would say that instead of having power, the women have been shaped by
power (Shankar et al. 2006). Examined from this perspective, the child-like appearance of the running
diva references the “girlification” of adult women observers may desire to gaze upon and possess (Gill
2007). She runs to make a statement of femininity but not feminine power. The female runners occupying
a traditionally masculine space get to compete alongside men but are still slower and less powerful than
men. The escapee mom knows her running is just a hobby – she has more pressing duties to attend to. The
visual and textual bodily communications in this dataset show women having fun (but not too much),
enjoying freedom (but not too much), and exercising agency (but not too much). The hoped-for result is
that consumers will attain desirable neoliberal bodies, while traditional gender norms remain intact.
Conclusion
In the present study, we asked: How might we understand images of female bodies in
advertisements in fitness media? We posed this question against competing backdrops of ideology, events
and structures that, on one hand, have typically excluded women from the masculine domain of sport, or
limited their success wherein, while, on the other hand, have seemingly welcomed women into sporting
life. Employing poststructuralist feminist theory with a hermeneutic methodology, we conducted a critical
reading of advertisements in the January/February 2017 issues of three North American running
magazines.
Our findings show that advertisements targeting female recreational endurance runners mirror
broader trends within the sport. From a macromarketing perspective, advertisements participate in the
contemporary media practice of permitting women a place in sport, but reminding them they may only
768
occupy a certain place. Through a neoliberal biopedagogy that teaches women they should tirelessly strive
to attain perfectly shaped bodies, the advertisements keep the focus on this body rather than on women’s
potential athletic achievements: success in the endurance running arena, for example, or social parity with
men in the sport. In sharing these findings, we contribute to research on the gendered ideology underlying
marketing communication by exploring the particular intersection of sport, the body, and advertising.
We invite future research to refine and build on these findings. In particular, we are interested in
work that shows how fitness advertisements are implicated in female recreational endurance runners’
relationships with their bodies. While we are curious how their reflections on these advertisements mirror
or complement our findings, it is entirely possible that the magazines’ readerships may enjoy the
advertisements – or at least think that they do – as they come to experience themselves as subjects with
creative power in engaging with media (Shankar et al. 2006). Relatedly, we are interested in seeing how
those who cannot attain the ideal running body depicted in advertisements challenge or resist their power,
as was shown to be the case among “fatshionistas” who use blogging as a medium for performative acts
like “coming out as fat” (Gurrieri and Cherrier 2013).
Further, considering this study examined advertisements that appeared in a single issue of three
running magazines, we also suggest future research track how trends in this media landscape emerge and
change over time, and how these representations of women and women’s bodies compare to those of men
and men’s bodies. Examining these separate but related realms could serve to make the male/female
dualities so often found in advertisements and other media more salient. Finally, following Gurrieri and
colleagues (2016), we call for greater scrutiny of the process of generating representations of women in
fitness advertising. Such an inquiry may resemble work from Zayer and Coleman (2015), who explored
advertising professionals’ understandings of their gender portrayals on men and women.
Like Guerrieri and colleagues (2012, 2014), we acknowledge the capacity of advertisements
sharing information about the body to bring about positive social change: it is entirely possible that
advertisements advocating exercise can be helpful and informative to some extent, and to some readers.
Yet, this critical reading highlights styles of visual and textual representation that reproduce and reinforce
elements of sport culture that marginalize and limit female athletes. Since gender research contains an
embedded critical nature that challenges essential sex differences and lays a political agenda for social and
cultural change (Bettany, Dobscha, O’Malley and Prothero, 2010), we ask what an alternative approach to
advertising might look like in this media space. To this end, envisioning a future where women are free to
participate and succeed in sport, unfettered by the pressures associated with the ideal running body,
marketing must be part of the solution rather than part of the problem (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002).
Advertising to female athletes in “good faith” (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002), then, means sharing
images that show the many potential ways of being and looking like a runner.
769
Appendix: Featured Advertisements
Source: Women’s Running, January/February 2017
770
Source: Women’s Running, January/February 2017
771
Source: Women’s Running, January/February 2017
772
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Structures and Bodies that Matter:
Casting an Intersectionality
Perspective on Climate Change
and Women Subsistence Farmers
Laurel Steinfield, Bentley University, USA
Introduction
Around the world, vulnerable, subsistence farmers are disproportionately bearing the effects of
climate change and environmental degradation. Yet what farmers in particular suffer the most?
This question is imperative to ask if marketplace actors and policy makers are to address
resilience in these communities, yet rarely is it considered. This manuscript considers this
question. Applying an intersectionality lens, I demonstrate how female, subsistence farmers in
rural Kenya are at an increased risk and disproportionately bear the effects of climate change.
Intersectionality, as an analytical disposition, directs scholars to examine the overlapping,
multiple oppressions, marginalizations, vulnerabilities, and discriminations that occur as a result
of intersecting identity characteristics (e.g. gender, socio-economic status, nationality or
geographical location). Aligning intersectionality with its historical legacy of critical praxis,90 I
move beyond a focus on identity categories to examine the complexities and power
dissymmetries that cause marginalization, oppressions, vulnerabilities and discrimination (Cho,
Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Collins 2015). These are the structures that need to be transformed
90 Intersectionality’s emergence from critical race-based theories and the writings of Black, Colored, and Latino feminists sought to infuse scholarship with activism to change the structures under study (Cho, Crenshaw, and
McCall 2013; Collins 2015)
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if experiences of oppressions are to change, and as I argue in this paper, if resilience is to be
increased amongst subsistence farmers most vulnerable to climate change.
Based on research conducted with 41 farmers, I deconstruct the varying elements—in
sociocultural and institutional structures and physical embodiments—that contribute to
intensifying their vulnerability, and consider the dilemmas that the actors—both women and
activists/researchers—navigate to improve resilience. This research adds to our understanding of
subsistence marketplaces on three accounts: i) it explores an under-researched area of subsistence
communities— agricultural prosumers; ii) it examines the connection between the human-social
and natural-environmental elements (e.g. climate change); and iii) it deepens our understanding
of gendered structures and physical embodied conditions that perpetuate overlapping oppressions
and intensify vulnerabilities.
Selected References
Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of
Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society 38 (4): 785–810. https://doi.org/10.1086/669608.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.”Annual Review of
Sociology 41:1–20.
783
What flavour is your feminism?
‘Brand activism’ and the corporate
enterprise of women’s
empowerment
Wendy Hein, Birkbeck University of London, UK
Brands, advertising and corporations have traditionally taken advantage of social movements, and
vice versa. As we celebrate the centenary of the suffragette act, we are reminded by the white
dresses of (often privileged) suffragettes, Amelia Bloomer coining women’s liberation through
‘bloomer’ trousers, and in later years, Edward Bernays’ strategic use of women’s ‘torches of
freedom’. These are only some examples of how objects and symbols have become iconic in
activist movements, and how this mechanism has been commercially appropriated.
Although these strategies are well established – by activists and marketers alike - Alex Holder
(2017) wrote in the Guardian that in contemporary times “Sex doesn’t sell any more, activism does.
And don’t the big brands know it”. In her article, she raises examples of Kenco coffee and its
campaign to help young Hondurans into coffee farming to avoid joining gangs, or Starbucks CEO
Howard Schultz’s commitment to hiring 10,000 refugees. Arguably, what is being labelled here as
‘activism’ adds value to products and brands designed for millennial audiences. Feminism and
women’s empowerment is no exception to this as it has seen renewed attention for a number of
years, both by activists and corporations. Campaigns such as Coca Cola’s ’5 by 20’ vow to
empower 5 million female entrepreneurs across its value chain. Creativity is now rated according
to how well brands can link to social issues, which in turn have become are branded in their own
right. HeForShe, Everyday Sexism, Free The Nipple, MeToo, and Time’s Up have all become
familiar campaign brands.
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The main question this paper seeks to tackle is how (un)easy this link between (corporate) branding
and activism has become. Specifically, what are the ethics behind this essentially neoliberalist
branding and consumption of feminism? How are these ethics raised within these campaigns?
Critically, who benefits from this kind of feminism, how and why? As history of marketing tells
us, marketing and activism have a lot in common. Yet, questions remain of whether and how
contemporary ‘activist branding’ linked to feminism is distinctive.
This paper thus seeks to contribute conceptual and critical perspectives on contemporary neoliberal
feminist branding and consumption, and questions its ethic, roles and mechanisms in this
proclaimed ‘age of the woman’. The conceptualisations offered here draw on emergent literature
documenting the rise of neoliberal feminism (Fraser 2013; Prugl 2015, Rottenberg 2018), and span
across ethics of feminist marketisation to consumption. It builds on meanings of activism and social
movements, feminism’s historical use or rejection of markets and marketing (Maclaran 2012),
appropriation of marketing techniques (Scott 2005, 2006), and addresses ethics of ‘classical
campaigns’ following Coleman’s (2013) work and methodologies. Concepts are also based on
long-term observations of various organisations that have claimed to pursue women’s
empowerment in the media, creative industries and on corporate levels.
Based on these initial insights, it is argued that we can differentiate between feminist brands within
these activist brands (Lazar 2007), and that consumer ethics vary across campaigns (Johnston and
Taylor 2008). The corporate framing of the neoliberal consumer centres on using the feminist
movement for their benefit rather than addressing ‘radical’ feminist issues. The notion of an
existence of brand activism is therefore debatable, in the sense that this activism often does not go
further beyond personal self-interest. Further, it is important to recognise the complexities of the
social issues that corporations are tapping into, and the far-reaching (possibly unintended)
consequences their involvement may have (Hein et al, 2016). It is important to carefully examine
the contemporary dynamics of these campaigns as well as related corporate and communication
activities, and raise questions of how consumers can use these feminist movements towards
returning to ‘real’ feminist and social justice issues.
785
References:
Coleman, C. A. (2013). “Classic campaigns- “It's Gotta Be the Shoes": Nike, Mike and Mars and
the Sneaker Killings". Advertising & Society Review, 14(2).
Hein, W., Steinfield, L., Ourahmoune, N., Coleman, C. A., Zayer, L. T., & Littlefield, J. (2016).
Gender justice and the market: A transformative consumer research perspective. Journal of Public
Policy & Marketing, 35(2), 223-236.
Holder, A. (2017). “Sex doesn’t sell any more, activism does. And don’t the big brands know it”,
The Guardian, 3rd February, available at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/03/activism-sells-brands-social-
conscience-advertising.
Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis.
Verso: London.
Johnston, J., & Taylor, J. (2008). Feminist consumerism and fat activists: A comparative study of
grassroots activism and the Dove real beauty campaign. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, 33(4), 941-966.
Lazar, M. M. (2006). “Discover the power of femininity!” Analyzing global “power femininity” in
local advertising. Feminist Media Studies, 6(4), 505-517.
Maclaran, P. (2012). Marketing and feminism in historic perspective. Journal of Historical
Research in Marketing, 4(3), 462-469.
Prügl, E. (2015). Neoliberalising feminism. New Political Economy, 20(4), 614-631.
Rottenberg, C.A. (2018 – forthcoming). The rise of neoliberal feminism. Oxford University Press:
Oxford.
Scott, L. M. (2005). Fresh Lipstick: Reddressing Fashion and Feminism. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Scott, L. M. (2006). Market feminism: The case for a paradigm shift. Advertising & Society Review,
7(2).
786
Market In/Equalities
– Forms & Practices I
Track Chair: Martina Hutton
Co-Chair(s): Maria Piacentini
787
Persuasion: an Engine of
Inequality?
Teresa Pereira-Heath, Nottingham University Business School, UK
Robert Cluley, Nottingham University Business School, UK
“He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill; deserted and disappointed him […]
She has given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been
weakness and timidity” (Jane Austen, Persuasion, p. 57)
In her introduction to Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”, Beer (2011) discusses how Austen sees
persuasion as “fraught with moral dangers” (p. xv). Good intentions may inspire persuasive
manoeuvres (as for Lady Russell), but good effects are not guaranteed and the moral justification
is questionable. The power gap between young, vulnerable Anne and wealthy Lady Russell makes
Russell’s dissuading Anne from marrying the man with whom she is in love especially problematic.
Likewise, inequalities between consumers and the marketplace raise moral questions about
marketing persuasion, especially since this persuasion is primarily aimed at benefitting the
persuader.
Persuasion is at the heart of marketing practice; not only commercial marketing but broader
applications of the concept (Kotler and Levy 1969) seek to persuade individuals into thinking and
acting in ways favourable to the company, organization, cause or individual it represents.
Persuasive messages have the ability to change consumers’ thoughts and behaviour (McGuire
2000), which makes them both powerful and in need of moral scrutiny. Persuasion also underscores
much of the criticism that marketing encounters; that marketing is “perhaps the most controversial
subdiscipline of the management sciences” is mostly due to “its role in influencing customers.”
(Alvesson 1994, p. 292). More recently, Miles (2013) posited that a discomfort towards the use of
788
persuasion was the unifying factor behind a range of criticisms that, based on diverse premises and
arguments, described marketing communication as somehow magical. Miles (2013) further argued
that the underlying suspicion of persuasion amongst marketing scholars was unhelpful.
Nevertheless, the concept of persuasion has been largely underexplored in marketing literature.
This manuscript identifies marketing persuasion as an important factor in explaining inequalities
between marketers and consumers and it examines how persuasion not only underlies many of
these inequalities but also exacerbates them.
Persuasion is generally seen as an art or skill required for success in life, one of individuals’ “most
valuable sociocognitive resources” (Friestad and Wright 1999, p. 185), and persuasive
communication has been used both for personal and social purposes at least since the Neolithic
period (McGuire, 2000). The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology traces back the use of the word
to 1513 in Sir Thomas More’s “History of King Richard III”, where the verb persuade is associated
with the act of “induc[ing] (a person) to believe or do something” (Barnhart and Steinmetz 2008,
p. 781). There, and in other writings, as well as in colloquial uses, persuasion is often taken to mean
something morally questionable, despite the valuable skill that it might represent. Its bad reputation
has been aggravated by examples from history (e.g. Nazi propaganda), which brought to light the
dangers of skilfully crafted and persistent rhetoric (Bytwerk 2005).
Persuasion’s powerful effects are not alien to businesses; they spend considerable resources on
investigating consumers’ motivations and preferences (Kilbourne 1999) and then on constructing
and disseminating persuasive messages (Ellis et al. 2011). Powerful brands, carefully constructed
content and enchanted spaces of consumption (Miles 2010; Ritzer 2010) all conspire to seduce. As
consumers grow to understand and resist persuasive efforts, marketers adopt new tactics to
counteract (Nelson 2013) and infiltrate spaces of resistance (Stoeckl and Luedicke 2014). Thus,
while social media technologies allow consumers to share useful information and feedback on
brands and companies in ways that empower them, businesses have found creative ways to
appropriate these channels to their advantage, so as to, for example enhance “customer
engagement” (Ashley and Tuten 2015). Other technological advances, such as neuroscience
(developed to enhance individuals’ health and well-being), are harnessed by marketing to obtain
novel and powerful insights into the workings of consumers’ brains in face of marketing stimuli
(Murphy, Illes and Reiner 2008). Contrary to narratives of consumer sovereignty, consumers have
their autonomy (Ellis et al. 2011; Tadajewski 2018) and power to resist depleted by these and other
marketing practices (Stoeckl and Luedicke 2014).
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Consumers’ weakness is exacerbated by the materialistic discourses that they encounter daily from
different cultural agents (e.g. advertising, film industry, press), and which accentuate inequalities
in the marketplace; “The idea that only a diamond signifies the permanent commitment for a happy,
lasting marriage can be a hardship to those who cannot manage the expense.” (Marlin 2013, p.195).
While challenging for some individuals, such discourses are persuasive in that they imbue
marketing offers with powerful symbolic meanings that promise to transform individuals’
conditions, being these securing or extending their identities and status, finding love or comfort,
receiving forgiveness or achieving any other mediated benefit (see Baudrillard 1998; Gabriel and
Lang 2015). Such narratives, supported by a neoliberal agenda (Shankar, Wittaker and Fitchett
2006; Heath and Heath 2016), may appear individually relatively inconsequential but when
aggregate make consumption “a top-of-mind behaviour” (Pollay 1986, p. 21). In such
circumstances, persuading individuals into individuals’ acts of consumption is made easier, since
consumption has been pre-legitimated.
As persuasion is normalized, it falls on the consumer to resist it. Knowledge about persuasion
related to marketplace phenomena is often viewed as common sense (Friestad and Wright 1999)
and used as justification for ethically questionable marketing practices (Heath and Chatzidakis
2012). Caveat emptor arguments overlook that consumers vary in their ability to discern
manipulative techniques, to resist persuasion or indeed to afford purchases. Individual
characteristics (e.g. age, ability), individual states (e.g. mood, grief) and external conditions can all
contribute to a consumer’s vulnerability in a consumption context (Baker et al 2005; see also
Andreasen 1957). In such circumstances, consumers “depend on external factors (e.g. marketers)
to create fairness in the marketplace.” (Baker et al 2005, p. 134). However, rather than restoring
equality, marketing often take advantage of such vulnerabilities. Thus, for example, advertisers for
baby products know that new mothers can be especially susceptible to messages alluding to their
babies’ safety and comfort, while money-lenders understand that those in desperate need for money
may overlook future interest rates.
In effect, marketing persuasion often thrives under conditions of inequality for these allow to
convince disadvantaged individuals that their status, image, knowledge, health or any other
perceived weakness may be restored (at least partially) by commodities. An unexperienced mother
can find comfort on buying from Johnson’s, which has been “Trusted by mums for over 125 years”,
while those borrowing money can aspire to some of the comforts and status enjoyed by the higher
social classes. At the same time, more advantaged individuals are kept separated, in a distinguished
790
position that selected marketing offers and communication help to secure. Luxury brands and those,
such as “fast-fashion” retailers, that operate further down the economic scale both directly benefit
from steep inequalities via the processes outlined by Veblen (1899); those at the top are able to
assert their position with the purchase and display of exclusive high-priced good while many more,
less privileged consumers are keen to buy the best approximation to the consumption choices of
the rich that they can afford, in order to obtain some reflection of their status.
While marketing segmentation is useful to effectively target (and make use of) structural
inequalities amongst consumers, marketers’ privileged access to media widens the gap in power
between themselves and consumers and helps to further shape market inequalities. Couldry (2000)
argues that, in analogy to Durkheim’s dichotomy of the sacred and profane, the media’s symbolic
power is created and reproduced by a social division of objects, spaces and people into “media”
and “ordinary”. An unequal power relation between “the media” and “ordinary people” is
reproduced through, amongst other things, “the media’s authority as the principle source of social
facts” (p. 178). That is to say, the media’s position of being listened to and believed keeps them in
a position of power. Since marketing and the media overlap and rely on one another to a large
degree, this self-reinforcing power of the media over “ordinary people” provides a means by which
the power that marketing holds over consumers can also reproduce and naturalise itself. Marketers
are, after all, major producers of media, in the form of advertising, social media posts, branding
and even text on packaging and can afford to place it in prominent and authoritative positions.
Through this production and through relationships with content creators and celebrities, marketers
can imbue their products with the specialness of the media world and gain control of part of the
symbolic power that this entails. More concretely, the marketer can use the authority of prominent
media platforms (and the insights collected from the market) to dictate culturally shared meanings
of their brands, which a consumer cannot hope to influence to a comparable extent. In so doing,
marketers can also rely on their army of loyal consumers who are advocates for their brands and
help to persuade others. This again can be especially effective when dealing with vulnerable groups,
such as children. As Susan Linn, a professor of Psychiatry, said in the movie “The Corporation”,
on the subject of marketing directed to encourage children to persuade (“nag”) their parents to buy
them the advertised products or services, “One family cannot combat an industry that spends twelve
billion dollars a year trying to get their children, they can’t do it”.
Thus, in so far as marketers have access to a vast array of tools and expertise to construct persuasive
material and have their activities legitimised by the dominant social paradigm, while consumers’
791
resources, ability and power to understand (and resist) such persuasion are limited, marketers’
interactions with consumers are necessarily uneven. Such inequality is both used by marketers to
strengthen their influence and is also exacerbated by this persuasion. Consumption is very much
about distinguishing oneself from others in terms of taste, status and ultimately power (Alvesson
1994); as long as inequalities persist, persuasive messages can be carefully tailored to hone the
superiority of the privileged, and nurture the aspirations and dreams of the rest. Establishing
equality requires understanding of the ways in which marketing power rests on such inequalities as
well as of the effects and ethical grounds of its persuasion.
References
Alvesson, Mats (1994), “Critical Theory and Consumer Marketing,” Scandinavian Journal
Management, 10(3), 291-313.
Andreasen, Alan R. (1975), The disadvantaged consumer. New York: Free Press.
Ashley, C. and Tuten, T. (2015), “Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory
study of branded social content and consumer engagement,” Psychology & Marketing, 32(1),
15-27.
Austen, Jane (1818/2011). Persuasion. London: Penguin Classics.
Baker, S.M., Gentry, J.W. and Rittenburg, T.L., (2005), “Building understanding of the domain of
consumer vulnerability,” Journal of Macromarketing, 25(2), pp.128-139.
Baudrillard, Jean (1998), The Consumer Society – Myths and Structures. Nottingham: Sage.
Beer, G. (2011), Introduction to Jane Austen’s Persuasion. London: Penguin Classics.
Bytwerk, R. (2005), “The Argument for Genocide in Nazi Propaganda,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 91(1), pp. 37-62.
Barnhart, R. K. and Steinmetz, S. (eds.) (2008), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (2008),
Edinburgh: WS Bookwell Ltd.
Couldry, Nick (2000), The Place of Media Power. London and New York: Routledge.
792
Ellis, N., Fitchett, J., Higgins, M., Jack, G., Lim, M., Saren, M., & Tadajewski, M. (2011),
Marketing – A Critical Textbook. London: Sage Publications.
Friestad, M. and Wright, P. (1999), “Everyday Persuasion Knowledge,” Psychology and
Marketing, 16(2), 185-194.
Gabriel, Yiannis and Lang, Tim (2015), The Unmanageable Consumer. London: Sage Publications
Ltd.
Heath, T. and Heath, M. J. (2008), “(Mis)trust in Marketing: a Reflection on Consumers’ Attitudes
and Perceptions,” Journal of Marketing Management, 24(9-10), 1025-1039.
Heath, T. and Chatzidakis, A. (2012). “The Transformative Potential of Marketing from the
Consumers’ Point of View,” Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 11 (4), 283-291.
Heath, T. and Heath, M. (2016), “Once Upon a Time there was a Consumer: Stories of Marketing
and the Marketing of Stories,” Journal of Marketing Management, 32(9-10), 811-826.
Kilbourne, Jean (1999), Deadly Persuasion – Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive
Power of Advertising. New York: the Free Press.
Kotler, Phillip and Levy, Sidney J. (1969), “Broadening the Concept of Marketing,” Journal of
Marketing, 33 (January), 10-15.
Marlin, Randal (2013), Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Toronto, Ontario: New South
Books.
McGuire, William J. (2000), “Standing on the Shoulders of Ancients: Consumer Research,
Persuasion, and Figurative Language,” Journal of Consumer Research, 27, 109-114.
Nelson, M.R., (2008), “The hidden persuaders: then and now,” Journal of Advertising, 37(1), 113-
126.
Miles, C. (2013), “Persuasion, marketing communication, and the metaphor of magic,”, European
Journal of Marketing, 47(11/12), 2002-2019.
Miles, S. (2010), Spaces for Consumption, London: Sage.
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Murphy, E.R., Illes, J. and Reiner, P.B., (2008), “Neuroethics of neuromarketing,” Journal of
Consumer Behaviour, 7(4‐5), 93-302.
Nelson, Michelle R. (2013), “The Hidden Persuaders: Then and Now,” Journal of Advertising,
37(1), 113-126.
Ritzer, G. (2010), Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals of
Consumption (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications Ltd.
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794
Exploring market inequalities
through the biography of surplus
food
Gillian Hopkinson91, Lancaster University Management School, UK
The research puzzle
Food waste and food insecurity are now both widely recognised as pressing social problems. The
two are frequently juxtaposed as two problems with a mutual solution – food redistribution from
a more affluent market of plenty to charities and third sector organisations where food can
combat hunger and also often address other inequalities. Surplus food from farmers,
manufacturers or supermarkets is thus provided at minimal subscription prices to projects such as
‘magic breakfasts’ (in schools), elderly lunch clubs, homeless hostels and social supermarkets.
What is noticeable in many of these projects is that food is not only used to reduce hunger, but
also as a necessary plank from which other inequalities may be tackled through benefit advice,
employment-ready clinics, social activities to combat loneliness, to increase school involvement
and so on.
However, the effect of food redistribution on poverty and market inequality is contested. On the
one hand the quantities of food provided through the complex redistribution networks is
impressive (FareShare, 2017) so that many commentators portray the programmes as an effective
means to redress food inequality. On the other hand, critics argue that food redistribution
depoliticises the issue of hunger, institutionalises the poverty that the food industry now requires
as a means of managing waste, stigmatises the poor and removes their agency and denies their
nutritional and cultural needs (Poppendieck, 1999). Additionally, the programmes very often are
managed and delivered by outsiders and as such reinforce an extant social hierarchy (Wakefield
795
et al, 2013). Does food redistribution entrench inequality and fail to address (even amplify) its
drivers? Or is it an effective and pragmatic solution to two problems (eg Tinneman et al., 2012)?
If one can see some truth in both perspectives then how might we appraise the effects according
to the varieties of food redistribution (as indicated by Alexander and Smaje 2008) – the types of
food, differences in the focus and organisation of different projects?
In this paper I look at the particular perspectives that can be drawn from marketing theory to help
us explore these questions. I look also at how marketing theory and our knowledge of market
inequalities and their intersections (for example inequalities surrounding lack of food, loneliness,
poor access to employment) can be enriched by an understanding of the networks of food
redistribution. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly to develop a theoretic framework through
which food redistribution can be analysed. Secondly to propose a methodology for the further
study of food redistribution and to discuss the ethical and practical issues that arise.
The conceptual inspiration
Questions of value have been important to marketers for some time: here I propose that an
approach drawing largely from market studies provides a uniquely illuminating approach to
examine exchanges and value – in essence therefore providing a means to examine how food
redistribution creates value across a range of inequalities. Market studies is apposite for two
reasons in particular, both derive from its rejection of essentialism and view of phenomena as
constructed within social process. Firstly, then, this approach rejects an emphasis on sellers and
consumers and forces us to give equal consideration to both in order to understand exchanges.
Secondly, and with an emphasis placed on process, market studies prioritises verbs over nouns
and looks at, for example how value is done from multiple perspectives, and how viable markets
are made through exchange. This latter point allows us to appreciate the fluidity of phenomena,
how something (the object of exchange or the actors and actions) is redefined and re-cognized.
The approach thus has promise in terms of analysing how an object is redefined from ‘necessary’
(for marketing reasons) waste as a liability for retailers to perishable stock that retains clients
within the redistribution network and then an attention boosting and attainment enhancing
breakfast asset in an educational context, or a reason to get to school early for a child, for
example. Using concepts from market studies developed around valuation, where value is
constructed, contingent, multiple, fluid yet underpins the creation of exchange markets, we can
get a better view of multiple objectives and perspectives, how these mesh together to enable
796
exchange and therefore how we might more completely understand the contribution (for better or
worse) of food redistribution to inequalities.
Methodological approach
The product biography has been widely used by those interested in global value chains. The
method closely follows an object from production to consumption and through its various points
of exchange – and is therefore well suited to explore the multiple and very diverse contexts in
which redistributed food lives its social life. The object is considered not only in financial terms
but as one embedded in the social and cultural practices with which it comes into contact. For
Spring and Araujo (2017) the method is valuable in marketing theory because it allows us to see
how objects become requalified and particularised (re-cognized and re-valued) through the chain.
Given the variation identified in the value of food across the multiple contexts served by
redistribution, it is proposed that an object biography can be used to follow food consignments
from the point of identification as ‘excess’ through to its consumption or disposal. Excess bread
retrieved from one manufacturer in one day, for example, these might be collected by several
local charities and some remain for disposal by the manufacturer. The method would allow us to
track the change in form across sites and the requalification of the object as this is explained by
the actors – as school breakfast toast, or in a night soup run amongst street sleepers, for example.
This might be replicated across contrasting food types such as ready meals originating from a
supermarket or cauliflowers gleaned from a farm (declaration of personal interest: I glean).
Development of the research
It is hoped that further pilot examples will be available for discussion at the conference –
however, the approach advocated here clearly raises research ethics and practical challenges
which opens questions for the audience. Additionally, however, the approach opens up
possibilities of very practical outcomes for industry, policy and social organisations. Specifically,
how might constructed and multiple understandings of value in food redistribution be used in
formulating policy and practice? How might a deep understanding of valuation throughout the
complex network of food redistribution help us to appreciate how, and to what extant, inequalities
can be redressed through food and how can that be objectively appraised and counted to inform
policies? If what is counted counts, what part might the research presented here play in shaping
food redistribution towards redressing rather than accentuating inequalities?
797
References
Alexander, Catherine, and Chris Smaje. "Surplus retail food redistribution: An analysis of a third
sector model." Resources, conservation and recycling 52.11 (2008): 1290-1298.
FareShare (2017) Report and financial statements for the year ending 31 March 2017. Available
at: http://fareshare.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/FareShare-annual-report-and-financial-
statements-2016-2017.pdf
Poppendieck, J. (1999). Sweet charity?: Emergency food and the end of entitlement. Penguin.
Spring, M., & Araujo, L. (2017). Product biographies in servitization and the circular economy.
Industrial Marketing Management, 60, 126-137.
Tinnemann, Peter, et al. "Healthy action against poverty: a descriptive analysis of food
redistribution charity clients in Berlin, Germany." The European Journal of Public Health 22.5
(2011): 721-726.
Wakefield, S., Fleming, J., Klassen, C., & Skinner, A. (2013). Sweet Charity, revisited:
Organizational responses to food insecurity in Hamilton and Toronto, Canada. Critical Social
Policy, 33(3), 427-450.
798
The care-less marketplace:
exclusion as affective inequality
Martina Hutton, University of Winchester, UK
Abstract
The care-less marketplace is a discrete site which reinforces structural inequality in the affective
domain of life. Drawing on the work of pro-care feminist theory, this empirical paper explores
marketplace exclusion from the perspective of economic disadvantage and its impact on relations
of love, care and solidarity. Adopting a voice-centred-relational approach, this interpretative
study examines the narrative accounts of a diverse group of women living in diverse poverty
contexts. Articulating marketplace exclusion as a series of affective burdens, material struggles
and disconnections embedded within the relational web of family, friends and community - these
experiences mirror participants’ imposed exclusion in the marketplace due to chronic economic
hardship. Through the diffusion of an alternative theoretical lens, affective inequality surfaces the
importance of care and how it is often most visible in the lives of vulnerable consumers when it is
absent or broken.
Keywords: Affective inequality, care-less, marketplace exclusion, poverty, relational
799
Extended Abstract
While people are undoubtedly economic actors and consumers, neither their rationality nor their
economic consumer choices can be presumed to be devoid of relationality (Gilligan, 1982, 1995;
Lynch, Lyons and Cantillon, 2007). Yet the very notion of the consumer as a relationally
engaged person navigating the marketplace, whilst simultaneously experiencing discrimination
and antagonism, is somewhat overlooked in consumer research. This paper therefore explores
marketplace exclusion from the perspective of economic disadvantage and traces its impact on
relations of love, care and solidarity as a consequence, to characterise the marketplace as care-
less – a generative site of structural inequality in the affective domain of life. As a contribution,
the paper extends the concept of affective inequality as a new theoretical approach for articulating
experiences of marketplace exclusion as it intersects with impoverishment. Moreover, at the
economic-affective interface, this paper defines experiences of affective inequality as disrespect,
relational carelessness and emotional disconnection. Despite growing recognition among scholars
of the importance of marketplace exclusion, the daily, invisible forms of affective suffering such
as anxiety, worthlessness, and discrimination, embedded in ordinary relationships and
interactions remains a neglected area of inquiry (Illouz, 2012). Furthermore, consumer
researchers have not succeeded in problematizing relational or affective issues in depth within the
context of poverty, particularly from the perspectives of those who sit on the periphery of this
social reality.
Drawing on the theoretical foundations of pro-care feminist theory which examines the
complexity with which power relations, exploitation and discrimination are embedded in all
manner of care relations (Folbre, 1994; Kittay, 1999; Nussbaum, 2001; Tronto, 2002), this paper
extends the lens of affective inequality to our understanding of marketplace exclusion, to dissolve
the conventional distinctions between the public and private realities of consumption. This is
important to draw attention to how the affective system and market system as structural sites, co-
constitute and reinforce emotional injustice for women who are already economically and
socially compromised.
The affective system is concerned with providing and sustaining relationships of love,
care and solidarity. These three elements are integral components of the affective domain of life,
as each element involves work that produces outcomes that can be seen and felt, if not always
easily measured or quantified. Care relations within the affective domain takes three main forms
800
and can be explained using the concentric view of care relations developed by Lynch, Baker and
Lyons (2009). Firstly, primary care relations (also known as love labour) typically relate to the
intimate sphere of the family and are defined by their strong attachments, interdependence and
depth of engagement. Secondary care relations are comprised of relatives, friends, neighbours and
work colleagues where there are lower order engagements in terms of emotional investment and
time but require general care work nonetheless to maintain important bonds and networks.
Finally, tertiary care relations comprise of solidarity work and involve relatively unknown others
for whom we care politically or economically though volunteering and activism. What each of
these care relations have in common is the varying degree of dependency and interdependency,
relations of giving and receiving and power relations.
The affective system does not operate in structural isolation, extending beyond the family,
into many other social structures, arrangements and institutions. It influences the operation of the
political, economic and cultural systems, insofar as it enables or disables people to engage in
those fields (Baker et al. 2004, 219). For example, in the gendered division of labour, women
undertake more care work than men in all classes, with poorer, working class, ethnic minority and
migrant women undertaking a disproportionately high level of caring (Lynch and Walsh, 2009),
relative to higher status groups. This is despite the fact that their resources to do so are often
limited and these constraints impact their equal representation in political and economic domains.
The interaction of affective and other inequalities is also visible in the lives of economic migrants
cut off from family and friends, as well as people experiencing poverty who are viewed as
unworthy, in a consumer-defined world (Blocker et al. 2011, 2013; Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 2004).
It has also been observed in the lives of prisoners whose experiences of isolation render them
dehumanised and denied of any meaningful, caring contact (Hill et al, 2015). As a consequence,
affective inequality can take three forms: i) when people have unequal access to meaningful,
loving and caring relationships, ii) when there is inequality in the distribution of the emotional
and other work that produces and sustains such relationships (Lynch et al., 2009) and iii) when
people have unequal economic resources which impact on their relations of love and care through
relational dis(connections) and intra-household inequalities (Cappellini, Marilli, and Parsons,
2014; Hutton, 2015). Egalitarian theorists have highlighted how little explicit attention has been
given to the negative counterpart of affective relations – relations of hatred, abuse and social
animosity (Lynch et al., 2009). Thus, it is important to consider a reconceptualization of affective
801
inequality as it interfaces with marketplace dynamics through disrespect, relational carelessness
and emotional disconnection.
As economic and emotional spheres in society become increasingly blurred (c.f. Illouz,
2007), inequality is a particular risk when the attention is solely focused on the individual and
their experience of pain, rather than the social and cultural systems in which care and compassion
is lacking or present (McRobbie, 2002). The affective system therefore represents an important
site of social relations that requires problematizing (Baker et al., 2004) as it intersects with the
economic system of the marketplace.
This paper traces the web of relational exclusions which characterise affective inequality
as it interfaces with economic disadvantage. Findings will demonstrate how the individualising
and isolating nature of the market undermines the affective norms of trust, mutuality and respect,
with marketplace interactions and consumption pressures placing tremendous strain on
participants’ care relations. Individualisation from the point of view of participants means, that
concern or care for others has steadily evaporated within mainstream society and has been
replaced with an indifference towards those less privileged. The dissolving empathy, the
intensification of disconnection, and disrespect (Pemberton, et al., 2014), participants’
experience, reinforce their status as citizens of “unequal worth” (Lister, 2004). Findings explore
the interface between the economic and the affective spheres highlighting how participants
oscillate between family, community and consumption pressure on limited incomes, with the
influence and power of the marketplace occupying a constant presence in their lives. To illustrate
this, two new themes are introduced; i) material struggles and disconnections and ii) affective
burdens. These themes explore the circuits of relational conflict located in the everyday lives of
women, as they reconcile the tension of impoverished marketplace interactions with the
judgement and disrespect of others.
The care-less marketplace not only excludes but continually creates and reproduces
inequalities in women’s resources, perpetuating inequalities of power and status and places
tremendous strain on their affective relations with others. Although affective inequality remains a
multi-faceted and emerging construct, this new conceptual approach encourages a different
appraisal of what constitutes marketplace exclusion within the context of economic disadvantage,
framed around structured inequality, based on relational conditions and emotional injustices.
There is a need to redefine our understanding of the active consumer from one that centres on the
public persona, the economic, political and cultural actor in the public sphere of the marketplace,
802
to one that recognises consumers as endemically dependent and interdependent. Attention to both
the everyday life experiences of pain, suffering and compassion – and to the wider context that
generate these - can create the possibilities for intervention in the structural conditions that
promote suffering (Singleton and Mee 2017). If we are concerned about the well-being of
individuals in general, and marketplace inequality in particular, we can no longer afford to ignore
the significance of the affective dimensions of human experience as they relate to and interact
with marketplace and consumption dynamics.
References
Baker, John., Kathleen Lynch, Sara Cantillon, and Judy Walsh. 2004. Equality: from theory to
action, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Blocker, Christopher. P., Julie A. Ruth, Srinivas Sridharan, Colin Beckwith, Ahmet Ekici, Martina
Hutton, Jose Antonio Rosa, Bige Saatcioglu, Debabrata Talukdar, Carloe Trujillo and Rohit
Varman. 2013. “Understanding Poverty and Promoting Poverty Alleviation through
Transformative Consumer Research”. Journal of Business Research, 66, 1195-1202.
Cappellini, Benedetta, Alessandra Marilli and Elizabeth Parsons. 2014.” The hidden work of
coping: Gender and the micro-politics of household consumption in times of austerity.”
Journal of Marketing Management, 30(15–16): 1597–1624.
Folbre, Nancy. 1994. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint, London:
Routledge.
Gilligan, Carole. 1982. In a different voice, Cambridge; Harvard University Press.
Gilligan, Carole. 1995. “Hearing the difference: theorizing connection.” Hypatia, 10 (2): 120–
127.
Hill, Ronald Paul, Justine Rapp, Michael L. Capella and the Gramercy Gentlemen. 2015.
“Consumption Restriction in a Total Control Institution: Participatory Action Research in
a Maximum Security Prison.” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 34 (2): 156-172.
803
Hutton, Martina. 2015. “Consuming Stress: Exploring Hidden Dimensions of Consumption-related
Strain at the Intersection of Gender & Poverty. Journal of Marketing Management, 31. (15-
16). 1695-1717
Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Illouz, Eva. 2012. Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kittay, Eva .F. 1999. Love’s Labor. New York: Routledge.
Lister, Ruth. 2004. Poverty. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lynch, Kathleen, John Baker and Maureen Lyons. 2009. Affective equality: Love, care and
injustice London; Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lynch, K., M. Lyons, and S. Cantillon. 2007. “Breaking silence: educating citizens for love, care
and solidarity.” International Studies in Sociology of Education, 17, 1-19.
McRobbie, Angela. 2002. ‘A Mixed Bag Of Misfortunes?: Bourdieu’s Weight of the World’,
Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (3): 129–138.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pemberton, Simon, Eileen Sutton, Eldin Fahmy and Karen Bell. 2014. “Life on a low-income in
austere times”. Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK Report: ESRC.
Sayer, Andrew. 2005. “Class, Moral Worth and Recognition” Sociology, 39 (5): 947-963.
Singleton, Vicky. and Steve Mee. 2017. “Critical compassion: Affect, discretion and policy-care
relations.” The Sociological Review Monographs, 65(2); 130-149.
Skeggs, Beverly. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge.
Tronto, Joan.C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York:
Routledge.
804
Negotiating (in)equalities around
intercultural relationships
Donal Rogan, Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Ireland
Extended Abstract
There is an increasing body of consumer research on how intercultural interactions in this age of
migration (Castles and Miller, 2007) shape consumer behaviour (e.g. Cross and Gilly, 2013; Cross
and Gilly, 2014; Luedicke, 2015). This paper argues that exploring issues around the dialectics of
equality and inequality at one such intercultural intersection - the intercultural household, helps
reveal how such dialectic tensions are negotiated and in what ways these negotiations influence
consumer behaviour. The paper illuminates a range of dialectic tensions around (in)equality within
intercultural relationships and elaborates on the some of the ways in which these tensions are
negotiated.
This study took place in Ireland, which has become a distinctive new regional space of migration
and mobility. The largest group of ‘East-West (European) free movers’ (Favell, 2008) in the
immigration boom since 2004 came from Poland. The participants’ social ecology and the context
for this study is one characterised, on the one hand by evidence of the effects of domination on
Polish people in Ireland, especially in the employment market and on the other by increasing
numbers of intercultural relationships. This study is based on individual and joint interviews with
fifteen Polish/Irish intercultural couples. In addition, a small number of accompanied shopping
trips to Polish groceries provided opportunities for observation. This study takes a relational
perspective. A relational dialectic analysis (Baxter and Montgomery, 1998) is used to illuminate
relational tensions around (in)equality. Relational dialectic analysis involves finding unifying
features and locating differences; the theory has been used extensively to examine various aspects
of relational dynamics. To be resolved, such tensions require a ‘both/and’ approach, leading to a
805
fusing or synthesizing of perspectives, while sustaining and embedding uniqueness (Conville,
2008).
This paper also uses the example of one intermediate marketing system (Hunt and Burnett, 1982),
the Polish grocery shop, to explore how its consumption is an example of the nexus between the
couples’ relational culture and their broader social ecology. Several researchers (Penaloza, 1994;
Cross and Gilly, 2013; Luedicke, 2015) have documented the role of retail institutions in consumer
acculturation processes. For many participants in this study, the shops are an anchor to the
homeland, facilitate cultural mediation and expression and are often framed as purveyors of
superior products. Unlike the much larger and more mainstream supermarket chains, whose market
dominance is often criticised, the Polish shop is often framed as a liberating and equalising
alternative, which leads to changes in household shopping practices. Fournier (1998) described
how consumers come to know and trust retail outlets and for many participants the Polish grocery
also enables cultural mediation (Bochner, 1982), as individual shoppers attempt to act as links
between different cultural systems by introducing, translating, representing and reconciling
cultures to each other.
The Polish shops also create both symbolic and social (Lamont and Molnár, 2002) boundaries.
Tilly (1998) argued that inequalities are inherently relational and categorical and this study also
illuminates some of the relational dialectic tensions around practices that constitute market level
inequalities. The Polish shops sometimes enable cultural separation. Tensions arise around the use
or non-use of English for example, which is perceived by some as an attempt at creating an unequal
access. Askegaard and Kjeldgaard (2002) observed that people reflexively interpret the meanings
embedded in marketplace resources differently. In their consumption of the Polish shop, the
participants in this study revealed not only a range of tension reducing strategies, but also a range
of embedded meanings around these shops. The shops sometimes enable a bridging of personal
agency with social structure. According to Ahern (2001, p. 112), agency is not infinite or unfettered
but it references “the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act”. The Polish shops enable everyday
practice, but this is often subject to tensions in the couples’ social ecology. Ideas that the shops
facilitate a shared belonging are often challenged. Yet, participants can also use the shops to
represent their relational culture; at one in the same time, these groceries enable participant’s play
an active role in converting what may appear culturally foreign, into something tangible and
806
relatable for those in their social milieu as well as enable others maintain a separation from the
mainstream.
Introduction
There is an increasing body of consumer research on how intercultural interactions in this age of
migration (Castles and Miller, 2007) shape consumer behaviour (e.g. Cross and Gilly, 2013; Cross
and Gilly, 2014; Luedicke, 2015). This paper argues that exploring issues around the dialectics of
equality and inequality at one such intercultural intersection - the intercultural household, helps
reveal how such dialectic tensions are negotiated and in what ways these negotiations influence
consumer behaviour. Dubos (1965. p.2) argued that human adaptation is “a dialectic between
permanence and change” so for a migrant and non-migrant partner the negotiation of dialectic
tensions, especially in the early stages of their relationship reveals a learning and adaptation
process.
Using a relational lens, this paper explores the nature of social structures and interactions that have
been generated within the consumer ecology of intercultural couples. In particular, this study seeks
to illuminate how equalities and inequalities inherent in the social ecology of migrants from the
EU8 (i.e. post 2004 EU accession states) are negotiated within the intimate intercultural
relationships they have established. The paper also uses the example of one intermediate marketing
system, Polish grocery shops, to explore how its consumption is an example of the nexus between
the couples’ relational culture and their broader social ecology.
This paper poses a number of research questions namely, how do equalities and inequalities within
an intercultural couples’ social ecology manifest as dialectic tensions, how are these tensions
negotiated and in what ways tensions around (in)equality have implications for consumption.
Literature Review
Negotiating (in)equality within a new cultural setting presents challenges, especially within an
intercultural relationship. Rogler (1994) noted that the migration experience creates an emergent
phenomenology of incessant reference group comparisons and trade-offs between the benefits of
the host society and the losses incurred in departing from the society of origin. Rooted in the bi-
807
cultural experience, Rogler (1994) argues that these dialectics reappear as immigrants participate
in diverse settings such as in the way they might achieve success in some aspects of their new life
but experience disproportionate problems of personal adjustment. One such adjustment is how
migrants negotiate inequalities in the new setting. In an intercultural relationship, the native partner
will also experience an adjustment process, or enculturation. Weinrich (2009) argues that the term
enculturation emphasises the agentic individual incorporating cultural elements during
socialisation. While acculturation typically references migrants’ movement towards the adoption
of mainstream culture, enculturation in an intercultural relationship describes the learning that
occurs within the couple’s distinct relational culture. This distinction between acculturation and
enculturation provides an important lens with which to view the negotiation of (in)equality within
intercultural households. This lens can be applied to the intercultural couples’ broader social
ecology as well as within their relationship.
The shifting cultural composition of contemporary societies provides a changing social ecology
(Bronfenbrenner, 1979) characterised by several sources of tension. Social ecological theory
(Bronfenbrenner, 1979) posits that individuals interact with and are influenced by multiple levels
of social phenomena, ranging from dyadic interaction to family (microsystem), neighbourhood and
community (mesosystem), state (exosystem) and cultural (macrosystem) dimensions. This
framework is also useful when considering how issues of equality and inequality are negotiated
within the social ecology of intercultural couples and the consequent impacts on consumption. In
exploring the couples’ external relationships, it is therefore helpful to consider how ideas of equity
and fairness are interpreted.
Drawing on the work of Fiske (1991), Luedicke (2015) used a relational configuration analysis to
explore how indigenes interpret immigrant consumption practices. Fiske (1991) argued that most,
if not all, human interactions are based on four fundamental relational models, one of which,
equality matching, lends itself to the analysis in this study. When ethnic groups coordinate and
interpret their relationships in terms of balanced reciprocity and distributive justice, then they tend
to use the equality matching model (Luedicke, 2015). Each group is seen as entitled to the same
amount of desirable goods and services and coordination is driven by a need for equity, fairness
and balanced reciprocity (Sahlins, 1972). Belk (2010) for example, noted that consumers draw on
equality matching most directly in their sharing and gift giving. Conflicts arise from equality
808
matching relationships when groups fail to resolve emerging imbalances, such as when one group
is perceived to be behaving inequitably. Such imbalances will be a source of tension.
In addition to this external interpretation of (in)equality, how internal tensions within the couples’
relational culture are negotiated must also be considered. Relational culture is the private set of
meanings, symbols, rituals and values that provide consensual order within the family unit, guiding
relationship practices and actions (Wood, 1982; Farrell et al, 2014). While relational culture is
highly dynamic and adjusts through the changing pressures and contexts of the family unit
(Conville, 2008), for the intercultural household, the newly established relational culture represents
“an intimate link between two social groups” (Kalmijn, 1998, p. 396). The relational work involved
in forging a relational culture can be expected to be challenging given initial cultural differences
and the oppositional or contradictory aspects captured therein. According to relational dialectic
theory (Baxter 1993), couples in a relationship face a common set of contradictions, tensions or
dialectics that must be negotiated: the internal and the external. The internal are constituted within
the relationship, while the external involve dialectic tensions between the couple and the
community (Baxter, 1993).
Building on Bakhtin’s work on dialogism (1981; 1984), relational dialectic theory is used to explore
the tensions between unity and difference in all aspects of social life. Dialectical theory is based on
the idea of opposition, cohering around the core concepts of contradiction and change (Baxter and
Montgomery, 1996; Baxter, 1987; Rawlins, 1983). Contradictions are a central aspect of
communicative life within families (Baxter, 2006), and represent a dialectic in which different,
often opposing, voices come together. Dialectical opposites are interdependent with one another,
and it is the way that these opposites are accommodated to arrive at unified position that creates a
relational system. Tensions in a relationship are a fundamental feature (Baxter and Montgomery,
1996), and the interplay of competing positions and voices is an energizing source of vitality,
resulting in changes in relationships (Baxter, 2004). For Conville (2008), this change process
involves relationship partners responding to one dialectical opposite (e.g. a need for equity and
fairness), which in turn creates pressure to attend to the opposite (e.g. addressing the tensions that
arise when inequity or unfairness are experienced). Over time, the relationship pair cycle back and
forth between responsiveness to the opposing demands, but importantly they never return to the
809
same place as before. The dialectical movement results in relational transformation and
development, moving the relationship through stages of interdependence, certainty and closeness
(Brown, Werner and Altman 1998; Conville, 2008).
Relational dialectics analysis therefore provides an interpretive theory of family communication.
In focusing on dialogue, the theory recognizes that family life is “a both/and experience – families
gain their meanings from the give-and-take interplay of multiple, competing themes and
perspectives” (Baxter, 2006 p.131). This method of analysis therefore helps reveal how tensions
around equality and inequality are interpreted and negotiated.
Context and Methods
This study took place in Ireland, which has become a distinctive new regional space of migration
and mobility. In 2016 almost 12% of the population was born outside Ireland (compared to 6% in
2002). The largest group of migrants, who have been described as the ‘East-West (European) free
movers’ (Favell, 2008) originate from Poland. In common with other European countries, notably
the United Kingdom (Trevena, McGhee and Heath 2013), the impact of the post 2004 ‘free movers’
has been significant in both urban and rural Ireland. Given labour shortages, Polish free movers
found ready acceptance from employers, especially in the wholesale and retail, accommodation,
food service and manufacturing sectors. By 2017, Polish born individuals represented almost seven
per cent of the Irish workforce (Central Statistics Office, 2017).
The participants in this study are fifteen intercultural couples comprising a Polish free mover and
an Irish partner. Households had been established for at least two years prior to interview. The
researcher adopted a purposive approach to participant recruitment. Initially, this involved using
personal contacts to identify potential informants. This approach yielded sufficient initial
participants (7 couples) to activate a snowball approach to engage the remainder. Details of the
intercultural couples are given in Table 1. In seeking intercultural couples, the researcher
intentionally sought to develop research sensitive to the broad spectrum of social relationships and
differences. The participating couples varied, for example in marital status, sexuality and religion.
Since the relational dialectic theory approach (Baxter, 2006, p.140) is defined by the need to reflect
multivocality, interviews were chosen to give voice to people’s lives and worldviews (Belk, et al.,
2013) and were conducted over a one-year period (2015/2016). An individual interview was
conducted with each participant, the purpose of which was to gain insights into the Polish
810
individual’s acculturation and to identify underlying consumption themes from both partners
(separately) for further exploration. The individual interview used open-ended discussion points
(Hill and Somin, 1996) toenable the participants convey meaning in their own terms (Belk et al.,
1988; McCracken, 1988, Thompson, et al., 1989). Initial “grand tour” questions (McCracken,
1988) encouraged talk about everyday consumption and how this had changed (or not) after coming
to Ireland and in the case of the couples after setting up home with their partner. Individual
interviews typically lasted between sixty and ninety minutes and were carried out in participants’
homes, workplaces or mutually agreed locations such as coffee shops. All interviews were
recorded, transcribed and coded line by line.
The subsequent joint interviews with each intercultural couple explored the consumption related
themes gleaned from the analysis of the individual interview transcripts. The joint interviews
allowed for the production of a jointly constructed narrative as partners interact and negotiate,
contradict or support each other in an emergent version (Newholm and Hopkinson, 2009). All
participants were given pseudonyms.
Consistent with an interpretive approach, all the interview narratives were analyzed using
comparative analysis (Fischer and Otnes, 2006). As the data gathering progressed informants were
constantly compared, for example on the basis of age, length of time in Ireland, educational
background, presence of children in the household etc. This iterative process tacked back and forth
between the data and the literature (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Bradford and Sherry, 2013; Cross
and Gilly, 2014). The analysis also revealed many “in-vivo” codes, common to the couples, for
example when they used “Irish” or “Polish” to preface particular foods, brands or retailers. Ethical
approval for the study was received, participants were provided with an information sheet, and
were asked for informed consent and for permission to have the interviews recorded.
This paper draws primarily on data collected from these fifteen couples (table 1). The research
approach acknowledges that families (or couples) communicate at relational levels, so tensions
arising may be especially revealing (Yerby, Buerkel-Rothfuss and Bochner, 1998). This paper pays
particular attention to the dialectic tensions around (in)equality revealed in the interviews.
811
Findings
The analysis aimed to (1) identify the intercultural dialectic tensions around (in)equality arising in
the couples’ broader social ecology and within their relational cultures and (2) identify how the
couples attempted to address these tensions.
The dialectic of equality – inequality in the social ecology of intercultural couples
Analysis of the interview narratives revealed tensions arising around a dialectic of equality –
inequality. The sources of these dialectic tensions in the intercultural couples’ social ecology, were
related to employment and relationships with others in their social milieu.
(In)equality in Employment
Ireland’s economic growth in the late 1990’s led the country to become one of the world’s most
globalised economies with economic policy driven by laissez-faire neo-liberalism (O’Hearn,
1998). This economic growth also led to the creation of a new dual service economy (Sassen, 2001)
driven by a demand for cheap foreign labour. Many of the jobs taken by migrants are those that
Irish workers no longer wished to take on, the so-called “3D” jobs – dirty, dangerous or dull.
Migration can often be a process of contradictory social mobility (Parreñas, 2001) and for many of
the Polish participants this is a source of dialectic tension:
I don’t regret at all...like coming here, but on the other hand I have been here 9 years, I
have a Master’s degree...and the job I do at the moment, you know I am almost embarrassed
to say what I do when I go home, to my friends...it’s a dead end job...but I wouldn’t have
met my husband... (Rachela)
In Rachela’s narrative, we see dialectic tension around employment unfolding. Prior to migration,
she had a job commensurate with her qualifications. In attempting to resolve the tension, she tries
to move to the opposite pole of the dialectic, rationalising her current ‘dead end’ job by observing
that she wouldn’t have met her husband, but the dialectic tension remains unresolved. In other cases
participants had direct experience of discrimination in the workplace, especially in the early days:
Well, job wise it was difficult...it was the boom time...and the hotel was really busy and I
found...many situations when ...they didn’t respect foreign workers...I was so tired and my
English was not good enough...to sit down and think about it and complain...or go to a
812
citizen’s information office... my boss at the time...was a real bully ...I didn’t have a good
experience at the beginning... (Jozefina)
The discriminatory practices of some Irish employers were also familiar to many of the Irish
participants:
A lot of them (Polish people) have been left vulnerable in the employment sense,
particularly the people working in manual jobs, like I know a good few who have been
screwed over and done by employers...(Patrick)
... like even in my workplace ...I was a manager in a department and I heard people talking
about “the Polish” and I actually got quite annoyed, who do you mean? Do you mean Anya,
or Camilla...in the office? The attitude was almost like...uh...one of those Polish girls...
(Peter)
For the Irish partner therefore, the dialectic tensions around (in)equality in the workplace, don’t
just relate to their partners, but also to other Polish people they know. Dialectic theorists
(Braithwaite and Baxter, 1995; Montgomery, 1993) have noted that relationships are maintained to
the extent that the partners can successfully manage, over time, the dynamic interplay of opposing
tendencies. The participating couples cannot easily resolve contradictions around (in)equality in
the workplace into some idealised state. A couple may feel that they have transcended the
contradiction, for example by downplaying the inequality apparent in the labour market by
juxtaposing the advantages of the new setting and their new relationship or by directly challenging
fellow employees in the workplace, but in a dialectic conception such equilibrium is not a
permanent resolution. In many ways resolution is impossible given the inequities or discrimination
that they are familiar with in the workplace. Consequently, in attempting to rationalise and
negotiate the tensions, we see the participants creating a simultaneous transitory fulfilment of both
poles of a contradiction.
(In)equality in Social Relationships
In contrast to experiences in employment, an aspect of social interaction mentioned by all the Polish
participants was the general social ease of interaction with people in Ireland; quite often the Polish
partner referred to their Irish partner as ‘easy going’, a recurring in-vivo code. Natia, for example,
spoke about her partner Matthew:
813
He is very easy going and I like his way... and I know if I was living with Polish man, he
wouldn’t be that relaxed... Polish people...everything…food… cleaning…has to be perfect
...since I met Matthew, I am not stressful about this... (Natia)
Ina also reflected on her previous relationships with Polish men:
I think, Polish men are still very conservative and they expect you to do all the chores...once
you start living together...you can differentiate between the roles then (Laughs)...They just
expect you ...to do these things because of tradition... (Ina)
In both these narratives Natia and Ina allude to previous socialisation and perceived cultural
difference, especially around equality:
Once I came to Ireland I see that women... are very empowered here... (Ina)
This differentiation is instructive. Nesdale and Mak (2000, p.483) argued that host country
identification among migrants is driven by immigrant attitudes to that host culture and society, but
also by the degree of acceptance by members of the dominant cultural group and the success the
migrant experiences in the new location of settlement. Acculturation research has highlighted
immigrant’s acculturation processes included “learning one’s place in society” (Peñaloza, 1994,
p.89). In comparing the culture of origin and culture of settlement, Natia and Ina compare at a level
of intimate interaction; they also found social acceptance, but in comparison to the cultural norms
they had been used to in previous relationships, they experienced a much greater sense of peer
equality. The notion of equality within relationships is an especially important developmental goal
(Conville, 2008). Equality within the relationship also contrasts with the inequality that is often
experienced in the wider social ecology, for example neither Natia (who has a Masters degree) nor
Ina experienced upward mobility in employment.
Ease of interaction within the relational culture is therefore reflected and often mirrors the Polish
participant’s sense of belongingness. Very often, Polish participants felt that in their everyday
interactions with people, there was an understanding of the reasons why they had come to Ireland;
sometimes this was used to compare experiences in other settings:
I went to London as a student; I was... a waitress in (a golf club)… You can imagine that it
was a job with some of the wealthiest people in London...the kind of people ...we don’t have
814
in Poland...I felt really looked down on... so when I came here, I presume it’s because so
many generations of Irish people emigrated…that makes Irish people a little bit more
welcoming... (Kasia)
Ger and Østergaard (1998) noted that migrants might consider themselves fully integrated into a
certain realm, only to discover that locals still see them as foreign and non-integrated. Amalja, for
example, did not feel especially integrated in the village where she lived, until her Irish brother–
in-law died; she was struck by the different way that death was dealt with in Ireland compared to
Poland. Strangers recognised her in the village and expressed condolence; when she reflected, it
made her feel included:
In Poland it’s not like that...funeral is done, that’s it...nobody ask you how you are. You see,
in here, people are talking about it, you are allowed to talk... (Amalja)
For Amalja, the experience suggested that locals, many of whom are now friends, considered her
to be part of their community, disaffirming her own sense of non-belonging and challenging her
previous socialisation.
While the experience of social acceptance among participants was broadly positive, some had
experienced negative comments from Irish people, particularly after the country experienced
economic difficulties. Often, when such incidents were recounted it was rationalised as a rare or
unimportant occurrence:
...actually only once a few weeks ago in (local town) did I feel unwelcome... but it was only
a teenager saying something... “Go home Polish”...Yeah, something like that... it affected
me... but this is just a child... who said something... or who is very insecure... (Ina)
In addition to negative encounters such as this, work colleagues, neighbours or friends asked some
participants if they planned to “go home” following the economic downturn experienced post-2008.
Luedicke (2011) observes that such socio-cultural discourses, conducted within social contexts that
are shared by migrants and locals, can contribute to the identity adaptation of both groups. The
question, often asked in work or social settings, while not overtly confrontational, can be
interpreted as assuming transience, or as a passive-aggressive attempt at dominance. Danica
outlined how she felt:
815
(Interviewer): ...that wouldn’t annoy you. That question...
Oh, it annoys me all the time, but I have to get over it ...I have been here… for 12 years... I
am married to an Irish man ... I pay my tax here... and at the same time I am not denying
my Polish roots... but if you ask me when do I go home, for me home is here really, but I
suppose I used to take that a bit personal until I realised Irish people are treated the same.
Like you see Seamus is from (outside Dublin), he has been here for 15 years and people say
what do you do for the weekend? Do you go home? (Laughs)... you know...you will be a
culchie92 forever! (Laughs) … so I understand that people don’t mean it in a bad way, they
mean...kind of go and visit your parents... (Danica)
Danica attempts to frame the question contextually, as one that would also be asked of her husband.
The fact that the question was asked in the first place was annoying, it challenges her sense of
belonging and is another example of one of the external dialectic tensions experienced which is not
easily resolved. It also indicates the ways in which Irish people continue to see their own locality
as an important basis for collective identification (Tovey 2005; Humphreys 2007; Corcoran et al.
2010); the couple’s response to the socio-cultural discourse revealing their shared sense of where
home is.
The need to connect or identify with people in one’s locale is also apparent in attempts by some
Irish participants to establish connections with the wider Polish community. For many of the Irish
partners, these attempts were often rebuffed. David and Jozefina live in a town that has a large
Polish community, but David found that his attempts to establish connection with Polish men in
various social settings largely unsuccessful:
In general, they wouldn’t be as easy going as Irish men ...they are very sort of stern or...
sort of strict... It’s probably...they are instinctively defensive...
These attempts at establishing connection can also be considered to be attempts at mediation.
Bochner (1982 p.29) elaborated on the concept of mediating persons who attempt to act as links
between different cultural systems by introducing, translating, representing and reconciling
cultures to each other. Attempting to perform the role of mediator was apparent in several
92A culchie is an informal Irish description of an unsophisticated country person, typically from outside Dublin.
816
circumstances, for example when negative comments are made by Irish people about migrants or
when some of the participants attempt to mediate with other Polish people. The attempted role of
mediator however, was not always successful; Eamon was asked by work colleagues if Cela had
married him for a visa:
And I would say, yeah… she got married for a visa...and let them carry on. There’s no point
educating people, certain people...
Mediation attempts were also related around experiences with Polish work colleagues; Tony, who
worked in the hospitality sector, was perplexed about a fellow employee’s lack of interest in
advancement:
... there is one guy who I would suggest could be the head chef in a very, very big kitchen
or hotel...because he has all the ability in the world ...he just does not want to learn
English...so he is still putting starters on plates...in a restaurant that he should be running
himself...I don’t know...because his wife is fluent, his two children are fluent...
Tony’s attempts at mediation, for example explaining the promotional opportunities that could arise
if his colleague undertook English classes, were not successful.
The tension experienced around these socio-cultural discourses, characterised by confrontation,
frustration or criticism challenges the participants’ attempts at mediation. The couples often
juxtapose this against their relational culture. Askegaard, Arnould and Kjeldgaard. (2005) revealed
migrants who demonstrated hyper-affiliation or identity in the new setting and expressed frustration
with fellow migrants’ inability or unwillingness to adapt. For the participants in this study similar
frustrations are apparent, but they don’t appear to arise because of a sense of hyper-affiliation or
identity; rather they seem to reflect the couples’ own intercultural enculturation and a desire to
mediate. The couples have learned, in the words of Mead (1963, p.185) “culture as it takes place
in a specific culture” and this has enabled them interact more easily. They attempt to mediate with
those who appear to have adopted a strategy of separation but the dialectic tensions created often
remain unresolved.
In attempting to explain why mediation is unsuccessful, participants often cited competition or an
unwillingness to become part of the community. When Barbara began an accountancy course she
817
was promoted from being a cleaner, to an office job, but the attitude of her Polish colleagues
changed:
... so I was the one from the office...”the posh one” you know...so, she is not cleaning with
us, so she is not kind of with us... it’s still the same...they don’t want to know me...
Competition within immigrant groups has been documented in many studies, including Polish free
movers (Triandafyllidow, 2006). Paradoxically, perceived advancement is often a source of
criticism. The perceived reason for non-engagement most often given, related to an unwillingness
to participate and an observation that many Polish men in particular wished to maintain a strategy
of separation:
...they want to live in their own lives and they don’t want to mix and that’s it (Magda)
In some cases this tension surfaces intra-generationally. Charles, for example, described his Polish
brother-in-law:
...the blokey attitude...he’s not polite, he’s not forthcoming with any information when you
visit...he is there... in his mind... to work to put food on the table... all she (Charles’s sister-
in-law) is there to do is to raise the kids and make him dinner...(Charles)
The perceived lack of egalitarianism served to contrast his relational culture with Ina where:
I do all the cooking here... and we share looking after the kids... (Charles)
These examples indicate that the couples’ sense of community is a source of several dialectic
tensions. Community is a term that can be interpreted rather broadly. In this analysis it is used to
explore how the participants described their interactions with both the Irish and Polish ‘other’ in
their social ecology. The sociological meaning of the term community is widely debated and
contested (e.g. Stein, 1964; Putnam, 2000; Baumann, 2001); this study uses the meaning of
community as outlined by Day (2006; p1) as “those things which people have in common, which
bind them together and give them a sense of belonging with one another.” When the couples discuss
their perceptions of some other Polish people in Ireland for example, a dialectic tension often
emerges. This tension is usually related as a perceived unwillingness to engage socially with Irish
people and with intercultural couples in particular. This sense of separation or non-engagement is
illustrated when Ina speaks of what happens in the village where she and Charles live and which
has a large Polish community:
818
...there are a lot of Polish people here...recognising each other on the street... the Polish
women... they meet outside the local supermarket. You can tell how they look at you if they
know that your partner is Irish...there is an element of...jealousy I’d say...but also
judgement ...it’s a funny politics that are going on, that’s why I didn’t make any friends
here...(Ina)
The wide dispersion of Polish people in Ireland means that such encounters are often related; if
social norms are rules of conduct, and norms are standards by which behaviour is judged,
encounters such as these suggest that norms also become some form of cultural rule (Varman and
Costa, 2008), and become a source of tension. Gizela was also frustrated with comments made by
some of her Polish friends:
…they highlight the differences between Polish and Irish...they are really critical about
Irish...so I do come across Polish friends who are really... critical ...negative even... Oh,
this Doctor is bad because he is Irish... and I don’t like it…(Gizela)
As mentioned by Ina there is often expressed frustration about the perceived judgement of the
Polish other, which she also felt online:
... on the internet ...there is this group called ‘In Ireland’... I studied sociology, so I am
looking at it from ...a different perspective...what people post, how they react ...and the way
they would judge other people...how they would judge women who are mixing with Irish...
this kind of attitude...even from young men, they judge Polish women for mixing... (Ina)
Other participants related dialectic social tensions such as those described by Ina. The apparent
judgment of the other suggests that norms are being used as some form of benchmark or standard.
The resulting tension is complex, challenging not only cultural identity, but also contrasting with
their experiences of (in)equality, their relationship and their strategy in Ireland. Some Polish
participants engage in differentiation, often taking the form of avoiding fellow Poles, as was the
case with Lech:
...for many guys the reason they decided to come and stay here ...it’s just easier to live your
normal life ...so like for me, this is one of the best things...being gay and living here in
Ireland...that I had never issues...my life here is much easier than over there in Poland...
Lech’s partner Hugh, described visiting Krakow:
819
...we went to one or two gay bars and...I remember going to one in Krakow and Krakow is
a big city...and ...like literally a hatch in the door opens and somebody peers out ...not nice,
not nice...there is a considerable amount of homophobia...
Lech maintains a distance from other Poles in Ireland, having only a small number of Polish friends.
This has been a deliberate strategy – “from the beginning I decided to stay away from other Poles”
and most of his friends are Irish.
In two cases, participants were members of the Church of Ireland (Anglican) and as one couple –
David and Jozefina describe, this was a source of external dialectic tension with Jozefina’s parents:
...they wouldn’t tell me anything like this... but you know your parents and I know that they
were disappointed... that this is not a Polish guy ... the church was different ... but it
(religion) wouldn’t make a difference to us ...my Mum is open more now than she would
have been a few years ago...
David: Yeah, she was quite stern... wasn’t she? When I met you first she wasn’t too happy...
but I think she is OK now...
This example is also indicative of an external dialectic tension; the relationship comes under
scrutiny from two sets of socialisation agents. Eamon, for example, who knows many Polish
couples, commented:
...if you are talking to a Polish couple, the woman very rarely speaks and the man does all
the talking and... I don’t think there’s an equal balance. The lady will only speak ...when
the person the couple are speaking to, speaks directly to her.
Several times during our encounters, Eamon spoke of what he perceived as a lack of equality among
many of the Polish couples he knew and how this was not going to be a feature of his and Cela’s
relationship, thus reinforcing their mutual desire to base their relationship on an equal footing.
The role of the Polish Shop in the Couples’ Social Ecology
The arrival of significant numbers of Polish free movers (Favell, 2008) in Ireland after 2004 was
quickly followed by the appearance of Polish shops that stock primarily Polish foods and groceries.
These shops are located mainly in urban locations and can be found in most Irish towns and cities.
The shops stock a wide range of Polish grocery products and often include a butcher counter.
820
Significant space is devoted to processed meats and dairy products and some shops will carry
regional products, brands or specialities especially from southern Poland where many Poles in
Ireland originate. Staples such as bread (which originates from Poland or from Polish bakeries in
Ireland) are stocked and some also sell fresh produce from Poland such as milk and eggs.In many
of the individual interviews, Polish participants spoke of their delight when they found a Polish
grocery shop:
I was happy to find a few Polish shops ...it makes you feel closer to home... (Lech)
All the participating couples have easy access to these Polish shops and the shop plays an important
role in their consumption strategy. Such has been the proliferation in the number of Polish shops
in Ireland, that several Irish participants were customers before meeting their partners. David, for
example, was a customer in his local Polish grocery:
I used to go... before I met Jozefina... just because I was curious... I liked trying out different
foods...(David)
The Polish shop has played a role in tension reduction that transcends both the initial acculturation
experience of the Polish partner, the enculturation of the Irish partner and into the enculturation
experience of being a couple. Fournier (1998) described how consumers come to know and trust
retail outlets and initially, for many of the Polish participants the shops helped in the settling in
process. Consumption of the Polish shops led to changed shopping behaviour and an introduction
to Polish food culture:
...we generally do our shopping in Dunne’s (Irish supermarket chain) and we have started
shopping in a Polish shop as well ....there’s a phenomenal choice in the Polish shops here
... I have come to really like a lot of the Polish foods... (Patrick)
The shops also play an important connecting role for the couples which include connecting the Irish
partner with the past:
...and quite frankly ...the product … is very good and it is very cheap in comparison to
Ireland...for instance their meat, their ham...I have to say it reminds me of product 20/30
years ago in Ireland ...you just don’t get the equivalent in an Irish supermarket (Hugh)
821
In other cases, the new experience of shopping in the Polish shop has led to a more involved
shopping ritual and a movement to greater engagement:
...but the biggest difference, if the two of us go into the Polish shop and we want to buy
some ham, or cheese or …whatever, Dorata will engage in conversation with whoever is
behind the counter – what’s a good cheese? Or what’s a good sausage or whatever...and
there is a conversation... So, it’s not all the pre-pack, you know the five slices of ham... like
why on earth would you spend €3.50 for 5 slices of ham, when you can get 10 slices of really
gorgeous stuff that the guy you trust has told you is really nice and has a lovely flavour ...to
me that’s the biggest thing...(Peter)
In this case we see that the shop is framed as not just a source of provisions but as a more interactive
space where there is engagement with the vendor and a range of products that are not only cheaper,
but also perceived as better than the more mainstream supermarkets.
The participants often relate how they attempt to introduce others in their social milieu to the shops
and in so doing reveal another example of their attempts at mediating (Bochner, 1982). While the
Polish shop was more likely to play an important role in the couples’ strategies of integrating Polish
products in their consumption, Gizela highlighted one aspect that she didn’t like:
…the one thing I don’t like about Polish shops...they don’t have advertisements in English
...and I rarely see Irish or English speaking people ...actually buying in Polish shops, I think
it is a big pity…
This observation indicating a sense that the shops tend to focus on Polish clientele; it was also an
observation made by Charles, which led to the following discussion with Ina:
I think there is probably an intimidation factor...going to the Polish shop ...they are not
going to speak English, so... you might have difficulty... (Charles)
But why would you go if it is not part of your culture? (Ina)
Well, I would go because I like trying different foods... like what is that? I have to try that...
even... if it’s really weird looking, I want to try it... you know...but you don’t see so much
Polish culture rubbing off on the Irish culture... you really don’t see that impact of Polish
people being here you know... at all. I wouldn’t say Irish people are closed to it... but I
would say it is actually the Polish people...who don’t encourage it... (Charles)
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Therefore, the Polish shops are sometimes viewed as enabling separation, the dialectic opposite to
the strategies being pursued by the couples. The Polish shops are intermediate marketing systems
(Hunt and Burnett, 1982) and several researchers (Penaloza, 1994; Cross and Gilly, 2013;
Luedicke, 2015) have documented the role of retail systems in consumer acculturation processes.
For many participants in this study, the shops are an anchor to the homeland, facilitate cultural
mediation and expression and are often framed as purveyors of superior products. Unlike the much
larger and more mainstream supermarket chains, whose market dominance is criticised, the Polish
shop is often framed as a liberating and equalising alternative, which leads to changes in household
shopping practices.
Askegaard and Kjeldgaard (2002) observed that people reflexively interpret the meanings
embedded in marketplace resources differently. In their consumption of the Polish shop, the
participants reveal not only a range of tension reducing strategies, but also a range of embedded
meanings around these shops. To the wider Polish community the shops may serve not just as
anchors to the homeland, but as enablers of separation as alluded to by several of the participants.
For the participants on the other hand, the Polish shops perform several roles. The shops enable a
bridging of personal agency with social structure. According to Ahern (2001, p. 112), agency is
not infinite or unfettered but it references “the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act”.
In attempting to negotiate dialectic tensions, the participants use the Polish shops not only to
introduce a range of provisions into the relationship, but also to their wider social milieu. The
couples’ desire to mediate means that they use their knowledge, skill and confidence in consuming
the products of the Polish shop to build and reinvent.
Discussion
In noting the emergence of multicultural marketplaces, characterised by consumers from diverse
ethnic, religious and national backgrounds, Kipnis, Broderick and Demangeot (2013) suggested
that marketing concepts such as consumer identity or consumer brand relationships are being
reframed and redefined. In this paper, culture is viewed as a key social system, which also generates
dialectic tensions around (in)equality. The internal dialectic tensions around (in)equality within the
intercultural couples’ relational culture interpenetrate an external dialectic. Inherent in this
interplay is enculturative learning as the couples seek to negotiate the in(equalities) in their social
ecology. The couples’ narratives which highlight their experiences of inequality are not merely
823
about their frustration or disapproval of such inequalities, they are simultaneously a dialectic of
their intercultural relationship in their social ecology.
Braithwaite and Baxter (1995) note that relationship partners have a variety of ways of responding
to dialectic exigencies, they may oscillate back and forth through time between efforts to fulfil first
one pole of the contradiction, then the other. Specialised activity domains may be developed so
each pole is privileged in separate activities; compromise may involve each pole being partly
fulfilled at a given time while integration implies that both partners seek to fulfil both poles of the
contradiction. In this study, several strategies are apparent as the couples attempt to negotiate the
dialectic tensions. A difficulty emerges however, as attempting to negotiate inequality ideas is
inherently tension laden. Relational dialectic theorists, for example, view attempts at trying to
achieve some form of balance between opposing forces as distinctly non-dialogic. Balance is
simply a holding action in which two phenomena, or oppositions, coexist but do not interpenetrate
(Baxter, 2004). Dialogue, is a centripetal-centrifugal flux and in dialogue, voices interpenetrate one
another and thereby constitute and change one another. Sometimes the partners can hold both sides
of the contradiction and manage them simultaneously, for example when the effects of inequalities
in employment are explained away by contrasting them with the advantages that the new life in
Ireland brings; however the underlying tension remains.
Migrants arriving in Ireland encountered a country that has experienced many social and cultural
changes. Keohane and Kuhling (2007) profile a contemporary Irish society where there has been
an increase in living standards, increased immigration, a secularisation of Catholicism and a
liberalising of laws on divorce and sexuality, coupled with a decline in traditional values and
community and what they described as deep ambivalence towards immigrants. Fanning (2011)
considers that Ireland’s neo-liberal developmental modernity has encouraged greater
individualism. Fanning (2002) and Lentin and McVeigh (2002) had argued that Ireland’s approach
to migrants has been opportunistic, leading to what Fanning describes as weak multiculturalism,
the objective being to manage diversity rather than contest inequalities.
The economic downturn post-2008 and consequent pan-European political and media discourse
about a perceived need to restrict immigration highlight what Hollifield (2004) describes as a liberal
paradox – the economic logic of liberalism (and a defining feature of globalisation) being one of
openness, but the political and legal logic being one of closure. Ireland’s economic downturn has
led to a marginalisation of the Polish community in Irish public discourse (Egger and Mc Donagh,
824
2011). Equally, Polish discourse on migration has emphasised the social down sides, with particular
emphasis on the ‘lost generation’ of mainly young well educated Poles who have migrated and the
‘euro orphans’, the children of migrating parents who have been left behind. Galasinska (2010)
notes that since 2008 there has been an on-going debate in Polish media about the return of the
post-2004 migrants. The discourse emphasises the economic and political arguments in order to
explain that a mass return might happen. The media narrative often suggests that those who left
should return to help build Poland’s economy and conversely, those who stay away have somehow
betrayed the homeland.
Several studies have found evidence of the effects of domination on Polish people in Ireland,
especially in the employment market. A study by Barrett and Duffy (2008) sought evidence as to
whether or not the length of time that immigrants had been in Ireland was associated with improved
occupational attainment. They found no evidence that this was the case. Favell (2008) pointed out
that migration from the East could encourage an exploitative dual labour market for Eastern movers
working in the West and reported cases of discrimination in employment in Ireland would tend to
support this view (Russell et al. 2008).
A contribution of this research study therefore is to show how, in attempting to cope simultaneously
and separately with a variety of dialectical oppositions around (in)equality, intercultural couples
attempt to weave together elements from each other’s cultures and simultaneously facilitate both
relational and social change. Within the boundaries of the relationship, equality is emphasised, at
the relationship’s border with the couple’s social ecology, attempts are made, largely through
mediation, to negotiate a more complex equality-inequality dialectic and in so doing attempt to
facilitate social change. There is not a permanent resolution of the various dialectic tensions, rather
relationship maintenance is practiced as the partners adapt and change.
This research study has a number of limitations. The geographic location of the study, the fact
that participants all came from Christian backgrounds and were of similar age must all be
highlighted. Further research is therefore needed across other contexts to explore how tensions
around (in)equality are negotiated among intercultural households and in what ways intermediate
marketing systems, such as grocery stores, are used in the process.
825
Table 1: Participant Profile
Name (Age) Gender Length of time
since household
established
together (years)
Length of time of
Polish partner in
Ireland (years)
Children (age) Occupations
Patrick (32)
Magda (32)
Male
Female
4
8
1 son
(Age 2)
Lab Technician
Administrator
James (32)
Aldona (32)
Male
Female
10
14
2 Daughters
(Age 9 & 5)
Company Manager
Retail Assistant
Oliver (34)
Amalja (31)
Male
Female
10
12
2 daughters
(Age 5 & 3)
Self Employed
Chef
John (36)
Cela (34)
Male
Female
3
10
-
Retail Supervisor
Mature Student
Hugh (35)
Lech (32)
Male
Male
5
8
-
Company Manager
Retail Supervisor
Simon (36)
Danica (38)
Male
Female
8
13
-
Public Servant
Customer Service Employee
Peter (33)
Dorata (32)
Male
Female
4
10
1 daughter
(Age 2)
Company Manager
Unemployed (Secretary)
Keith (33)
Tereska (32)
Male
Female
5
8
1 daughter & 1
son (Ages 5 &
2)
Self employed tradesman
Shop Assistant
Henry (30)
Gizela (31)
Male
Female
5
6
1 Son
(Age 6 mths)
Company Manager
Engineer
Charles (33)
Ina (32)
Male
Female
4
9
2 Sons
(Ages 3 & 1)
Musician
Administrator
Kevin (34)
Kasia (33)
Male
Female
5
8
-
Mature Student
Administrator
David (36)
Jozefina (38)
Male
Female
3
8
1 Son
(Age 2)
Agricultural Worker
Childcare Assistant
Matthew (50)
Natia (48)
Male
Female
3
8
1 daughter (age
9) from previous
relationship
Construction Site Manager
Chef (Unemployed)
George (33)
Rachela (34)
Male
Female
6
9
Twin daughters
(Age 2)
Administrator
Administrator
826
Name (Age) Gender Length of time
since household
established
together (years)
Length of time of
Polish partner in
Ireland (years)
Children (age) Occupations
Tony (38)
Barbara (34)
Male
Female
4
10
-
Hospitality Manager
Financial Manager
Note: Fictitious names have been used. The occupations of the Polish partner are those at time at
interview. In many cases occupations were not commensurate with the person’s academic
qualifications or previous employment in Poland.
827
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834
Ethical
Consumption in emerging
economies I
Track Chair: Thi Tuyet Mai Nguyen
Co-Chair(s): Vu Hung Nguyen
Thi Hoang Yen Nguyen
835
Oblivious Consumption—
Concealed Production: Viewing
Modern Slavery Through
Consumer’s Eyes
Michal Carrington93, University of Melbourne, Australia
Andreas Chatzidakis, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Deirdre Shaw, University of Glasgow, UK
It is estimated that at least 1,243,400 people are modern slaves across Europe. . In this study, we
begin to explore modern slavery through consumers’ lens. Drawing on in-depth interviews with
30 informants in 3 UK cities we discover two pivot points at the core of consumer obliviousness
and the representation of categories of modern slaves. First, consumer judgements of
vulnerability drive representations of authenticity in claims to slavehood; and, second,
perceptions of the locus of responsibility—internal or external—underpin consumers’ emotive
responses and willingness to act.
836
Closing the intention-behavior gap
to facilitate green consumption
Vu Hung Nguyen, National Economics University, Vietnam
Hung Cuong Nguyen, Vietnam Women Academy, Vietnam
Thi Bao Thoa Hoang, Vietnam National University, Vietnam
Abstract
Green consumption has become an important academic and practical topic. However, a recurring
theme in the literature has been the attitude-behavior gap in green consumption. Employing a
proposed theory by Peattie (Peattie 2001, 2010), this study developed and tested two key
moderators to the relationship from green consumption intention to the behavior, namely product
availability and perceived consumer effectiveness. Under high levels of the moderators, the
relationship between the intention and the behavior were hypothesized to be stronger. Our data
sample 416 consumers in two big cities in Vietnam provided supports for the hypotheses. Our study
results thus contribute to the green consumption literature and the more general literature of
consumer behavior. Implications and recommendations for further research were discussed.
Acknowledgement: This research is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and
Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under grant number 502.02-2016.07.
1. Introduction
Environmentally responsible behavior and green consumption have become the important topics
in marketing literature for several decades (Catlin and Wang 2013; Leonidou et al. 2013; Peloza
et al. 2013; Haws et al. 2014). In fact, the concept of green consumption may have emerged from
837
1960s (Straughan and Roberts 1999; Kim et al. 2012). This concept then has probably come into
the marketing scholarship via Fisk’s theory of responsible consumption (Fisk 1974), Heninon and
Kinnear’s concept of ecological marketing (Henion and Kinnear 1976), and Kardash’s related
notion of ecologically concerned consumer (Kardash 1976). Indeed, as Peattie observed, while
studies in the field revealed differences between countries and cultures, there are striking
“similarities in growing environmental values, concerns, and the interest in green consumption”
(Peattie 2010, p. 199).
Promoting green consumption then is expected to help solve the problems of over-exploitation of
natural resources, a result of the global population explosion (Kates 2000; Wu and Chen 2014;
Nguyen et al. 2015) and the unprecedented economic development in many Asian countries (Lee
2008). In fact, green consumption became the mainstream topic at the top of different international
and national public administration agendas (Miniero et al. 2014). Green consumption now is
perceived as being intertwined with discourse on long-term sustainable development (Lee 2008;
Kim et al. 2012). Some scholars even goes further to suggest that green consumption can trigger a
worldwide green revolution (Ottman 1993). Firms around the world then have reshaped their
strategies with the common slogan of “green marketing” to meet the increasing environment
concerns by consumers (Lee 2008; Miniero et al. 2014). This trend can be particularly prominent
in the fast-growing economies of Asia where the rising financially-empowered consumers are
willing to spend more than previous generations (Lee 2008).
However, most research on green consumption in the past seemed to search on the wrong place by
profiling green consumers (Peattie 2001). This was not effective because all consumer should be
characterized as green ones who are facing with a choice between products of identical
specification except some aspects of eco-performance (Kardash 1976; Peattie 2001). Thus instead
of trying to understand the green consumers, scholars have called for efforts to understand the green
behaviors (Peattie 2001). Recent studies then have focused more on understanding different
environmentally-friendly behaviors with high environmental impacts such as food purchase,
transport for work, leisure, and travel, and household management (Peattie 2010).
However, even recent research have just started to explore different factors that help explain green
consumption behaviors. The factors range from culture and values (e.g.: Dietz et al. 2005; Pepper
et al. 2009), socio-demographic characteristics (e.g.: Laroche et al. 2001; Diamantopoulos et al.
838
2003) to attitudes, norms, perceived control, and intention (e.g.: Wu and Chen 2014; Nguyen et al.
2015). Among the models to explain the behavior, theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the
extended one, theory of planned behavior (TPB), by Ajzen and Fisbein have been applied the most
(Peattie 2010). Still, one notable and recurring theme in this stream of research is the “attitude-
behavior” gap which reflects the fact that “environmental knowledge and strongly held pro-
environmental values, attitudes, and intentions frequently fail to translate into green purchasing and
other pro-environmental behavior in practice” (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002; Fraj and Martinez
2006; Josephine and Ritsuko 2008; Peattie 2010). Evidence for the gap has been recorded in
different countries including, for example, UK (Young et al. 2010), Canada (Durif et al. 2012), or
China (Lee 2008). Scholars thus have called for further research to close the gap.
This study thus endeavors to explore some factors that may close the gap between green
consumption intention and the actual behavior. In particular, we identify unavailability and
perceived effectiveness of consumer behavior for buying green products as the key factors that may
change the relationship between green consumption intention and the actual behavior. This
corroborates with the two key dimensions under the proposed new paradigm by Peattie (2000;
2010) to look for green purchasers: the compromise in different alternatives of offerings and
confidence in outcomes of the offerings.
This study thus makes several contribution to the literature. First, results from this study helps
explain an attitude-behavior gap in green consumption behavior: why consumers may have
intention to behave environmentally-friendly but then do not engage in the actual behaviors (Peattie
2010). By identifying the hindering or facilitating factors to the relationship between the behavioral
intention and the actual behavior, marketers then can fine-tune their marketing strategies for green
products. Second, this study can also provide some contribution to a larger literature on the gap
between intention and behavior. In fact, studies in consumer behaviors usually viewed the intention
as the same or at least highly correlated with the actual behavior (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005).
However, in theory, there always exists a gap between the intention and the actual behavior, a
phenomenon termed by consumer behavior theorists as “literal inconsistency”: the failure to act in
accordance with the stated intention (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005, p. 178). This study thus helps
reconfirm the determinant role of intention in explaining behavior but at the same time, explain the
theoretical inconsistency, at least in the field of green consumption.
839
The remaining of this article will be structured as follows. First, we present the theoretical
frameworks including the model to explain the facilitators or hinders to the relationship between
green consumption behavioral intention and the behavior. Next, we describe our research
methodology including data collection and the measures used. The next section will be provided
with the result of hypothesis tests. This article then is concluded with the discussion of the
research’s result and recommendations for further research in the field.
2. Theoretical framework
2.1. Green consumption: the attitude – behavior gap
The term “green consumption” may not have a clear and consistent meaning (Peattie 2010). In
fact, it has been used differently and sometimes interchangeably with other terms (Kim et al. 2012)
including socially responsible consumption (Antil 1984), ecologically conscious consumption
(Fraj and Martinez 2006), environmentally responsible consumption (Gupta and Ogden 2009),
environmentally friendly consumption (Laroche et al. 2001), and pro-environmental consumption
(Welsch and Kühling 2009). Moreover, the term green consumption by itself may be problematic
because while green implies conservation of environmental resources, consumption involve the
destruction (Peattie 2010).
Fortunately, there’s a common theme running through all the terms. It is the desirable consumption
goal to minimize environmental consequences (Kim et al. 2012). The term “green” then can also
be viewed more broadly as “oriented toward sustainable development” (Peattie 2010, p. 197). Thus
green consumption can be understood as purchase and consumption behaviors by an individual
which are related to environmental and resource-related problems and are motivated by not only a
desire to satisfy the individual needs but also a concern for the welfare of society in general (Antil
and Bennett 1979; Antil 1984). The consumption of green products, which are produced without
toxic chemicals from recyclable or biodegradable materials, have environment-friendly packaging
and with low detrimental environmental impact at all stages of its lifecycle with long term goal of
natural environment preservation (OECD 2009; Biswas and Roy 2015; Nguyen et al. 2015) then
can be a green consumption behavior.
Green consumption has become a hot topic, especially in the developing economies (Lee 2008).
In fact, this trend may have rooted from the ecology movement in the 1960s which focused on
840
pollution and energy conservation in developed countries (Straughan and Roberts 1999; Kim et al.
2012). Recently, green marketing has been realized as a source of competitive advantage in
business and politics (Straughan and Roberts 1999; Peattie 2001). For example, it has been
evidenced that by responding to the environmental concerns of customers or having green
orientation, firms can create “win-win” strategies which benefit both the firms via operational and
financial gains and the planet (Peattie 2001; Gleim et al. 2013). Green consumption has also been
at the top of multiple international public administration agenda since the United National
Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 (Miniero et al. 2014). In many developing
Asian economies with rapid resource exploitation and heavy pollution associated with the
unprecedented economic development, concerns have been raised over the quality of environment
(Lee 2008). To respond to these concerns from increasing financially-empowered consumers in
the economies (The Economist 2006; Li and Su 2007), policies and business strategies related to
consumption there are being re-shaped to give more considerations to environment protection
(Martinsons et al. 1997; Lee 2008).
As a result, green consumption and other environmentally responsible behaviors are receiving
increasing attention in the literature (e.g.: Peattie 2010; Catlin and Wang 2013; Leonidou et al.
2013; Peloza et al. 2013; Haws et al. 2014). This focus is consistent with the persistent interest in
understanding socially responsible consumption (e.g.: Webster 1975; Antil 1984; Roberts 1996).
In particular, to explain green consumption behavior, several theories have been applied, most
notably including the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein 1980), the extended version,
the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen 1991), or the general theory of marketing ethics (Hunt and
Vitell 1986). For example, applying the general theory of marketing ethics, a study may explain
the consumers’ green consumption behavior based on the evaluations of what are right and wrong
to the customers, the evaluation of cost-benefit results and the evaluation of the ethical acceptance
related to their behaviors (Chan 2001). Other models applied include norm-activation-model and
value-belief-norm theory (Stern 1999) and the social practice approach (Spaargaren 2003; Shove
and Walker 2010).
Among the models used, the most commonly applied to green consumption is probably the theory
of reasoned action (TRA) or the extended one, theory of planned behavior (TPB), by Ajzen and
Fishbein (Peattie 2010; Biswas and Roy 2015). Under this theory, green consumption behavior
841
can be explained by the behavioral intention which then is determined by the attitudes, subjective
norms, and perceived behavioral control (Ajzen 1991). This theory has been applied in different
area of green behaviors including, for example, food consumption (e.g.: Vermeir and Verbeke
2008), household recycling (e.g.: Kaiser and Gutscher 2003), general pro-environmental behavior
(e.g.: Kaiser et al. 1999), or general green consumption (e.g.: Wu and Chen 2014).
However, while a number of studies in green consumption have employed TRA or TPB, some just
focused on either intention or behavior (e.g.: Gleim et al. 2013; Kelkar et al. 2014; Lan and Sheng
2014). In such studies, the intention and behavior are seemingly assumed to be the same or if not,
at least, the correlation between the two should be very high. This assumption then may lead to
intriguing consequences. First, if the intention and behavior are closely related, it would be difficult
to explain why consumers adopt a positive attitude towards the environment conservation or green
consumption and thus intend to take green consumption but does not behave in accordance to green
consumption intention (Peattie 2010; Young et al. 2010). Second, such assumption will deflect us
from looking for contextual variables facilitating and transforming intention into behavior (Ajzen
and Fishbein 2005). Recent empirical evidence found that the correlation between green
consumption behavioral intention and the behavior can be high for general green consumption
behaviors but not close to one (e.g.: Wu and Chen 2014; Nguyen et al. 2015).
While attitude and intention have in many cases been found as influencing the actual behavior in
green consumption, there seems to still exist the attitude-behavior gap (Peattie 2010; Gleim et al.
2013). This is when consumers show their favorable attitude or have intention to behave
environmentally-friendly but many of them do not engage in the actual green behavior (Peattie
2010). Empirical evidence has been collected to demonstrate this gap. For example, 30% of UK
consumers report that they were concerned about environment but struggled to engage in green
purchases (Young et al. 2010). Similarly, while 46 to 67% of UK citizens showed their favorable
attitude toward organic food, the actual purchase was only 4-10% for different product range
(Hughner et al. 2007; Young et al. 2010). In Canada, an online survey of 1000 respondents in July
2009 also demonstrated the gap of about 40% between self-perception and the actual action taken
to improve the environment in different categories including energy, food, recycling, reuse, fuel
performance, and green product preference. Thus as Peattie has observed and concluded “despite
842
the popularity of TPB and TRA modeling approaches to green consumption behaviors, they have
some severe limitations,…” (Peattie 2010, p. 212).
In fact, one common criticism of TRA and TPB is the neglection of the contextual variables (Peattie
2010). This limitation thus might have led to the development of other models including Attitude-
Behavior-Context (ABC) model by Stern and colleagues (Stern 2000) or Motivation-Opportunity-
Ability (Gatersleben et al. 2002). Under these models, behaviors are determined by the joint
influence of both attitude or intention and contextual variables. Several contextual variables have
been proposed and explored in the literature including habits, financial constraints, lifestyles, old
brand loyalties, uncertainties, or perceived trade-offs between different ethical factors (Peattie
2001), other common belief relating to the sacrifices in terms of convenience, costs, performance
(Ottman et al. 2006), or economic costs (Gadenne et al. 2011). Thus, attitude or intention may
only determine actual behavior only if contextual conditions are favorable (Zsóka 2008).
Reviewing empirical evidence in various fields for the TRA or TPB models, Ajzen and Fishbein
also admitted that there may be an intention-behavior gap in many fields which has been termed
“literal inconsistency” (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005, p. 178). In fact, the correlations between
intention and behaviors have been found to be on the averages of .45 to .62 for general domains
(Ajzen and Fishbein 2005). Studies in specific domains also produced similar correlation results
from .44 to .56 (Albarracin et al. 2001; Ajzen and Fishbein 2005). However, it has been sometimes
found that intention is a poor indicator of behavior (Ajzen 2011). Besides other measurement
reasons, it has been proposed that the gap between intention and behavior can be narrowed when
conditions exist to prompt people to form an implementation intention (Gollwitzer 1999; Ajzen
and Fishbein 2005). Such conditions should help delegate control of the people’s goal-directed
behaviors to the stimulus situation by activating the mental representation of a specified situation
and make it chronically accessible (cf. Ajzen and Fishbein 2005).
Corroborating with the arguments, in green consumption area, Peattie proposed two dimensions
that may facilitate closing the gap between attitude or intention to actual behaviors, including the
compromise involved and the degree of confidence generated in the environmental benefits of a
particular choice (Peattie 2001; 2010). In fact, the compromise can take a variety of forms such as
paying the green premium, accepting a lower level of technical performance, or travelling to non-
standard distribution outlets when purchasing green products for use. Similarly, the confidence
843
includes several aspects such as one that the environment issues are real, the offering can improve
eco-performance, or the purchase of green products can make some material difference (cf. Peattie
2001). To fill in the gap in the literature, in this paper, we just explore two factors, the availability
of green products and the perceived consumption effectiveness, which correspond to the two
dimensions, the compromise and the confidence, respectively.
2.2. Hypothesis development
Green consumption intention can be understood as a person’s motivation to exert effort to enact
the green consumption behavior (cf. Ajzen and Fishbein 1980). Under TRA or TPB, intentions
and behaviors are strongly correlated when measured at the same level of specificity and when the
time interval between intention and behavior is short enough (Conner and Armitage 1998; Ajzen
and Fishbein 2005). In fact, the correlations between the two have been found to be rather high in
different behavior domains, ranging from .45 to .62 (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005). Thus, we would
expect a similar case in green consumption. In fact, several recent studies in green consumption
found high correlations between the two (Wu and Chen 2014; Nguyen et al. 2015). Therefore we
would expect a similar result in this study but make no formal hypothesis for the relationship.
However, the correlation between intention and behavior in different areas can vary considerably
(Ajzen 2011). In green consumption, we propose two variables that may facilitate the relationship
between the intention and the behavior, namely availability of green products and perceived
consumer effectiveness, corresponding to two dimensions by Peattie (2001), compromise and
confidence, respectively.
Green product availability
We argue that green product availability can facilitate the relationship between green consumption
intention and the behavior in several ways. First, as Peattie argued, green consumption is a choice
by consumers between alternatives of different levels of eco-performance (Peattie 2001; 2010). In
many cases, though assuming high costs for green products is misconceived, the genuine cost
burden for the product exits as it has to internalize some market “externalities”. Thus compromise
is an important issue in green consumption which may include extra time or effort or sacrificing
quality or cost in purchasing (Peattie 2001). Consumers then may not buy or use green products if
844
they perceived their total benefits lower than the total costs, though they have positive attitude and
intention to act environmentally-friendly (Peattie 2001; Ottman et al. 2006; Peattie 2010).
Availability of green products thus can lower such perceived costs, making the green offering more
appealing (Ottman et al. 2006; Peattie 2010).
Second, in general, intention can be converted into an actual behavior may depend on whether the
consumers can remember their intention (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005). We expect a similar case in
green consumption. In this case, availability of green products may act as a situational cue that
when encountered will help remind the consumers’ memory for the behavioral intention.
Availability of green products triggers the consumers’ memories of green consumption scenarios
that they may have had in their intentions before. In other words, the availability of green products
reminds consumers to act in accordance with their established intention (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005).
Empirically, Seyfang (2006) showed that availability of the local organic food networks play an
important part in stimulating consumer’s green consumption behavior. Similarly, Bonini and
Oppenheim (2008) found that a limitation in supply can hinder green consumption actual behavior.
Recently, in a qualitative research, Gleim and colleagues found that unavailability of green
products is one of the top reasons for green consumers not to buy a green alternative (Gleim et al.
2013). Synthesizing the above arguments and evidence, we formally hypothesize that:
H1: The availability of green products moderates the relationship between green consumption
intention and actual behavior such that the more the green products are available, the stronger
the positive relationship between the intention and the behavior.
Perceived consumer effectiveness
Perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE) is referred to the consumer’s belief that individual
consumers can make a difference or impact on environment by purchasing or using
environmentally friendly products (Antil 1984; Kim et al. 2012; Gleim et al. 2013). Similar
concepts include self-efficacy (Bandura 1986) or locus of control (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002).
Evidence has been fairly conclusive that PCE can lead to greater levels of green consumerism
(Roberts 1996; Straughan and Roberts 1999; Kim et al. 2012). In this study, we argue that PCE
may facilitate the relationship from green consumption intention to the behavior.
845
First, consumers may want to choose a green alternative because it can bring better benefits than
the less green one (Peattie 2001; 2010). The benefits here may include the actualization of the goal
to positively influence the environment. Thus when consumers have a confidence that they can
make an environmental difference via green consumption, they are more likely to act according to
their intention or attitude (Peattie 2001). In the reverse case, when consumers are confused or
skeptical about the overt green claims, they can be scared away (Davis 1993; Peattie 2001).
Second, in general, consumers usually behave with their goals in mind (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005).
Thus whether intention can be converted into the actual behavior may depend on the ability to
control the goals (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005). In green consumption, consumers have their goals of
not only satisfying their needs but also for the welfare of society in general (Antil and Bennett
1979; Antil 1984) via the green consumption. Thus if consumers perceive that they can control the
goal of bringing welfare to society by improving the environment, they may behave according to
their intention.
Empirically, it has been found that when consumers believe their behavior contributing to their
goal accomplishment, the relationship between environmental responsibility attitude and the
behavior will become stronger (Berger and Corbin 1992). In the same vein, it has been found that
lack of trusted information about green alternatives may result in the gap between consumer’s green
attitude and actual buying behavior (Ginsberg and Bloom 2004). A recent qualitative research by
Young and colleague also found that lack of available information on the environmental and social
performance of products and manufacturers differentiate green consumers by their actual green
consumption behaviors (Young et al. 2010). Corroborating the above arguments and evidence, we
formally hypothesize that:
H2: The perceived consumer effectiveness moderates the relationship between green
consumption intention and actual behavior such that when consumers believe that their green
consumption behavior is more effective in achieving their environment and society goals, the
positive relationship between green consumption intention and the actual behavior becomes
stronger.
846
2.3. Antecedents to green consumption intention
The key antecedents to intention under TRA include attitude and subjective norms that have tested
in different consumer behavior and green consumption studies (e.g.: Wu and Chen 2014; Nguyen
et al. 2015). Moreover, several studies have distinguished the attitude towards the environment in
general and the attitude towards green consumption (e.g.: Ling-Yee 1997). To further ensure our
model result reliability, in this research, therefore, we would re-test the relationships between the
variables and green consumption intention without making any further hypotheses.
The tested model is illustrated in Figure 1. To ensure the reliability of the results, we add several
control variables that may affect green consumption intention and behavior including gender,
income level as well as price sensitivity of green products (Gleim et al. 2013).
3. Research methodology
3.1. Research context
The urbanization process in Vietnam has been accelerated since 1986 with the country’s “Doi Moi”
(Reform) policy. In fact, after 1986, the economic reforms have produced changes in different
processes of development including the urbanization (Albrecht et al. 2010). It was estimated that
the recent urbanization rate of about 3.4% in Vietnam has been the highest among Southeast Asia
countries (World Bank 2011). However, with the nation’s recent population of about 90 millions,
the rapid urbanization process has resulted in different socio-economic challenges, especially in
big cities. Media and researchers have recognized different pressing issues for the cities including
alarmingly worsening environment, poor urban planning, high corruption, and poor infrastructure,
among others (Bryant et al. 2015).
The environmental issues can be more pressing in the big cities in Vietnam. In fact, recently as
many as 50% of the urban population reside in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city. The consensus now
is that big cities in Vietnam have grown more rapidly than their governance capacity (Quertamp
and de Miras 2012). Thus even though the governments have tried their bests with its participation
in international sustainable conventions and issuing different regulations on environment
protection, it has been admitted that environmental achievement has not been in par with the
country’s sustainable growth potential (VNGovernment 2012). In fact, as Nguyen and Nguyen
847
(2017) pointed out most environment regulations and policies in Vietnam have been in the forms
of administrative commands requiring firms to follow green production strategies. The
government, however, seems to be mis-oriented on how to encourage green consumption (Nguyen
and Nguyen 2017).
3.2. Data collection
In this study, data was collected from consumers in two major cities in Vietnam: Hanoi and Ho Chi
Minh city. In each city, a supermarket is randomly selected. At each supermarket, respondents were
selected randomly that one out of every three patrons were invited for an interview. After five days
at each supermarket, 416 of respondents were interviewed with the questionnaires in total. The
interviewers are MBA students in two major universities in the two cities who were trained
carefully about the questionnaire. The interviews were taken in December 2016.
3.3. Measures
The measures used in this research are all modified from previous studies. In particular, measures
for key variables in our model including the availability (unavailability) of green products and
perceived consumer effectiveness are modified from the items in the work of Kim et al. (2012).
Green consumption intention is modified from Chan (2001). Green consumption behavior is
modified from Wu and Chen (2014). Measures for other variables are also modified from previous
works with attitude towards the environment and attitude towards green consumption from Ling-
Yee (1997), green product price sensitivity from Kim et al. (2012), and subjective norms of green
consumption from Wu and Chen (2014) (see Table 1 and 2 for detailed items).
To ensure the face validity of the measures, back translation method was used. In particular, the
first translator did the translation of all the original items into Vietnamese. A second independent
translator did the translation back into English. Two English versions, the original and the translated
one, were compared and resolved for any differences.
3.4. The sample
The final number of fully answered questionnaires in this study is 416. The sampled respondents
are aging from 16 to over 60. However, most of them are young consumers (78% of the respondents
848
are from 16 to 40 years old) and female (63%). Around 83% of the respondents have education
background of university level and higher. Thus this sample bear similarities to typical consumers
in major urban areas in Vietnam (Nguyen et al. 2013).
4. Analysis result
4.1. Measure reliability and validity
To evaluate reliabilities and validities of the measures, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and
Cronbach alphas were carried out. Independent and dependent variables were subjected to EFA
separately to reduce common method bias (Podsakoff et al. 2003).
In particular, first, items for the attitude towards the environment, attitude towards green
consumption, green product price sensitivity, the (un)availability of green products, perceived
consumer effectiveness and subjective norms of green consumption were subjected to EFA with
Principal Component analysis method and Varimax rotation. During this process, we eliminated
02 items with low factor loadings. In total, six factors were extracted with the total variance
extracted of 68.01 percent. Most of these factors have the acceptable Cronbach alphas (higher than
0.7) (see Table 1). The factors of (un)availability of green products and subjective norm of green
consumption have Cronbach alphas of 0.63 and 0.67, respectively. These, however, can be deemed
as acceptable for studies in fairly new areas (higher than 0.6) (Cohen et al. 2003).
Next, the items for green consumption intention and behavior are subjected to EFA using the same
method. The resulted factors and reliability coefficient alphas are acceptable: two factors are drawn
with a total variance extracted of 64.61 percent (see Table 2).
849
4.2. Hypothesis testing
To test the hypotheses in the research model, first the item scores for each factor are averaged to
form the variable for that factor. To test for moderation effects, multiplication variables are created
by multiplying the moderator and the independent variables. However, to remove the non-essential
correlation between the multiplication variables and the independent variables that create them, we
mean-centered the independent variables before taking the multiplication (Cohen et al., 2003). OLS
regressions are the used to test the models.
With green consumption behavior as the dependent variable, three regression models M1, M2 and
M3 are tested (Table 3). The analysis results show that multicollinearity may not be a problem in
our estimates (the highest value of VIF is only 1.68). Regression result shows that the our models
are acceptable. R2 for the full model (M3) is 51 percent, much higher than those of the model
without multiplication variables (M2) and those of the model with only control variables (M1).
Furthermore, intention is the important positive determinant to green consumption behavior as
expected. Other variables such as subjective norms, attitude towards the environment, the
(un)availability of green products and green product price sensitivity all have significant effects on
green consumption behavior as expected.
Notably, the regression analysis results show that the multiplication variable between green
consumption intention and green products unavailability, has a negative effect on green
consumption behavior (significant at 95% confidence level), while the relationship from intention
to green consumption behavior is positive. Thus, the unavailability of green products have a
negative moderating effect on the relationship between green consumption intention and behavior.
This also means availability of green products have a positive moderating effect on the relationship
between green consumption intention and behavior. Hypothesis H1 is supported.
Similarly, the multiplication variable between green consumption intention and perceived
consumer effectiveness have a positive effect on green consumption (significant at 99% confidence
level) while the relationship between intention and green consumption behavior is positive.
Therefore, perceived consumer effectiveness has a positive moderating effect on the relationship
between green consumption intention and behavior. Hypothesis H2 is then supported.
850
Finally, to ensure the theoretical suitability of the collected data, regression analyses were run with
green consumption intention as the dependent variable (Table 4). The analysis results indicate that
the variables such as attitude towards green consumption, perceived consumer effectiveness,
subjective norms of green consumption all have positive impact on green consumption intention as
predicted theoretically. R2 of the full model (M5) is 27 percent, significantly higher than the model
with only control variables (M4). This analysis results thus further demonstrates the suitability of
our collected data.
5. Discussion and recommendations
5.1. Result discussion
Green consumption used to be an important research topic in marketing literature, especially in the
western countries (Catlin and Wang 2013; Leonidou et al. 2013; Peloza et al. 2013; Haws et al.
2014). Recently, with the increasing level of concerns for environment especially in the emerging
Asian economies, green consumption has been pushed back to the forefront in consumer behavior
studies (Peattie 2010). In fact, by looking at the wrong place with green consumer profiling, the
topic seemed to subdue in the last decade (Peattie 2001). Recently, by focusing on the behavior,
instead of the consumers characteristics, research of the topic got a better movement with studies
in different economies, especially in the emerging Asian ones (e.g.: Lee 2008; Wu and Chen 2014;
Nguyen et al. 2015).
However, a recurring theme has been noted in the literature is the “attitude-behavior” gap reflecting
the failure to translate positive environmental values and attitudes into actual behavior (Kollmuss
and Agyeman 2002; Fraj and Martinez 2006; Josephine and Ritsuko 2008; Peattie 2010). Such
a gap has been recorded with evidence in different countries (e.g.: Lee 2008; Young et al. 2010;
Durif et al. 2012). This study thus endeavors to answer the call from scholars to take an
investigation into the gap.
In this study, by looking at the gap between behavioral intention and the green consumption
behavior, we identified two keys moderating variables including green product availability and
perceived consumer effectiveness. Our data with Vietnamese consumers in two big cities of
Vietnam, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, helped confirm our hypotheses that the moderators facilitate
the relationship from behavioral intention and green consumption. Thus when green products are
851
more available (i.e. high product availability) and/or consumers perceive better that their actions
of purchasing or using green products can make a positive impact on the environment (i.e. high
perceived consumer effectiveness), consumers with intention to consume green would be more
likely to do it. Our research findings thus help explain a gap between the intention and behavior.
In fact, similar to some recent research, our research results have shown that the correlation between
intention and behavior in green consumption can be high, controlling for other variables
(standardized beta equals to .282 in our study) (e.g.: Wu and Chen 2014; Nguyen et al. 2015).
However, such relationship can be even higher when green products are more available or
perceived consumer effectiveness is higher. Thus, this may help explain, for example, why 30% of
UK consumers reported to be concerned about environment but struggled to engage in green
purchases (Young et al. 2010) or why 46 to 67% of UK citizens showed their favorable attitude
toward organic food but the actual purchase was only 4-10% for different product range (Hughner
et al. 2007; Young et al. 2010). In different developed countries the consumers may not really
believe that their green purchases can really make an impact on the environment or green products
are not easily found around (Ginsberg and Bloom 2004; Bonini and Oppenheim 2008). In the
emerging Asian economies, green consumption may just be a starting trend (Lee 2008).
Thus our study results corroborate with previous studies in several ways. First, our study results
also confirmed the role of product availability in impacting the green consumption behavior (e.g.:
Lee 2008; Gleim et al. 2013). Moreover, the results in this study stressed that product availability
also has the moderating role in facilitating the transition from green consumption intention to actual
behavior. The moderating role has been proposed via qualitative studies including such as Seyfang
(2006) in UK or Gleim et al. (2013) in the US.
Second, our research results also confirmed the determining role of perceived consumer
effectiveness on green behavior (e.g.: Lee and Holden 1999; Young et al. 2010; Kim et al. 2012).
But more importantly, our research result also emphasized the moderating effect of perceived
consumer effectiveness on the relationship between green consumption intention and behavior.
This result thus corroborates with previous findings from a Canadian sample on the moderating
role of perceived consumer effectiveness on the relationship between attitude and behavior (Berger
and Corbin 1992).
852
Our study results thus make several contribution to the extant literature. First, results from this
study helps explain a gap between green consumption intention and behavior, the gap that has
become a recurring theme in the field (Peattie 2010). In fact, two moderating factors here including
green product availability and perceived consumer effectiveness can be considered as
corresponding to two dimensions proposed by Peattie (2001) that may help close the attitude-
behavior gap, namely the compromise and the confidence, respectively. Moreover, our study may
be the first to test such contextual variables in an emerging Asian economy, Vietnam, where green
consumption is beginning to become a major trend.
Second, results in this study also provide contributions to a larger literature on the gap between
intention and behavior in general. In fact, studies in different fields of consumer behaviors usually
viewed the intention as the same or at least highly correlated with behavior (Ajzen and Fishbein
2005). Our study results, however, have shown that there always exists a gap between the intention
and the actual behavior, at least in the field of green consumption (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005). This
study thus helps reconfirm the determinant role of intention in explaining behavior but at the same
time, explain the theoretical inconsistency.
5.2. Managerial implications
Our study results can also help recommend strategies for firms in doing their green marketing.
However, instead of spreading on different solutions such as educating consumers, building better
products for both ecological and functional performance, and so on (Bonini and Oppenheim 2008),
our research results recommend to focus on increasing availability of green products. This strategy
focus will not only help increase awareness of green products to potential purchasers but also turn
the consumers who already have intention to consume the products into the actual consumer of the
products. Firms should also take advantage of the study results from previous research in the field
to fine-tune their shelf showing strategies including detailed green information on the packaging
(e.g.: Gleim et al. 2013).
Moreover, our study results further recommend increasing the consumers’ awareness of the green
product performance that helps accomplish personal goals of environment impact. Similarly, this
social and education green consumption strategy would help not only increase green consumption
behaviors but also turn the consumer intention into actual green behaviors. Under this strategy,
853
consumers need to be aware of their personal impacts via consuming green products (Kim et al.
2012). Thus promotion strategy that helps link purchases with particular environment impacts
would be helpful (see Gleim et al. 2013 for examples).
5.3. Limitation and recommendations for further research
Our study is not without limitations. In fact, the data for this study was gathered from single
sources. However, we minimized common method bias to the best we could by arranging questions
in good flow order with ones for independent variables first and then the dependent variable
(Podsakoff et al. 2003). Our EFA and Cronbach alpha analyses also seemed to show reliable and
valid measures. However, future research may find it beneficial to monitor actual green
consumption behaviors to glean the best accurate indicators for the behaviors.
It should also be noted that in our analyses we found a positive relationship between income and
green consumption intention but negative one between income and the behavior. That may look
intriguing at first but can partly be explained by the fact that trust in green products in some
emerging country can be problematic (Kim et al. 2012). Thus while high-incomed consumers may
be willing to spend more on green products, they actually do not believe there would be such
products available in the market to purchase. Still further future research should be designed more
specifically about brand trust to explain this.
Finally, while our study started to shed light on a gap between attitude and behavior in green
consumption, future research may explore other moderating variables to the relationship between
intention and behavior. Under this line of research, other variables corresponding to two
dimensions as proposed by Peattie (2001), the compromise and confidence, would be helpful.
Moreover, other contextual variables that moderate the relationship between attitude and intention
in green consumption are worth to explore.
To conclude, this study may be the initial step of hopefully many to come as studies continue to
investigate how marketers can further increase green consumption for the sake of both the business
and the environment. There is much left to be explored and discussed with regards to green
consumption and green strategies in today of sustainable demands from worldwide markets.
854
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Attitude towards
green
consumption
Attitude
towards the
environment
Subjective
norms
Green
consumption
intention
Green
consumption
behavior
Perceived
consumer
effectiveness
Green products
availability
Control variables
H
1 H
2
Figure 1: Green consumption behavior – Testing Model
862
Table 1: Independent variable – EFA and Reliability Analysis Result
Factor Indicator Factor
loading α
Attitude towards
the environment
Humankind are destroying the environment .856
0.800 I’m concerned about environment pollution .802
Natural environment balance is complicated and
disappointing .771
Attitude towards
green
consumption
Unsanitary food is harmful to our health .822
0.751 Plastic bags used to carry foods are harmful to the
environment .758
Subjective norm
of green
consumption
I purchase most of products online .720
0.668 In my office, green consumption demonstrates higher status .804
When purchasing, I am heavily influenced by the people who
are going with me .722
Green products
price sensitivity
I will purchase green products when they are on sale .886
0.780 I will purchase green products if they are on a promotion .915
I will purchase green products if their price is equal to or not
higher than regular products .597
The
(un)availability
of green
products
I actually do not know where green products are sold .788
0.628 Green products are not sold at stores close to where I live .728
I cannot easily find green products if I do not look for it
carefully .701
Perceived
consumer
effectiveness
(PCE)
My green consumption behavior can have a positive impact
on the environment. .729
0.706 Energy-saving products have a significant impact
economically to families and society .714
Products labeled ‘green’ are ensured with 100% quality .647
I will only purchase fresh food if I know its origin .638
863
Table 2: Dependent variable – EFA and Reliability Analysis Result
Factor Indicator Factor
loading α
Green
consumption
intention
I plan to buy green products (organic foods or energy saving
products) over the next one month 0.761
0.839
I am willing to consider switching to other brands for
ecological reasons 0.866
I am willing to pay more for a product which is healthy or
helps protect the environment 0.787
I will consider buying green products because they are less
polluting. 0.791
Green
consumption
behavior
I prefer purchasing safe or traceable foods 0.809
0.838
I prefer purchasing green label products 0.778
I rarely use plastic bag to carry foods 0.756
Electric appliance in my family are energy saving 0.651
I introduce the green products I use to my friends and
relatives. 0.799
Table 3: Regressions with green consumption behavior as dependent variable
Independent variable M1 M2 M3
Gender .134*** .061 .070a
Income -.227*** -.164*** -.147***
Attitude towards the environment .221*** .073a .110**
Attitude towards green consumption .079 -.182*** -.127***
Subjective norm of green consumption .297*** .161*** .176***
Green product price sensitivity -.133* -.194*** -.180***
The unavailability of green products .003 -.015
Perceived consumer effectiveness .514** .510***
Green consumption intention .282*** .282***
Green consumption intention x Green product
unavailability -.085*
Green consumption intention x Perceived consumer
effectiveness .222***
R2 .18 .48 .51
R2 change .30*** .04***
Adjusted R2 .17 .46 .50
Significant at different confidence levels: a 90%, * 95%, ** 99%, and *** 99.9%.
N=416
864
Table 4: Regressions with green consumption intention as dependent variable
Independent variable M4 M5
Gender .15** .08a
Income .19** .18***
Attitude towards the environment -.02
Attitude towards green consumption .10*
Subjective norms of green consumption .27***
Perceived consumer effectiveness .32***
R2 .05 .27
R2 change .22***
Adjusted R2 .05 .26
Significant at different confidence levels: a 90%, * 95%, ** 99%, and *** 99.9%.
N=416
865
Environment or Economy?
Difference in perception of
sustainable tourism between
environmental friendly tourists
and mass tourists.
Hoang Linh Nguyen, Université de Lille, France
Extended Abstract
Economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts are the main three pillars of
sustainable development (UNWTO, 1996). Yet, sustainability is usually synonym with only its
environmental aspects, while neglecting the other two, both in academic (Lim and Cooper, 2009)
as well as in corporate practices (Hughes, 2017). Therefore, it is not strange that alternative tourism,
whose focus is mainly on preserving the environment, dominates the sustainable tourism
development (STD), but only with limited impacts on the society as a whole (Weaver, 2013;
Peeters, 2013). The market response to STD has been only strong rhetorically, but weak in
purchasing power (Weaver, 2013; Peeters, 2013). While this gap can be explained by consumer’s
reluctance to change their behavior (Miller, 2000), the current practices still remain strong toward
environmental protection, rather than economic and social development. Since the definition of
STD suffers from confusion and misinterpretation due to its ambiguity and complexity (Sharpley,
2000), we can assume that the mass tourists have a slightly different view from their ecological
counterparts, leading to different behaviors, despite showing the same level of support toward STD.
This study aims to explore and compare the perceptions of ecological tourists and mass tourists in
an attempt to bridge this gap.
866
The research venue is set around the online debate surrounding the cable car project in
Fansipan, Sapa, Vietnam, from its construction to its inauguration. Ever since Doi Moi, Vietnam
enjoys a robust economic growth, with a burgeoning middle class desiring to spend their newly
found wealth (Mai et al., 2009). The government of Hanoi pursuits a modernist approach to its
economic development, increasingly integrating the local minorities into the national economy and
turning the once exotic remote town of Sapa into a modern tourism site, decorated with a highway,
a cable car and a symbolic destination (Michaud and Turner, 2017). Tourism, as a catalyst for
growth and quality of life, has been embraced by the government and its people across the country
(e.g. Nguyen, Rahtz and Schultz, 2014). Like in China, they encourage projects directed toward
the domestic middle-class tourists, who are becoming far more important for the industry than the
international tourists (Michaud and Turner, 2017), but receive little academic attention (Chan,
2006).
The cable car to Fansipan remained at the spotlight of the Sapa grand project. Being the
highest peak in Vietnam and traditionally an alternative tourist spot, known for its hiking trip and
breathtaking view, Fansipan remained exclusive to a small number of backpackers and praised as
a desirable and symbolic destination. The cable car opened the peak to the mass, putting modernist
leisure facilities packed with Vietnamese tourists on weekend retreats. This sparked a strong debate
both within the backpacker community, as well as in the general population of whether should such
a construction be built. And since the cable project claimed to bring sustainable development to the
region (Nhandan, 2016), it received as much support as critics from all sides. The fierce exchanges
between communities’ members of many different groups of tourists provide a rare opportunity to
address the perception issue of the mass tourists.
Employing netnography methodology, the author examines several major online tourist
communities in Vietnam to explore their opinions regarding the Fansipan Cable Car project based
on its dimensions (UNWTO, 1996). The preliminary observations and findings reveal a stark
contrast between the perceptions of mass tourists and their ecological counterparts. While both
communities recognize the degrading environment that accompanies economic benefits, the two
are separated by their attitude toward the other stakeholders as well as their expectation to the
project’s outcomes. As the main target of the government’s modernization (Michaud and Turner,
2017), the mass tourists show a stronger support toward the corporate actors and the government,
hence a positive expectation of a better-protected environment, more developed region and
867
enriched local population in the future. On the other hand, the ecological communities see the mass
tourists, the developers and the government as corrupted and evil entities, “chopping down the
Hoang Lien Son to enrich themselves” and “having bad attitude”, leading to a much pessimistic
outlook for the destination. Consequently, the frequency of Fansipan related discussion peaked
right before the project inauguration and dwindled as the ecological community’s member
abandoned Fansipan for other destinations. At the same time, they contained less debate and moved
toward casual trip planning. Nevertheless, in either side, the author observes a lack of mention of
the local minorities, who are usually treated as the exotic decoration (Michaud and Turner, 2006)
and receive little attention in a Kinh-dominated structure (Michaud and Turner, 2017). This hints
at a much complex situation beyond the simple sustainable/non-sustainable name tag. This study
will discuss these preliminary results and their implications in order to promote ethical
consumption to the mass in emerging countries.
References
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Western Tourism and Host-Guest Interactions in Vietnam’s Border Tourism”, Tourist Studies,
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Hughes C.P., Semejin J., and Caniels M. (2017), “The Sustainability Skew”, Current Opinion in
Environmental Sustainability, 28, 58-63.
Lim C. C. and Cooper C. (2009), “Beyond Sustainability: Optimising Island Tourism
Development”, International Journal of Tourism Research, 11(1), 89-103
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Hill Station”, Annals of Tourism Research, 66, 37-48.
Michaud, J. and Turner, S. (2006). “Contending Visions of a Hill-Station in Vietnam”, Annals of
Tourism Research, 33(3), 785–808.
Michaud, J., and Turner, S. (2016), “Tonkin’s Uplands at The Turn of the 20th Century: Colonial
Military Enclosure and Local Livelihood Effects”, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 57(2), 154–
167.
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of Sustainable Tourism, 1, 17–39.
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Convergence”, Tourism Management, 33, 1030–1037.
869
Sharing Economy as
complementary Economy? The
relation between providers and
consumers I
Track Chair: Elfriede Penz
Co-Chair(s): Barbara Hartl
Eva Hofmann
870
Zone of Optimal Distinctiveness:
The Effect of Provider’s Asset
Personalization on Customer’s
Psychological Ownership of Shared
Lodging
Sabrina V. Helm94, University of Arizona, USA
Anita D. Bhappu95, University of California Merced, USA
Extended Abstract
The sharing economy has had a significant impact on the travel and hospitality industry
(Mody et al. 2017) with successful platform businesses – such as Airbnb and HomeAway –
offering peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodations that compete with traditional business-to-consumer
(B2C) hotel chains. Airbnb has four million shared lodging options across more than 191
countries, which represent more accommodations than offered by the top five hotel chains
combined (Airbnb 2017). HomeAway has two million P2P vacation rentals in 190 countries
listed on its platform (HomeAway 2018). This volume of available shared lodging is a
commanding example of the market disruption posed today by the sharing economy.
A potential marketing challenge unique to shared lodging relates to a provider’s
personalization of a P2P accommodation, which is their underutilized asset. Unlike traditional
B2C hotel rooms that are standardized in configuration and décor to corporate specifications,
94 [email protected] 95 [email protected]
871
shared lodging is individually furnished and decorated according to the personal preferences of
the provider who is renting out their house, apartment or room. This asset personalization leads to
the authenticity and uniqueness of P2P accommodations, which are factors valued by customers
in the sharing economy (Tussyadiah and Pesonen 2016). However, a customer may have
difficulty feeling psychologically at home in shared lodging that is highly personalized by a
provider.
In this paper, we conceptually explore how a provider’s asset personalization presents
challenges for a customer’s psychological ownership of shared lodging. Drawing on the literature
about psychological ownership, service-dominant logic, the experience economy and the theory
of extended self, we contend that there is a zone of optimal distinctiveness for P2P
accommodations wherein customers’ psychological ownership of them is maximized (see Figure
1). Our goal is to contribute to theory development specific to the interaction between market
actors in the sharing economy. From a managerial perspective, we shed light on how providers
can maximize not only the authenticity and uniqueness of their P2P accommodation but also
customers’ psychological ownership and caretaking of it. This latter understanding could enhance
the service experience and mitigate the property damage of shared assets.
Customers’ psychological ownership – the state of having possessive feelings about
material objects (Pierce et al. 2001) – is instrumental to them valuing and responsibly
experiencing P2P accommodations (Pierce et al. 2003). Having shared or temporary possession
of a material good engenders an individual’s “proprietary feelings” towards it (Belk 2014), which
increases its perceived value (Jiménez et al. 2013). Belk (2014) has even suggested that shared
goods can become part of a consumer’s extended self (1988). Whereas ownership has been the
normative consumption ideal (Belk 2014), consumers in the sharing economy primarily
appreciate physical assets for their “value-in-use” (Bardhi et al. 2012).
Service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch 2004) is a paradigm for understanding value
creation during consumption, and goods sharing is one of the competencies that service is often
based on (Maglio & Spohrer 2008). Furthermore, service systems are comprised of entities that
“interact by granting access rights to one another’s resources” (Maglio & Spohrer 2013, p. 666).
As such, P2P accommodations in the sharing economy can be conceptualized as a service system
wherein the act of renting out one’s house, apartment or room is the service. Therefore, shared
lodging is legally a non-ownership service “in which customers acquire some property rights to
872
an asset and are offered a certain degree of freedom in using this asset for a specified period
while the burdens of ownership remain with the owner” (Moeller & Wittkowski 2010, p. 172).
According to literature on the experience economy (Gilmore and Pine 2002), providers
need to focus on the design and delivery of services to differentiate their market offerings. Pine
and Gilmore (1998) identified four dimensions of a service experience – entertainment,
education, escapism, and esthetics, which can increase its value to customers. Even though all of
these dimensions could be relevant to shared lodging, we focus on esthetics because it refers to
the physical environment of a P2P accommodation and customers’ interpretation of its distinctive
design (Mody et al. 2017).
Sharing economy customers seek unique service experiences, which are shaped in large
part by staying in places that are authentically designed and curated by the providers. Therefore,
the personalization of P2P accommodations is a source of competitive advantage for both
providers and platform businesses in the sharing economy. Providers that list rooms, apartments,
and homes for rent on Airbnb and HomeAway are encouraged to showcase their individuality
through the furnishing and decoration of these spaces, which reflect their tastes and preferences.
Customers may even perceive service offerings as being more authentic when P2P
accommodations are more personalized by providers, which creates high variance in shared
lodging.
Although a provider’s asset personalization can distinguish a P2P accommodation from
other service offerings, it can also hinder customers’ psychological ownership of shared lodging
if they don’t feel comfortable staying in it. Customers may have difficulty adapting highly
individualized spaces to fit their needs and possessions. Some Airbnb and HomeAway
accomodations have no room for guests to unpack and organize their belongings; every surface
and wall is filled with the provider’s personal artifacts and memorabilia, which reinforce that the
shared lodging is not owned by the customer. At the same time, mimicking the generic esthetic of
B2C hotel rooms could pose similar constraints for customers’ psychological ownership of a P2P
accommodation; it becomes too depersonalized to engender a sense of belonging. Therefore,
enabling customers to feel at home in P2P accommodations is arguably very important in this
service context. We contend that customers’ psychological ownership of shared lodging is
maximized when an owerns’s asset personalization is moderate, which we define as the zone of
optimal distinctiveness (see Figure 1).
873
References are available upon request.
Figure 1. Optimal Distinctiveness of Shared Lodging
874
Sharing Economy: Power, Trust,
and Cooperation
Eva Hofmann, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Barbara Hartl, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Elfriede Penz, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Sarah Marth, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Thomas Sabitzer, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
The presentation will focus on the Austrian Science Fund funded three years project
“Collaborative Consumption: power, trust and cooperation”. This project aims to explain
cooperative behavior in the sharing economy. In the sharing economy, consumers no longer own
a good, but temporarily have access to this good (e.g., using car sharing or engaging in
community gardens) (Bardhi & Eckhard, 2012; Belk, 2014). When these consumers use resources
provided by others, each individual is financially better off when they make use of the shared
resources without contributing in return, harming the community (e.g., harvesting fruits in a
community garden without taking care of the plants). The sharing economy can, therefore, be
presented as a real-life social dilemma in which individual interests contradict the community’s
interests (Dawes, 1980).
Engaging in the sharing economy is increasing in popularity, stimulating new business models
(Schor, & Fritzmaurice, 2015). These new business models comprises new challenges for the
market place, as sharing economy businesses are blamed of not offering a standardized level of
875
service and price and of lacking safeguards for customers. We differentiate three core sharing
economy business models: (a) business-to-consumer models, (b) peer-to-peer exchange between
single individuals, and (c) self-regulating communities without a distinct authority. We assume
and have first empirical evidence (Hofmann, Hartl & Penz, 2017) that the different models are
characterized by different kinds of power (coercive power and legitimate power) to prevent
uncooperative behaviour by consumers and by different kinds of trust (implicit and reason-based
trust) in providers as well as other users of the shared good. To investigate differences between
models, we apply the slippery slope framework (Gangl, Hofmann, & Kirchler, 2015), which
highlights the dynamic between power and trust and thereby offers a theoretical framework.
Specifically, we investigate (1) what kind of power and trust consumers perceive in the sharing
economy business models; (2) how the introduction of power affects trust, cooperation, and
consumers’ decision to engage in the sharing economy; and (3) the impact of power in a real-life
environment of the sharing economy.
We use a multi-method approach (focus groups, online questionnaire, laboratory experiments,
field experiment), investigating how power of authorities providing shared goods impact trust,
and cooperation. The focus groups investigate how power and trust are perceived within the
respective sharing economy business models. The online questionnaire assesses with a
representative sample how different forms of power (coercive power and legitimate power) –
manipulated via websites of different sharing economy business models - can induce trust and
cooperation in the sharing economy. The laboratory experiments on the one hand investigate how
coercive and legitimate power of the three sharing economy business models influence
contribution to and usage of a shared good and investigates how trust differs over the different
business models. On the other hand the laboratory experiments examine which feature of a
sharing economy business model (coercive and/or legitimate power) stimulates participation in
the respective model instead of taking part in a simple lottery. The field experiment is undertaken
with community gardens, whereby each community garden is introducing either coercive,
legitimate or neutral rules to the garden. Based on this manipulation conflicts between the
gardeners and solving of these conflicts are observed with questionnaires and event diaries.
The results of the project are extraordinary, because first, we examine a current form of consumer
behavior, i.e., sharing by comparing the sharing economy models, business-to-consumer, peer-to-
peer, and self-regulating community in their approach to power wielding, trust, and cooperation.
876
Second, the results of the project will encourage sharing what is of advantage for businesses,
consumers and the environment. Third, we extend the validity of the slippery slope framework by
innovatively distinguishing between trust in fellow users (horizontal trust) and trust in the
provider of the good (vertical trust).
First results show that the motivation to engage in the sharing economy is specifically monetary,
independently from the sharing economy business model. Power and trust are both important to
participants of the sharing economy, whereby unexpectedly in the current focus groups power
was more discussed than trust, and power and trust differ over the various business models.
Additionally, with the first laboratory experiment we found that contributions to a shared good
differ based on wielded coercive and/or legitimate power, but usage of the shared good is evenly
divided by the persons sharing the good. We want to add that at the time of the presentation more
results will be ready for demonstration.
These and the future findings of the comprehensive research project provide deeper insights for
researchers. They show how power in the sharing economy is related to trust and cooperation and
how to use the slippery slope framework to apply it to their research. Besides this, it also has an
impact on legislators, because it allows for recommendations for legislators, what consumers
want kind of regulation in the sharing economy, and where a trust regime is sufficient.
877
References
Bardhi, F. and Eckhardt, G.M. (2012). Access-based consumption: the case of car sharing.
Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 881-898.
Belk, R. (2014). You are what you can access: sharing and collaborative consumption online.
Journal of Business Research, 67(8), 1595-1600.
Dawes, R. M. (1980). Social dilemmas. Annual Review of Psychology, 31, 169-193.
Schor, J., & Fritzmaurice, C. (2015). Collaborating and connecting: The emergence of a sharing
economy. In L. Reisch & J. Thogersen (Eds.), Handbook on Research on Sustainable
Consumption. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Hofmann, E., Hartl, B., & Penz (2017). Power versus trust – What matters more in collaborative
consumption? Journal of Services Marketing, 31(6), 589-603.
Gangl, K., Hofmann, E., & Kirchler, E. (2015). Tax authorities' interaction with taxpayers: A
conception of compliance in social dilemmas by power and trust. New Ideas in Psychology,
37, 13-23.
878
Environmental crises; value in
collaborative governance
Pia Polsa, Hanken School of Economics, Finland
Sanne Bor, Hanken School of Economics, Finland
Abstract
Collaborative governance situations are specific as multiple, potentially conflicting stakeholders
are brought together with the aim of finding a shared solution to a multi-partner problem.
Environmental crises is one such kind of phenomenon. When environmental crises occur,
particularly if they are manmade, actors such as companies, governments on different levels,
NGOs, citizen forums etc., may come together to find a solution to the shared problem. This can
be on a global level, such as the Paris agreement, but also locally when different activities put
different demands on the environment (growth in number of people living in an area, growth in
economic activity) which may damage or destroy the environment, which may be the livelihood
of others, or unique or important in other ways. When needing to find solutions in a collaborative
governance setting, it is not always clear what value such a process would bring to the different
actors or if the final collaborative solution would be valuable to all those involved or represented
in the process. In this paper, we review the value co-creation literature from the marketing
domain and provide insight into the different perspectives and dimensions of value to provide a
value-mapping framework for collaborative governance setting. The aim of the current paper is to
analyze current literature on value in order to extend this literature to provide insights beyond the
dyadic producer-customer relation, adding the possibility for value destruction and providing a
multidimensional view on value for stakeholders. In so doing, we adapt the value co-creation
literature to collaborative governance situations. We also extend the value literature to a network
approach that is not company centric but problem solution centric. In addition, we extend
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collaborative governance literature to include notion of value that might detect value and disvalue
in collaborative networks and, in consequence, through value provide understanding for possible
solutions. Following methods were used for literature search: search words “value co-creation”
and “stakeholder value” in major marketing journals were used (JM, JAMS, MS, IMM, IJRM,
JCR, JBE, JCP). Environmental crises as a context as opposite to for example health crises has
been chosen to be able to later easily find empirical cases for data collection. Unlike for example
pan-epidemic health crises, environmental conflicts exist constantly in many societal levels from
local to global thus easier to access empirically. A brief summary of existing literature is
provided in Table 1. The table is a work in progress and will be updated it with the identified 53
articles by the time of the conference. Literature so far has purchase focus and therefore only two
stakeholder are used; customers/clients who have a problem or a need and companies who can
solve that problem or need. The table shows the value dimensions provided by the current
literature as well as the definition of each dimension. It also marks what kind of actors have been
considered in the previous literature as those who create, co-create, or receive value. The results
are in progress.
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Value To whom
Source Definition Dimension Company Customer
(Karababa &
Kjeldgaard,
2014)
Value typology
(ibid) Income and price of a product Economic x
(ibid) The use value of a product Use x
(ibid) Goodness of something else like person or product Social
(ibid) Cultural meaning of a product Semiotic
(Zeithaml,
1988)
Perceived value
(ibid) A use value of a product Utility x
(Sheth,
Newman &
Gross, 1991)
Functional benefit of product attributes
Functional
x
(ibid) Beliefs and desired goals for the individual from the
product Social
(ibid) Functional or social value that is only valuable during a
specific circumstance Conditional
(ibid) Feelings, affection and memories that are associated with
the product Emotional
(ibid) To learn or try something new Epistemic
(Holbrook,
2002; Sánchez-
Fernández &
Iniesta-Bonillo,
2007)
To buy desirable products that bring pleasure or to have
fun
Hedonic
(ibid) The appearance of a product that is appealing Aesthetic x
(ibid) The value to do what is right per personal beliefs Ethical
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Value To whom
Source Definition Dimension Company Customer
(ibid) The practical benefits of the product attributes Practical x
(Holbrook &
Hirschman,
1982; Arnould,
2014)
Experiential value
(Babin, Darden
& Griffin,
1994)
Value of being able to fulfil personal fantasies
Fantasies
(ibid) Value of being able to express emotions Emotions
(ibid) Value of having fun Fun
(ibid) Value of seeking distraction or escaping from reality Escapism
(ibid) Value of achieving something personally
desired Fulfilment
(ibid) Value of participating in something important Involvement
(ibid) Value of participating in something important Network
(idid) Value of being included in a network Identity
Table 1. Value in existing literature
882
References
Arnould, E. J. (2014). Rudiments of a value praxeology. Marketing Theory, 14(1), 129-133.
Babin, B. J., Darden, W. R., & Griffin, M. (1994). Work and/or fun: Measuring hedonic and
utiliarian shopping value. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(March), 644-656.
Holbrook, M. B. (2002). Introduction to consumer value. Consumer value: A framework for
analysis and research (pp. 1-28). London, US: Routledge.
Holbrook, M. B., & Hirschman, E. C. (1982). The experiential aspects of consumption:
Consumer fantasies, feelings, and fun. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(2), 132-40.
Karababa, E., & Kjeldgaard, D. (2014). Value in marketing: Toward sociocultural perspectives.
Marketing Theory, 14(1), 119-127.
Sánchez-Fernández, R., & Iniesta-Bonillo, M. A. (2007). The concept of perceived value: A
systematic review of the research. Marketing Theory, 7(4), 427-451.
Sheth, J. N., Newman, B. I., & Gross, B. L. (1991). Why we buy what we buy: A theory of
consumption values. Journal of Business Research, 22(2), 159-170.
Zeithaml, V. A. (1988). Consumer perceptions of price, quality and value: A means-end model
and synthesis of evidence. Journal of Marketing, 52(3), 2-22.
883
Macromarketing
Measurement and Methodology
I
Track Chair: Benn Wooliscroft
Co-Chair(s): Francisco Conejo
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Historical Marketing Systems
Research: Applying Layton’s
(2015) MAS Framework
to the Emergence and Growth of
Denver Begging Systems
Francisco J. Conejo, University of Colorado - Denver, USA
Ben Wooliscroft, University of Otago, New Zealand
Abstract: This article explores the application of historical research to understand the emergence
and growth of current marketing systems. It does so in the context of 19th-Century Denver begging,
using broad tenets derived from Layton’s (2015) MAS systems framework. Empirical data from
period newspapers indicates that by 1880 Denver begging reached significant proportions and
diversity. Consistent with the literature, it emerged through a combination of micro, meso, and
macro factors. The proposed tenets, i.e. convergence, drivers, specialization, stratification, power,
environment, growth, and diversification, indeed explain Denver begging’s early development.
Historical research can, and should, be used to better understand the origins of current marketing
systems. Though it also reveals how rich and complex marketing system legacies can be.
Keywords: Marketing, systems, history, 19th Century, Denver, begging.
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Introduction
Systems are at the core of macromarketing (Hunt 1981, Peterson 2016). By integrating the
various participants, flows and environments associated to the issues of interest, systems transcend
conventional managerial thinking. This results in a broader and deeper phenomenological
understanding, important in today’s increasingly-complex marketing environment (Layton 2007).
Much has been written on theoretical marketing system aspects. Yet only a few efforts, e.g.
Layton (2015) or Haase et at. (2018), apply this theory to understand the nature and operation of
actual marketing systems. Research on marketing systems’ historical development is virtually non-
existent. This is unfortunate. Present marketing systems derive from unique temporal/spatial
circumstances. Studying these social, cultural and economic legacies is important: Not only does it
help researchers better understand present marketing phenomena. Equally important, historical
systems research extends and fine-tunes marketing theory as a whole (Layton 2015b).
In line with the above, and the 2018 Macromarketing Conference’s Research Methods
Track, the present paper explores how historical research might be applied to better understand
current marketing systems. It does so in the context of 19th-Century Denver begging.
As to why 19th-Century, the period is of historical interest as it marks the transition towards
a consumer society. The social, demographic and economic changes of the era greatly contributed
towards the development of modern marketing, it important to further understand these processes
(Fullerton 1988, Strasser 1989). As to why begging, marketing theorists, e.g. Hunt (1983), have
long called for research to transcend managerial contexts and also address non-conventional
exchanges. Also, with few exceptions, e.g. Belk (1992) who covers pre-1870 Mormon migrations,
or Hill, Hirschman et al. (1997) who address the Great Depression, historical research has tended
to focus on prosperous contexts, neglecting those of hardship, equally important to understand. The
last decade has thus seen increased interest in vulnerable market participants, e.g. Baker, Gentry
et al. (2005); bottom of the pyramid markets, e.g. Agnihotri (2012); subsistence entrepreneurs, e.g.
Viswanathan, Echambadi et al. (2014); and ad hoc exchange systems, e.g. Baker, Hill et al. (2015),
among others. Finally, as to why Denver, histories may be presented geographically (Hollander,
Rassuli et al. 2005). Along these lines, Layton (2015b) suggests focusing historical marketing
The authors kindly thank the Denver Public Library’s Western History Department, the History Colorado Museum’s
Library, and University of Colorado - Denver History Professor Thomas J. Noel (Dr. Colorado) for their valuable
insights into this project.
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systems research on specific places. Peterson (2016), in his Systems Macro-Cross, adds that an
under-researched area of marketing systems are the places they are associated to. He thus
encourages place-based systems research.
This paper begins by addressing the begging phenomenon. Building on these conceptual
foundations, the paper then discusses begging as a marketing system. The research methodology
used is commented on next. Results are thereafter presented. In these, the origins, growth and
diversification of 19th-Century Denver begging are discussed, per the broad tenets derived from
Layton’s (2015) marketing systems framework. A general discussion follows. The paper ends with
some limitations and future research suggestions, as well as some closing thoughts.
This study focuses on a somewhat distant time and place, 19th-Century Denver. The authors
would like to nevertheless point out how the historical processes uncovered uncannily mirror
present-day problematics. By stimulating awareness and discussion thereon, the authors hope that
a better present and future might be created.
Conceptual Overview
Begging generally occurs when gifts are solicited from unknown passersby in a public space
(Adriaenssens and Hendrickx 2011). This usually takes place in high-transit locations. Beggars
might target pedestrians, as in downtown areas, or travelers, like at intersections (Homeless-Advice
2017). Regardless, prime locations are those that force passersby to slow down, ideally stop, giving
beggars the opportunity to ask for help (Holleran 2011). Beggars request mostly money, widely
preferred as it allows to conveniently purchase various goods and services. Though gift appeals
might also refer to food or clothing (Gmelch and Gmelch 1978). The income derived from begging,
be it monetary or in-kind, then serves individuals to sustain themselves, their households, and
organizations they might belong to (Abebe 2009).
Begging takes on different forms. It can be a short-term survival strategy to cope with
interim adversity, e.g. job loss. Though once better income opportunities emerge, most individuals
move on to pursue them (Abebe 2009). Begging can also be a permanent, long-term occupation. It
thus becomes an actual livelihood, through which professional mendicants make their living
(Bentwick 1894). Furthermore, and depending on the circumstances, begging may be conducted
full-time; part-time, to supplement income from other sources like odd jobs, welfare, or scavenging;
or intermittently, to gain extra money on the side (Adriaenssens and Hendrickx 2011).
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Begging is a complex phenomenon. It derives from interrelated cultural, social, and
economic factors. A systems approach is thus required to properly address it. The fundamental
issue behind begging is the lack of better livelihood opportunities (Abebe 2009, Adriaenssens and
Hendrickx 2011). Though how this comes about depends on a series of macro, meso, and micro
factors, which in conjunction, drive individuals towards the activity.
At the macro level, begging might result from widespread socio-environmental disruption.
Livelihoods may be thwarted by war, natural disaster, disease, or famine; as by economic crises or
political change (Cooke 1908). At the meso level, livelihoods might be upset by market
fluctuations, or companies going under/downsizing due to technological or outsourcing
advantages. At the micro level, livelihoods may be thwarted via the lack or loss of required skills,
making individuals unsuitable for employment (Gmelch and Gmelch 1978). The above might be
compounded by other personal factors such as physical or mental disability, failing health,
discrimination, homelessness, family dysfunctionality, or substance abuse, among others (Ozanne,
Moscato et al. 2013). All the above, combined with lack of support, limited alternatives/
opportunities, and excessive competition, leave some with no other recourse than to beg. That said,
begging might also be a choice. Despite the shame, harassment and risk associated to it, some
people still opt to become beggars to resist proletarianization (Gmelch 1986), achieve
independence (Abebe 2009), or lead an adventurous life (Cooke 1908).
Despite increasing academic interest in begging phenomena, the practice is by no means
recent. Begging is a direct byproduct of human development. As such, it is found across all
civilizations since ancient times (Cooke 1908). Among others, Kothay (2013) discusses begging in
ancient Egypt; Holleran (2011) in ancient Rome; Ribton-Turner (1887) from the Middle Ages to
the Modern era; and Segrave (2011) from late modern to contemporary times.
Briefly, early human groups were small, members related by blood. Begging did not exist
in this close context. The sick, weak, or disabled were cared for by kin (Gillin 1929). This stems
from primitive societies not yet having differentiated political, economic and social subsystems.
Everyday life integrated all these functions. Group members partook in them all to preserve group
cohesion and thus survive. Though as civilization arose, human groups become large and complex.
Labor division and specialization became necessary. This separated production from consumption.
Differentiated political, economic and social subsystems emerged, each vying for specific interests
888
(Dixon 1984). With people unrelated, estranged, and competing for limited resources, begging
emerged in response to lacking social support structures (Gillin 1929).
Begging as Marketing System
Begging is a complex social phenomenon. It is thus ideal for systems research. Layton
(2007, p. 230) defines marketing systems as “a network of individuals, groups, and/or entities,
embedded in a social matrix, linked directly or indirectly through sequential or shared
participation in economic exchange, which jointly and/or collectively creates economic value with
and for customers, through the offer of assortments of goods, services, experiences and ideas, that
emerge in response to or anticipation of customer demand.”
Marketing systems are oft misconstrued as needing to be formal, sophisticated, and large,
thus significant within social settings. However, marketing systems are rather diverse: They might
be informal or temporary; of a grey, black, or criminal nature; operate via cash, cash alternatives,
or barter; have few, even single direct participants; and be of moderate or marginal importance
within a community. While these alternative marketing systems co-exist, compete, or even conflict
with conventional ones, they remain marketing systems nonetheless Layton (2015).
Based on the above definition, and the range of alternative marketing systems possible, it
is argued that begging, comprising in first instance the beggar-almsgiver dyad, though more
broadly passersby, businesses, city authorities, and related organizations, indeed constitutes a
marketing system. As to the key issues of value creation and exchange, Wooliscroft et al.’s (2017)
cross-cultural research shows how beggars do offer different types of value to system participants,
stimulating exchange. The value beggars provide responds to, even anticipates, participant needs,
ranging from utilitarian service provision (e.g. car washing), through entertainment (e.g.
musicians), to self-enhancement (e.g. feelings of piety/social-conscience). Interestingly, beggars’
value provision often transcends isolated transactions, instead becoming recurrent over time. In
some instances long-term transactional relationships develop, beggars becoming permanent
fixtures within communities’ socio-economic structure. This results, consistent with the goal of
marketing systems, in an increase of participants’ potency of assortment (Alderson 2006).
As to begging systems’ nature, they are arguably in first instance horizontal marketing
systems. While beggars encompass multiple locations, they still comprise a single, rather narrow
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stratum within the greater vertical systems order Layton (2015). If anything, begging systems are
part of various broader socio-economic systems, unique in that they intersect the latter.
Furthermore, begging systems lie somewhere between micro and meso-leveled marketing
systems. Like households or small businesses, individual beggars create value and exchange at the
micro level. Transactions typically involve only two immediate parties, beggars and almsgivers.
However, when looked at collectively, beggars form a rather homogeneous social phenomenon
transcending individual transactions. One might thus conceive begging systems, which aggregate
individual beggars within specific temporal and spatial boundaries, as collective meso-level
marketing systems (Layton 2010, Layton 2015b).
Finally, begging systems are arguably emergent marketing systems. Their operation
transcends autarchy and randomness. Exchanges between beggars and almsgivers are by no means
uninformed and unregulated. While still informal, they are governed by convention and common
practice, not to mention communities’ laws and regulations. Furthermore, and also characteristic
of emergent marketing systems, specialization has become common place, beggars offering diverse
assortments of value (Layton 2010, Layton 2015b).
Methodology
Historians reconstruct the past via evidence surviving into the present (Gaddis 2002). Past
marketing systems also leave evidence behind. This allows researchers to go back in time, and
better understand their emergence and growth. By gaining insights as to when, how and why earlier
marketing systems developed, researchers are better poised to understand current versions of those
marketing systems (Layton 2015b).
Fullerton (2011) highlights the importance of primary sources whilst conducting historical
marketing research. He mentions, p. 437, that original sources help researchers get “into the mind
of contemporaries…to see the world as they did”. Written records are especially useful for
historical systems research. They provide insights into systems participants, their physical and
social environments, and the processes through which systems developed (Layton 2015b).
Following e.g. Henning and Witkowski’s (2013) 19th-Century brand advertising research, or
Minowa and Belk’s (2018) wartime gift and nationalism study, the present effort uses period
newspapers to assess the development of 19th-Century Denver begging systems.
890
Personal documents like diaries, journals, or letters admittedly provide glimpses into the
everyday lives of ordinary people (Burgess 2005). By 1870 about 80% of US adults were able to
read and write (NCES 2018). Given this robust literacy rate, personal documents might have
constituted a viable data source, see e.g. Belk (1992). However, the population presently under
study, beggars, was oft destitute. They tended to have few, if any belongings, beyond those able to
be worn. This, and their oft-reckless lifestyle, made the likelihood of beggars keeping personal
documents rather slim. Newspaper reports were instead used, being a primary source relevant to
period/phenomenon of interest. Factual and informative, period newspapers offer fairly ample, rich
and reliable source material (Smith and Lux 1993, Tuchman 1994).
Before conducting historical systems research, the temporal, spatial and product boundaries
of the focal marketing system must be delimited (Layton 2015b). This study’s focal system is
Denver begging between 1859 and 1880. Participants comprise beggars and all other related city
stakeholders, such as citizens, businesses and authorities. Per Hollander et al.’s (2005) guidelines,
this periodization is context-driven. It follows turning points in Denver’s history: 1859 marks the
Rocky Mountain News’ launch, Denver’s first and arguably most important newspaper, published
scant months after the town’s foundation. 1870, serving as midpoint, marks the highly-significant
arrival of the railway to Denver. Finally, 1880 roughly marks Denver’s first 20 years of existence.
The latter decade, thanks to the railroad, was of significant growth, change and progress. By 1880
Denver was consolidated as the economic, political and social center of the recently-formed state
of Colorado, with all the trappings of an emergent modern city (Leonard and Noel 2016). Denver
was also recognized regionally as having metropolitan status, "the central city of the trans-Missouri
country" (RMN 1875).
To explore Denver begging’s development, multiple local newspapers were consulted. This
tapped different perspectives, newspapers often at odds with one another. Newspapers were mostly
accessed via the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. This online database, supported by the
Colorado State Library, contains over one million digitized pages from 220 Colorado newspapers
published mostly between 1859 and 1923 (CHNC 2018). Newspapers were complemented with
other historical sources, i.e. physical, microfilmed and scanned documents from the Denver Public
Library’s Western History Department, and the History Colorado Museum’s Library. This
achieved at least some triangulation, which allowed to better approximate reality, truth the ultimate
goal of marketing research (Hunt 1990).
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Keywords associated to begging were used to search sources. Queries were limited to full-
text items, confined to Denver County, and restricted to 1859-1880, inclusive. Searches began with
the terms beggar and begging. Presently-used terms like panhandler were also queried though
yielded no results. Searches then snowballed following period verbiage, like beggary, vagrant,
vagrancy, vagabond, mendicant, mendacity, bummer, hoodlum, pauper, tramp, deadbeat, indigent,
and loafer. Some of these terms are admittedly not synonymous with beggar/begging. However,
they are closely related, their search providing a thicker understanding of the phenomenon/period
of interest (Hudson and Ozanne 1988).
1,692 total search results were obtained, all read. Those not referring to Denver begging
were discarded. This was done when search terms figured in stories, anecdotes, jokes, poems,
figures of speech, personal insults, and accounts from other Colorado towns, US cities, or countries.
Semi/illegible results were also eliminated, as were those in other languages (Denver had
newspapers in e.g. Swedish). Each relevant search result was summarized, key points highlighted.
Verbatim quotes were occasionally extracted. Synopses were then ordered by date to eliminate
redundancies, as pieces often contained various search terms and/or were published multiple times.
The above steps reduced search results to 214 (13%) unique, relevant newspaper features, used in
the present analysis.
Per the historical marketing research of e.g. Belk (1992) or Hill, Hirschman et al. (1997),
the constant comparative method was used for analysis. Data were iteratively read and content
analyzed until distinct and stable thematical categories emerged, see Glaser and Strauss (1967) or
Miles, Huberman et al. (2014). Empirical results were then cross-referenced with other historical
sources. This allowed further theoretical saturation, where additional observations cease to
contribute information and instead confirm prior findings. Data thus became more representative
and generalizable (Guest, Bunce et al. 2006), the latter a main goal of empirical science, the basis
for theoretical development (Uncles and Kwok 2013).
Guiding this inquiry was Layton’s (2015) MAS framework. Integrating environmental
factors, socio-cultural beliefs, and differentiated resource endowments, it identifies the causal
processes underlying formation, growth and adaptation of marketing systems. By linking micro,
meso and macro processes, the framework helps understand value creation and exchange in social
settings. The MAS framework is extremely comprehensive and nuanced. However, its rigor also
892
complicates its application. This research thus derived some fundamental tenets from the
framework, and empirically tested them via the historical marketing research conducted.
Results
Overall, findings align, and empirically support, the tenets derived from Layton’s (2015)
framework. The following sections apply said tenets to discuss early Denver begging’s emergence.
Tenets go from general to specific, arranged somewhat sequentially. The first three, referring to
convergence, drivers, and specialization, are rather broad. Explained via general Denver history,
they frame empirical results. The second five, on stratification, power, environment, growth, and
diversification, specifically refer to Denver begging. Comprised by mostly empirical results, they
illustrate the emergence and growth of this activity via representative examples.
Tenet 1) Convergence: Marketing systems emerge when people converge on a place and time
in pursuit of perceived opportunities.
Denver, Colorado, lies some twelve miles east of the Rocky Mountains, where Cherry
Creek enters the South Platte River. Asides from the rare trapper or trader, the Denver area was of
little interest to Whites. Early explorers deterred, rather than aided, its settlement through bleak
portrayals (King 1911). E.g., Major Zebulon Pike’s 1805-07 expedition, ordered by President
Jefferson, explored the southwestern portion of the recently-acquired Louisiana Territory (Hart and
Hulbert 2007). Though having visited Colorado’s southern mountains in late fall/early winter, he
portrayed the area as cold, difficult, and generally inhospitable (Pike 1810). Years later, Major
Stephen Long’s 1819-20 expedition portrayed the eastern Colorado plains as the Great American
Desert. Destitute of vegetation, thus worthless, he suggested that the plains be used as a great barrier
to separate Indians from the habitable eastern portions of the US (James 1823).
Subsequent portrayals would be more accurate and flattering. However, early appraisals of
Colorado’s mountains and plains as a great wasteland burned themselves onto the popular psyche.
These early descriptions did not entice settlers. Few were willing to deviate from the Oregon and
Santa Fe trails, which passed north and south of what would later become Colorado. Few were
willing to take the long, hard, and dangerous trip west, with little to look forward to. Colorado, and
the Denver area in particular, remained uncolonized (King 1911).
893
A groundbreaking event was needed to shift popular perceptions and focus attention on the
area. This suddenly happened in late 1858: After a series of placer gold discoveries, two mining
camps were nearly simultaneously founded on opposite sides of Cherry Creek: Auraria (named
after aurum - gold in Latin) (DPL 2018) and Denver City (originally St. Charles, though claim
jumped and renamed after Kansas Territory Governor James Denver to gain favor). Founded in
October and November of 1858, both towns merged in 1860, constituting what from then on would
be Denver. News of these gold discoveries shot nationwide causing the 1859 Gold Rush, and with
it, Denver’s development (Leonard and Noel 2016).
Tenet 2) Drivers: Peoples’ convergence upon a place is driven by shared social, economic and
physical environments.
A good portion of Denver gold seekers were trying to escape the late-1850s’ recession
(Leonard and Noel 2016). The early 1850s were prosperous, fueled by the fabulous 1848+
California gold finds (Ross 2003). Unbridled optimism led to assumptions of never-ending western
migration: By 1857 the Kansas Territory was receiving almost 1,000 settlers daily. This, combined
with the desire to multiply the new-found wealth, led to a speculative surge. Eastern financial
institutions embarked on a series of questionable railroad and real-estate investments in the west,
also offering settlers attractive mortgage terms (Calomiris and Schweikart 1991).
However, the bubble burst mid-1857. A sharp decline in westward travel was brought about
by two main factors: First, by a large drop grain prices, which deterred would-be farmers to go west
and buy land (Ross 2003). Second, by the political violence that developed in Kansas around the
slavery issue. Western land values plummeted. Over-mortgaged farms foreclosed. Railways went
into default. The insolvency then spread to eastern investors, especially institutions (Calomiris and
Schweikart 1991). The securities collapse turned into a financial panic, first in New York, then
across the country. Broad commercial failure ensued, and with it, layoffs now affecting the average
person (Glasner 1997). Within this context, news of Denver’s gold finds caused the outbreak of
Cherry Creek Yellow Fever, spurring migration towards the new town (RMN 1859b).
Denver migration was also stimulated by eastern social conditions. Overpopulation and
decreasing quality of life are long-recognized emigration drivers, e.g. Ravenstein (1889) or Lee
(1966). By 1860 the US population was about 31 million, having grown by over a third just the
decade prior (USCB 2018). Eastern cities were not only becoming large, crowded, and polluted
894
(Most 2014). Increasing competition across sectors was also making opportunities difficult to attain
(Ferrie 1997). The same applied to agriculture, good lands long-taken (Burns 2004). Life in the
east was certainly not bad across the board. Though indicating the desire for better conditions is
the vast number of people who migrated west: By the 1860s about half a million had made their
way to Oregon, California and Utah. Willing to travel nearly 2,000 miles, mostly by foot, and face
extraordinary hardship, even frequent death, along the way (Gibbons and Amos 1986), shows how
eagerly some easterners yearned for a better life. Especially the poor European immigrants. Tired
or unwilling to compete with established Americans, they saw the west as a land of opportunity
(Belk 1992). This is congruent with Turner’s (1920/2010) Frontier Thesis, the west a safety valve
of sorts, relieving social pressures in the east.
Finally, Denver migration was also driven by manifest destiny (MD) (Leonard and Noel
2016). This notion, widespread after the 1840s, maintained that Americans were destined to expand
west across the continent (Pratt 1927). Three basic assumptions supported MD (still prevalent in
today’s rhetoric): 1) the virtue of American people, customs, and institutions, a.k.a. American
Exceptionalism; 2) the obligation to spread Americans’ superior way of life, and remake others in
their image; and 3) Americans’ God-given destiny to execute this important mission (Weeks 1996).
The power of these assumptions derives from them complementing traditional American ideals
such as individualism, ruggedness and self-reliance (Belk 1992), as well as the
entrepreneurial/capitalistic values of the era (Rosen 1976). Also, from being rooted in American
history. They go back, first, to independence appeals. E.g., Paine’s influential Common Sense
(1776/1922, p. 57) indicates that "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A
situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah". Second, to early puritan
settlements. E.g., Governor Winthrop’s famous “A Model of Christian Charity” sermon
(1630/1838, p.47) mentions "that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are
uppon us", referring to his Massachusetts colony being an example for the world.
Tenet 3) Specialization: Given limited resources, capabilities and opportunities, as well as
competition, system participants specialize, leading to the emergence of diverse action fields.
Auraria and Denver City were founded largely by miners. Subsequent arrivals also focused
on this activity. Though not everyone was dedicated to mining. While indeed supportive of this
industry, from the settlements’ beginnings a diverse economy already existed (Leonard and Noel
895
2016). To illustrate, the Rocky Mountain News’ very first issue was published a few months after
both settlements’ foundation. Perusal of its classified ads, RMN (1859c), reveals how the towns
comprised various action fields, e.g. meal and food supply, blacksmithing, carpentry, building,
cabinetmaking, undertaking, law, real estate, county recording, town company management,
intelligence, justice of peace, and a masonic lodge, among others.
Also to consider is that both settlements were incorporated town companies. As such,
shareholders wanted them to develop into proper cities over the mid to long-term, beyond their
mining camp status. Economic activity thus quickly diversified, supplying the needs of an
increasingly-heterogeneous/non-miner population. Areas like farming, ranching, manufacturing,
transportation and trade, as well as their respective support activities, were quickly established
(Leonard and Noel 1990). Calls for economic diversification are seen early on. That same inaugural
RMN issue (1859a) mentions how despite everyone being smitten by Yellow Fever, new arrivals
should consider other activities. Not only does it portray farming and ranching as sure things,
markets already there and increasing. But unlike mining, they also provided steady, safe, long-term
income. The piece concludes that over the next few years growing immigration will be opening
markets for everything. It was thus essential to build a proper community from the start, supplied
with everything necessary, than to just take advantage of the opportunity offered by gold.
Tenet 4) Stratification: Diverse endowments (information/skills/physical assets), combined
with environmental opportunities, even chance, increase system participants’ inequality.
Begging is the ultimate expression of inequality. Those dedicated to the activity, even
lacking a proper livelihood, are at the bottom of the social order (Adriaenssens and Hendrickx
2011). Interestingly, begging emerged almost concurrently with Denver’s founding. An early RMN
(1860) encourages readers to consider Denver's poor and indigent, who lack proper food and
shelter. This not only indicates early social inequality. It also suggests, beyond single instances,
that entire classes of deprived residents already existed, likely among which were beggars.
Newspapers lack in-depth accounts of how people became beggars. However, reports do
allow to reconstruct possible origins. One might first mention Denver attracting extant beggars.
Frontier crossings like the western migration are long-acknowledged rites of passage. Trials
surmounted along the way spur internal growth (Trumbull 1896), consistent with Jungian
individuation (Conejo 2017). Frontier crossings also legitimized individuals socially. Mere survival
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endowed people with a certain strength, competence and stature (Belk 1992). With nothing to lose,
the possibility of riches, perhaps seeking social redemption, i.e. to start anew in a remote location,
one may reasonably assume some beggars to have journeyed to early Denver. The RMN (1866)
mentions how the gold attracted vagrants. Another issue (1866b, p. 1) complains about
"mendicants, who cross the plains and crowd themselves upon us".
A second factor prompting begging was enroute hardship. The RMN (1860b) reports the
distance between Leavenworth, Kansas (the last civilized outpost) and Denver to be 610 miles.
Trains nonexistent, the hot, dusty plains were crossed mostly by foot, pushing wheelbarrows,
pulling handcarts or with pack animals. The journey, which took weeks, was fraught with danger.
Besides inclement weather, gold-seekers were subject to bandits, Indians, wildlife, injury, disease,
accident, and mechanical failure (Burns 2004). Risks were amplified by Argonauts packing light
to speed-up their journey (Belk 1992). Also by their nature, described as "peevish, sullen,
boisterous, giddy, profane, dirty, vulgar, ragged... idle, petulant, quarrelsome, unfaithful,
disobedient, refractory, careless, contrary, stubborn" (Gibbons and Amos 1986, p. 174).
Pikes Peakers mostly followed two routes west: North, along the Platte River, or south,
along the Arkansas River. To reduce distance, some took the less-known central Smoky Hill Trail
across the Kansas plains. One of the latter was an 1859 party which included Daniel Blue and his
brothers. Some weeks into their travels, their packhorse wandered off leaving them scarcely any
provisions. They then got lost, also having to endure the harsh plains’ climate. Their condition
desperate, they resorted to cannibalism eating one another as they died. Only Daniel Blue made it
to Denver, thanks to some Arapaho Indians helping him (Blue 1860). The possibility of losing
everything enroute to Denver, and arriving with nothing, essentially a beggar, was all too real.
A third factor prompting beggary was vice. Mining was a brutal activity. It involved long
hours, intense physical work, exposure to the elements, and squalid living conditions. There were
also mental effects. Miners had little else to do while encamped. For months they were alone or
with the same group of men, often leading to cabin fever. Because of these hardships, when miners
got back into town they enjoyed themselves to the fullest (Burns 2004). Aware of these intentions,
a hospitality industry quickly emerged in Denver. Comprising saloons, gambling, and brothels, it
mined the miners of their earnings (VisitDenver 2018). An early RMN (1860) complains how
gaming saloons are causing ruin and beggary, open even on Sundays. Another account that year
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mentions “As you wander about these hot and dirty streets you seem to be walking in a city of
demons…Every fifth house appears to be a bar, a whiskey-shop, a lager-beer saloon; every tenth
house appears to be either a brothel or a gambling house; very often both in one” (DHH 2018).
Vice would continue to cause beggary. The RMN (1870, p. 2) mentions how "...the splendid
drinking and gambling saloons…will clean him out comfortably in a single night... becoming
sober…(he) begs or borrows enough to take him to his place of work...till the next heat... (until by
spells he becomes) a chronic, hopeless and disgusting dead beat". The RMN (1873, p. 4) adds how
"The common, filthy, vulgar, repulsive loafers are bloated wretches who hang about the low
saloons, and beg for the whiskey that has made them what they are." The Denver Daily Times
(1876) mentions men dropping from one stage to another until attaining the lowest depths of
vagrancy. Though the consequences of vice did not only apply to men themselves. The Colorado
Antelope (1880) tells how a family was abandoned by the father, a worthless drunk, the wife and
three children left sick and destitute, with nothing, on the day of their arrival.
A fourth factor prompting beggary was prospecting failure. News of the sensational Denver
gold discoveries shot nationwide (Leonard and Noel 2016). E.g., the New York Times (1858, p. 1)
mentions “Yesterday $10,000 in gold dust arrived from Pike’s Peak. One man brought in $6,000
as the result of a few week’s work. A small boy had $1,000, which he says ‘he dug down and found,’
and the little fellow says ‘he can get all he wants’…These stories are reliable…that the Kansas
mines are far ahead of those in California must be believed…We are on the eve of an intense gold
excitement in the west. The presence of large quantities of the precious metal in the neighborhood
of Pike’s Peak is now conceded on all sides…By next Spring the rush will be immense from all
parts of the Union.” Though results were rarely that rosy. The RMN (1860c, p. 2) mentions how
"Many hard working men were almost in a starving condition, and many families suffering because
of the difficulties procuring the precious metal".
Denver gold finds were indeed significant. Though misinformation prompted mining
failures. The RMN’s inaugural issue (1859b, p. 2) clarifies that “We do not…endorse all the
extravagant stories that have been written respecting the gold mines of this region, many we admit
are much overcolored”. The article then comments on Argonauts’ poor preparation “emigrants
who suffer severely - those who come on foot with packs on their backs, poorly provided with
money, clothing, bedding and provisions. They arrive without tools, these scarce and difficult to
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obtain…Every emigrant should bring with him from the States a full set of mining tools and at least
three months provisions and clothing, then there need not be this gloomy foreboding and fear of
starvation if he should fail to find remunerative employment immediately on his arrival…It is a
mistaken idea to expect that supplies can be found in this new country…they must be brought”. A
letter in that same issue, p.2, also calls attention to unrealistic expectations: “men have come here
without knowing or dreaming of what is required for mining. They expect to find the precious metal
on the surface or to dig it as they do potatoes at home…If any man expects to make a fortune here
in a few days he had better stay away or go away, he will surely be disappointed…We beg those
who are coming out to think about this”. Despite clear warnings, mining failures would continue
through the years. Two decades later the Denver Daily Times (1877) recounts how tens of
thousands of men came to mining states with wild hopes of fortune, and disappointment soon
converted them to tramps, retuning empty handed, begging food and shelter on their way.
Though begging was not only caused by mining failures. A diversified economy allowed
Denver to quickly outgrow its fairly uniform petty-bourgeois origins. Socioeconomic inequality
increasingly marked residents. On the one hand, fabulous local wealth was created. Some residents
became prominent capitalists, even by national standards. Yet on the other hand, the new economic
activities also created an oft-precarious working class, sensitive to industry/market fluctuations
(Rosen 1976). The Denver Daily Tribune (1878, p. 1) mentions how "With the help of labor saving
machines, the whole system of agriculture has changed, so that a landed monopoly... has already
become established in this country...thousands of families have found steady employment in the
various factories, which have been rapidly closed upon them; and now men, women and children
are, without distinction, brought down to beggary and starvation...". Farmers and ranchers were
additionally susceptible to environmental challenges. The eastern plains are semi-arid, under
constant threat of drought. They are also a fragile ecosystem, the slightest change causing
consequences (Isenberg 2000). E.g. the RMN (1875, p. 3) laments Colorado farmers being affected
by grasshopper plagues: "Hundreds…lost from three-fourths to seven eighths of all their crops, and
to-day are entirely without breadstuffs for their families, seed to plant, or feed for their teams to
enable them to make provisions for another harvest...this is not a class of beggars...but...would like
the means to enable them to secure a crop."
Finally, becoming a beggar might have simply been a personal choice. An existential piece
in the Denver Daily Times (1878, p. 2) explains how an average professional tramp views his
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situation: “...you ought to be glad to have such good times. Here take a drink and don't be a fool...I
get a living, and that's all a man wants. Now look at those poor devils hurrying along to and from
work. They slave all day, and worry about it if they don't get a chance to do it...year in and year
out, and give all the grub we need to such chaps as me without thinking much about it. You and I
lay here and sun ourselves...I tell you there is no danger of any man starving to death in this country
if he ain’t ashamed to wear raged clothes and has cheek enough to ask for grub. These folks will
toil and slave to support us, and why shouldn't they if they are fools enough?"
Tenet 5) Power: As systems develop, participant power changes. Darwinian struggles ensue,
incumbents/challengers related via cooperation, co-existence, competition, or coercion.
One of the earliest, most prevalent themes uncovered is that of begging Indians. These were
mostly active outside Denver. E.g., the RMN (1859) mentions a plains-crossing party afflicted by
Indians’ intolerable begging; the RMN (1860) Indians begging and stealing in the foothills; and
the RMN (1862) mountain Indians annoying settlers by their thieving and begging propensities.
The RMN (1871) adds Indians showing up at ranches; the RMN (1862) these to be armed, mounted,
likely operating in groups; and the RMN (1869, p.1) how "our people have the right to be free from
annoyance and insult from vagabond savages, wandering door to door, taking advantage of the
absence of the man of the house, to insult females and frighten children." To understand Indian
beggary’s origins and prevalence, a review of Indian-White relations is needed.
The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteed the Arapaho/Cheyenne vast lands between the
Arkansas and North Platte rivers, and east from the Rockies to settled Kansas. The treaty
acknowledged Indian ownership of the lands and relinquished any US Government (USG) claims
upon them. While it allowed the USG to build roads and military posts, and provided white settlers
safe passage to Oregon, the treaty bound the USG (p. 594) “to protect the aforesaid Indian nations
against the commission of all depredations by the people of the said United States” (Kappler 1904).
Indian-White relations before Denver emerged were generally good. Visiting trappers and
traders had for decades established cooperative and mutually-beneficial exchange relationships.
Even when Denver’s initial mining camps were established in 1858, relations between both groups
were of tolerance and co-existence. However, by 1860 Denver had mushroomed to nearly 5,000
people. These immigrants, who now lived, farmed, ranched, and mined Indian lands, directly
violated the Fort Laramie Treaty, which guaranteed Indian sovereignty (Leonard and Noel 2016).
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Ignoring its obligations, and to protect its interests, the USG had the Arapaho/Cheyenne
sign the 1861 Fort Wise Treaty. In it, both nations ‘agreed’ (p.807) to unconditionally “cede and
relinquish to the United States all lands now owned, possessed, or claimed by them, wherever
situated”, except for a small tract to which they would be confined (Kappler 1904). The reservation,
1/13th the size of the 1851 allotment, was in barren southern Kansas. Some Indian bands, including
the famed Dog Soldiers, did not agree with the treaty and refused to meet its terms. Opposition
derived from it having been signed by a small minority of chiefs, who lacked the authority to
represent the Indian nations as a whole. Signatories were also thought to have been tricked into
accepting the treaty’s terms, a few even bribed. This the case, some tribes continued living on their
ancestral lands. Others also grew increasingly belligerent towards Whites, perceived as a threat to
Indian livelihood and culture (Greene 2004). Tensions rapidly escalated. This led to the Colorado
Indian Wars, in which the US Army and local militias suppressed the Indian threat. It also led to
the infamous 1864 Sand Creek Massacre (Hyde 1968).
White settlers thus challenged, outcompeted, and replaced Indian incumbents. Numerical,
technological, and resource superiority, not to mention a series of dubious self-serving treaties
violently enforced, reversed the roles. Deprived of their lands, essentially their livelihoods, and
unable to integrate into the new economic order, Indians were systematically reduced to beggary.
As to the Indian War’s effectiveness, the RMN (1867) mentions "a few straggling parties of Indians
who seemed pure beggars and poor devils, more to be pitied than dreaded".
Asides from economic motivations, taking Indians lands was also driven by the above-
discussed Manifest Destiny ethos. Specifically, by beliefs of Anglo-American superiority, and
therefore, White settlers’ right to dominate over inferior races. Indians destined to subordination
justified their systematic expulsion and extermination (Horsman 1981). Though animosity towards
Indians would continue. E.g., the RMN (1869, p. 1) mentions how “Indians must be compelled to
abandon their vagrant life and submit to the means and usages of civilization." It later adds (1871,
p. 2) "The so-called civilization of the Indians is a sham. The fact is, an Indian is a miserable lazy
vagrant, wherever he may be found, and under any circumstance". Whites’ presumed superiority
also extended to other ethnicities. E.g., the RMN (1870) mentions how Blacks must be subjected
to forced education and labor as otherwise they are inclined to lead unproductive vagrant lives.
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Tenet 6) Environment: Focal systems are impacted by the dynamics of the physical
environment, the competition for resources, and sustainability limits.
Indians’ demise also links to environmental change. For over 10,000 years the Denver area
had been frequented by nomadic hunter-gatherers due to its relatively benign weather and abundant
resources. By 1850 these visitors were mostly Arapaho/Cheyenne (Leonard and Noel 2016). Plains
Indians had always been nomadic. They roamed vast land extensions following the buffalo, central
to their socio-economic structure (Greene 2004). Buffalo were not only a key food source. They
also provided important materials, e.g. leather, fur, and bone, used by Indians to make most of their
everyday implements.
Until the early 19th-Century buffalo had remained extraordinarily abundant. Some 30
million are said to have roamed the land. Though by the mid-1800s buffalo numbers were in sharp
decline. On the one hand, herds had been displaced from their natural habitats by White migration
and settlement. Farms and ranches not only took over key grasslands. More importantly, water
sources, vital in the semi-arid plains environment. Confined to ever smaller areas, herds started to
overgraze, the fragile plains ecosystem pushed to its limit. On the other hand, buffalo were being
killed by Whites on an unprecedented scale. Migrants and settlers saw the animals as a convenient
food source. Traders, disregarding the meat, sought to sell their valuable pelts in the east. Finally,
the US Army was killing entire herds to starve Indians into submission (Isenberg 2000).
By the mid-1860s Indians’ main resource had been thwarted, and with it, their traditional
socio-economic system. Though oppressive policies would continue. E.g., the RMN (1875)
comments on Indian settlements being starved. By then completely reliant on government
handouts, authorities were ignoring their needs. The Denver Daily Times (1878) also comments on
Indians not receiving their allotted supplies. With nothing to hunt, and on the verge of starvation,
they had no other alternative than to beg or rob to sustain themselves.
Tenet 7) Growth: As systems develop, action fields grow in number of participants.
By the early 1860s some 100,000 Argonauts had visited Denver in search of fortune.
Though the droves soon realized that Denver’s placer deposits had become too scarce to sustain
them. New mountain discoveries shifted mining away from the city. While some adventurers
followed the gold, most returned home disillusioned. Denver thus became a supply and service
center for the nascent mountain towns, losing momentum by the mid-1860s (Leonard and Noel
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2016). Within this gloomy context, newspaper mentions of begging are sparse. The RMN (1861)
reports how saloons and sporting halls have emptied given the poor gold yields, though they still
count with their bummer regulars. The RMN (1867) adds that compared to Denver no other
community "has a less number, in proportion, of paupers or persons in indigent circumstances."
Reactivating Denver’s development, and thereby begging, was the railroad’s arrival. Until
then, goods crossed the 600 miles of eastern plains necessary to reach Denver by ox-drawn wagons.
These averaged two miles per hour, slightly below walking speed. The more-affluent were able to
afford the stagecoach. While twice as fast, it still involved a bone-jarring week or so of hot, dusty,
cramped travel. This all changed in 1870. That year city leaders completed the Denver-Pacific
railway, which linked to the Union Pacific transcontinental route in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 100
miles north of Denver. Another eastern connection was established via the Kansas-Pacific railroad.
Rail communication ended Denver’s stagnation. While during the 1860s Denver’s population had
remained under 5,000 people, between 1870 and 1876, the city grew nearly five-fold, to around
24,000 (Leonard and Noel 2016).
Immigration also included beggars. These traveled west searching for better conditions.
Some beggars came to Denver by foot, conveniently following the rather direct tracks. E.g., the
RMN (1874) describes how a Denver-bound train scooped up a tramp along the tracks with its
cow-catcher. A year later the RMN (1875) complains how western railroads have become lined
with tramps, some coming to Denver. Other beggars arrived on trains. The Denver Daily Times
(1874) describes how bummers hide in freight cars, aided by accomplices who nail car doors shut
to avert discovery. Occasionally, bummers manage to hide in grocery cars, in which they enjoyed
themselves tremendously. Though beggars sometimes traveled among regular passengers. The
Denver Weekly Tribune (1873, p. 2) mentions how “on a single Kansas-Pacific train of the present
week there were seven of these degraded creatures, all of whom had tickets to Denver”. The RMN
(1874) also mentions how railways occasionally offered charity by giving indigents free rides.
Unlike the decade prior, the 1870s were characterized by frequent beggar mentions. Several
concerningly allude to their large and growing number. A RMN (1872) piece titled The Nuisance
of Beggars in Denver, bemoans how paupers from other areas are streaming in by rail. Its good
climate and openhearted people make the city a pleasant refuge. The Denver Daily Times (1872,
p. 4) complains that Denver has become “infested with a considerable number of beggars, who tell
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pitiful tales and ask alms...”. As to numbers, the RMN (1875) mentions Denver having “been
blessed with its fair share of vagabonds, bummers and loafers, which the police estimate to be
between 100-200...” The Denver Daily Times (1874) estimates the city to have a dozen or two of
old bummers. The RMN (1875) mentions 43 indigents laid up in the county hospital. The above
figures notwithstanding, beggar numbers did fluctuate. The Denver Daily Times (1873) mentions
that having gotten rid of most vagrants, the city was now understaffed, waiting to get some more
into the calaboose to do pending city work.
Because of their increase, not to mention their unsavory behavior, beggars become a clear
nuisance in 1870s Denver. The RMN (1874, p. 4) calls for the police to raid "the bummers, loafers
and vagrants generally, who infest the sidewalk of Larimer, between Fifteenth and Sixteenth
streets...to scatter the pestiferous gang." It later adds (1875, p. 4) that the "worthless tramps…are
a greater scourge to Colorado than all the thieves, gamblers, and prostitutes in the community."
Tenet 8) Diversification: As action fields grow, they become more diverse. Participants come
to occupy specific niches with unique value offerings.
Denver beggars quickly transcended the initial out-of-luck miner and became more varied.
A number of different types soon emerged, their characteristics often overlapping. As to purpose,
the overwhelming theme is of personal or familial sustenance, beggars asking for money, food,
shelter, or work. However, begging occasionally served institutions. E.g., the Daily Mining Journal
(1865) complains about churches sending young ladies into the community to beg for donations.
In regards to gender, by far most begging reports refer to males. E.g., the RMN (1873)
comments on men frequently asking for alms. The male predominance is understandable given that
miners initially founded in Denver, a similar pattern seen throughout the early western frontier
(Burns 2004). However, female beggars are occasionally reported. E.g., the Denver Daily Times
(1872) mentions a middle-aged woman asking for money, while the RMN (1875) how a miserable
wreck of a girl, who fallen on hard times, turned herself in for vagrancy to have shelter and food.
As to age, most beggars seemed to range from young to middle-aged adults. This also
inferred by frequent complaints of them being able-bodied, unwilling to work (DDT 1873). Older
beggars are also reported. E.g., the Denver Daily Times DDT (1874) mentions how old bummers'
seedy and forlorn appearance endears them with people. Younger beggars are only occasionally
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reported. The RMN (1873) mentions boys asking for lodging or money, the Denver Mirror (1874,
p. 1) a young girl, “the cheekiest and most persistent little beggar that ever struck Denver”.
In regards to race, downtown Denver beggars were found to be mostly White. Though the
Daily Colorado Tribune (1868b) mentions Indians who visit town daily to trade and beg; and the
Denver Daily Times (1875) a colored vagrant arrested for living in a vacant house. As to religion,
most beggars seemed protestant or catholic, consistent with the general population. In response to
an anti-Semitic City Council comment, the RMN (1875, p. 4) mentions that given their work ethic
and solidarity, "Jewish beggars and Jewish drunkards are rare as diamonds", the Jewish poor
rarely a charge on the public.
As to health, beggars seem mostly in good shape, simply uninterested in work (DDT 1873).
Though beggars are sometimes described as being alcoholic (RMN 1876), sick (RMN 1872), or
insane (RMN 1869); also occasionally disabled, e.g. blind (RMN 1871), deaf-mute (RMN 1874),
or having a limp (DDT 1876). The Denver Weekly Tribune (1873, p. 2) mentions multifarious
attractions such as the beggar “… with the white swelling… the one-armed man, who was carried
through machinery, and the no armed woman, whose only merit consists in that deprivation.”
An 1870’s theme is veterans, not surprising since the Civil War, with its many casualties,
ended just a few years prior. E.g., the Denver Weekly Tribune (1873, p. 2) mentions a veteran, a
“despondent individual with a single leg, who claims to have fought in every battle during the late
war”. Despite sparse mentions, the veteran theme seems to have been gaining importance. The
RMN (1874) mentions the Soldiers and Sailors Union of Colorado. Created, among others, to look
after sick and maimed ex-servicemen, and to seek employment for those indigent.
In regards to legitimacy, some beggars indeed met misfortune. Physically unable, or subject
to sudden job loss, they had no other recourse to sustain themselves (DDT 1873). However, other
beggars are unmasked as impostors. The Denver Daily Times (1872, p. 4) comments how a “
woman, is at work upon the credulity of liberal housewives, by unfolding a tale of misfortune, and
soliciting money”. The RMN (1874, p. 3) warns of "an old impostor, with a face like a boiled
cabbage, who is playing the role of mendicant and soliciting alms. He owns a house and a lot.”
As to with whom begging is conducted, nearly all reports refer to individuals operating solo.
Though reports occasionally mention accompanied beggars. E.g., the Daily Mining Journal (1865)
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talks of ladies begging in pairs; the Daily Colorado Tribune (1868a) of a lady begging with
children; and the Daily Colorado Tribune (1868b) of Indians begging in family.
In regards to location, most begging took place within the city center, such as on streets
(WC 1864), or around the numerous saloons RMN (1873). Beggars also occasionally visited
homes. E.g., the RMN (1875, p. 4) complains about "worthless tramps who beg broken victuals at
our back doors”. While most beggars were fairly fixed, some were also itinerant. E.g., the RMN
(1874) mentions a vagabond who tramps around the country.
As to length of activity, beggar timespans vary substantially. E.g., the RMN (1876)
mentions a long-time Denver beggar; the RMN (1875) some active for years, the RMN (1873) one
active for a couple years; while the RMN (1873) one who spends a few days in each town. As to
regularity, some are professionals, choosing beggary as a business (RMN 1874) or career RMN
(1875). Others are part-timers. The RMN (1870, p. 2) mentions how "gradually becoming
sober...he appreciates the situation, begs or borrows enough to take him to his place of work...till
the next heat... (until, by spells, he turns out) a chronic, hopeless and disgusting dead beat".
Worth mentioning is how during the 1870s begging approaches became more diversified.
From generally eliciting pity, beggars start to provide more concrete value towards passersby via
performed entertainment. E.g., the Denver Weekly Tribune (1873) mentions wheezy hand organ
grinders; while the Denver Mirror (1874) a beggar who sings, rather unsuccessfully.
Despite the nuisance that beggars represented, over time some became institutions, colorful
parts of the community. E.g., the RMN (1866) mentions how some miserable scoundrels tried to
rob a noted local pauper; or the Denver Tribune (1873) how a local vagrant, a Central Register
regular, fell ill. Sometimes prominent beggars are named. E.g., the Denver Daily Times (1876)
talks about Howe, a man who has limped around town for years without a livelihood. The RMN
(1876) mentions the death of long-time Denver beggar, Jim Bleddin; while the Denver Mirror
(1874, p. 1) kindly acknowledges their “…pert and sprightly little friend, Miss Julia Palmer....”.
Discussion
This paper set out to explore how historical research might be applied to understand the
emergence and growth of marketing systems. It did so in the context of 19th-Century Denver, using
tenets derived from Layton’s (2015) systems framework. This has been accomplished. Data
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obtained from period newspapers indicates that the tenets, i.e. convergence, drivers, specialization,
stratification, power, environment, growth, and diversification, do explain the development of
Denver begging. This also indicates that Layton’s (2015) framework might be empirically testable.
Historical stage theories suggest that sequential marketing processes observed in one setting
might broadly apply to other spatial-temporal instances (Hollander, Rassuli et al. 2005). The
sequentially-ordered tenets, as herein applied, might approximate such a stage theory. That said,
tenets are not necessarily sequential. Consistent with other marketing systems, tenets might follow
complex, non-linear, mutually-influencing dynamics, see Conejo and Wooliscroft (2015a).
As a whole, by 1880 Denver begging reached significant proportions and diversity. It took
only 20 years for this action field to go from non-existent, to attaining a certain maturity. This
accelerated development is consistent with the literature: Begging is the product of larger, more
complex social organizations. With people unrelated, estranged, and competing for limited
resources, begging rapidly emerges in response to lacking social support structures (Gillin 1929).
Also consistent with the literature, results indicate that Denver begging emerged through a
combination of micro, meso, and macro factors. Micro causes not only include personal error or
misfortune, but proclivities such as vice or laziness. Even if the above were absent, individuals
could still be reduced to beggary by lacking or losing a required skill or ability. Meso factors
affected groups, e.g. workers. Layoffs might be caused by industry, market or technological
changes. Also by labor conditions. 19th-Century workers lacked officially-established maximum
hours, minimum wages, safety conditions, health/life insurance, and pension plans. Workers were
thus at the mercy of oft-ruthless employers. If deemed expensive, unproductive, or for whatever
reason undesirable, employees were summarily dismissed (Hill, Hirschman et al. 1997). The era’s
social structure was also markedly different than today’s. Most Americans were working class, the
bulk dedicated to agriculture or manufacturing (Margo 1991). Limited opportunities and strong
competition within these sectors often left people with no other recourse than to beg. Finally,
begging was also caused by broad macro factors affecting population sectors en-masse. One might
first mention the pervasive laissez-faire economy of the time, comprising ruthless capitalism with
lack of social consideration (Rosen 1976). Other, factors would political, social and environmental,
the 19th Century an era of massive change for the US (Burns 2004).
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Perhaps most striking are the parallels between the period studied and current times. As
today (see e.g. Phillips’ (2016) scourge of Denver hoodlums), by the 1870s vagrants had
undoubtedly become a problem for Denver. Reports often mention crimes. E.g., the RMN (1875)
reports a tramp brazenly taking cash from a downtown business’ money drawer; the Denver Daily
Times (1877) a beggar stealing his benefactor’s hat, revolver and boots; and the Denver Daily
Times (1876) two beggars killing the man who gave them food and employment. Reports also
mention beggars as a city burden. E.g., the Denver Daily Times (1877) complains of the mayhem
that vagrants cause at night, not allowing residents to sleep; the Denver Daily Times (1875) of how
bummers occupy public buildings nightly for lodging; and the RMN (1875) of indigents saturating
poorhouses, hospitals, courts and jails, increasing city expenditures. Finally, and surprisingly, are
reports of bummers also compounding drugs. E.g. the RMN (1874) recounts how one visited a
pharmacy demanding a pint of whisky to dissolve a pound of camphor he had eaten.
As today, the 20-years studied mention different approaches used to address Denver’s
begging problem. On the one hand are different forms of assistance. From early on, and throughout
the entire period studied, are frequent mentions of charitable initiatives. E.g., the RMN (1861)
comments on the creation of the Ladies' Indigent Aid Society; the Weekly Commonwealth (1863)
on the Denver Theater offering function proceeds to the Relief Association; and the RMN (1867)
on the Catholic Church intending to set up an orphan asylum and indigent hospital.
The above initiatives reflect the mentality of the times: Laissez-fair economics frowned
upon public assistance to the needy. It argued that social welfare was beyond the government’s
scope, individuals having to take care of themselves. In this context, the needy were mostly helped
by private charities. Interestingly, Denver’s economic elite played a decisive role in implementing
19th-Century social welfare (Rosen 1976). Noteworthy among this elite is Elizabeth Byers, wife of
the RMN’s owner/editor, who over the years led multiple initiatives (Leonard and Noel 2016).
That said, Denver’s laissez-fair mentality softened over the years. Government support of
the needy gradually increased, as evidenced by published county expenditures. E.g., the RMN
(1868, p. 1) reports how the Board of County Commissioners allocated $85 towards a "medical
stores, jail and pauper account"; the RMN (1869, p. 1) mentions support of lunatic paupers worth
$435; and the RMN (1869, p. 2) disbursements for insane paupers worth $3,180.57. The growing
908
amounts suggest institutionalization of social welfare programs. The increasing account specificity
also indicates an ever larger and more complex city to run.
On the other hand, and despite the above assistance, numerous reports show how
approaches to begging were mostly not benign. E.g., the RMN (1864, p. 3) reports how a man dealt
with the issue privately, savagely kicking a Blake St. bummer who "insolently addressed him with
improper phraseology". Other times, solutions were official. E.g., the RMN (1870) mentions a $20
fine for vagrancy; the Denver Daily Times (1872) 15 days jail; the Denver Daily Times (1877, p.4)
forced labor, the men, "sentenced to the chain gang in expiation of their fines"; and the RMN
(1875) banishment from Denver.
However, the above measures, both charitable and punitive, did not seem to curtail beggars.
Assistance efforts, while more humane, were occasionally derided as coddling this population.
Lacking true need to improve themselves, assistance efforts were seen as actually perpetuating the
activity. E.g., the RMN (1870) complains how deadbeats are thriving, owing to the generous people
who take care of those who will not take care of themselves. Punitive measures were no more
effective. Recurrence was an ongoing problem, the revolving door already active back then. E.g.,
the RMN (1875, p. 4) complains how John Cronan, "a chronic old bummer who has infested the
police court and calaboose most of the time for a year past", was again arrested.
The ineffectiveness of measures, both charitable and punitive, highlights begging’s
complex multidimensional nature. It also shows how isolated efforts, regardless of how
magnanimous or severe, are ineffective in curtailing this activity. Interestingly, a few articles
already recognize begging’s complexity and ask for more comprehensive solutions. E.g., the RMN
(1874, p. 1) calls to "attack the question of a permanent remedy for the manifold calamity". The
Denver Daily Times (1879, p. 2) goes further, indicating that "the donation of a little money would
only be a partial and temporary relief and that the aim in view should be more comprehensive...
part of a plan for the permanent good…" The piece then stresses the importance of elevating
paupers, and integrating them to become productive community members.
Finally, the period studied also shed light on Denver’s political dynamics. Vagrants were
undoubtedly a problem. Newspapers frequently published complaints, calling for stricter laws,
severer punishments, and police action. However, one also sees lack of political will to truly resolve
the issue. E.g., an early RMN (1861) mentions how a politician secured, among others, the bummer
909
vote. Years later the paper (1875) again comments how the city’s saloon, gambling and bummer
elements formed a ring to support a man representing their interests. The Denver Daily Times
(1877) complains how the bummer vote has become a necessity, candidates to office regularly
giving out drink money in saloons to capture votes. The piece adds how bummer influence will
likely continue after candidates are elected, in detriment of the town.
In sum, and as can be seen, historical research does allow to better understand the
emergence and early development of current marketing systems. The approach can, and should, be
used. Though it also reveals how rich and complex system legacies can be.
Limitations and Future Research
This study addressed how early Denver begging developed. While it does provide insights,
the study is not exempt from limitations. A difficulty whilst conducting historical marketing
research is to overcome interpreting the period under study based on current social norms (Hill,
Hirschman et al. 1997). Transporting oneself back to the 1860/70s was a fascinating albeit
challenging exercise. It required discarding many of today’s givens (e.g. racial equality, moderate
capitalism, social welfare) to understand that period’s begging. While efforts were made to reduce
these biases, data interpretations might still be colored. Similarly, one cannot assume newspaper
reports to be objective. As historians have long recognized, documents are oft colored by the social,
cultural and economic interests of those producing them (Belk 1992), e.g. RMN owner/editor
William Byers closely-related to Denver's socio-economic elite (Leonard and Noel 2016).
This study is also limited to mid to late-19th-Century Denver. While marketing systems
might have broad structural and operational similarities (Layton 2009), the insights obtained do not
necessarily reflect other contexts. Further research addressing different times and places is
recommended to see if the same developmental patterns emerge. To address begging’s historical
development methodically, future research might keep the time period fairly constant and gradually
vary locations. Efforts might first address other western towns to verify present results. Studies
could then gradually move to other, different locations. Once spatial differences and similarities
are established, research might move to other time periods until establishing a comprehensive
picture of begging systems’ development.
While informative, newspapers focus on exceptional rather than typical events (Smith and
Lux 1993). Furthermore, the mindset of involved actors, as well as events’ broader context, is often
910
absent from reports (Tuchman 1994, Hollander, Rassuli et al. 2005). Personal documents transcend
reported events. They introspectively reveal the context, meanings and emotions associated to them
(Belk 1992). Despite the various biases associated personal documents, see e.g. Allport (1942), and
the potential difficulty in procuring them for this population, future research might still look into
using journals, letters or photographs to further understand begging systems. This would extend
present results by reconstructing the internal lives of beggars, perhaps even gaining a longitudinal
view of factors and processes bringing about the activity. Personal documents would also help to
methodologically triangulate results.
The present study applied broad tenets derived from Layton’s (2015) framework to
understand an emergent begging system. However, the application was rather coarse given this
study’s exploratory nature. Future research might therefore apply said framework in detail. This
might be done by focusing on more specific timeframes, say a single to a few years; or by reducing
system aggregation to specific participants, say beggars-almsgivers only. Conversely, studies might
extend aggregation levels to broader participant sets, longer timeframes, or explicitly link begging
with higher-order systems. Future research might therefore focus on micro, meso or macro levels
of analysis, each with unique sets of components, flows and outcomes. Finally, the present research
focused on the more literal begging system aspects. However, post-industrial marketing systems
have become increasingly symbolic, characterized by the transfer of meaning, see e.g. Conejo and
Wooliscroft (2015a, 2015b). In this regard, future research might address more abstract begging
aspects, both at the individual and collective levels.
Based on all the above, the present research might thus be seen as a stepping stone into both
broader and more detailed studies, which should deepen understandings of begging systems.
Closing Thoughts
Vagrants are the byproduct of our system, "the true barometer of a country's financial
weather" (RMN 1875, p. 2). Walking down the 16th St. Pedestrian Mall, with its tall buildings,
elegant restaurants, and hip bars, one realizes how much Denver changed over the past century and
a half. However, the beggars and vagrants crowding this area also show how much further the city
still needs to progress. Beggars are still abundant and diverse; still a nuisance for passersby,
businesses and city officials; and still subject to charity, indifference, and hostility. Despite having
researched a bygone era, the issues uncovered remain surprisingly current. Immigration, social
911
welfare, veteran support, education, employment, crime, discrimination, wealth distribution, and
sustainability, are as current today as they were 150 years ago. This underscores the need for serious
structural change instead of isolated token efforts. A systems approach to resolve begging,
contemplating the above and other issues, is thus called for. The authors invite discussion.
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VisitDenver (2018). "Denver Early History - Brief Interview with Prof. Tom Noel." Retrieved Feb.
15, 2018, from https://www.denver.org/about-denver/denver-history/early-denver-history/.
Viswanathan, M., et al. (2014). "Subsistence entrepreneurship, value creation, and community
exchange systems: A social capital explanation." Journal of Macromarketing 34(2): 213-226.
WC (1863). No Title. Weekly Commonwealth. Denver, CO, December 16, p. 4.
WC (1864). No Title. Weekly Commonwealth. Denver, CO, May 25, p. 2.
Weeks, W. E. (1996). Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution
to the Civil War. Chicago, Il, Ivan R. Dee.
Winthrop, J. (1630/1838). A Model of Christian Charity. Collections of the Massachusetts
Historical Society - Vol. VII. Boston, MA, Charles C. Little and James Brown: 31-48.
Wooliscroft, B., et al. (2017). A Taxonomy of Voluntary Street Exchanges: From Beggars to
Concert Musicians. 2017 Macromarketing Conference: Macromarketing Systems’ Contributions
to Society: Past, Present & Potential, Queenstown, New Zealand.
921
Challenges in Assessing
Effectiveness of Cultural Appeals
in Marketing for Higher Education
Andriy Kovalenko, Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology, New Zealand
Background
Western higher education institutions (HEIs) increasingly rely on internationalisation in their
practices (Hazelkorn 2015). The popularity of this strategy is frequently attributed to the reduction
of public funding and the consequent dependence of HEIs on the tuition fees of international
students (Stein 2016). Several authors have suggested that internationalisation engrosses HEIs in
status building instead of focusing them on the development of mutually beneficial cultural
relationships (Knight 2014). Not surprisingly, some managerial and academic staff see
internationalisation only as a strategy for recruiting international students and staff (Al-Youssef
2009).
Internationalisation is also associated with a lack of meaningful communication between Western
HEIs and their overseas markets. Although recruiting international students requires understanding
of their needs and expectations (Schofield et al. 2013), there is frequently a substantial gap between
the information required by applicants and what is actually included in promotional materials
(Hemsley-Brown and Oplatka 2006). Financial constraints of many HEIs could be blamed for such
practices, but there is also a possibility that recruitment managers may intentionally use
standardised messages to project Western capitalist values to the ‘developing’ world (Bradshaw
and Tadajewski 2011). In this respect, the promotional messages of some Western HEIs function
as a tool for acculturation of international students. The process of acculturation is hardly avoidable
if one is studying in a new cultural environment. However, rather than making this process more
922
stressful, marketing communication can mitigate its negative effects. Overseas applicants are likely
to find a message more relevant and appropriate if it appeals to familiar cultural values. Developing
of such messages necessitates the use of methods that can explain how international students
interpret marketing communication developed by Western HEIs. One of these methods is discussed
below.
Methods for understanding cross-cultural communication
In marketing for Western higher education, communication is largely fact-based. Even the
intangible idea of reputation can be presented as a ranking position. Facts are expected to persuade
the applicant that a certain university is better than others and, therefore, is more justified as a
choice. Persuasive communication is commonly attributed to low-context cultures (e.g. Nishimura,
Nevgi and Tella 2008) that largely rely on direct and explicit messages (Hall 1959). Prospective
students from most individualistic societies may find this communication style quite natural.
However, many international applicants come from collectivist cultures in which communication
is highly contextual and is often presented through metaphors, allegories and aesthetic impressions
(De Mooij 2014).
The effectiveness of persuasive communication depends on coherence of argumentation (De Mooij
2014). To make the message more convincing, it is usually expressed with words message receivers
can easily comprehend. If communication is largely written or verbal, it makes sense to focus on
analysing texts. The findings of Okazaki and Mueller (2007) about the prevalence of content
analysis in cross-cultural advertising research over other methods, support this assumption. Many
studies of marketing for higher education also rely on content analysis methods. For example,
Hemsley-Brown (2012) used elements of content analysis to compare the information on university
websites with the personal statements of international applicants, while Morrisha and Sauntson
(2013) interpreted university mission statements with one of the types of content analysis
(APPRAISAL analysis).
Krippendorff (2012) defined content analysis as a research technique for understanding the
meaning of verbal, written and visual messages within a specific context. The context of
communication can be shaped by such circumstances as psychological conditions, socio-economic
interests and the cultural background of the message sender (Krippendorff 2012). Understanding
messages in terms of the first two contexts should pose no difficulty because on a daily basis,
923
researchers experience different psychological conditions in a socio-economic environment. The
cultural context, however, is more challenging to grasp, unless researchers share similar cultural
values to study participants, or are assisted by members of the culture in question. In other words,
content analysis with its main goal of finding what something means (according to a researcher)
should be complemented by other methods that facilitate hearing how representatives of a certain
culture actually interpret the meaning.
Comparing textual analysis of a message with the audience discourse of its meaning is known as
the reception method (Bullo 2014). In this method, the media text is studied not only in terms of
its intrinsic meaning, but also as an outcome of the relationship between the reader and the text
(McQuail 1997). When a marketing message is perceived, it is likely to evoke attitudes which go
beyond mere the semantic properties of the message. These attitudes reflect personal experience
and the cultural knowledge of the reader which exist prior to exposure to the message (Messaris
1997). Bullo (2014) suggests studying sense-making by, firstly, singling out lexical elements of the
text and allocating them to specific discourse-semantic categories (APPRAISAL method), and,
secondly, by studying how focus group participants interpret the message in terms of its socio-
cultural context. Unlike content analysis methods that mostly rely on secondary data analysis, the
reception method makes it possible to gain an insight into how the audience’s socio-cultural
background affects their sense-making of a marketing message. Modifying the message in
accordance with suggestions of the focus group can transform the audience’s role of passive
message receivers into active participants in the communication process.
The reception method has been used in a few studies of advertising in general (e.g. Bullo 2014). It
appears that it should be also practiced more widely in the area of marketing for higher education,
in particular in cross-cultural studies.
924
References:
Al-Youssef, Joanna (2009), “The internationalisation of higher education institutions: A case study
of a British university,” PhD diss., University of Bath.
Bradshaw, Alan, and Mark Tadajewski (2011), “Macromarketing roundtable commentary—the
export of marketing education,” Journal of Macromarketing, 31(3), 312-321.
Bullo, Stella (2014), Evaluation in advertising reception: A socio-cognitive and linguistic
perspective. Springer.
De Mooij, Marieke (2014). Global marketing and advertising: Understanding cultural paradoxes.
Sage Publications.
Hall, Edward T. (1959), The silent language. 3. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Hazelkorn, Ellen (2015), “Globalization, internationalization and rankings,” International Higher
Education, 53.
Hemsley-Brown, Jane, and Izhar Oplatka (2006), “Universities in a competitive global
marketplace: A systematic review of the literature on higher education marketing,”
International Journal of Public Sector Management, 19(4), 316-338.
Hemsley-Brown, Jane (2012), “The best education in the world’: reality, repetition or cliché?
International students' reasons for choosing an English university,” Studies in Higher
Education, 37 (8), 1005-1022.
Knight, Jane (2014) “Is internationalisation of higher education having an identity crisis?” In The
Forefront of International Higher Education, Springer, Dordrecht, 75-87.
Krippendorff, Klaus (2012), Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Sage.
McQuail, Denis (1997), Audience analysis. Sage.
Messaris, Paul (1997), Visual persuasion: The role of images in advertising. Sage.
Morrish, Liz and Helen Sauntson (2013), “Business-facing motors for economic development’: an
appraisal analysis of visions and values in the marketised UK university,” Critical Discourse
Studies, 10 (1), 61-80.
925
Nishimura, Shoji, Anne Nevgi, and Seppo Tella (2008), “Communication style and cultural
features in high/low context communication cultures: A case study of Finland, Japan and
India,” Uudistuva ja kehittyvä ainedidaktiikka. Ainedidaktinen symposium, 8, 783-796.
Okazaki, Shintaro, and Barbara Mueller (2007), “Cross-cultural advertising research: where we
have been and where we need to go,” International Marketing Review, 24 (5), 499-518.
Schofield, Cathy, Debby Cotton, Karen Gresty, Pauline Kneale, and Jennie Winter (2013), “Higher
education provision in a crowded marketplace,” Journal of Higher Education Policy and
Management, 35(2), 193-205.
Stein, Sharon (2016), “Rethinking the ethics of internationalization: Five challenges for higher
education,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 12(2), 1-26.
926
Looking at Complex Issues:
Alternative Research
Methodologies for
Macromarketing
Alexandra Ganglmair-Wooliscroft, University of Otago, New Zealand
Introduction
Macromarketing deals with complex topics, it explores ‘big’ issues and often deals with
wicked problems exploring marketing systems, developing markets, sustainability or quality of
life. Macromarketers try to understand what characterizes efficient markets, sustainable firms or
happy consumers. The research methodology applied when investigating these phenomena
influences the results of a study (Wooliscroft, 2016) and, subsequently, effects what conclusions
are drawn from that study and what policies are suggested.
A recent special issue of the Journal of Macromarketing explored alternative research
methodologies (Vol 36(1)). This paper contributes to that discussion of alternative research
methodologies in macromarketing. It explores some of the assumptions underlying mainstream
methodological approaches that are based on classical analysis techniques like correlations,
Regression Models or Structural Equation Modelling and discusses a possible alternative.
Macromarketing research’s characteristics often overlap with those encountered in wicked
problems:
A frequent lack of one single and definitive formulation of the problem
The encountered situation is not the result of one event, but represents a set of
intersecting, related events that have occurred over time.
The inclusion of multiple stakeholders whose perception of the encountered
situation is different.
927
The problem / encountered situation does not stand alone, but is embedded in a
larger system.
Values, culture and politics are often involved in the (research) problem and
provide different strategies to solve it.
There is not one solution and it is not clear whether the problem can be really
solved. (Kazdin, 2009)
These characteristics are central to many macromarketing studies that explore market
systems (Layton 2015) or to case study based research on developing markets (Shultz, Burkink,
Grbac, & Renko, 2005). Macromarketing research frequently deals with the complexity of an
encountered situation and discusses multiple solutions to the problem at hand.
However, studies that focus on quantifying macromarketing issues – for example
investigations of Quality of Life or Sustainability – frequently ignore the complexity inherent in
these topics; they implicitly and without any further discussion ‘assume complexity away’. A
tendency to simplify, to look for one solution or emphasize the influence of one variable – to
assume complexity away - is facilitated by the foundations of applied research methodologies and
analysis methods, most importantly (variations of) Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA).
Key assumptions of Multiple Regression Analysis
MRA is based on a number of assumptions that are not found in many empirical
situations, especially when complex constructs are under investigation. In particular, MRA is
based on correlations, assumes linearity and symmetric relationships, and investigates the net-
effect of one variable (Kent & Argouslidis, 2005; Skarmeas, et al., 2014; Woodside, 2013). The
technique also assumes that there is one, best solution that applies for everybody – answer
patterns who do not fit that best solution are regarded as outliers and generally eliminated from
further investigation.
The following list highlights a number of MRA characteristics and their research
implications:
MRA estimates “the effect size of each independent variable on the dependent variable,
after controlling for the impact of the other independent variables also included in the
equation” (Skarmeas, et al., 2014; 1797). It focuses on one variable’s impact on a
phenomenon, rather than on combinations of variables that lead to an outcome.
928
o Multicollinearity between independent variables can have considerable effect on
MRA results, as the inclusion of additional explanatory variables can switch
significant and non-significant predictors (Woodside, 2013), having a substantial
impact on the outcome and related interpretation.
o Cases that do not support observed net-effects are regarded as outliers and
frequently eliminated from further analysis.
Empirical phenomena are frequently not (completely) linear and correlation coefficients
might not be the best tool to describe them. Skarmeas et al., (2014) suggest a comparison
with Gladwell’s (2000) tipping points where “a change in an independent variable may
have little or no impact on a dependent variable, until this change reaches a certain
threshold” (p.1798).
In symmetric relationships, high (low) values of independent variables always
correspond to high (low) values of dependent variables (Skarmeas, et al., 2014).
However, symmetric relationships are not implied in many verbal statements used to
describe a phenomenon (Kent & Argouslidis, 2005): for example, stating that sustainable
businesses are profitable does not imply that the opposite is true.
o Referring to empirical data, Woodside (2013) suggests that only correlation
coefficients above 0.8 indicate a symmetric relationship while correlation
coefficients between 0.3 and 0.7 are pointing towards an asymmetric relationship.
Correlation coefficients between 0.3 and 0.7 “indicate that while some of these
actions may be useful in combinations with other actions, none alone are sufficient
to explain a high Y [outcome variable]” (465).
An alternative to classic quantitative research techniques
The following section discusses an alternative to classic quantitative research approaches that
might be used to overcome shortcomings of classical research techniques:
QCA / fsQCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis / fuzzy Qualitative Comparative
Analysis) is based on a different epistemological foundation compared to mainstream statistical
techniques, building on set theory and applying Boolean algebra to formalize results (Wagemann,
Buche, & Siewert, 2015). The research approach and analysis technique has been introduced into
the social sciences by Charles C. Ragin in 1987, and was advanced in two seminal books (Ragin,
2000 & 2008) to become the most developed form of set-theoretic method in social sciences
929
(Schneider & Wagemann, 2010). QCA / fsQCA allow for asymmetric relationships – when the
absence of a condition does not automatically lead to the reverse result - and equifinality – when
more than one (bundle of) conditions can produce the desired result.
Using set relations analysis, QCA’s main goal is to reveal conditions for a specific
outcome (Wagemann, et al., 2015). QCA’s roots in set-theory are evident in the different
terminology applied: researchers talk about set membership scores (rather than value of variable);
set relations (rather than correlation); conditions (not independent variables) and outcome (not
dependent variable). The result is referred to as solution formula or solution term (not an
equation) (Schneider & Wagemann, 2010).
Originally, QCA used crisp dataset, coded 0 & 1. A lot of concepts are empirically fuzzy.
Their fuzziness stems from non-sharp conceptual boundaries as the concept is dichotomous in
principle but empirical manifestation occurs in degrees (Schneider & Wagemann, 2012), for
example membership in the ‘developed economies’, ‘efficient markets’ or ‘happy consumer’
category is not (always) a clear cut yes or no. In 2000, QCA was extended to include fuzzy data
(Wagemann, et al., 2015). fsQCA makes the research approach more realistic and easier
publishable - quantified output data is more appealing for main stream publication outlets
(Wagemann, et al., 2015). The distinctive terminology introduced above is particularly important
in fuzzy set QCA, as results look almost regression like, but - as they build on Boolean algebra
rather than linear algebra – are not related to MRA results (Wagemann, et al., 2015).
When conducting a fsQCA, traditional variables need to be ‘calibrated’, converted into
sets that represent the degree of membership in a specific category or condition, ranging from 0 to
1 (with 0 being no membership and 1 being full-membership) (Skarmeas, et al., 2014). As a first
step, the researcher sets these boundaries for full membership & full non-membership of a set,
and for the cross-over point. For example, when ethical consumers are of interest, the researcher
determines the level of ethical behaviour that qualifies a person to be considered a fully ethical
consumer (set membership = 1), the level that qualifies a person to be considered a non-ethical
consumer (set membership = 0) and at what level a person is regarded to be ‘more in than out’ of
the set of ethical consumers (cross over point). (Kent & Argouslidis, 2005).
The outcome of this calibration process is a unique kind of scale that is not quite an
interval scale, as full-membership / non-membership are qualitative states (Ragin, online). The
scale also contains the 0.5 infliction point, where cases become ‘more in than out’, mirroring that
on some point on that scale, the same increase in membership leads to a qualitatively different
930
result (e.g. the step from 0.2 to 0.4 membership is qualitatively not the same as the step from 0.4
to 0.6 membership – in the first example, both cases are ‘more out’, while in the second example
one is ‘more out’ while the other is ‘more in’).
The fsQCA program then fits the raw data in-between the three qualitative anchors using
a logistic function (Schneider & Wagemann, 2012). The quality of the solution is explored using
two indicators: consistency and coverage. Consistency can be explained analogous to a
correlation coefficient and coverage analogous to a coefficient of determination (e.g. R2), but
both indicators are Boolean algebra applications (Woodside, 2013). High consistency, indicates
pathways that almost always lead to a given outcome while coverage indicates “how many cases
in the dataset that have high membership in the outcome condition are represented by a particular
causal complex condition”, with results being presented for each pathway and the solution as a
whole (Skarmeas, et al., 2014, 1799).
In line with its set-theoretical foundations, the interpretation of QCA results differentiates
between sufficient and necessary conditions. In set notation, the outcome is a subset of necessary
conditions and sufficient conditions are a subset of the outcome (Skarmeas, et al., 2014). All
cases that display an outcome, also have a necessary conditions, but necessary conditions by
themselves are not enough to produce the outcome (Kent & Argouslidis, 2005). When a sufficient
condition occurs, the outcome is present, but these conditions may not be the only ones leading to
the outcome (Skarmeas, et al., 2014). Sufficient conditions imply that there are other conditions
that too produce the same outcome (Schneider & Wagemann, 2012). QCA looks for
combinations of conditions that are jointly sufficient for the outcome to occur (Kent &
Argouslidis, 2005).
fsQCA studies ask: what combinations of inputs lead to a high outcome (Woodside, 2013)
as “ingredients are meaningful only within proper configurations – the recipes” (Ordanini, et al.,
144).
The technique highlights:
configurational causation: causes rarely occur in isolation but work on combination,
equifinal causal statements: multiple pathways lead to the same outcome, and these different
explanations of the outcome are equally valid, &
asymmetric relationships: the explanation of an outcome’s absence cannot be directly derived
from the explanation of its presence (Skarmeas, et al., 2014; Wagemann et al., 2015)
931
Applications of fsQCA are suggested to supplement statistical techniques based on correlation
coefficients like MRA ), providing a holistic and more detailed view (Skarmeas, et al., 2014).
QCA in Business Applications and Macromarketing Studies
In line with its originator’s home discipline, the majority of QCA applications are found
in sociology and political science (Skarmeas, et al, 2014), with a geographical weighting towards
European based studies. However, the research approach does gain attention in a business context
(see Kan, et al., 2015, and Wagemann, et al., 2015 for discussions of business related QCA).
When the focus shifts to business and management studies that have employed QCA, it
can be seen that the applications relate to a variety of research contexts ranging from macro- to
truly micro-level data (see Wagemann, et al., 2015 for an overview) covering a range of journals.
For example, Grohs, Raies, Koll & Muehlbacher (2015) explore different paths leading to brand
strength; Ordanini, et al (2014) explore combinations of attributes leading to adoption of new
services; Skarmeas, et al., (2014) examine CSR scepticism; Woodside, et al. (2011) explore
cultures’ consequences on tourism behaviour; and Garcia-Castro & Aguilera (2014) investigate
the role of family involvement in business performance.
Discussion and Conclusion
QCA takes into account that it is often not ‘a competition’ to determine individual
important effects but the combination of effects is important and one outcome can be achieved by
various combinations of inputs. QCA also acknowledges that the absence of an outcome is not
caused by the opposite of its presence. The technique further lends itself to investigating systems,
a key concept in macromarketing.
Looking at the technique’s limitations, it is clear that the use of Boolean Algebra reflects a
different research paradigm, with different underlying assumptions. This aggrevates the
communication of QCA/fsQCA results in mainstream journals – although there is a tendency of
accepting alternative research approaches, including QCA is evident in the discussion above. It is
suggested, that the technique’s main limitation lies in the subjective decisions required that
heavily influence the final results, particularly the researcher determined cuf-off points for full
membership/full non-membership and the cross-over point. However, traditional statistical
techniques also require subjective judgement calls and one could argue that making those explicit
– as is required for QCA – enhances the transparency of the solution. Particularly fsQCA might
932
supplement traditional research techniques to provide a holistic and more detailed view
(Skarmeas, et al., 2014), particularly emphasizing equifinality and asymmetry found in many
empirical situations.
Looking at the Journal of Macromarketing’s table of content, QCA does not appear to
have a strong following, although this paper suggests that the technique is highly suited for
macromarketing research question. For example, one of (macro-)marketing’s key contribution is
the maintenance and improvement of Quality of Life of citizens and consumers (Wilkie & Moore,
1999). Quality of Life is a highly complex construct, with different conceptualizations and
definitions stemming from different research streams (see Sirgy, 2012, for an extensive review of
QOL research). Research studies generally apply statistical analysis techniques especially
Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) & Structural Equation Models (SEM) to determine
variables that influence SWB. The main goal of these analysis techniques is to determine the net-
effect of an individual variable (for example one life-domain’s influence on LS), after separating
out the influence of other variables (Woodside, 2013).
Several papers suggest that Satisfied or Happy Individuals are characterized by high
levels in a combination of life domains (Sirgy & Wu, 2013; Peterson et al., 2005). fsQCA could
provide a research methodology to investigate multiple pathways to happiness.
References
Garcia-Castro, Roberto, and Ruth V. Aguilera (2014). Family involvement in business and
financial performance: A set-theoretic cross-national inquiry. Journal of Family Business
Strategy, 5(1), 85-96.
Gladwell, Malcolm (2000). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
USA: Little, Brown and Company.
Grohs, Reinhard, Karine Raies, Oliver Koll, and Hans Mühlbacher (2015). One pie, many
recipes: Alternative paths to high brand strength. Journal of Business Research.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.12.037
Kan, Anderson Konan Seny, Emmanuel Adegbite, Sami El Omari, and Mahamat Abdellatif
(2015). On the use of qualitative comparative analysis in management. Journal of
Business Research. 10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.10.125
933
Kazdin, A. E. (2009). Psychological science’s contributions to a sustainable environment:
Extending our reach to a grand challenge of society. American Psychologist, 64(5), 339.
Kent, Raymond A., and Paraskevas C. Argouslidis (2005). Shaping business decisions using
fuzzy-set analysis: Service elimination decisions. Journal of Marketing Management,
21(5-6), 641-658.
Layton, R. A. (2015). Formation, growth, and adaptive change in marketing systems. Journal of
Macromarketing, 35(3), 302-319.
Ordanini, Andrea, A. Parasuraman, and Gaia Rubera (2014). When the Recipe Is More Important
Than the Ingredients A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of Service Innovation
Configurations. Journal of Service Research, 17(2), p.134-149.
Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction:
The full life versus the empty life. Journal of happiness studies, 6(1), 25-41.
Ragin, Charles C. (1987) The comparative method: Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative
strategies. Berkley: University of California Press.
Ragin, Charles C. (2000). Fuzzy-set social science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ragin, Charles C. (2008). Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Ragin, Charles C. (online), Redesigning Social Inquiry, University of Arizona, Available at:
http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/379/1/RDSI_RMF.pdf
Schneider, C. Q., & Wagemann, C. (2012). Set-Theoretic Methods for the Social Sciences (A
Guide to Qualitative Comparative Analysis), Cambridge University Press, UK
Schneider, Carsten Q., and Claudius Wagemann (2010). Standards of good practice in qualitative
comparative analysis (QCA) and fuzzy-sets. Comparative Sociology, 9(3), 397-418.
Shultz, C. J., Burkink, T. J., Grbac, B., & Renko, N. (2005). When policies and marketing
systems explode: An assessment of food marketing in the war-ravaged Balkans and
934
implications for recovery, sustainable peace, and prosperity. Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 24(1), 24-37.
Sirgy, M. J. (2012) The psychology of quality of life: Hedonic Well-Being, Life Satisfaction, and
Eudaimonia (2nd edition) Social Indicators Research Series Vol. 50., Springer: Dordrecht.
Sirgy, M. J., & Wu, J. (2013). The pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life: What
about the balanced life?. In The exploration of happiness (pp. 175-191). Springer
Netherlands.
Skarmeas, Dionysis, Constantinos N. Leonidou, and Charalampos Saridakis (2014). Examining
the role of CSR skepticism using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Journal of
Business Research, 67(9), 1796-1805.
Wagemann, Claudius, Jonas Buche, and Markus B. Siewert (2015). QCA and business research:
Work in progress or a consolidated agenda?, Journal of Business Research,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.10.010
Wilkie, W. L. and E. S. Moore. (1999). Marketing’s Contribution to Society. Journal of
Marketing 63 (Special Issue): 198–218.
Wooliscroft, B. (2016). Introduction to the Special Issue on Research Methodologies for
Macromarketing: Macromarketing Research; It’s Not Rocket Science… It’s Much
Harder. Journal of Macromarketing, 36(1), 8-10.
935
Ethics, Equity and
Social Justice I
Track Chair: Ann-Marie Kennedy
Co-Chair(s): Joya Kemper
Nicky Santos
936
Ethics in Marketing Practices in
Different Countries: The Case of
Data Privacy in using Digital
Marketing
Carole Doueiry Verne, Saint-Joseph University, Lebanon
Jean-François Verne, Saint-Joseph University, Lebanon
Stéphane Bourliataux-Lajoinie, IAE of Tours, France
Abstract
With the internet development and social network, nowadays, several millions of consumers,
especially in the richest countries, do their business on the web. As a result, data privacy (or
information privacy or data protection) problems emerge because the firms share data related to
personal information. According to Westin, (1967, p.7), information privacy refers to "the claim of
individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent
information about them is communicated to others".
In fact, consumers are vulnerable in their dealing with business because they have not a control on
the subsequent use of their personal information (Culnan and Williams 2009). It is what Xu et al.
(2008) define when they talk about information privacy from the perspective of individuals in terms
of their ability to control or limit access to their personal information. But in the marketing digital
process, most of the firms use information about preferences of consumers in order to develop
algorithm and other tools of mathematic which improve decision-making and enable the
maximization of their profit. In other words, firms use analytics to convert data to actionable
knowledge. This method can become unethical if the consumers are not informed about the use of
937
their data privacy. The use of these personal data by the digital marketing can create an information
asymmetry problem in which at least one party of a transaction has relevant information whereas
the other not. According to Akerlof (1970), information asymmetry plays a double role in privacy
valuations and decisions making. By taking an example from the context of electronic shopping,
Tsai et al (2011) assert that before the consumer complete his first purchase with an online merchant
or firm, the merchant may have limited information about consumer’s taste, reservation price and
so on. However, after the purchase, the consumer does not have information of how the firm will
use the personal information he revealed as part of transaction. Indeed, according to Schwartz
(2010), because of the development of computer science, it is very easy to trace non-personally
identified information (i.e. information used without the consumer’s knowledge) to recognize
individuals. It has been demonstrated that, by combining a zip code, birth date and gender, we can
identify 87% of the US population (Sweeney, 2000).
In fact, people that use research tools such as Google or participate in social media sites like
Facebook or LinkedIn, pay bills online or shop at online retailers such as Amazon.com, are
generating potentially valuable information for the companies they do business with. However, it
is not sure that people know how these companies use the information.
That’s why firms must analyze what consumers think by means of key questions about data privacy
ownership that all business manager face. For example, Pingitore et al. (2013) take a sample
including 5000 respondents in US, 2081 in China and 1516 in India (who were at least 13 years
old). The findings of Pingitore et al. (2013, p. 4) show that in 2012, 68% of US consumers thought
that the existence of laws and organizational practices delivered a reasonable level of protection
against 51% in 1999. But in 2012, as well as in 1999, 81% of consumers say that they lost control
regarding their personal information, collected and used by companies (there are 74% in India and
72% in China).
This study shows that, in these countries, consumers have strong opinions about who should have
access to their personal and online data. They are less concerned with benign data, such as age, but
are more concerned about who has access to their online activity. Most consumers think that neither
companies nor the government should have access to their online activity via cookies or social
media tools.
938
Consequently, studies of how privacy preference and practices vary cross-nationally have to be
more developed (Martin and Murphy 2017). In other words, global research examining privacy
similarities and differences at both the consumers and organizational levels across international
population is needed in countries characterized by individualist and collectivist cultures such as
France, Lebanon, Japan, South Korea etc…Our study will shed light on this cross-cultural aspect.
Our problematic is summarized as follows:
How internet users’ information privacy concerns (thereafter IUIPC) influence a consumer’s
decision to release or not release personally identifiable data in a certain situation? Do the
companies adopt an ethical behavior regarding their data privacy policy? Are there differences
between countries characterized by Individualist or Collectivist Cultures?
In order to exhibit these differences, we use the IUIPC model (Internet Users’ Information Privacy
Concerns) developed by Malhotra et al., (2004). IUIPC is the degree to which an internet user is
concerned about marketer’s collection of personal information, the user’s control over the collected
information and the user’s awareness of how the collected information is used.
Our questionnaire will be addressed to a sample of 100 persons minimum, dealing their business
online, in every country of our study (France, Japan, Lebanon and South Korea).
The results of our study will enlighten us about the necessity to include Ethics in the marketing
strategies of international companies.
References
Akerlof, G. (1970), “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”,
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), pp. 488-500.
Culnan M.J and Williams, C.C. (2009), “How ethics can enhance organizational privacy: Lesson
form the ChoicePoint and TJX Data Breaches”, MIS Quaterly, Vol. 33, No 4, pp. 673-687.
Martin, K. D. and Murphy P.E. (2017), “The Role of Data Privacy in Marketing”, Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science, 2017, 45:135-155.
Pingitore G., Meyers J. and Clancy M., (2013), “Consumers Concerns about Data Privacy Raising:
What Can Business Do?”, McGraw Hill Financial, Global Institute, 17 pages.
Schwartz, P.M. (2010), “Data Protection Law and the Ethical Use of Analysis”, The Centre for
Information Policy Leadership, Hunton and William LLP.
939
Sweeney, L. (2000), Uniqueness of Simple Demographics in the U.S. Population (Carnegie Mellon
University, School of Computer Science, Data Privacy Laboratory, Technical Report LIDAP-
WP4).
Tsai J.Y., Egelman S. and Crannor , L. (2011), “The effect of Online Privacy Information on
Purchasing Behavior: An Experimental Study”., Information System Research, Vol. 22, No 2, June,
pp. 254-268.
Xu, H., Dinev, T., Smith, H. J., and Hart, P. (2008), “Examining the Formation of Individual’s
Privacy Concerns: Toward an Integrative View,” in Proceedings of the 29th International
Conference on Information Systems, Paris (available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2008/6;
December).
Westin, A. F. (1967), Privacy and Freedom. Athenaum, New York.
940
“Sharing” and “Values” as
Foundations for a Balanced View
of the Business-Government
Partnership
Samuel Petros Sebhatu, Karlstad University, Sweden
Bo Enquist, Karlstad University, Sweden
Extended Abstract
In the new globalized business landscape an imperative to avoid separating business and ethics still
remains valid. This should be reinterpreted in the actual context of the global society of today to
reflect the need for good governance dialectic, which refers to how different institutions handle
shared risk, CSR practices (which include societal and environmental perspectives for shared
responsibility), and resource integration to facilitate new business models for values-based
governance. In this article, we imply the link between moral and value that link the shared thinking
of responsibility in organizations. We are aiming to underscore several ways in which social, and
environmental inequalities must be identified and communicated with all stakeholders. Such
identifications can lead to governance, responsibility, and facilitation from economic and moral
perspectives. This study is contributing to the discussions on service research based on the macro
marketing approach to understand the complexity. Vargo and Lusch (2017) discuss the need for
macro marketing in the future of service research by presenting a framework that can inform macro
marketing theory and research. This is based on the opportunities around ethics, environmental
sustainability, social sustainability and public policy. The objective is examining a tripartite form
941
of sharing, or the “Triple S”: shared risk, shared values, and shared responsibility from “V square”
perspective: Values and Value based on the communication business and government relationship.
Economic and moral values pertain to how actors, businesses, and customers operate, using their
available resources and selecting from available alternatives. Public institutions as Social
institutions are also affected by social mechanisms, which are made up of beliefs, practices, codes,
values, and behaviors (Kennedy, 2016). Social mechanisms identifies macro and systems level
aspects, such as social networks and opinion leaders, and community/population level features,
such as social norms, culture, cohesion, collective efficacy, social capital, income disparities, and
prejudice, which are contributing to macro-level social marketing (Ibid). We are assessing shared
responsibility from a wider perspective of a new paradigm or model of integration at the macro
level. To comprehend business and ethics in this new landscape requires a contextual approach
(Edvardsson and Enquist, 2009; Lusch and Vargo, 2014; and Vargo and Lusch, 2017), aligned with
a broader, transcendent view of business logics (Enquist et al, 2015). This perspective is not firm
centric but rather reflects societal and marketing ethics views (Laczniak and Murphy, 2012; 2014)
and implies a methodological understanding that goes beyond objectivism and relativism
(Bernstein, 1983). In this paper, we imply the link between moral and value as a vital foundation
for business and government relationships that links the shared thinking of responsibility. This is
reinterpreted based on the necessity of a systemic view of the eco-system (macro, meso, and micro)
of business practices that balances risk, values and responsibilities in the actual context of the global
society of today to reflect the need for good governance dialectic.
The paper contributes to the ongoing discussions of sharing in the public-private partnership as a
paradigm and balancing value and ethics by developing a model to assesses the communication of
the two sides from the “Triple S” – Shared Risk; Shared Values; and shared Responsibility –
perspective. This is based on the way value is co-created by integrating the eco-system thinking
into values-based governance and give sustainable business a new dimension. It refers to how these
different institutions handle shared risk, CSR practices (which include societal and environmental
perspectives for shared responsibility), and shared responsibility through resource integration to
facilitate new business models for values-based governance embedded in sharing the core values.
As the “Triple S” are not mutually integrated, which shared responsibility is a common determinant
of the communication to put together shared values and risk. To elaborate the business government
942
partnership for value co-creation, we construct a matrix of shared risk, shared values, and shared
responsibility based on the eco-system at micro, meso, and macro levels to understand this complex
relationship sharing.
The paper adopts three cities and city regions of the complex eco-system to finding solutions to the
moral dilemma of mobility, social, and environmental inequalities. Hyper norms are considered as
the institutionalizing and facilitating processes in the ecosystem. The moral dilemma in relation to
ethics and governance for economic and social value is illustrated by the need to transform urban
regions through public transport, which is embedded in socioeconomic and environmental
challenges and the business and government partnership. Stakeholders’ values give the common
purpose, as realized through good governance processes in the dialectic between governance and
CSR based on stakeholder dialogues.
With this theoretically grounded, exploratory study, we clarify the moral dilemma surrounding
values-based governance that embraces different concepts, using living cases represented by the
regions of Paris, Cape Town, and Buenos Aires. Our goal is to describe the challenges associated
with understanding the moral dilemma in values-based governance that stems from the
simultaneous presence of shared value, shared risk, and shared responsibility. An ethical dilemma
perspective, applied to governance in urban regions, helps reveal the relevant, existing social and
environmental perspectives. West (2017) presents how some of the major challenges of rapid
urbanization and global sustainability manifest systematic regularities and similarities in either
companies or cities structure and dynamics. In line with West’s (2017) thinking and prior
theoretical contributions, we are presenting the key ethical dilemmas and ethics in these case
studies. This study also reveals specific challenges associated with integrating values-based
governance in this context.
Our theoretical framework is built using the concepts of ethics, governance, values, and
responsibility from prior literature. Then we establish our framework with three case studies,
referring to the city regions of Paris, Cape Town, and Buenos Aires. After we reflect on the dialectic
between theory and practice, where the framework meets the cases, we conclude with a summary
of the main contributions and limitations of this study and by developing a model for values-based
governance based in the “Triple-S” that can also suggest directions for further research.
943
References
Bernstein, R.J (1983). Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, University of Pennsylvania Press,
Philadelphia.
Edvardsson, B. and Enquist, B. (2009). Values-based service for sustainable business – Lessons
from IKEA, Routledge, London.
Enquist, B., Sebhatu, S. P., Johnson, M., (2015). Transcendence for business logics in value
networks for sustainable service business, Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 25 (2),
181 - 197
Laczniak, G.R. and Murphy, P.E. (2012). Stakeholder theory and marketing: moving from a firm-
centric to societal perspective, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 31 (2), 284-292.
Laczniak, G.R. and Murphy, P.E. (2014). The relationship between marketing ethics and corporate
social responsibility: serving stakeholders and the common good, Hill and Langan,
Handbook of Research on Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility, Edward Elgar,
pp. 68-87
Lusch, R. and S. Vargo (2014) Service Dominant Logic Premises, Perspectives, Possibilities,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Kennedy, A. M. (2016). Macro-social marketing. Journal of Micromarketing, 36(3), 354-65.
Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2017). Service-dominant logic 2025, International Journal of Research
in Marketing 34 (1) 46-67.
West G., (2017). Scale. The universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of
life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
944
Challenges and
opportunities in the sharing
economy I
Track Chair: Nicole Koenig-Lewis
Co-Chair(s): Sabine Benoit
Kristina Wittkowski
Carmela Bosangit
945
Tourism Sharing Economy and
Well-being
Yousra Assaad96-97, Newcastle University, UK
Yichuan Wang98, Newcastle University, UK
Introduction
Ever since the notion of a sharing economy was highlighted by Time Magazine as one of the ten
ideas that will one day change the world (Walsh 2011), there has been a significant increase in
scholarly attention dedicated to investigating the impact sharing economies will have on
individuals, organizations and society as a whole. Particularly, sharing economy has revolutionized
the landscape of tourism industry, with recent impressive estimates showing that an additional 1%
increase in listings on Airbnb results in a 0.05% decrease in total revenues in Texas hotel market
(Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers in press). There has been extensive academic research studying
consumption practices and behaviors from a recipient perspective, but relatively little attention has
been given to understand what impacts sharing economy has, from a sharer point of view
(Fagerstrøm et al. 2017).
96 Corresponding author 97 [email protected] 98 [email protected]
946
Conceptual development and hypotheses
Using the self-determination theory (SDT) in conjunction with a tourism well-being perspective,
this study develops a focused model examining the impact of extrinsic rewards on hosts’ wellbeing
through their engagement with Airbnb. Fig. 1 shows our research model, reflecting our three
hypotheses.
We argue that in the context of sharing economy in tourism the economic incentive is
important as the home-sharing service is offered in return for financial compensation (Kim, Yoon,
and Zo 2015; Luchs et al. 2011). Thus, this study expects that when people have identified the
benefits from using sharing economy platforms such as receiving extra income by hosting through
Airbnb, they are most likely to engage in sharing activities spontaneously and do not feel pressured
to be involved. We therefore hypothesise that H1. Extrinsic rewards from using the sharing
platform have a positive effect on sharers’ engagement in sharing economy activities.
ICT was shown to allow people to develop social capital that can lead to a greater sense of
well-being (Bargh and McKenna 2004; Ganju, Pavlou, and Banker 2016). Hence we argue that H2.
Engagement in sharing economy activities has a positive effect on sharers’ well-being.
The tourism literature suggests that there is a positive economic impact of tourism on
residents’ well-being (Kim, Uysal, and Sirgy 2013). Specifically with Airbnb, a house is an
expensive asset and sometimes the economic gain of temporary renting may be small relatively to
potential negative consequences of renting such as damage incurred to the property which the
landlord may find very stressful to and runs counter to their wellbeing. Online platforms are
considered as facilitators to human behavior and their wellbeing. In the case of Airbnb, this
platform allows visibility of potential recipients and allows the host greater control over choosing
the recipient as well as active participation in interacting with potential recipients. This would give
enhanced confidence and peace of mind to the host. Hence, active participation, familiarity and
engagement in the sharing activities would be the mechanism through which economic gains can
translate into wellbeing. We therefore hypothesise that H3. Sharers’ engagement in sharing
economy activities mediates the relationship between extrinsic rewards and well-being.
947
Methods
Data from 175 Airbnb hosts in London were analyzed through PLS. PLS was chosen for data
analysis because it not only enables to test hypotheses in complex path models (Nitzl et al. 2016).
PLS also has the ability to model constructs with small to medium sample sizes (Chin, Marcolin,
and Newsted 2003).
Results and discussion
The results of PLS analysis are presented in Fig. 2.
The findings show that hosts’ engagement with Airbnb fully mediates the relationship
between extrinsic rewards and their wellbeing. The paper has some important managerial
implications.
This paper makes three theoretical implications. First, to our knowledge, this study is the first
to examine the effect of engagement in sharing economy activities related to tourism industry on
sharers’ well-being. Previous studies have mainly focused on behavioral intentions from a recipient
perspective (e.g. Hamari, Sjöklint, and Ukkonen 2016). Second, our results reveal that obtaining
monetary rewards in return for hosting on Airbnb will lead to greater well-being. Engagement in
hosting activities on Airbnb remains an important component in boosting sharers’ well-being.
Thus, a mediating role of engagement has been identified in the sharing economy context. By
contrast, previous studies have focused only on the direct effect of various motivational factors on
behavioral intention (e.g. Lamberton and Rose 2012). Third, this study contributes to the tourism
well-being literature. While the concept of wellbeing is not an unchartered territory in the tourism
discipline as most research have broadly examined the positive effect of tourism experiences on
both tourists and residents’ wellbeing (Uysal et al. 2016), our study adds to this literature by
investigating the role of engaging in a specific online platform: Airbnb in enhancing the wellbeing
of hosts.
The current study also offers practical implications for sharing economy platform designers.
Given that engagement in Airbnb has been found to lead to hosts’ wellbeing, it is advised that
platform designers would aim to enhance users’ engagement by including for example infographics
and short videos (a short live clip on the actual interaction between the host and the guest) as using
visual content increases interaction in social media. Platform designers can also include games,
948
contests and giveaways. For example, you could ask hosts to fill-out an entry form, or share their
favorite hosting story for a chance to win a top feature of their property ad.
The findings of our study are subject to some limitations. First, given the difficulties of data
collection on Airbnb hosts, our study was performed based on 175 responses only. Gathering
additional data in the future would help in generalization. Second, we only investigated the impact
of sharing economy on a single city (i.e. London). As the role of regulations and taxations in the
sharing economy would increase barriers to entry for platform providers and sharers, differences
in demographics, national culture and the level of entry in the sharing economy should be taken
into consideration in the future studies.
949
References
Bargh, John. A., & Katelyn YA McKenna (2004), “The Internet and social life,” Annual Review
Psychology, 55, 573-590.
Chin, Wynne W., Barbara L. Marcolin, and Peter R. Newsted (2003), “A partial least squares
latent variable modeling approach for measuring interaction effects: Results from a Monte
Carlo simulation study and an electronic-mail emotion/adoption study,” Information
Systems Research, 14(2), 189-217.
Fagerstrøm, Asle, Sanchit Pawar, Valdimar Sigurdsson, Gordon R. Foxall & Mirella Yani-de-
Soriano, M. (2017), “That personal profile image might jeopardize your rental opportunity!
On the relative impact of the seller's facial expressions upon buying behavior on Airbnb™,”
Computers in Human Behavior, 72, 123-131.
Ganju, Kartik K., Paul A. Pavlou and Rajiv D. Banker (2016), “Does information and
communication technology lead to the well-being of nations? A Country-Level Empirical
Investigation,” MIS Quarterly, 40(2), 417-430.
Hamari, Juho, Mimmi Sjöklint and Antti Ukkonen (2016), “The sharing economy: Why people
participate in collaborative consumption,” Journal of the Association for Information
Science and Technology, 67(9), 2047-2059.
Kim, Kyungmi, Muzaffer Uysal and M. Joseph Sirgy (2013), “How does tourism in a community
impact the quality of life of community residents?,” Tourism Management, 36, 527-540.
Kim, Jeonghye, Youngseog Yoon & Hangjung Zo (2015), “Why People Participate in the
Sharing Economy: A Social Exchange Perspective,” In PACIS (p. 76)
Lamberton, Cait Poynor and Randall L. Rose (2012), “When is ours better than mine? A
framework for understanding and altering participation in commercial sharing systems,”
Journal of Marketing, 76(4), 109-125.
Luchs, Michael, Naylor, R.W., Rose, R.L., Catlin, J.R., Gau, R., and Kapitan, S. (2011), “Toward
a sustainable marketplace: Expanding options and benefits for consumers,” Journal of
Research for Consumers, 19(1), 1–12.
950
Nitzl, Christian, Jose L. Roldan and Gabriel Cepeda (2016), “Mediation analysis in partial least
squares path modeling: Helping researchers discuss more sophisticated models,” Industrial
Management & Data Systems, 116(9), 1849-1864.
Uysal, Muzaffer, M. Joseph Sirgy, Eunju Woo and Hyelin Lina Kim (2016), “Quality of life
(QOL) and well-being research in tourism,” Tourism Management, 53, 244-261.
Walsh, Bryan (2011), Today’s smart choice: Don’t own. Share. Available at
www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2059521_2059717_2059710,00.html
Zervas, Georgios, Davide Proserpio and John W. Byers, J. W. (2017), “The rise of the sharing
economy: Estimating the impact of Airbnb on the hotel industry,” Journal of Marketing
Research, 54(5), 687-705.
951
Figure 1. Research model
Figure 2. PLS results of the structural model with engagement in sharing economy activities
as a mediator
Notes: * p< 0.05; ** p<0.01; *** p<0.001
Number on path: standardized parameter estimation, Number in parentheses: T-Value. Non-
significant pats are in dashed lines.
Engagement in
Sharing Economy
Activities
R2= 0.154
Extrinsic
Rewards
Well-being
R2= 0.359
0.392 (5.832) *** 0.544 (7.538) ***
0.115 (1.844) n.s.
H1
H3
(mediation)
H2
Engagement in
Sharing Economy
Activities
Extrinsic
Rewards Well-being
952
Examining Public Value Creation
in the Sharing Economy
Anne Bäro99-100, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
Susanne Pankov101, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
Stefan Anderer102, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
Timo Meynhardt103, University of St.Gallen, Switzerland
Vivek Velamuri104, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
Note: This manuscript is work in progress. Please do not forward or cite without explicit information
Purpose of the Paper
To date, the value of the sharing economy is discussed controversially whether it is “a pathway to
sustainability or a nightmarish form of neoliberal capitalism” (Martin, 2016, p. 149). While present
literature is debating the positive and negative effects of the sharing economy, little is known about
how the value of the sharing economy is perceived by the public or how trust in and
recommendation of sharing ventures are affected by value perceptions. Therefore, we conducted a
quantitative online survey and asked participants (n = 1197) to evaluate sharing ventures’
contribution to societal value creation. Thereby, we move beyond the theoretical discourse that is
currently holding academic controversies on the sharing economy and refer to the call for reliable
99 Corresponding author 100 [email protected] 101 [email protected] 102 [email protected] 103 [email protected] 104 [email protected]
953
data within the field of the sharing economy. Building on public value theory, this study provides
a more comprehensive understanding of the value created by the sharing economy and its possible
implications.
Theoretical Background
While the sharing economy is characterized by fast economic growth and importance, it is presently
replete with discourses about whether the sharing economy creates or harms societal value (e.g.,
Bellotti et al., 2015; Hamari et al., 2015; Tussyadiah, 2016). While proponents argue that sharing
platforms provide the opportunity for individuals to sell their services and resources, opponents
stress, that this new market form predominantly destroys jobs and living spaces (e.g., Netter, 2016).
Although, the effects of the sharing economy are intensively debated, an empirical investigation of
sharing ventures’ value contribution to society is still missing. Therefore, we draw on public value
theory, which can be defined as an attempt to articulate how organizations contribute to the
common good (Meynhardt et al., 2017). The public value approach is based on the cognitive-
experiential self-theory by Epstein (2003) who identified four basic human needs: the need for
positive self-evaluation, the need for maximizing pleasure, the need for gaining control and
coherence, and the need for positive relationships which translate into four public value
dimensions, i.e., task fulfilment (= utilitarian-instrumental), social cohesion (= political-social),
quality of life (= hedonistic-aesthetical), and morality (= moral-ethical). Accordingly, public value
is created when organizational actions positively affect basic human needs (Meynhardt, 2009).
Guided by the principle “public value is what the public values” (Talbot, 2006, p. 7), this concept
makes transparent what makes an organization, i.e. a sharing venture, valuable to society.
Research Question and Hypotheses
To date, a multitude of studies have been looking at the positive and negative effects of the sharing
economy on a macro-level, such as the economy, the environment (e.g., Benkler, 2017) or the
effects of the sharing economy on a micro-level, such as personal values, attitudes, and norms (e.g.,
Roos & Hahn). Research on the value of the sharing economy for society is frequently raised for
exploration but still barely empirically investigated. Thus, we aim to answer the following research
question: To what extent do sharing economy ventures contribute to public value creation?
Furthermore, we argue that sharing ventures which are primarily non-profit oriented are
perceived greater in their public value contribution than profit-oriented sharing ventures (Murillo
et al., 2017; Schor, 2014). Moreover, we hypothesize that this effect is reversed for materialistic
954
individuals who estimate the public value creation of for-profit organizations higher than for non-
profit organizations (Parguel et al., 2017). We further suggest that a higher perceived public value
contribution leads to higher levels of trust as well as higher levels of recommendation of the
respective sharing venture (Barnes & Mattson, 2017; Ertl et al., 2016).
Research Design
Sample
This study explores the perceived public value creation of the sharing economy based on an online
survey conducted in 2017 amongst 1197 respondents in Germany. Since the sharing economy is
often linked to younger generations living in urban areas, the study primarily aimed for recruiting
people between 18 and 35 years who are living in cities bigger than 100,000 inhabitants. This
increases the knowledge base regarding the sharing economy amongst the general population and
ensures that respondents are familiar with the sharing economy ventures they are presented with in
the survey. Table 1 describes the sample composition according to several demographic variables.
The sample is diverse and well balanced on several key demographics, such as gender, household
income and household size. As intended, young people living in urban areas are overrepresented.
Furthermore, the vast majority of respondents holds middle or higher education.
Data Collection
Based on qualitative interviews prior to the online survey, this study distinguishes four sectors:
accommodation, mobility, goods and food sharing. In the final survey, eleven sharing ventures
were included: Airbnb, couchsurfing (accommodation), UBER, DriveNow, BlaBlaCar, callabike,
nextbike (mobility), Spielzeugkiste, alleNachbarn (goods), foodsharing, and TooGoodToGo
(food). These sharing ventures have been selected because they are in line with our definition of
the sharing economy as enabling the temporary utilization of services and goods through digital
platforms. Second, the selected sectors all involve the sharing of overcapacity of underutilized
assets and represent the most common objects for sharing. Third, our preliminary pilot study has
shown that these eleven sharing ventures are sufficiently well known by our target group. Finally,
we aimed for contrasting every venture predominantly perceived as profit-oriented with a venture
predominantly perceived as non-profit oriented. To avoid respondent fatigue, each individual
respondent is only asked to evaluate the public value contribution of maximally five randomly
selected sharing ventures. In total, all sharing ventures are, however, sufficiently covered.
955
A panel of 2000 respondents was invited via e-mail. All participants of the survey had to be
active users of sharing platforms or at least had to have detailed knowledge about sharing services.
Respondents rated the public value of a sharing venture if they indicated on a 6-point Likert scale
that they are familiar with the particular sharing venture (1: I don’t know the sharing venture at all
and am not able to give an opinion; 6: I know the sharing venture and am able to give an opinion).
Only participants who indicated a familiarity score equal to or greater than 4 were then requested
to evaluate the public value contribution of the particular sharing venture.
If respondents had sufficient knowledge of the sharing venture, they received a selection of
up to five sharing ventures to evaluate their particular public value contribution. The measurement
of the public value contributions was utilized with the help of a 12-item scale based on the four
public value dimensions, i.e., task fulfilment (= utilitarian-instrumental), social cohesion (=
political-social), quality of life (= hedonistic-aesthetical), and morality (= moral-ethical dimension)
(3 items per dimension). Example items include:
[This particular sharing venture] “...performs well in its core business” (task fulfilment),
“...contributes to social cohesion in Germany” (social cohesion), “... contributes to the quality of
life in Germany” (quality of life), and “... complies with accepted standards of morality” (morality).
The measurement of public value contributions by means of this 12-item measure is based on
earlier studies and results in a final public value score for each of the sharing economy ventures
(range between one and six, the higher the greater the perceived public value of the respective
sharing venture). Answers were given on a six-point scale (1 = disagree to 6 = agree).
Moreover, a one-item measure for trust has been included: “I trust this [sharing venture]”.
The measurement of trust by means of single-item measures is based on earlier studies’ results
which have shown that for trust already one item is sufficiently reliable (e.g., Schoorman, Meyer,
& Davis, 2007). Answers were given on a six-point scale (1 = strongly disagree to 6 = completely
agree).
We applied Harrison-Walkers (2001) three-item word-of-mouth scale to assess personal
recommendation. The items were: “It is likely, that I say good things about this organization”, “I
would recommend this organization to my family and friends”, and “If my friends would look for
this kind of organization, I would recommend them this”. Answers were given on a six-point scale
(1 = strongly disagree to 6 = completely agree).
Finally, participants completed a German translation (Solomon, Bamossy, & Askegaard,
2001) of the three-item short version of the material values scale (MVS) (Richins, 2004,
956
Cronbach’s α = .74). The items were: “I admire people who own expensive houses, cars, and
clothes”, “I enjoy a lot of luxury as part of my life”, and “I would be happier if I could afford to
buy more things”. Answers were given on a six-point scale (1 = strongly disagree to 6 = completely
agree).
Furthermore, we controlled for several respondent characteristics: respondents’ age (as
continuous variable), gender (male = 0, female = 1), education (three groups, ranging from lower
to higher education), income (five groups, ranging from a gross monthly income of less than EUR
1,000 to more than EUR 4,000), and household size (number of residents).
Findings
Based on our empirical survey data we are able to answer our research question to what extent do
sharing economy ventures contribute to public value creation.
Table 2 displays the sharing ventures’ public value contribution (total and dimension scores).
Participants report a high appreciation of the sharing ventures indicated by a high public value
score (M = 4.14, SD = 0.75). While participants rank two services that are concerned with
distributing surplus food (Foodsharing, M = 4.71;ToGoodToGo, M = 4.33) among the first three,
the commercially more successful ventures Airbnb (M = 4.06) and UBER (M = 3.51) are ranked at
the bottom of the table. The sub dimensions with some variances reflect the general rating.
However, some results obtain a more nuanced picture. While Airbnb is seen more critical than most
other ventures (e.g. the moral-ethical dimension is M = 3.88) its utility (utilitarian-instrumental
dimension M = 4.27) is rated among the first five within the field of sharing ventures.
Table 3 displays the public value and its sub dimensions of sharing ventures clustered as for-
profit (Airbnb, DriveNow, UBER, Spielzeugkiste, foodsharing) and non-profit (couchsurfing,
BlaBlaCar, alleNachbarn, ToGoodToGo).
The results indicate a substantial difference of the means (d = 0.25), implying a higher
perceived public value for non-profit sharing ventures by our sample. While the non-profit ventures
(M = 4.29) are above the mean of all sharing ventures (M = 4.14), the for-profit ventures obtain a
value below (M = 4.07). The outlined public value data and the additional measures shown in Table
4, allow us to perform the subsequent inferential analyses. The five variables obtain substantial and
significant correlations (p = .01) among each other.
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Our results show that the public value contribution for non-profit sharing ventures is higher
than for for-profit sharing ventures. Interestingly, this effect is reversed for materialistic consumers
who rate the public value contribution of for-profit organizations higher than of non-profit ventures
(z = 1.47; p = 0.07).
Finally, our results show that a higher perceived public value contribution leads to higher
levels of trust (r = 0.80; p = 0.01) as well as higher levels of recommendation of the respective
sharing venture (r = 0.80; p = 0.01).
Contribution
Our study makes several contributions. First, we provide empirical evidence that the sharing
economy’s value creation is not restricted to mere sustainable value, but rather of multidimensional
quality taking into account moral and political, as well as utilitarian and hedonistic aspects of value
creation. Second, our study draws on a rich data set which broadens our understanding of value
created by different market logics in the sharing economy. Third, by taking a public value
perspective we advance and extend previous research on values in the sharing economy, which, so
far, has been mainly focusing on the subsisting and evolving value system of individuals
participating in the sharing economy. Finally, by combining approaches of the sharing economy
and public value, we add significant insights into the nascent theory of two evolving research
domains.
Selected References
Acquier, Aurelien., Thibault Daudigeos, & Jonatan Pinkse (2017), “Promises and paradoxes of
the sharing economy: An organizing framework,” Technological Forecasting and Social
Change, 125, 1-20.
Belk, Russell (2010), “Sharing”, Journal of Consumer Research, 36, 715-734.
Botsman, Rachel & Roo Rogers (2010), What’s Mine Is Yours. New York: Harper Business.
Drucker, Peter (1973), Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. New York, NY: Harper
Business Edition.
Epstein, Seymour (2003), “Cognitive‐experiential self‐theory of personality”, In T. Millon, M. J.
Lerner, & I. B. Weiner (Eds.), Handbook of Psychology (Vol. 5, pp. 159-184). New York:
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Meynhardt, Timo (2009), “Public Value Inside: What is Public Value Creation?” International
Journal of Public Administration, 32(3-4), 192-219.
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Table 1
Sample Composition and Representativeness
Sample (N=1997)
Age > 25 26.3%
25 – 34 66.3%
35 – 44 7.2%
45 - 54 0.2%
Gender Male 45.4%
Female 54.6%
Education Lower Education 3.1%
Middle Education 56.1%
Higher Education 40.2%
Others 1.0%
Income 0 – 1000 26.6%
1000 – 2000 32.3%
2000 – 3000 22.5%
3000 - 4000 11.8%
4000 + 6.9%
Household Size 1 27.6%
2 40.2%
3 18.7%
4 + 13.5%
City Size 5.000 1.9
20.000 2.5
100.000 8.9
500.000 35.7
500.000 + 51.0
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Table 2
The Public Value of the Sharing Economy Ventures
Rank Organization PV HA UI ME PS
1 Foodsharing 4.59 4.71 4.22 4.74 4.69
2 Spielzeugkiste 4.43 4.56 4.34 4.47 4.33
3 TooGoodToGo 4.33 4.47 4.16 4.52 4.18
4 BlaBlaCar 4.30 4.40 4.31 4.18 4.31
5 couchsurfing 4.29 4.36 4.01 4.30 4.50
6 DriveNow 4.24 4.46 4.53 4.12 3.85
7 alleNachbarn 4.23 4.29 4.01 4.23 4.40
8 nextbike 4.21 4.47 4.26 4.22 3.90
SV overall 4.14 4.28 4.16 4.10 4.01
9 callabike 4.10 4.27 4.31 4.15 3.69
10 airbnb 4.06 4.20 4.27 3.88 3.90
11 UBER 3.51 3.70 3.60 3.38 3.36
Note. The table shows the final public value score (PV) for each sharing venture as well as for
the sub dimensions (ME represents the moral-ethical, UI the utilitarian-instrumental, PS the
political-social, and HA the hedonistic-aesthetical dimension). SV overall is the mean Public
Value score over all sharing ventures.
Table 3
Public Value of for-profit vs non-profit Organizations within the Sharing Economy
Rank Organization PV HA UI ME PS
1 Non-profit 4.29 4.38 4.17 4.26 4.34
2 SE overall 4.14 4.28 4.16 4.10 4.01
3 For-profit 4.07 4.22 4.15 3.98 3.90
Note. The table shows the final public value score (PV) for non-profit sharing ventures
(couchsurfing, BlaBlaCar, alleNachbarn, TooGoodToGo) and for for-profit sharing ventures
(airbnb, DriveNow, UBER, Spielzeugkiste, foodsharing) as well as for the sub dimensions.
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Table 4
Correlation Matrix
Variables M SD 1 2 3 4 5 6
1. Public Value 4.14 0.80 1
2. Public Value for-profit 4.07 0.91 0.91 1
3. Public Value non-profit 4.29 0.84 0.86 0.60 1
4. Materialism 3.29 1.18 0.15 0.18 0.12 1
5. Trust 4.03 1.04 0.80 0.74 0.71 0.14 1
6. Word of mouth 4.22 1.01 0.80 0.75 0.72 0.09 0.88 1
Note. Correlations are significant p = .01. N varies among correlations.
961
Ethical consumption
in emerging economies II
Track Chair: Thi Tuyet Mai Nguyen
Co-Chair(s): Vu Hung Nguyen
Thi Hoang Yen Nguyen
962
Drivers of Green Product Purchase
Intention: An Empirical Study on
Consumers in an Emerging
Economy
Thi Hoang Yen Nguyen, Posts and Telecommunications Institute of
Technology, Vietnam
Thi Tuyet Mai Nguyen, National Economic University, Vietnam
Abstract
Extending the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study aims to explore the driver role of three
TPB’s variables (attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control) and two extended
variables (environmental concern and electronic word-of-month) on consumer intention to
purchase green products in Vietnam - an emerging Asian country with fast growing rate and
increasing environmental problems. Data was collected via an online survey with 552 respondents
in 2018. The results of data analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM) show that attitude
(ATT), perceived behavioral control (PBC), environmental concern (ENV) and electronic word-
of-month (EWOM) are four significant predictors of the intention to purchase green products
(INT), of which the most important is PBC. The actual study also proved the significantly
determinant role of ENV and EWOM as having both direct and indirect effects on INT. In the
context of an emerging country, sustainable consumption becomes increasingly important in the
pursuit of sustainable development, while empirical research on this topic is generally limited; this
research promises to make both theoretical and practical implications.
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Keywords: Purchase intention, green products, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral
control, environmental concern, electronic word-of-mouth
1. Introduction
The enormous amount of environmental pollution and of global warning has been increasing
steadily environmental issues in recent years and environmental concern rapidly emerges as a
mainstream issue for consumers (Chen 2010). As a consequence, they seek to purchase
environmentally friendly products for future generations’ benefits (Khare 2015). According to
Nielsen's 2015 Global Corporate Sustainability Report, consumers in the world are more willing to
pay more for sustainable goods. However, in order to develop environmentally sustainable
consumption, it is necessary to promote consumers’ willingness to engage in consumption
behaviors which is environmentally friendly. Under the operational perspective, sustainable
consumption may be achieved by encouraging green product consumption (Paul, Modi, and Patel
2016).
Green products are understood as products that do not pollute the earth or deplore natural resources,
and can be recycled or conserved (Shamdasani, Lin, and Richmond 1993). Research on green
product consumption could be subdivided in different ways. It seems that in marketing literature,
authors pay attention to examine the intentions and behavior of the consumers (a deep and
comprehensive review is provided in Peattie (2010)’s work). Although there are a number of
models and theories which could be used to explain consumers’ green product consumption
behavior in general, and purchase intention in particular, the most commonly applied theory to
green consumerism are the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behavior
(TPB) (Peattie 2010). According to TPB, consumers’ behavior is shaped by their behavior
intention, which is driven by consumer attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm and perceived
behavioral control. Thanks to its usefulness and appropriateness, TPB has been employed in
previous works as theoretical foundation to investigate determinants of green consumption
behavior, in both developed and emerging economies (cf. Paul, Modi, and Patel 2016; Chen and
Tung 2014). Despite the general usefulness, several critiques of this model were discussed in
previous studies (Zhao et al. 2013). Our literature review also pointed out that one common
limitation shared by authors in applying TPB is that TPB alone is not sufficient to explain green
consumption behavior in various context. Therefore, numerous studies made efforts to improve the
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explanatory power of the theory by adding additional constructs when applying the TPB model.
Nevertheless, the extension of TPB seems to vary according to the specific context of research.
In emerging economies, because sustainability issues and environmental consciousness are also on
the rise, government, corporate decision-makers and consumers are becoming more conscious
about environment-related problems, including environmentally sustainable consumption. The
Nielsen's 2015 Global Corporate Sustainability Report also points out that consumers in
developing countries tend to seek out and pay more for sustainable products. In fact, they are often
closer to and more aware of the needs in their surrounding communities as they are reminded daily
of the challenges around them, which leads to a desire to give back and help others. Perhaps, for
these reasons, in recent years, studies on green product consumption behavior in general and their
intention to purchase green products in particular have gained prominence in emerging economies.
However, it is necessary and meaningful to investigate consumer’s green product purchase
behavior in different contexts of emerging economies since consumer’s purchase behavior may
differ across different cultures.
Vietnam is an emerging economy in Asia which is considered one of the fastest growing consumer
markets in Southeast Asia (Nguyen and Nguyen 2017). Among Vietnamese large population of
more than 90 million people, 31% live in urban areas (UNFPA 2014). Vietnamese urban population
and industrialization rate both have rapidly increased. Industrialization rate of some provinces is
even around 35-40%/year (Institute of Statistic Science 2012). Urbanization has been causing
significant negative impacts on the environment, including environmental pollution, hazardous
waste, high risk of environmental accidents, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. The
phenomenon leads to higher environmental consciousness for sustainable consumption of
Vietnamese goverment and consumers in recent years. Thus, the term “green consumption” has
become more and more farmiliar for Vietnamese consumers. Therefore, it is meaningful to examine
the determinants of green purchase behavior in Vietnam, where the research topic seems to receive
still very modest attention.
Drawing on and extending TPB, this study explores factors influencing the intention to purchase
green products in Vietnam. It enlarges application scope of the original TPB with three
determinants of intention to purchase (attitude toward purchasing green products, subjective norm
and perceived behavioral control) to examine the role of environmental concern and electronic
965
word-of-mouth in the context of an emerging Asian country. This research may then give
practitioners a new understanding of consumers’ adoption of green products, which can be used in
order to build adequate marketing strategies to encourage green consumption in the context of
emerging countries in Asia. The paper is structured in three main parts. Firstly, the literature review
and conceptual framework is introduced. Secondly, the methodology will be described and
followed by the analysis and results. Finally, we will present discussion and implications, as well
as research limitations and perspectives for future studies.
2. Conceptual framework
In marketing literature, TPB provides a useful framework for understanding how attitude,
subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control are combined to influence both planned and
realized behavior. Based on TRA, TPB is extended by adding a new construct named “perceived
behavioral control” as a predictor of behavior. In TPB, behavior intention, which is defined as “the
individual’s intention to perform a given behavior” and indices “how hard people are willing to try,
of how much of an effort they are planning to exert, in order to perform the behavior” (Ajzen 1991),
is a central factor. As populated, TPB assumes attitude toward behavior, subjective norm and
perceived behavioral control as three predictors of behavior intention. TPB is a well-researched
model and has been largely used by researchers in marketing discipline in order to predict and
explain consumer behavior intention across a variety of contexts and consumption sectors.
As regards to green consumption behavior, TPB is widely employed (Peattie 2010) in the research
context of both developed and developing countries. Our review of previous research shows that
attitude toward green purchase behavior, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control were
proved as three significant predictors of green products purchase intention in numerous works (e.g.
Paul, Modi, and Patel 2016; Wu and Chen 2014). Therefore, we believe that TPB is an appropriate
theoretical framework for our research whose main aim is to investigate determinants of consumer
intention to purchase green products. In this study, based on TPB of Ajzen (1991), consumer
intention to purchase green products (INT) is defined as consumer’s intention to perform green
product purchasing activities and this indicates both consumer willingness to try as well as planned
efforts to perform purchasing activities. We now discuss each of three TPB predictors of consumer
intention to purchase green products.
2.1 Attitude toward purchasing green products (ATT)
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In TPB, attitude toward the behavior is understood as “the degree to which a person has a favorable
or unfavorable evaluation or appraisal of the behavior in question” (Ajzen 1991). Based on this
definition, we understand attitude toward purchasing green products as the degree to which
consumer has a favorable or unfavorable evaluation or appraisal of green products activities. The
positive relationship between ATT and INT has been largely established across many research of
green consumption (cf. Paul, Modi, and Patel 2016). In case of emerging markets in Asia, this
relationship has been also proved. ATT is even showed as an important determinant of INT in Zhao
et al. (2013) and Wu and Chen (2014)’s empirical works. These suggestions lead us to expect the
similar finding in the present research on Vietnamese consumers’ behavior. In other words, we
believe that if consumer’s attitude toward purchasing green products is favorable, consumer is more
likely to purchase green products. Therefore, the following hypothesis is formulated:
H1. Attitude toward green purchase is positively related to intention to purchase green products
2.2. Subjective norm (SN)
Subjective norm is the second predictor of individual’s behavior intention in TPB. It is a social
factor which refers to the perceived social pressure to perform or not to perform the behavior (Ajzen
1991). Moreover, in an empirical research, Hee (2000) found that the influence of others who are
close/important to the person/actor such as close friends, relatives, colleagues, or business partners
is a part of subjective norm across variety cultures. Based on TPB and Hee (2000)’s highlight, in
our study, SN is defined as consumer’s perceived social pressure including the influence of others
who are close/important to him/her to perform or not to perform green product purchasing
activities.
Similar to the impact of ATT on INT, SN has been largely proved as the predictor of INT in
previous works on green consumption (cf. Paul, Modi, and Patel, 2015). The positive relationship
between SN and INT has been well found in green product consumption of emerging economies
(e.g. We and Chen 2014; Chen and Tung 2010). It means that the higher consumer’s perceived
social pressure is, in other word, the more consumer’s close/important others (e.g. friends, relatives,
colleagues) agree and/or accept to purchase green products, the more likely consumers engage in
buying green products. In Vietnam, a developing country with collectivistic culture, SN has been
also proved to be predictor of consumer purchase intention in the case of ethical consumption
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(Nguyen and Nguyen 2017). The previous research’s findings have led us to expect the positive
impact of SN on INT. Then, the following hypothesis is proposed:
H2. Subjective norm toward green purchase is positively related to intention to purchase green
products
2.3. Perceived behavioral control (PBC)
Perceived behavioral control is the added construct in TPB in comparison with TRA and is the
third predictor of behavior intention. It refers to “the perceived ease or difficulty of performing the
behavior” (Ajzen 1991) and reflects past experiences and anticipated obstacles (Paul, Modi, and
Patel 2016). In the present study, we also understand PBC as consumer’s perceived ease or
difficulty of perform green product purchase activities basing on his/her past experiences and
anticipated obstacles. The previous research findings support the positive relationship between
PBC and INT in the context of green consumption across cultures, including emerging countries in
Asia (e.g. We and Chen 2014; Chen and Tung 2010). This means that if consumer perceives greater
opportunity and fewer difficulty in purchasing green products, she/he is more likely to consider
purchasing green products. In light of the above review, we expect the similar positive relationship
between PBC and INT in our study. Thus, the related hypothesis is presented below:
H3. Perceived behavioral control toward green purchase is positively related to intention to
purchase green products
2.4. Extension of TPB: Influence of electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) and environmental
concern (ENV)
2.4.1. Electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM)
In marketing, the term word-of-mouth (WOM) refers person-to-person conversation between
consumers about a product (Chatterjee 2001). EWOM is considered as a new form of WOM which
becomes more and more popular with the worldwide spread of the Internet. EWOM is defined as
“any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product
or company which is made available to multitude of the people and institutes via the Internet”
(Hennig-Thurau and Walsh 2004).
Today, the rapid development of Internet technology allows online consumers to exert different
forms of EWOM. Among which, product reviews that consumers post on the Internet are one of
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the most important forms (Sen and Lerman 2007; Bambauer-Sachse and Mangold 2011; Jalivand
and Samiei 2012). Specially, with the development and popularity of social media, online product
reviews become more and more familiar and available to consumers, even in emerging countries.
For this reason, in this study, we focus on this form of EWOM.
Lots of studies have indicated the role of online product reviews (as an important form of EWOM
communication) in gathering information about product and in forming consumer’s purchase
intention in variety of context (e.g. Chen and Xie 2008; Chatterjee 2001). Jalilvand and Samiei
(2012) also found that, EWOM (online product reviews) positively exerts indirect effects on
purchase intention via the mediator role of TPB’s variables. It means that the valence (positive vs
negative) of the reviews significantly affected TPB’s variables. These suggestions led us to expect
that in the context of green consumption in emerging countries, EWOM (online product reviews)
has similar effects on INT. Thus, we formulated the following hypotheses.
H4. Electronic word-of-mouth is positively related to attitude toward green purchase
H5. Electronic word-of-mouth is positively related to subjective norm toward green purchase
H6. Electronic word-of-mouth is positively related to perceived behavioral control toward green
purchase
H7. Electronic word-of-mouth is positively related to intention to purchase green products
2.4.2. Environmental concern (ENV)
Environmental concern refers to an individual’s general orientation toward the environment and an
individual’s concern level to environmental issues (Kim and Choi 2005). From the late 1980s,
attending to numerous environmental disasters, the issue of environmental awareness was clearly
in evidence. Thus, this has led to a progressive increase in environmental awareness by consumers
(Kalafatis et al. 1999), which in turn influences consumer purchase behavior. In marketing
literature, the effect of environmental concern on consumer’s sustainable consumption behavior
has been investigated by a lot of studies across different contexts (cf. Kim and Choi 2005; Paul,
Modi, and Patel 2016). The indirect effect of consumer’s environmental concern on their intention
to purchase green products via TPB’s variables in the context of emerging countries was also
exploited and proved by some works (Chen and Tung 2014; Paul, Modi, and Patel 2016).
969
Moreover, the findings of these studies have pointed out the positive influence of ENV on each of
TPB’s variables (ATT, SN and PBC).
Besides, the direct impact of ENV on INT in the context of sustainable consumption was indicated
by variety of works (cf. Kim and Choi 2005). Specially, Paul, Modi, and Patel (2016), in their
empirical study in the context of India- an emerging economy, have developed the extended TPB
with aim to predict INT. In their work, both the direct and indirect effects via the mediator role of
TPB’s variables of ENV on INT have been proved. Expecting the similar results on the effect of
ENV in our study, we established the following hypotheses.
H8. Environmental concern is positively related to attitude toward green purchase
H9. Environmental concern is positively related to subjective norm toward green purchase
H10. Environmental concern is positively related to perceived behavioral control toward green
purchase
H11. Environmental concern is positively related to intention to purchase green products
In addition, we also expect the positive relationship between ENV and EWOM in our specific
context of research. In fact, there are lots of motives which may lead consumer to engage in EWOM
(cf. Wolny and Mueller 2013; Hennig-Thurau and Walsh 2004) including different forms of
consumer involvement such as self-involvement, product involvement, and other involvement (or
concern for others). It suggests that if consumer concerns for a specific subject or problem, she/he
could more engage in EWOM on this subject or problem. Then, we believe that the more consumer
concerns for environmental problems, the more likely she/he engage in online green product
reviews. Thus, the following hypothesis is proposed.
H12. Environmental concern is positively related to electronic word-of-mouth
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Figure 1. The research model
3. Methodology
3.1. Data collection
As discussed, the main focus of this study has been in the context of emerging countries which
are increasingly facing environmental problems and green consumption is becoming a growing
trend in the recent years. Therefore, Vietnam is selected as the field study site. An online survey
was conducted to collected data in Q1 2018 toward 552 respondents. The demographic data of the
respondents including, gender, age, occupation and place of residence are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Demographic profile of respondents
Variable Frequency Percentage
Gender Male 37
Female 63
Age
15-20 years old 1.4
21-34 years old 55.3
35-49 years old 42.2
50-65 years old 1.1
Occupation
Scholar/student 17.8
Functionaries/employees in state
enterprises/organizations 39.3
Managers/employees in private/foreign companies 30.1
Intention to
purchase green
product
(INT)
Attitude toward
green product
purchase
(ATT)
Subjective norm
(SN)
Perceived
behavior control
(PBC)
Environmental
concern
(ENV)
Electronic word-
of-mouth
(EWOM)
H1
H2
H3
H8
H9
H10
H11
H4 H5
H6
H7
H12
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Variable Frequency Percentage
Senior managers / business owners 3.8
Housewifes and others 9
Place of
residence
(provinces)
Hanoi 83.7
Hochiminh City 3.8
Others 12.5
3.2. Measurement instruments
In order to collect data, a questionnaire was created with items which were validated in prior
research are adapted to the research context. INT, ATT, SN and PBC scales (TPB scales) are
adapted from the research of Paul, Modi, and Patel (2016). These scales were initially adapted to
the green consumption context from the initial TPB scales developed by Ajzen (1991). Other scales
were adapted from prior works conducted in the context of green consumption: Paul, Modi, and
Patel (2016) for ENV scale and Bambauer-Sachse and Mangold (2011) for EWOM scale.
With aim to adapt measurement scales to the research context, we conducted a qualitative
research via two traditional focus group interviews and two online focus group interviews toward
42 consumers between 18-43 years old. Then, the measurement instrument was administered
thought two phases (a test using traditional self-administration technique to five respondents before
another using online self-administration technique to five other respondents) to check the
understanding of respondent and errors in the measurement instrument. Based on the respondents'
feedback, we made modifications to the questionnaire to improve its readability and ensure its
accuracy and appropriateness.
4. Results
4.1. Reliability and validity of measurement scales
In order verify the suitability of the measurement scales, we conducted two phases of analyses with
various techniques to assess its reliability and validity using SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 23.0.
Using SPSS 23.0 in the first phase, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on all items
in order to initially identify underlying factors and to assess the degree of uni-dimensionality of
scales before conducting EFA on items of each factor. EFA procedure permitted us to delete five
poor items and to refine the constructs. In the second phase, we firstly performed confirmatory
factor analysis (CFA) on measurement model of each construct before conducting a CFA on the
overall structural model. CFA model was estimated by the method of maximum likelihood. For
972
assessing the model fit to the data, we used various indicators: absolute fit indices (CMIN/DF, GFI,
AGFI, and RMSEA), incremental fit (CFI) and parsimony fit index (CAIC). With the results of the
CFA, we then assessed the reliability of measurement scales by calculating Jöreskog's rho
coefficient. This coefficient allows us to justify the reliability of the internal validity of the
measurement scale (Jöreskog 1971). Finally, we assessed the average variance extracted (AVE)
value of constructs in order to verify the convergent validity, and compared the AVE of each latent
variable with the squared correlation (2) shared with other latent variables for assessing the
discriminant validity of measurement scales (Fornell and Larker 1981).
Table 2 summarizes the number of items and the results of the reliability and convergent validity
tests. Factor loading of items () is all higher than 0.6. The indicator of internal consistency
reliability () of all instruments in our research is greater than 0.8 and the AVE of all constructs is
also higher than 0.5, which shows that items specified in the measurement models are internally
consistent and share a high proportion of variance in common. According to the suggestion of Hair
et al. (2010), we find that these results exhibit adequate convergent validity.
In addition, as showed in Table 3, the test of discriminant validity of the independent constructs is
positive: the explained variance is greater than the variance shared with other constructs in the
concept’s measurement model (except the shared variance between PBC and INT). It means that
these constructs can be grouped with other constructs to provide a more reliable measure of the
concept. Therefore, discriminant validity of measurement scales used was ensured.
Table 2. Reliability and convergent validity of measurement scales
Constructs Items ρ AVE
INT
Int1-I will consider buying green products in coming
times.
0.68
9
0.916 0.646
Int2-I will consider switching to green product brands 0.79
3
Int3-I plan to spend more on green product rather than
conventional product.
0.81
5
Int4-I expect to purchase green product in the future 0.77
6
Int5-I definitely want to purchase green products in near
future
0.86
1
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Constructs Items ρ AVE
Int6-I intend to buy green products regularly for a long
time)
0.87
3
ATT
Att1-I like the idea of purchasing green products 0.79
9
0.873 0.581
Att2-Purchasing green products is a good idea 0.82
3
Att3-I have a favourable attitude toward purchasing
green products
0.77
0
Att4-I think purchasing green products is a civilized
behavior
0.70
1
Att5-I think purchasing green products is a positive
trend)
0.70
9
SN
Sn1-Most people who are important to me think I should
purchase green products when going for purchasing
0.83
2
0.910
0.717
Sn2-Most people who are important to me would want
me to purchase green products when going for
purchasing
0.88
8
Sn3-People whose opinions I value would prefer that I
purchase green products
0.81
0
Sn4-Most people who are close to me would want me to
purchase green products when going for purchasing
0.85
5
PBC
Pbc1-I believe I have the ability to purchase green
products
0.71
4
0.853 0.593
Pbc2-If it were entirely up to me, I am confident that I
will purchase green products
0.75
9
Pbc3-I see myself as capable of purchasing green
products in future
0.86
7
Pbc4-I have resources, time and willingness to purchase
green products
0.73
2
EWOM
Ewom1-I often read other consumers’ online product
reviews to know what green products/brands make good
impressions on others
0.83
6 0.918 0.737
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Constructs Items ρ AVE
Ewom2-To make sure I buy the right green
product/brand, I often read other consumers’ online
product reviews
0.92
7
Ewom3-I often consult other consumers’ online product
reviews to help choose the right green product/brand
0.89
1
Ewom4-I frequently gather information from online
consumer product reviews before I buy a certain green
product/brand)
0.77
3
ENV
Env1-I am very concerned about the environment 0.73
4
0.914 0.641
Env2-I would be willing to reduce my consumption to
help protect the environment
0.68
7
Env3-Major political change is necessary to protect the
natural environment
0.87
6
Env4-Major social changes are necessary to protect the
natural environment
0.88
2
Env5-Anti-pollution laws should be enforced more
strongly
0.80
1
ENV
Env6-Specific guidance and instruction
for environmental protection activities are necessary to
protect the environment)
0.80
7
Table 3. Convergent validity test’s result
INT ATT SN PBC EWOM ENV
INT 0.646* 0.379 0.249 0.669 0.292 0.458
ATT 0.581* 0.226 0.370 0.138 0.433
SN 0.717* 0.276 0.137 0.185
PBC 0.593* 0.212 0.364
EWOM 0.737* 0.173
ENV 0.641* * AVE of constructs
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4.2. Hypotheses testing results
After assessing the reliability and validity of the measurement scales, a structural model was
estimated to examine the research hypotheses. The overall fit measures of the structural model
indicate an adequate fit of the model to the data (Chi-square=943.216; DF=359;
Chi=square/df=2.627; CFI =0.952, TLI=0.945, GFI= 0.890, RMSEA= 0.054). R2 for INT, ATT,
SN, PBC and EWOM are respectively 0.739, 0.468, 0.252, 0.44 and 0.176. The results indicate
that the proposed model provide considerable insights with regards to antecedents of INT. Table 4
presents a summary of the hypothesis tests.
Table 4: Results of testing the research hypotheses
Hypothesis Hypothesized path Standardized
estimate SE CR P Supported
H1 ATT INT 0.085 0.041 1.979 0.048 Yes
H2 SN INT 0.047 0.02 1.406 0.16 No
H3 PBC INT 0.546 0.046 9.991 *** Yes
H4 EWOM ATT 0.113 0.03 2.679 0.007 Yes
H5 EWOM SN 0.224 0.051 4.831 *** Yes
H6 EWOM PBC 0.246 0.035 5.523 *** Yes
H7 EWOM INT 0.155 0.024 4.37 *** Yes
H8 ENV ATT 0.629 0.058 12.02 *** Yes
H9 ENV SN 0.366 0.085 7.506 *** Yes
H10 ENV PBC 0.525 0.065 10.031 *** Yes
H11 ENV INT 0.211 0.056 3.943 *** Yes
H12 ENV EWOM 0.419 0.074 8.929 *** Yes
R2 INT =0.739; R2 ATT=0.468; R2 SN=0.252; R2 PBC=0.444; R2 EWOM=0.176
*** means 0.001 of significance
Four among five hypotheses on the direct influence of ATT, SN, PBC (three constructs of
TPB) and ENV, EWOM (two added constructs) are supported. Only the hypothesis on the influence
of SN is rejected. It means that the direct effect of SN on INT is, unexpectedly, not significant in
the present study while the direct influence of four other constructs (ATT, PBC, ENV, EWOM)
were found to be positive and significant with p<0.05. Among the four predictors, PBC is the most
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important (=0.546). We also found that the direct effect of two extended constructs of TPB, ENV
(=0.211) and EWOM (=0.155), on INT was greater than that of ATT (=0.085). A surprised
finding in this study is that the direct effect of ATT on INT was found to be very weak.
Our hypothesis test’s results also reveal that ENV exerts important indirect effects on INT
through TPB’s variables: ATT (=0.629), PBC (=0.525). In addition, it has an indirect influence
on INT via EWOM (=0.419). In regard to EWOM, like ENV, the present empirical study found
both its direct (=0.115) and indirect effects on INT. The indirect effect of ENV on INT is also
found through TPB’s variables: ATT (=0.113) and PBC (=0.246).
5. Discussion, implication and future research perspectives
5.1. Discussion and implications
The research findings indicate the utility of our extended TPB model in predicting consumer
intention to purchase green products in emerging countries such as Vietnam. 12 hypotheses were
developed and tested, of which 11 hypotheses received supported from the empirical data.
Except the non-significant effect of SN on INT, our research shares similar results on the
effect of TPB’s two other factors (ATT and PBC) on INT with the other research in the context of
green consumption, especially in emerging marketing (e.g. Paul, Modi, and Patel 2016; Wu and
Chen 2014; Chen and Tung 2010). In fact, it shows that ATT and PBC have a positive and direct
effect on consumer’s intention to purchase green products. However, in our study, the effect of
ATT on INT is much weaker than that of PBC. The finding is different from that of previous
empirical works. PBC is the strongest predictor of INT among all identified predictors (ATT, PBC,
ENV and EWOM). This suggests that consumer’s perception of ease to buy green products
significantly influences on his/her intention to purchase green product. It also means that in order
to facilitate consumer’s engagement on green purchase intention, green marketers need to reduce
consumer’s perceived difficulties in performing green product purchase activities. To do that,
according to some authors (e.g. Vermeir and Verbeke 2008) they must focus on communicating
availability of green products, mode of acquisitions, and variety of green products with a view to
enhance the perceived availability beliefs and consumers’ convenience by stressing its logistic
efficiency. Besides, in our point of view, green marketers also should enhance marketing
communication in the direction of highlighting consumer's independence and self-sufficiency in
making green product purchase decisions.
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With regards to the impact of SN on UI, different from our expectation, SN is a non-
significant predictor of INT in this study, unlike various previous works’ findings in the context of
emerging countries (e.g. Chen and Tung 2014; Wu and Cheng 2014). However, in reality, there is
not a consensus on the significant role of SN on INT even in similar contexts of research. In fact,
if some previous studies in emerging economies found the similar results on the effect of SN on
INT (e.g. Paul, Modi, and Patel 2016; Tarkianen and Sundqvist, 2005); the non-significant of SN
on INT within TPB theoretical framework was also recently pointed out by Nguyen and Nguyen
(2017)’s study in the specific context of ethical consumption in Vietnam. The reason of the non-
significant effect of SN in this context, according to the authors, is that “perhaps, for many young
consumers, the influence of their important people could be modest since they are getting to be
more individualistic and more independent in their purchase behavior”. Because young consumers
(under 34 years old) take account for more than half of our empirical work sample, we think this is
a reasonable reason to explain the non-significant effect of SN on INT in the present research.
The main contribution of the present study is that ENV was found to have a significant,
positive and direct on INT. Importantly, it also has a significant indirect influence on INT through
TPB’s variables. This indirect effect of ENV on INT is even stronger than the direct effect.
Moreover, this variable also exerts an important and positive impact on EWOM which also has
both significant direct and indirect impacts on INT as discussed in the paragraph below. The
findings related to the role of ENV suggest that green marketer should well identify and target
consumers who are highly concerned about environmental problems. This suggestion shares
similarities compared to that in Paul, Modi, and Patel (2016)’s empirical work in the context of
India.
In addition, the significant and both direct and indirect effect of EWOM on INT forms
another contribution of our study. Firstly, the significant positive and direct impact of EWOM on
INT was found although its impact is weaker than that of ENV. It means that when a consumer
read positive online green product reviews, she/he tends to engage more in buying green products.
Secondly, EWOM also has a significant positive indirect effect on INT via TPB’s variables,
especially PBC and ATT. In other word, favorable online reviews on green product contribute to
enhance her/his perceived behavior control and attitude toward purchasing green products, through
which his/her intention to buy green products increases. These findings suggest green marketers to
focus on Internet marketing, especially social media marketing activities which promote
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interactions among consumers (e.g. consumers’ sharing of experiences, online product reviews)
via brand community, social communities and consumer generated content programs (Tuten and
Solomon 2013). Nevertheless, in order to form favorable EWOM activities for green brands,
consumers’ positive experiences need to be created and consumers should be encouraged to share
these experiences. Consumer-generated content programs could be appropriated for enhancing
viral marketing activities in this case.
5.2. Future research directions
Our research has some limitations that must be debated, and which may lead to future
research directions. Firstly, with regard to the sample, the respondents in the empirical research
mainly come from Hanoi. Future works should use a more representative sample by collecting data
from consumers located in other big cities in Vietnam such as Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang and
Haiphong where green product market is also very potential. Secondly, this study considers green
products in general. Because there are a large variety of green product categories, it may be
necessary and more interesting for future works to consider a (or some) specific green product
categorie(s). Their findings could interestingly be differents. Finally, a cross-culture study which
could be conducted between Vietnam and other emerging countries in Asia may be interesting in
future research. By doing so, they could compare the green purchase intention among consumers
from countries with different culture and/or social background.
979
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Markets and Marketing Activity as
Indicators for Sustainable Policy
and Practice – Perspectives from
Vietnam
Cliff Shultz, Loyola University Chicago, USA
Thi Tuyet Mai Nguyen, National Economic University, Vietnam
Mark Peterson, University of Wyoming, USA
Abstract
Markets and marketing activity are reflective of larger interests and concerns of a society;
perhaps even an entire country and region (e.g., Peterson 2013; Sredl, Shultz and Brecic 2017).
Building on more than two decades of macromarketing research projects in Vietnam (e.g., Shultz
2012; Nguyen, Rahtz, Shultz 2014), this working study explores the extent to which that
plausible assumption might be true, and in what contexts, while simultaneously exploring the
impact of several policies and business practices on marketing and consumer behavior on the
consumers, marketers and related actors in a single market. That is, the fish market in Dong Hoi,
Vietnam.
Readers might reasonably wonder why the Dong Hoi fish market is a good venue for such
a study. Located on Vietnam’s central-north coast, Dong Hoi is the capital of Quang Binh
Province. It has a relatively small population (160,000 residents); but its fish market is literally
and figuratively in the mainstream of several local, national and global events and trends; all of
which have major repercussions for business, policy, markets, marketing and consumers, from
Dong Hoi to downtown Leipzig.
983
The most obvious acute-events and ongoing-concerns to Vietnam watchers are a massive
fish-kill, and the escalating tensions in the East Sea (or South China Sea, depending upon one’s
sensitivities), respectively. The former was caused by pollution from the Formosa Ha Tinh Steel
Corp -- a massive operation by any measure -- built by Taiwanese investors in Vietnam’s Ha
Tinh Province, which is also on the coast, north of Quang Binh. Hailed as a major FDI success,
the plant leaked poisonous chemicals killing millions of fish, by many accounts practically
sterilizing the sea along a hundred-kilometer stretch of coast, including Quang Binh and Dong
Hoi (e.g., Tiezzi 2016).
The latter stems from centuries-long antipathies toward China, including disputes over
territorial claims in the East / South China Sea. Agitation is growing in response to operations
conducted by naval warships of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and PRC’s militarization
of formerly unpopulated atolls and artificial islands in waters generally recognized as sovereign
to Vietnam rather than PRC, although the Philippines and other countries make claims as well;
equally important, this sea is one of the world’s largest shipping lanes, through which goods
consumed the world over must pass (e.g., Connor 2018).
Such acute and chronic conditions have profoundly affected the Dong Hoi fish market and
a stakeholder-chain that stretches to adjacent provinces, Hanoi, Beijing, Taipei, ASEAN, the US,
APEC and Europe. Topics of particular interest that have emerged from our initial field research
in Dong Hoi include food and water access and safety; workers’ roles/limits/opportunities;
market demands and policy pressures; CSR and sustainable practices; citizen-advocacy and social
media; technological influences; transparency, accountability, restitution and justice; cooperation
and conflict resolution; and inevitably, individual QOL and societal well-being -- not only in
Dong Hoi and Vietnam more broadly, but around the world. The authors will share some
preliminary observations and findings from field research in the Dong Hoi fish market and
relevant sources to make key points regarding these topics vis-à-vis local marketing systems and
their dynamic relationships with larger and more complex systems.
984
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of Macromarketing, 34 (1), 28-44.
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Macromarketing, 32 (1), 7-17.
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on Pre- and Post- War Developments in Bosnia, with Implications for Sustainable Peace
and Prosperity,” Journal of Macromarketing, 37 (3), 300-316.
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Outcomes, Challenges, and Implications,” Journal of Macromarketing, 37 (4), 409-425.
985
Factors Influencing Green Apparel
Purchase Intention: A Study of
Young Consumers in Vietnam
Thi Tuyet Mai Nguyen 105 106, National Economic University, Vietnam
Pham Ngoc Khanh Huyen, National Economic University, Vietnam
Do Viet My, National Economic University, Vietnam
Bui Thuy Dung, National Economic University, Vietnam
Bui Bich Hang, National Economic University, Vietnam
Leu Thu Huong, National Economic University, Vietnam
Abstract
This study aims to investigate some antecedents of green apparel purchase intention among
young consumers in Vietnam, an Asian emerging economy. A consumer survey was conducted
and structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed model and hypotheses. The findings
show that attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control toward green apparel
purchase are positively related to purchase intention. In addition, materialism is found to be a
significant predictor of attitude toward buying green apparel products. Based on the findings, we
draw some implications for managers and policy makers.
105 Corresponding author 106 [email protected]
986
Keywords: Green apparel purchase intention; materialism; Theory of Planned Behavior; young
consumers, emerging country.
Acknowledgement: We would like to thank the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and
Technology Development (NAFOSTED) for financially supporting the 1st author to attend the
43rd Macromarketing conference.
1. Introduction
Nowadays, people including those from emerging countries are more informed about
environment and this leads to their increasing concerns for environmental issues such as climate
change, global warming and disastrous pollution. In marketing field, the topic related to
environmental, sustainable and green consumption behaviors has attracted considerable research
attention from both scholars and practitioners (Abdulrazak and Quoquab 2018; Narula and Desore
2016). However, the topic has received less attention in the context of emerging countries,
specifically in Asian ones (Joshi and Rahman 2016). In addition, the inconsistent research findings
pertaining to factors influencing green purchase behavior in this context calls for further
investigation (Nguyen, Lobo, and Greenland 2017).
The apparel industry is considered to have negative effects on the environment through all
stages from production to product consumption (Hill and Lee 2012). Although the green apparel
products have captured increasing consumer interest and there has been a trend of consuming these
products, still a modest number of studies have examined consumer purchase behavior toward
green apparel products (Ko and Jin 2017). In addition, green consumption in general and green
apparel product consumption in particular may vary for different countries due to differences in
terms of development level and culture (Ko and Jin 2017). Therefore, it is meaningful to examine
the consumption behavior toward green apparel products in the context of Vietnam, where similar
to many other developing countries giving priority to economic development it faces challenges of
environmental degradation.
In the literature, many theories have been used to study consumer behaviors, of which the
Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been extensively employed to explain consumer purchase
intention and behavior in various domains. With regard to the field of green purchase in general
and green apparel purchase in particular, the TPB has been employed and considered as a robust
987
model in explaining the behavior in many previous studies (e.g., Chan 2001; Cowan and Kinley
2014; Ko and Jin 2017; ). In this study, we use the extended TPB as a theoretical framework to
examine the antecedents of intention to buy green apparel products among young Vietnamese
consumers. Specifically, we examine the impact of the three antecedents from the TPB (i.e.,
attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control toward green apparel purchase) on
purchase intention (PI). Although values have been considered to have a significant impact on
environmental attitudes and behaviors, there is still a little research on the relationship between
specific values and environmental behaviors, especially in the context other than Western societies
(Zibenberg 2018). In addition, it is noted that the relationships between values and green purchase
behavior is still unclear (Nguyen, Lobo, and Greenland 2017). In this study, we proposed a
conceptual framework integrating the TPB model with an important consumer value, materialism.
This construct has been significantly investigated as a predictor of consumer behaviors (e.g.,
Nguyen and Tambyah 2011; Segev, Shoham, and Gavish 2015).
Past research has examined the role of materialism in explaining consumer behaviors, including
green purchase. The negative side of materialism has often been found when it comes to
environmentally friendly behaviors. However, the literature also provides some inconsistent and
mixed findings (e.g., Perera and Klein 2011; Polonsky, Kilbourne, and Vocino 2014; Segev,
Shoham, and Gavish 2015). This calls for further research investigation on the relationship between
materialistic values and green purchase. This study aims to investigate factors driving young
Vietnamese consumers’ purchase intention toward green apparel products with emphasis on the
role of materialistic value. The research results contribute to enhancing our knowledge of this
interesting and important purchase behavior in an Asian emerging country where, to our best
understanding, only little research effort has been given to explore this topic. In this paper,
following the introduction section, we first present a theoretical background and conceptual
framework. We then discuss the research methodology, followed by the research results. Finally,
we discuss the findings and provide implications and avenues for future studies.
2. Theoretical background and conceptual framework
2.1 Young consumers and green apparel purchase
988
Previous studies have suggested that young consumers are important since they are more
concerned and responsible with regard to the environment and environmental protection issues (cf.
Lee 2011). They have also been considered as the driving force that brings about the change and
they are more receptive to new ideas such as green or environmentally friendly consumption (cf.,
Joshi and Rahman 2016). In Vietnam, as many other developing countries, green consumption and
green products are still relatively new and emerging concepts. Young Vietnamese consumers are
expected to be the important group who are more knowledgeable about sustainable and responsible
consumption, and thus are more likely to be pioneers in green purchase behaviors. Young people
generally are more concerned with apparel products than the older ones (Ogle et al. 2014; Vieira
2009) and they are considered a significant market segment for apparel products (Valaei and
Nikhashemi 2017). They are more influenced by fashion and more likely to engage in trying new
products (Dickson et al. 2004). In our study, the group of young consumers is selected to serve our
research purpose.
The topic pertaining to green consumption has been much examined in the context of developed
countries, in the areas of environmental sociology and psychology, and recently, it has attracted
significant research attention from marketing scholars (e.g., Kotler 2011; Polonsky, Kilbourne, and
Vocino 2014). In the literature, the concept of green consumption has been used with different
terms such as ecologically conscious, environmentally responsible, environmentally friendly,
socially responsible and pro-environmental consumption. Generally, green products refer to any
products that are environmentally friendly or have minimum impact on environment. Specifically,
green products are defined as “those that have less of an impact on the environment, are less
detrimental to human health, are formed or part-formed from recycled components, are
manufactured in a more energy-conservative way, or are supplied to the market with less packaging
(Chen and Chang 2013; p. 108). In this study, we focus on green apparel products that are highly
salient product category for young people, and examining the several antecedents driving the
intention to buy green apparel products among young consumers in Vietnam, an emerging country
in Asia.
2.2 Factors influencing purchase intention toward green apparel products
Antecedents from TPB model
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The TPB (Ajzen 1991) is a well-researched model that has been proved successful in predicting
and explaining behaviors across a variety of domains, including explaining individuals’ green
purchase behaviors. Previous studies on green apparel consumption have employed and found the
TPB as an appropriate theoretical framework for examining this purchase behavior (e.g., Cowan
and Kinley 2014; Ko and Jin 2017).
Under the TPB, behavioral intention construct is at the core of the model that plays the role as
a powerful predictor of the behavior (Ajzen 2011). In this study, we focus on explaining the
consumers’ purchase intention (PI), rather than the behavior. The TPB indicate three important
antecedents of behavioral intention, including attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms, and
the perceived behavioral control (Ajzen 1991). On the basis of TPB, in this study, attitude (ATT)
refers to the consumer’s positive or negative evaluation of buying green apparel products;
subjective norm (SN) can be defined as the perceived social pressure that encourages one to engage
in purchase of green apparel products; and finally, perceived behavioral control (PBC) refers to the
difficulty or ease perceived by an individual to perform the purchase of green apparel products.
Previous studies have provided empirical evidence for supporting the impact of the antecedents
from the TPB on purchase intention with regard to environmentally friendly products in general
and green apparel products particularly (e.g., Alwitt and Pitts 1996; Cowan and Kinley 2014;
Diamantopoulos et al. 2003; Ko and Jin, 2017; Summers et al. 2006). However, the impact
magnitudes of the three antecedents from the TPB has been inconsistent and dependent on the
specific research context. In this study, we re-test the relationships between three important factors
of the TPB and purchase intention toward green apparel products in the context of Vietnam, an
emerging country in Asia. We expect to see the similar findings pertaining to the significantly
positive impact of these antecedents on PI. Therefore, the following hypotheses are presented.
H1: The consumer attitude toward green apparel purchase is positively related to green apparel
purchase intention for young urban Vietnamese consumers.
H2: The consumer subjective norm toward green apparel purchase is positively related to green
apparel purchase intention for young urban Vietnamese consumers.
H3: The consumer perceived behavioral control toward green apparel purchase is positively
related to green apparel purchase intention for young urban Vietnamese consumers.
990
Materialism and green apparel purchase intention
In consumer research, previous studies have sought to extend the TPB model by adding the
new variables with the purpose of understanding better the intention and behavior in the specific
research context (Joshi and Rahman 2016; Nguyen and Nguyen 2017). Materialism is an important
consumer value, the level of that is increasing in the context of developing countries (cf. Nguyen
and Tambyah 2011; Polonsky, Kilbourne, and Vocino 2014). In the field of green consumption,
materialism has been considered as an important and promising factor influencing the behavior.
Therefore, this construct is integrated into our research model.
In the literature, materialism has been viewed as a personality trait (e.g., Belk 1985), and as a
consumer value (e.g., Richins and Dawson 1992). According to Richins and Dawson (1992, 308),
materialism is defined as a “set of centrally held beliefs about the importance of possessions in
one’s life”. They identified three important belief domains of materialism, including 1) Possession-
defined success: the extent to which one uses possessions as indicators of success and achievement
in life; 2) Centrality of acquisition: the extent to which one places possession acquisition at the
center of one’s life; and 3) Acquisitions in pursuit of happiness: the belief that possessions are
essential to satisfaction and well-being in life. In our study, materialism is viewed as a consumer
value.
Values can have direct or indirect impact on consumers’ attitudes and behaviors (Gregorya,
Munch, and Peterson 2002). Past research’s empirical findings pertaining to the relationship
between materialistic values and green purchase behavior are unclear and inconsistent. In literature,
materialism has long been considered as having a negative impact on environmentally friendly
attitudes and behaviors in the context of both developed and developing economies (e.g., Kilbourne
and Pickett 2008; Lu and Lu 2010; Muncy and Eastman 1998; cf. Segev, Shoham, and Gavish 2015
as well). The main reason probably is that materialism has been considered as a negative value,
which would result in unethical behaviors (Muncy and Eastman 1998). Materialistic values are also
considered as opposite to the pro-social value of universalism (Segev, Shoham, and Gavish 2015)
and closely related to self-interested values (Grouzet et al. 2005). Therefore, consumers with high
materialistic values may pursue their own achievements without concerning for or even at the
991
expense of the common good of the environment (Richins and Dawson 1992; Segev, Shoham, and
Gavish 2015).
On the other hand, there has also been empirical evidence to show that materialism is not
necessary to be antithetical to pro-environment consumption (Andreou 2010; Ogle et al. 2014).
Environmentally friendly consumption may be positively associated with high social status and
convey a “costly signal”. The findings from a recent study by Strizhakova and Coulter (2013)
suggest that materialism has a strongly positive effect on environmentally friendly tendencies
including willingness to pay extra for environmentally friendly products among people with the
global cultural identity, in the context of both emerging and developed markets.
It has been suggested that depending on a specific context, a particular component of
materialism may be more dominant and it is associated with particular antecedents and
consequences (Segev, Shoham, and Gavish 2015). When examining the impact of materialism’s
components on environmental behaviors, only ‘success’ component of materialism was found to
be a significant predictor of consumer environment concerns (Polonsky, Kilbourne, and Vocino
2014). With regard to green apparel purchase, the green apparel products are considered as
expressive ones. Consumers often buy clothing for its symbolic value that reflects their status
(Solomon 1983). It is also noted that Asians are extremely conspicuous consumers (cf. Prendergast
and Wong 2003). In the context of a transitional economy of Vietnam, many young urban
consumers tend to buy new and fashionable items, and use modern status symbols including apparel
products for the sake of status (Nguyen, Smith, and Cao 2009). Therefore, among three components
of materialism, the status component – SUC- may be more apparent and strongly associated with
green apparel purchase since it reflects on the self and one’s achievements. Those consumers
holding high level of success value may demonstrate greater concern for self-status. They may
view products such as clothing as signs of success (Ogle et al. 2014). In our study, we include
success component (SUC) in our research model as a proposed predictor of the ATT and PI with
regard to green apparel products. It is expected that for the highly materialistic young consumers
(i.e. holding high level of SUC) green apparel products may be viewed with the image of something
new, trendy, modern, and unique (e.g., unique in terms of organic and natural fabrics and no
synthetic dyes), and in general they cost more. Therefore, materialistic young consumers may show
more favorable attitude toward green apparel purchase and are more likely to consider buying green
apparels since these products can help them publically express the self as being trendy,
992
knowledgeable and successful in life, and improve their prestige of being caring and altruistic.
Based on the above discussion, the following hypotheses are presented.
H4a: Materialism (SUC) is positively related to the consumer attitude toward green apparel
purchase for young urban Vietnamese consumers.
H4b: Materialism (SUC) is positively related to green apparel purchase intention for young
urban Vietnamese consumers.
In sum, this study focuses on examining the relationships between the antecedents (i.e., three
antecedents from the TPB model and especially materialistic value/SUC) and PI toward green
apparel products. The proposed conceptual framework is presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Conceptual framework
Antecedents of green apparel purchase intention among young urban Vietnamese
consumers
+
Purchase
Intention
Attitude
Subjective
norm
Perceived
behavioral control
Materialism
(SUC)
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3. Research Methodology
3.1 Measures and questionnaire development
In this study, we adapted the established scales in the literature. Specifically, the scales
measuring the three antecedents from the TPB (i.e. ATT, SN, and PBC) and PI were adapted and
modified from Armitage and Conner (1999) and Armitage et al. (1999). Specifically, PI, ATT and
SN each was measured by three items; PBC was measured by 7 items including both internal and
external PBC. The six-item scale measuring SUC was adapted from Richins and Dawson (1992).
This scale has been widely used in the literature, including studies in the context of Vietnam (e.g.,
Nguyen and Tambyah 2011). All the scale items are scored on a 7-point Likert-type format ranging
from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7).
In our study, the questionnaire includes all the scale items measuring five constructs in the
research model. In addition, some demographic questions such as gender, age, education level,
occupation and income were included at the end of the questionnaire. The items originally in
English were first translated into Vietnamese by a bilingual student and then were translated back
into English by another one, following the back-and-forth translation process (cf. Nguyen and
Tambyah 2011). The translated version and the original one in English were carefully checked by
an English-fluent scholar. We used a small sample of young consumers to test the questionnaire.
On the basis of the comments, necessary changes regarding the content understanding and the
format were made to the questionnaire.
3.2 Sample and data collection
Our survey was conducted in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. Hanoi, one of the two most
populous cities in Vietnam, similar to many other major cities in Southeast Asian countries, is
facing typical environmental problems such as air and water pollution, and hard waste management
issues (Parker et al. 2014). Hanoi has been selected as a research site in many consumer studies in
the context of Vietnam (e.g., Nguyen and Smith 2012; Nguyen, Smith, and Cao 2009; Nguyen and
Nguyen 2017). In this study, selection of Hanoi for data collection can ensure the necessary
conditions for the occurrence of green consumption in general and green apparel consumption in
particular (e.g., significant consumers with higher level of environmental knowledge, higher living
standards and the availability of green products in the market).
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In this study, we used a self-administered questionnaire and we delivered a total of 350
questionnaires to a sample of young consumers in Hanoi, of which 284 valid questionnaires could
be used for final analysis. Data was collected mainly by using mall-intercept method. A trained
research team visited shopping malls and shops along the streets selling apparel products, and
respondents were intercepted for completing the questionnaire. In addition, the data was collected
from several universities in Hanoi since students are considered an important group among young
consumers. The definition of green apparel products was provided from beginning to ensure the
common understanding among respondents. In our sample, there were slightly more females
(56.34%) than males (43.66%). The sample covered the range of ages from 18 to 30 with the age
average of 22.28. More than 42% of the respondents held a high level of education (holding
bachelor degree or above), and 78.52% earned an average monthly household income of more than
USD 400. Table 1 presents demographic profile of our respondents.
Table 1: Demographic profile of respondents (n = 284)
Characteristics Frequency % of Total
Gender Male 124 43.66
Female 160 56.34
Age group (years) ≤ 24 (18-24) 213 75.0
> 24 (25-30) 71 35.0
Level of education ≥ bachelor degree 121 42.6
< bachelor degree 163 57.4
Monthly personal
income
< VND 4.5mil (≈ US$200) 182 64.08
≥ VND 4.5mil 102 35.92
Monthly household
income
< VND 9mil (≈ US$400) 61 21.48
≥ VND 9mil 223 78.52
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4. Research findings
Since the scales used in our study are established in the literature, we assessed the reliability
and validity of the scales through performing Cronbach’s alpha and confirmatory factor analysis
(CFA). After that, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to test the proposed model
and hypotheses.
4.1 Scale assessment
CFA
We conducted CFA for each scale measuring the constructs in our model. The results showed
good fit. After that we conducted the full measurement model including all items measuring the
constructs in our model, and five latent variables. Two items measuring SUC and three items
measuring PBC were dropped due to several values of standardized residual covariances associated
with it were larger than 2.58 (Hair et al. 1998). The results of CFA demonstrated a good level of
fit: χ2 (103) = 224.74; CMIN/df = 2.18, p < .01; GFI = .91; CFI = .97; TLI = .96; and RMSEA =
.06. All t-tests of the observed variables were significant at the .001 level.
Cronbach’s alpha
The Cronbach’s alpha was calculated for each scale, ranging from .86 (for SUC) to .93 (for
ATT). These results demonstrated a good level of reliability with coefficient alphas exceeding the
cut-off value of .70 (Hair et al. 1998).
4.2 The structural equation model and hypothesis testing
Correlations among the constructs
Before testing the proposed hypotheses, we checked correlations among the constructs used in
this study. Table 2 shows no serious multicollinearity problem and in general the correlation
coefficients are significant and in the direction as expected, except the correlation between SUC
and PI toward green apparel products (i.e. non-significant and in opposite direction).
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Table 2: Correlation matrix and descriptive statistics
Mea
n S.D. 1 2 3 4 5
1. ATT 5.05 1.44 1
2. SN 4.21 1.44
.622*
*
1
3. PBC 4.58 1.38
.527*
*
.603*
*
1
4. SUC 4.39 1.48 .140 * -.043 -.051 1
5. PI 4.07 1.65
.558*
*
.723*
*
.604*
*
-.093 1
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).
Structural path analysis
The results of the structural equation analysis indicated that the model achieved a good level of
fit: χ2 (104) = 289.93; CMIN/df = 2.78, p < .01; GFI = .90; CFI = .95; TLI = .93; and RMSEA =
.08. The R2 for PI was .61. These showed evidence that the model provided considerable insights
with regard to antecedents of PI toward buying green apparel products. Five hypotheses were tested
and four of five hypothesized paths were statistically significant and in the predicted direction.
The results showed that all the hypothesized paths pertaining to the effects of three determinants
from the TPB model on intention to purchase green apparel products were positively significant as
expectation. Specifically, ATT was a significant predictor of PI (β1 = .13; t-value = 2.69), lending
support to H1. SN was found to have a positive effect on PI (γ1 = .59; t-value = 8.12), thus H2
received support from the data. In addition, the findings also provided support for H3 confirming
that PBC was positively related to PI (γ2 =.25; t-value = 3.86).
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With regard to the effect of materialistic value, H4a pertaining to the positive relationship
between SUC and ATT toward green apparel purchase was supported (γ3 = .14, t-value = 2.55).
However, unlike our expectation, ATT was found to be insignificantly related to PI and the
relationship was in opposite direction to our prediction (γ4 = -.09, t-value = -1.88). Therefore, H4b
failed to receive support from the data. The results of hypothesis testing are summarized in Table
3.
Table 3: Estimates of structural equation coefficients
Hypotheses Structural path Standardized estimate P value
H1 ATT - PI .13 < .01 (s)
H2 SN - PI .59 < .01 (s)
H3 PBC - PI .25 < .01 (s)
H4a SUC – ATT .14 < .01 (s)
H4b SUC - PI -.09 > .05 (ns)
s: the hypothesis is supported ns: the hypothesis is not supported
5. Discussion
5.1 Discussion on the findings
The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of some antecedents on intention to buy
green apparel products among young Vietnamese consumers. We proposed and tested an extended
TPB model with the addition of the success component of materialism. Five hypotheses were tested
and four of them received support from the data. Specifically, the findings confirm that all three
antecedents from the TPB model are positive contributors to green apparel purchase intention. This
is consistent with the findings from previous studies in the area of green apparel consumption (e.g.,
Cowan and Kinley 2014). Among direct paths to PI toward green apparel products, the path from
SN to PI was the most salient and, thus SN was found to be the most influential predictor of PI.
This is similar to the findings from Ko and Jin (2017) and Cowan and Kinley (2014) for both groups
998
of American and Chinese consumers with regard to green apparel purchase. In our study, ATT,
although was proved to be a significant and positive predictor of PI, showed less impact on PI
compared with SN and PBC. This is in line with suggestion from previous studies that attitude
alone is not always the best predictor of consumers’ green purchase behavior (Joshi and Rahman
2016).
This study also examined both the direct and indirect effect of SUC on green apparel purchase
intention among young urban Vietnamese consumers. As our expectation, the findings provided
empirical evidence for supporting the significantly positive impact of SUC on ATT toward green
apparel purchase. However, contrary to our expectation, the direct impact of SUC on PI failed to
receive support from the data. It means that, for specific category of green apparel products in the
context of Vietnam, the young materialists with high level of success value, while generally have
a positive attitude toward purchase, may not consider to buy green apparel products. This suggests
that perhaps currently the green apparel products available in the market may be associated with
some disadvantages such as few choices, less attractive designs and styles, and high price. These
products may not be seen as status symbols, and even a commitment to buying green apparel
products may represent some opposite values (e.g., frugality and less success) and it may get
criticism from others (e.g., Perera and Klein 2011). For better understanding, this issue should be
further investigated in the future studies.
From a theoretical perspective, this study examines an important issue pertaining to the factors
driving an important consumption behavior, green apparel purchase intention. The TPB model was
extended by integrating an important and debatable relationship between materialism (i.e. SUC)
and green apparel consumption (i.e. green purchase intention). This contributes to enhancing our
knowledge about green apparel purchase and its antecedents in the context of Vietnam, an emerging
economy in Southeast Asia.
5.2 Implications and future research directions
Implications
The findings from this study provide several managerial implications. Managers should
develop relevant and effective marketing strategies in order to raise the level of awareness about
999
green apparels and their benefits, and attract more consumers, especially the young group to engage
in purchasing green apparel products. Since SN was found to have the strongest impact on PI in
this study, firms may need to design effective communication campaigns to enhance knowledge
about green apparel products and how green apparel purchase and consumption can bring good
things to consumers and the whole society. In the context of a collectivistic culture, when young
consumers perceive social influence from their family, friends, colleagues and surroundings
favorable toward green apparel products, they are more likely to show strong intention to buy these
expressive items.. Using celebrities, the idols of young consumers in the firm’s communication
campaigns may have positive impact on consumers’ attitude and intention to buy green apparel
products.
In this study, SUC is found to be a significant predictor of ATT, therefore, firms should design
communication messages focusing on building the image of green apparel products as means to
convey status symbols for the consumers who buy and use these products. Since young consumers
are conscious about latest design and fashion, it is important that the firms invest in technology and
other resources to introduce variety of apparel products that are not only green but also trendy,
fashionable, and sophisticated in designs, styles and fabrics. Famous designers should be employed
to create premium product lines and add values to the image of the green apparels. The findings of
this study also confirmed the significant impact of perceived behavioral control on green apparel
purchase intention for young consumers. Managers should develop strategies to make green apparel
products more available and affordable in the market, especially for young group of consumers.
The findings of this study also provide some implications for policy makers with regard to
developing relevant policies to facilitate firms to commit to offering green apparel products to the
market and encourage consumers to engage in buying these products. Policy makers can support
businesses producing green apparel products by issuing relevant policies pertaining to tax, land
use, capital, technology, and trade promotion so that more green apparel products can be produced
and consumers can access these products easier. In addition, effective and creative communication
programs and activities may need to develop with the purpose of educating and guiding consumers,
especially the young ones to be smart and responsible in purchase and consumption. For example,
organizing discussion forums pertaining to ‘youth and green apparel products’, green-fashion
week, eco-fashion campaigns, and green fashion competition, etc. would be useful to capture
attention from young consumers and the whole society toward green apparel products. Green
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apparel purchase and consumption can become an emerging trend in emerging economies like
Vietnam when firms can see production of green apparels as opportunities to gain competitive
advantages and consumers, first young ones, perceive green apparel products associated with the
image such as trendy and global fashion, unique design, natural and organic fabrics, and elite and
premium symbols.
Future research directions
The future studies can consider several avenues to improve the limitations of this study. First,
future research may want to use a larger and more representative sample drawn from not only Hanoi
but also from other big cities such as Danang and Ho Chi Minh City. Second, future studies may
want to include also the construct of purchase behavior and integrate some mediators and/or
moderators into the model to explain better the purchase intention and the buying behavior toward
green apparel products. It would also be interesting to examine the purchase behavior toward local
vs. foreign green apparel products since motivations to purchase these types of products may be
different among consumers. In addition, future research may conduct cross-cultural study between
Vietnam and some other country that is different in terms of culture and level of economic
development. By doing so, it can significantly enhance our understanding of the important
consumption behaviors, environmentally friendly purchase in general and green apparel purchase
in particular.
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Marketing &
Development III
Track Chair: Andes Barrios
1006
The Integrative Justice Model and
Strategic Value Co-Creation: The
case of Jesuit Worldwide Learning
(JWL) and Higher Education at
the Margins
Tina M. Facca-Miess, John Carroll University, USA
Nicholas J.C. Santos, Marquette University, USA
In light of increased corporate engagement in low-income markets, characterized as the base-of-
the-pyramid market, Santos and Laczniak (2009b) develop a normative ethical framework labeled
as the integrative justice model (IJM). The IJM postulates five inter-related components that are
essential for treating poor consumers in a fair and just manner. These five elements are: 1)
authentic engagement without exploitative intent; (2) co-creation of value; (3) investment in
future consumption; (4) genuine interest representation of stakeholders; and (5) focus on long-
term profit management.The elements are arrived at through an examination of thirteen
frameworks in moral philosophy, marketing theory, management frameworks as well as religious
doctrine. It is beyond the scope of this paper to get into the derivation of the IJM and the
normative theory building process it followed. These can be found in Santos & Laczniak (2009a,
b; 2012). It is also beyond the scope of this paper to examine the application of the IJM to various
domains. Interested readers can read Laczniak & Santos (2011) for an application to
Macromarketing; Santos, Laczniak & Facca-Miess (2015) for an application to transformative
justice and Santos (2013) for an application to social entrepreneurship.
1007
In this paper, we will analyze a Jesuit initiative known as Jesuit Worldwide Learning:
Higher Education at the Margins (JWL) through the lens of the integrative justice model with a
special focus on strategic value creation. While almost all the key elements of the IJM are
applicable to JWL, we focus on value creation on account of the track that the paper is being
submitted to. We will, however, draw some connections with the other elements of the IJM. We
begin with a brief history and background into JWL. We then focus on co-creation giving
examples of how JWL has used strategic value co-creation. Finally, we list some limitations and
also possibilities for future research.
JWL is a “collaborative global partnership comprised of organizations, institutions,
companies, and above all, people, to provide tertiary education to those who would otherwise not
have access to higher learning opportunities” (www.jwl.org). JWL began in 2010 as a three year
pilot project known as “Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins (JC:HEM)” with a
liberal arts diploma program offered in three refugee camps (Kakuma in Kenya, Dzaleka in
Malawi, and Aleppo in Syria). In 2011, it began also offering Community Service Learning
Tracks. These programs were co-created by refugees, host community members, Jesuit Refugee
Services, faculty, and universities. In September 2016, JC:HEM changed its name to Jesuit
Worldwide Learning and moved its global headquarters from the U.S. to Geneva, Switzerland. As
of date, JWL has community learning centers in: Herat & Bamyan in Afghanistan; Guereda &
Goz Beida in Chad; Amman in Jordan; Khanke, Erbil & Domiz in northern Iraq; Kakuma in
Kenya; Dzaleka in Malawi; Taunggyi in Myanmar; Brooklyn in U.S.A.; Mannar, Vavuniya, &
Hatton in Sri Lanka; and Madurai in India (www.jwl.org). Since 2010, over 5,000 forcibly
displaced and marginalized people have studied in JWL’s programs, of whom about 50% are
women.
JWL is an organization that is built on four cornerstones: global thinking, strategic
partnerships, Ignatian experience, and highest quality for affordable cost. Through these
cornerstones it is able to be sustainable, scalable, and transferable. JWL uses a student-centered,
blended model of online learning. Students come together to form a cohort to study together and
are supported and accompanied by an onsite tutor or coordinator of the learning community.
These students can be in a refugee camp, remote village or dispersed over a big city. Further,
students are formed into virtual classroom communities of about 15-20 students from different
countries and cultures so as to form a global virtual community. In additional to the blended
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online learning, JWL’s courses are flexible and adaptable, incorporate both the global and local
dimensions and are community focused.
Value-creation in the IJM follows the emergent thinking in the field of marketing, that
value co-creation should not take place only at the point of exchange but rather at every point of
interaction between the firm and the consumer. In the IJM there is a special focus placed on the
low-income consumer. JWL uses multiple stakeholders for value co-creation. It uses volunteer
faculty from U.S. universities to provide content and volunteer time to deliver and assess. At the
local level, it uses facilitators to ensure that the target group can access the materials and also put
in the required effort. Alumni also become providers of input for further course development and
delivery.
The recent JWL Stakeholder Survey is aimed at identifying the impact of the organization
on beneficiaries and their communities. The JWL research team, inclusive of the authors, used the
IJM as a framework for assessing stakeholder feedback to be utilized in strategic planning and
impact measurement. Here we consider the value co-creation (VCC) items, based on the decision
principles posed by Santos and Laczniak (2012). Stakeholders rated the extent to which they
agreed with the various tenets, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1=low and 10=high (Table 1). Of
the VCC items measured, the top rated is trust in JWL as a long-term partner (M=9.25), followed
by overall feeling part of creating value in experiences with JWL (M=9.21), and the extent to
which one’s values align with what JWL values (M=9.08).
Value Co-Creation Items Measured M SD
I trust JWL as a long-term partner 9.25 1.42
Overall, I feel like I am a part of creating value in my experiences with JWL 9.21 1.32
What I value aligns with what JWL values 9.08 1.41
I have the opportunity to create a more valuable experience for myself at JWL 8.97 1.54
When I contribute to JWL, my offering is valued 8.90 1.64
I have opportunities to share in JWL resources (e.g., learning center, programs,
services)
8.85 1.96
JWL uses the ideas of the students to help make our communities better 8.77 1.73
It is easy to participate within the JWL community 8.49 2.05
JWL uses the ideas of the alumni to help make our communities better 8.44 1.97
JWL community makes me feel less vulnerable 6.84 3.37
Table 1 Value Co-Creation items measured on 1=low to 10=high scale
1009
Preliminary analyses, based on 170 responses from current students, alumni (both
considered “beneficiaries”), faculty, administrators, community partners, and collaborating
NGOs, suggest that a sense of shared mission, or “values alignment” plays a very significant role
in stakeholders’ overall feeling part of creating value with JWL. Other elements contributing to
the explanation of value-creation perceptions include having an opportunity to share in resources
(e.g., learning center, programs and services), feeling that one’s offering is valued, and ease of
participation with JWL. Each element is predictive of overall feeling part of creating value, yet
values alignment is the most significant predictor (Table 2)
Significant Predictors R2 t statistic p value
I have opportunities to share in JWL resources (e.g.,
the learning center, programs, services) .56 5.17 <.001
What I value aligns with what JWL values* .68 5.44 <.001
When I contribute to JWL, my offering is valued .71 3.55 <.01
It is easy to participate within the JWL community .72 -2.23 <.05
Table 2 Predictors of overall feeling of value creation. Multivariate Regression Analysis, dependent variable: Overall I feel like I am part of creating value in experiences with JWL. *Values alignment most significant predictor
Beneficiaries, those who self-identified as current students or alumni, are significantly more
likely than other stakeholders to agree that they have opportunities to create a more valuable
experience for themselves at JWL. Further, the beneficiaries are significantly more inclined to
agree that JWL uses the ideas of students and alumni to help make their communities better. It
should be noted that the difference between beneficiaries and other stakeholders regarding overall
feeling part of creating value in experiences with JWL approaches significance (p <.06), where
beneficiaries are more likely to feel part of value co-creation (Table 3).
Significant Differences Xbeneficiaries XOtherStakeholders t statistic p value
I have the opportunity to create a more valuable
experience for myself at JWL 9.32 8.47 2.42 <.05
JWL uses the ideas of the students to help make our
communities better 9.12 8.26 2.33 <.05
JWL uses the ideas of the alumni to help make our
communities better 8.82 7.85 2.28 <.05
Table 3 Significant Differences Beneficiaries vs. Other Stakeholders
It is an important note to donors that the impact of value co-creation is more clearly felt by
students and alumni than other stakeholders. And that is not necessarily a bad thing, just a reality
1010
of the (social and geographical) distance between donors, administrators, even faculty, and life at
the margins, for most of these beneficiaries, in a refugee camp. We argue that engagement in
value co-creation practices can impact overall quality of life at the margins. We infer that value
co-creation practices are evidence of respecting the dignity of the beneficiaries, potentially
serving as a catalyst for transformation in quality of life.
References:
Laczniak, Gene R. and Nicholas J. C. Santos (2011). The Integrative Justice Model for Marketing
to the Poor: An Extension of S-D Logic to Distributive Justice and Macromarketing.
Journal of Macromarketing, 31 (2): 135-147.
Santos, Nicholas J.C. and Gene R. Laczniak (2009a). ’Just’ Markets from the perspective of
Catholic Social Teaching. Journal of Business Ethics, 89 (supplement 1): 29-38.
Santos, Nicholas J.C. and Gene R. Laczniak (2009b). Marketing to the Poor: An Integrative
Justice Model for Engaging Impoverished Market Segments. Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 28 (1): 3-15.
Santos, Nicholas J.C. and Gene R. Laczniak (2012). Marketing to the Base of the Pyramid: A
Corporate Responsibility Approach with Case Inspired Strategies. Business and Politics,
14: Iss. 1, Article 4.
Santos, Nicholas J.C., Gene R. Laczniak and Tina M. Facca-Miess (2015). The “Integrative
Justice Model” as Transformative Justice for Base-of-the-Pyramid Marketing. Journal of
Business Ethics, 126: 697-707.
1011
Paradise Lost: Selling Community
Well-Being for Outsider Profit
Don R. Rahtz107, The College of William and Mary, USA
Shultz (2007, 2015, 2016) has long argued that marketing and marketers can contribute to the
well-being of communities through the development, nurturing, and promoting of markets for the
betterment of those who make up the community. It is these markets and their mechanisms that
contribute to sustainable social, political, and economic growth and well-being for the members
and interested stakeholders in the community. As Shultz, Rahtz, and Sirgy (2017) point out, the
well-being of the community is a variable state existing on a continuum between flourishing and
distressed. A community is never stable and must strive to build and protect a variety of systems
that can provide resiliency in the face of any number of natural, political, social and economic
threats.
The current paper explores development process questions regarding best practices and
sustainable outcomes to ensure enhancements to community quality of life (QOL). That is, can
the process be better optimized to provide desired outcomes for the local community, larger
society, and relevant stakeholders? Currently, public policy decisions are often sold to the
community by short-term economic or financial gain arguments, with speculative promises for
long-term benefits, sometimes to the detriment of long-term environmental and societal well-
being.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the case of one community in transition from an
agricultural/aquaculture based economy to one based on tourism. In making the transition, the
1012
community policy makers welcomed outside investment and promises of new jobs opportunities
and an enhanced well-being for the community. What they experienced was something different.
In the examination of this community’s transition, several aspects regarding the protection of the
community’s well-being became apparent. These were such things as:
• There were initial discussions and front-end assessments of possible impacts.
• Once the development begins in earnest, the assessments and monitoring faded.
• Outside forces began to enter the market seeking to optimize the profit or personal gain
without regard or empathy for the community and their original intent for enhancement of
community well-being.
• Systems needed to be better developed and be adaptive to maintain control and monitor
shifts within the community well-being system.
Selected References
Shultz, Clifford (2007), “Marketing as Constructive Engagement,” Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 26 (2), 293-301.
Shultz, Clifford (2015), “The Ethical Imperative of Constructive Engagement in a World
Confounded by the Commons Dilemma, Social Traps, and Geopolitical Conflicts,” in Handbook
on Ethics in Marketing, Alexander Nill, ed., Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 188-219.
Shultz, Clifford J. (2016) "Marketing an End to War: Constructive Engagement, Community
Wellbeing, and Sustainable Peace," Markets, Globalization & Development Review: Vol. 1: No.
2, Article 2.
DOI: 10.23860/MGDR-2016-01-02-02
Shultz, Clifford, Don R. Rahtz, and M.Joseph Sirgy (2017) “Distinguishing Flourishing from
Distressed Communities: Vulnerability, Resilience and a Systemic Framework to Facilitate Well-
Being,” (2017) in Handbook of Community Well-Being, Rhonda Phillips ed. Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Springer pp. 403-421.
1013
Markets, Conflict, and Fear of
(Non)-Development: A Discourse
Analysis of the Production &
Consumption of Cyprus Peace
Talks
Cagri Yalkin108, University of Birmingham, UK
This study identifies the intersection of conflict resolution, ethnicity, discourses of development,
and markets as an understudied node in marketing and problematizes peace marketing. Through
analysing the news and UN statements on the latest round of peace talks in Cyprus, first the study
illustrates how, in parallel with commercial liberalist theories of conflict resolution, the idea of
marketization is cast as the solution to decades of political and ethno-religious conflict. Secondly
by way of in-depth interviews, we illustrate how, through this construction, notions such as
peace, security, justice and well-being are veiled behind the rhetoric of development and are
communicated as dependent on the idea of thriving markets.
As politics and markets are intertwined, religious and ethnic differences are susceptible to being
manipulated to achieve economic, political, and ideological ends (e.g. Jafari et al. 2015). While
commercial liberalism, the idea of sustaining peace and avoiding conflict, is widely used (e.g.
Keohane 2011) its potential role in existing ethnic and religious conflict is yet to be further
investigated. The premise that groups or nations or territories that are in trade relationships with
one another are less likely to engage in war has been examined in international relations (e.g.
Owen 1994), conflict resolution (e.g. O’Neal et al. 1996) and tourism studies (e.g. Sonmez and
1014
Apostolopoulos 2000). However, offering economic benefits through integration to the market
system as a solution to political and ethnic conflict, has received little attention.
Scholars contend that trade between states is associated with reduced militarized disputes or wars
(Green and Self 1996; Press-Barnathan 2006). However, "Strong evidence indicates that
neoliberal forms of capitalism are not conducive to peacebuilding in a post-conflict transition.
Global flows of capital, primary resources, global governance and neoliberal states work against
the democratic political interests of citizens and unsettle their habitus of legitimacy. This may be
accepted as necessary in a stable, late capitalist state, but in a conflict environment, to
overestimate capitalism’s contribution to peace would be very dangerous” (Richmond 2014, p. 3).
Marketing neoliberalism as both the transformatory mechanism and the main end-product of
peace needs to be problematized and studied. Hence, we investigate whether commercial
liberalism remedies existing conflict.
Cucolo (1999, p.12) views the Arizona Market in the former Yugoslav Republic as “the best four
acres in the American sector for changing perceptions’’ and Sredl et al. (2017) illustrate how
market(ing) exchange acts as a means of building community and that community emerges
through social interactions of exchange. Similarly, Barrios et al. (2016) study the Columbian fair
trade coffee exchanges and argue that the actors in this market facilitate the transitioning of the
war economy to peace economy: “marketers can contribute to peacemaking and thus produce
mutually beneficial outcomes for consumers and society” (p.185) which puts the consumer
identity in the center of the peace process. In as much as we recognize the points illustrated by
these studies, we diverge from this line of literature and problematize the uniformly positive role
attributed to markets and market(ing) exchanges in building community in post-conflict areas.
We argue that this particular peacemaking process in itself fosters making consumer
subjectivities, and that civic notions are paired with the market rhetoric.
The Cyprus Conflict is selected because it has been one of the longest-standing conflicts and
there have been many rounds of UN-led peace talks since the island’s partition in 1974. Previous
peace talks had focused on peace and stability, however, the final round of talks has been
especially entrenched in the market rhetoric. Despite its small size, the island is connected to
wider issues in the Middleast and Europe as it is both used as a trade route and military base. It
also presents a unique context for observation because its northern part has been under embargo
since 1974 and contemporary consumer culture currently can be ‘sampled’ but not submerged
1015
in. While the southern half was integrated with the rest of the world, it has been somewhat
removed from the contemporary consumer culture as it exists in Western Europe109.
Press coverage and official statements by the two heads of states in Turkish, Greek and English,
and statements of the UN secretary general, and the UN spokesperson for Cyprus were discourse
analysed through netnography (Kozinets 2010). In the second stage, in-depth interviews with 14
citizens between 18-83 years of age were conducted to illuminate how these constructions were
received by the citizens on both sides of the island. The combined population of the entire island
is 1.1million, with about 850,000 Greekcypriots and 300,000 Turkishcypriots (Statistical Service
2011)110. The sample was varied in terms of ethnicity, religion, gender, and political alignment.
Findings indicate that on the production side, first, conflict resolution is constructed through
discourses of market making: “The island stands on the cusp of reaping real political and
economic benefits not only for Cypriots, but also beyond the island across the wider region by
contributing to stability and co-operation..a new model fit for the 21st century that prioritises
economic growth and development” (UNcyprustalks, 2016). Secondly, conflict resolution is
constructed through equating development with neo-liberalism: “Settlement will not only benefit
the two communities but…With the solution, the neutrocarbon will act as a source of peace,
stability, and cooperation rather than conflict… United Cyprus will be a hub through which gas
can be transported…Interconnectedness of Europe and Middle East will come true via Cyprus
and Turkey….GCs and TCs must see each other as future partners”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE3xVPkuwgg)
However, on the consumption side, the citizens interpret the peace talks as ‘Money for Peace’:
“We recovered from it but I wouldn't care if the economic crisis carried on forever. The Republic
of Cyprus signed a deal for the oil anyway…it doesn’t make a difference if we make a ‘forced’
peace. The oil will traded eventually…it’s not like we desperately need the money flowing in from
this”. (Magda, 34, F, banker, Greekcypriot).
109 The first ‘mall’ opened in 2007 in the south and 2014 in the north. 110 The percentage of adults aged 30-34 with tertiary education is 49.9% in the Republic of Cyprus (comprising our
Greekcypriot informants) (Eurostat, 2015) and the percentage of adults aged 18-30 with tertiary education is 90% in
the unrecognised Northern Cyprus (comprising our Turkishcypriot informants) (Al-Jazeera 2014). The make-up of
the sample roughly reflected the education level on the island.
1016
References
Barrios, Andres, Kristine de Valck, Clifford J. Shultz, Olivier Sibai, Katharina C. Husemann,
Matthew Maxwell-Smith, and Marius K. Luedicke. 2016. "Marketing as a means to
transformative social conflict resolution: lessons from transitioning war economies and the
Colombian coffee marketing system." Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 35(2), 185-197.\
Cucolo, Tony. 1999. Grunt diplomacy: in the beginning there were only
soldiers. Parameters, 29(1), 110.
Green, Michael J. and Self, Benjamin L. 1996. Japan's changing China policy: from commercial
liberalism to reluctant realism. Survival, 38(2), 35-58.
Jafari, Ali-Akbar, Dedeoğlu, Ayla Ö., Regany, Fatima, Üstündağli, E., & Batat, Wided. 2015.
Rethinking religion in the context of ethnicity and well-being. Marketing Theory, 15(2), 287-295.
Keohane, Robert. 2011. Neoliberal Institutionalism. In C.W. Hughes & Y.W. Lai (Eds.), Security
Studies: A Reader (pp.222-242), London: Routledge.
Owen, John M. 1994. How liberalism produces democratic peace. International security, 19(2),
87-125.
Press-Barnathan, Galia. 2006. The neglected dimension of commercial liberalism: Economic
cooperation and transition to peace. Journal of Peace Research, 43(3), 261-278.
Richmond, Oliver P. 2014. The Impact of Socio-Economic Inequality on Peacebuilding and
Statebuilding. Civil Wars, 16(4), 449-467.
Sredl, Katherine C., Clifford J. Shultz, and Ružica Brečić. 2017. "The Arizona Market: a
Marketing Systems Perspective on Pre-and Post-War Developments in Bosnia, with Implications
for Sustainable Peace and Prosperity." Journal of Macromarketing: 0276146717712359.
UNCyprusTalks. 2016. Turning the Page of History, available at
http://162.243.184.203/2016/12/30/turning-the-page-of-history-in-2017/ (last accessed 1
December 2017).
1017
Macromarketing
Measurement and Methodology
II
Track Chair: Ben Wooliscroft
Co-Chair(s): Francisco Conejo
1018
Defective Sorts and the loss of
value: The case of farming in New
Zealand
Ben Wooliscroft111 112, University of Otago, New Zealand
James Wilkes113, University of Otago, New Zealand
Marketing is a provisioning technology, that through transvections aims to match heterogeneous
supply and demand, with the goal of increasing the potency of assortment of both parties of
exchanges.. Macromarketing considers the interactions between markets, marketing and society.
This paper considers a major industry in New Zealand, the red meat industry, and how its
transvections lead to system wide loss of potential potency of assortment. It identifies the concept
of defective sorts, sorts which negatively remove heterogeneity in the channel.
At the very centre of markets and marketing is Alderson’s (2006a, p. 255) law of exchange:
Given that x is an element of the assortment A 1
and y is an element of the assortment A 2 ,
x is exchangeable for y if, and only if, these three conditions hold: (a) x is different from y
(b) The potency of the assortment A 1
is increased by dropping x and adding y (c) The
potency of the assortment A 2
is increased by adding x and dropping y
Following on from the law of exchange and fundamental to the concept of marketing as a
discipline is the heterogeneity of demand and supply (Alderson, 1957), which underlies the law
of exchange. Building on this heterogeneity is segmentation of customers to serve them better,
111 Corresponding author 112 [email protected] 113 [email protected]
1019
and more efficiently (Smith, 1956). Associated with this view of markets is the concept of dual
search — producers searching for customers and customers searching for producers (Alderson,
1965) to satisfy the heterogeneity of demand and supply. An efficient/effective market will match
demand and supply to increase the potency of assortment of the populace, individually and
collectively, and with it quality of life.
When an industry represents a major part of the productivity of an economy/society, it also is
responsible for significant environmental degradation (49% of green house gases come from
agriculture in NZ (NZ Agricultural Green House Gas Research Centre, 2018)), employs many (25
000) and generates considerable foreign exchange earnings ($6.7billion in 2016) its performance
is a macromarketing issue (Meat Industry Association, 2018).
This paper deals with defective sorts, sorts which irreparably damage the assortment, or which
would require considerable resources to ‘undo’. A defective sort leads to a suboptimal
transformation and a suboptimal transvection, with suboptimal matching processes and reduced
potency of assortments.
Context: The Meat Industry
The New Zealand red meat industry operates a business model, which could be argued is a
derivative of Gustavus Swift’s (an American industrialist) original red meat disassembly line,
which Schatzker (2010) suggests inspired Henry Ford to create his now famous automotive
assembly line. Prior to Swift’s industrial processing innovation, cowboys strategically drove their
cattle to market taking their time to fatten their cattle on the way. When they arrived in town they
had a much closer connection to resellers such as butchers and restaurateurs. Their business
model was focused on delivering the best possible animals to market. The advent of the railroads
and increased transport efficiency killed off this traditional business model and changed the way
cattle were sorted. The new method resulted in increased efficiency and lower costs, but quality
was often illusive and unpredictable. The need to resolve this issue led to the development of the
USDA grading system where beef is sorted into Prime, Choice, Select and Standard grades. The
USDA grading system is intensely focused on marbling. Schatzker (2010) states, “The US
Department of Agriculture employs 200 meat graders, 140 of whom specialize in beef. In a single
day, a USDA grader can judge as many as 1200 beef carcasses, each carcass requiring no more
1020
than six to eight seconds of the graders time.”
The problem from a marketer’s perspective is the marbling system is far from perfect when it
comes to selecting the very best tasting steaks and these days modern beef lovers demonstrate
heterogenous demand. Whilst there are many proponents of marbling being the holy grail there
are many others who believe there are more important attributes. Taste and flavor being two of
these. From a marketer’s perspective, focusing solely on marbling can lead to ‘defective sorting’
and loss of value. For example. Schatzker (2010)reports that steak lovers in Chicago and
Philadelphia have a preference for flavor over tenderness or juiciness. How does the UDSA
grading system accommodate this demand? Schatzker goes on to suggest, “In the modern
industrial system, steak has effectively become a widget.” The adoption of a business model
based on efficiency and supported by methodologies such as grading systems potentially
encourages an environment where defective sorts can become embedded.
The New Zealand red meat industry appears to be trapped in two worlds. On the one hand its
meat processing industry has been structured around efficiency and commodity trading, which
suits the antiquated economic construct of homogeneous markets, whilst its stated desire is to
transition to value, which requires a shift in marketing philosophy as well as an acknowledgement
that supply and demand is in fact, heterogeneous. This elevates the requirement for an effective
exchange of information, which implies modification and innovation requirements throughout the
transvection.
Alderson and the Transvection
A transvection is “a unit of action of the marketing system resulting in placing a final product in
the hands of the consumer but reaching all the way back to the raw materials entering into the
product.” (Alderson, 2006a, p. 231). A transvection “can be shown symbolically as T V = ST ST
S...T S where S is a sort and T is a transformation” (Alderson, 2006b, p. 264).
“The sorts (sorting out, accumulation, allocation, assortment) combined with transformations
provide a means to understand the processes of the market place in providing a finished
product which has the appropriate form, time and space utility for the end consumer”
(Wooliscroft, 2006, p. 40).
1021
There are four types of sort:
a sorting out, the breaking down of a heterogeneous collection into smaller homogeneous
collections; and
b accumulation, the building up of a large homogeneous collection from several smaller
homogeneous collections; and
c allocating the breaking down of a large homogeneous collection into several smaller
homogenous collections; and
d assorting, the building up of a large heterogeneous collection from several homogeneous
collections (Hunt, Muncy and Ray, 2006, p. 366)
Sorts either increase or decrease heterogeneity. It is important to make explicit that products have
multiple attributes, or dimensions, on which they can be sorted. It would be possible to perform
an entire transvection while ignoring one of the dimensions. There are two main reasons that this
would be done; 1) the attribute is a constant (all coal is made of carbon) or b) there is no, or little,
value attached to the heterogeneity of the attribute. The problem arises when there is
heterogeneity of an attribute, which is associated with heterogeneity of demand at the consumer
end, and differences in value, but a sort removes or discards this heterogeneity. That dimension is
now treated within the transvection as a constant, though it was not a constant and there is
heterogeneity of demand.
Each product has multiple attributes (or dimensions) and any of the four sorts can be made on
each dimension, while another dimension is ignored (taste) the channel, in this case the meat
processor, has stocks of different cuts, but there is considerable heterogeneity that has been
discarded in creating those stocks.
The four types of sorts can be represented mathematically, where P is a product, the superscript
represents attributes and the subscript represents the stock.
1022
The problem of deficient sorts arises when an accumulation is undertaken on an attribute that
loses the possibility of sorting on another important (to the consumer) attribute.
An example; a carcass enters the cutting chain and is divided into a variety of cuts (for simplicity,
legs, ribs and back steaks). Those cuts are accumulated so that in the processing plant there is a
stock of legs, ribs and back steaks. While you can still, relatively easily, tell the weight of each
item, unless you are tracing each piece of meat you have lost the origin of the animal, the breed of
the animal, its age, etc. etc. In essence the deficient sort has removed the possibility of that
(origin, breed, age, etc) heterogeneity being meaningfully transferred to the consumer. There is
now a market for different cuts of beef, by weight.
Analogous to the second law of thermodynamics, once a process has occurred that reduces this
heterogeneity, it will require additional energy from outside the system to regain it. In the case of
the transvection, re-establishing the source of the beef, breed, etc. may require chemical or dna
testing of the meat — a costly and time consuming process.
The red meat industry in New Zealand takes cattle of a variety of breeds, raised on different feed,
in different climates, of different ages and within minutes of entering the killing plant the source
of the meat is lost (while it may be traceable for health purposes it is not for branding or
communicating the value proposition of the meat) and the meat separated by cut throughout the
plant. Meat is considered in terms of tons, a commodity focus.
In a parallel situation dairy production in New Zealand is measured in tons of milk solids.
Whether farmers produce;
• exceptional tasting milk from finely breed cattle, raised in beautiful meadows on a variety of
high quality feed, and milked in a milking shed that is like a an operating theatre for
cleanliness and a health resort for happy cows, or
1023
• milk solids from any cattle, fed what ever is cheap (including palm solids known to contribute
to deforestation in areas of importance for orangutan, and to contribute to an increase in
net green house gases), milked in a dirty shed, without being cleaned before the milking
machine is attached, exploitively over milked and often mistreated,
there is no difference in the price paid to the farmer for their kilo of milk solids. That leads to
no motivation to improve the lot of the land, the cows, the food safety at source, the overall
environment, etc.
Discussion and Conclusion
When there is no heterogeneity of offering at the consumer end, due to a deficient sort in the
transvection, there is no motivation for producers to maximise quality or heterogeneity.
Demand and supply are heterogenous and variety of offers is required to satisfy the variety of
desires held by (potential) consumers. The market is a place for the exchange of information
regarding offerings and desires, a place of double searches(Alderson, 1957).
Commodities encourage substitution through technological solutions (in this case synthetic meat
and dairy products) as there is no/reduced variety in a production focus and no variety to compete
with in the commodity offering.
If we are to maximise the potency of assortment of members of our society, we need to maintain
the heterogeneity of products and avoid deficient sorts. An efficient market is not one in which
every product is reduced to a commodity and sold for the lowest price, contrary to economic
thinking, rather it is a market where the key heterogeneous attributes are maintained and both
producers and consumers benefit from a matching process that leads to maximum potency of
assortment. Identifying deficient sorts, as a part of transvection analysis or on its own, is a
macromarketing tool for system wide potency maximization.
1024
References
Alderson, W. (1957). Marketing Behavior and Executive Action: A Functionalist Approach to
Marketing, Homewood, Ill., Richard D. Irwin Inc.
Alderson, W. (1965). Dynamic Marketing Behavior: A Functionalist Theory of Marketing,
Homewood, Ill., Richard D. Irwin Inc.
Alderson, W. (2006a). The heterogeneous market and the organized behavior system, in B.
Wooliscroft, R. D. Tamilia and S. J. Shapiro (eds), A Twenty-First-Century Guide to
Aldersonian Marketing Thought, Springer, pp. 205–233.
Alderson, W. (2006b). Transactions and transvections, in B. Wooliscroft, R. Tamilia and S. J.
Shapiro (eds), A Twenty-first Century Guide to Aldersonian Marketing Thought, New
York, Springer, chapter 14, pp. 217–249.
Hunt, S. D., Muncy, J. A. and Ray, N. M. (2006). Alderson’s General Theory of Marketing: A
Formalization, in B. Wooliscroft, R. Tamilia and S. J. Shapiro (eds), A Twenty-First-
Century Guide to Aldersonian Marketing Thought, New York, Springer, pp. 359–371.
Meat Industry Association (2018). Meat industry association (nz), online.
URL: https://www.mia.co.nz
NZ Agricultural Green House Gas Research Centre (2018). Agricultural greenhouse gases & the
new zealand beef & sheep sectors. URL: https://www.nzagrc.org.nz/beef-sheep-
sector.html
Schatzker, M. (2010). Steak: One Man’s Search for the World’s Tastiest Piece of Beef, U.S.A.,
Penguin Group.
Smith, W. R. (1956). Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing
Strategies, Journal of Marketing 21(July): 3–8.
Wooliscroft, B. (2006). Introduction to Part II: Wroe Alderson’s Theory of Market Behaivor —
Selected Writings, in B. Wooliscroft, R. Tamilia and S. J. Shapiro (eds), A Twenty-First-
Century Guide to Aldersonian Marketing Thought, New York, Springer, pp. 39–42.
1025
Customer Value within a Broader
Perspective: Development and
Validation of a Public Value Scale
Timo Meynhardt, HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
Anna Jasinenko, HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany
Customer value creation is at the heart of marketing research and practice (e.g., Holbrook 1994;
Woodruff 1997). To create value for customers is widely accepted as a major license to operate
for marketing and organizations overall (Slater 1997). So far, the customer value discourse was
led by an individualistic customer perspective (e.g., value creation as an exchange value (Bagozzi
1975) or use value (Holbrook 1999)). But an isolated focus on dyadic company-customer
interaction neglects that economic transactions, and thereby their value creation, are always
embedded in a broader social and cultural context (Layton 2011). Meynhardt, Chandler and
Strathoff (2016) argued that value creation can be only understood embedded in its full
ecosystems, where the micro-, meso- and macro-level are in constant synergetic interaction. The
recent development of market moralization makes obvious that customers not only reflect their
personal value but try to align it with social and non-economic interests (Stehr 2007). Customers
became more sensitive to value that goes beyond egoistic interests and have more possibilities to
counter-check their perceptions and judgements with customers around the world via internet and
social media. Overall, value can never be experienced isolated but is always co-created or
destroyed within an ecosystem (Domegan et al. 2012; Meynhardt et al. 2016).
One promising candidate to look at customer value from a more holistic perspective is the public
value concept. It originated from the field of public administration (Moore 1995) but is nowadays
also increasingly applied in the private sector (Meynhardt 2015, 2016; Moore and Khagram
1026
2004). According to Meynhardt (2009, 2015), public value is created or destroyed if
organizations (e.g., with their products or services) affect basic needs of individuals. He
understands value as an inherently subjective psychological experience but acknowledges that
value is created in relationships with “the public” (Meynhardt 2009). Based on that public value
is defined as “the combined view of the public about what they regard as valuable” (Talbot 2006,
as cited in Meynhardt 2009, p. 206). Even though the public value concept is highly appreciated
in research and practice, a validated survey scale is still missing. Therefore, the purpose of the
current study was to develop and validate a Public Value Scale that should help to enable
empirical research within a broader perspective of customer value.
Public Value Scale Development and Validation
Following Meynhardt’s (2009) psychologically focused public value conceptualization, we
operationalized public value as the perceived basic need fulfillment of individuals by
organizations. Based on the basic needs from Epstein’s cognitive-experiential self-theory (2003),
Meynhardt (2009) defined four public value dimensions (task fulfillment, quality of life, morality
and social cohesion) that were reflected in the scale.
In the first step of the scale development, a provisory item pool of 53 items was developed based
on basic needs theory (Epstein 2003; Meynhardt 2009) and previous studies in this field (e.g.,
Meynhardt and Bartholomes 2011; Strathoff and Bilolo 2014). These items were tested in a pre-
study, where 300 participants rated two organizations (international & national enterprise) in an
online survey. An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed four orthogonal factors
(= four public value dimensions) and a second-ordered factor (= public value), as expected from
theory. Nineteen best fitting items were selected and tested in the second step, where 1299
participants rated four organizations (international & national enterprise, cooperative, public
service organization). The items were re-tested using exploratory and confirmatory analyses. The
best fitting 12 items (3 items x 4 dimensions) were selected. The analyses confirmed the expected
four dimensional structure with a second-ordered public value factor. Reliability analyses showed
very high values for every dimensional-subscale applied to each organization (Cronbach’s α >
.82).
Public Value & Consumer Behavior. Constructed for application in marketing research and
practice, the scale’s predictive validity was tested with a range of consumer variables. As
1027
expected, we found very high correlations with word-of-mouth (r = .81), trust (r = .79), loyalty (r
= .67), customer satisfaction (r = .54), willingness to pay (r = .53) and medium correlation effects
with consumption frequency (r = .38). Moreover, we found that the hedonic-aesthetical (= quality
of life) dimension of public value had overall the highest influence on all consumer variables.
Interestingly, the moral dimension showed very high correlation with word-of-mouth and trust (r
≥ .76) but a far smaller correlation with the actual frequency of consumption (r = .27).
Public Value, CSR & Reputation. For construct validity analyses, a corporate social
responsibility (CSR, Currás-Pérez, Bigné-Alcañiz, and Alvarado-Herrera 2009) and a reputation
scale (Agarwal, Osiyevskyy, and Feldman 2015) were included in the survey, as they have
conceptual interactions but also differences. Public Value, CSR and corporate reputation are often
mistaken to be similar concepts for reflecting positive societal outcomes. However, there are
important conceptual differences. Shortly, CSR could be an important predecessor of public value
(but public value could be also derived from other corporate behavior), whereas a high reputation
could result among others from a high public value (but other aspects beside public value could
influence reputation). This was also reflected in our data: CSR as well as reputation correlated
strongly with the public value scale (CSR: r = .84, p < .001; Reputation: r = .77, p < .001). But
we found that CSR was mostly reflected in the moral dimension of public value (CSR r = .83, p <
.001) and far less in the dimension of task fulfillment (r = .54, p < .001), implying that CSR could
result in public value in the moral dimension but not reflect the whole concept sufficiently. For
reputation we found only low correlations with the “Market Prominence” dimension of reputation
(r = .36, p < .001), implying that public value could explain a great deal of a company’s
reputation but would neglect important parts of it.
Overall, the current study provides a highly valid and reliable 12-item Public Value Scale with
four dimensional sub-scales that could be used for empirical marketing research and help to
understand customer value creation from a holistic perspective.
1028
References
Agarwal, James, Madelynn Stackhouse, and Oleksiy Osiyevskyy (2017), "I Love That Company:
Look How Ethical, Prominent, and Efficacious It Is—A Triadic Organizational
Reputation (TOR) Scale." Journal of Business Ethics, 1-22.
Bagozzi, Richard P. (1975), "Marketing as exchange." The Journal of Marketing, 32-39.
Currás-Pérez, Rafael, Enrique Bigné-Alcañiz, and Alejandro Alvarado-Herrera (2009), "The role
of self-definitional principles in consumer identification with a socially responsible
company." Journal of business ethics, 89 (4), 547.
Domegan, Christine, et al. (2012), "Value, values, symbols and outcomes." Marketing Theory, 12
(2), 207-211.
Epstein, Seymour (2003), "Cognitive‐experiential self‐theory of personality." Handbook of
psychology, 2 (7), 159-184.
Holbrook, Morris B. (1994), "The nature of customer value: an axiology of services in the
consumption experience." Service quality: New directions in theory and practice, 21, 21-
71.
Holbrook, Morris B., ed. (1999), Consumer value: a framework for analysis and research.
Psychology Press.
Meynhardt, Timo (2009), "Public value inside: What is public value creation?." Intl Journal of
Public Administration, 32 (3-4), 192-219.
Meynhardt, Timo. "Public value: turning a conceptual framework into a scorecard." (2015): In
Public Value and Public Administration, Bryson, John M., Barbara C. Crosby, and Laura
Bloomberg, eds. Georgetown University Press, 147-169.
Meynhardt, Timo (2016), “Public Value: The Contribution of Organizations and Companies to
the Common Good.” In Responsible Entrepreneurship - Business and Society: Bridging
the Gap, Bertelsmann Stiftung, ed. Gütersloh: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung, 25-35.
1029
Meynhardt, Timo, and Steffen Bartholomes (2011), "(De) Composing public value: in search of
basic dimensions and common ground." International Public Management Journal, 14
(3), 284-308.
Meynhardt, Timo, Jennifer D. Chandler, and Pepe Strathoff (2016), "Systemic principles of value
co-creation: Synergetics of value and service ecosystems." Journal of Business
Research, 69(8), 2981-2989.
Moore, Mark H. (1995), Creating public value: Strategic management in government. Harvard
university press.
Moore, Mark H., and Sanjeev Khagram (2004), "On creating public value: What business might
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marketing, 45 (1/2), 259-276.
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Talbot, Colin (2011), "Paradoxes and prospects of ‘public value’." Public Money &
Management 31 (1), 27-34.
Strathoff, Pepe, and Céline Bilolo (2004), "Of Hedgehogs and Foxes: The Influence of Individual
Cognition on Public Value." International OFEL Conference on Governance,
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Woodruff, Robert B. (1997), "Customer value: the next source for competitive
advantage." Journal of the academy of marketing science, 25 (2), 139.
1030
Towards a Grounded Theory of
Social Enterprise Places: Building
Legitimacy and Markets for Social
Enterprise
Anthony Samuel, Cardiff University, UK
Introduction
In the past decade, the role of Social Enterprises (SE) in neo-liberal leaning societies has become
more pronounced. Following the post 2008 recession and the resulting politics of globalised
austerity SEs’ potential to fill the chasm left following the withdrawal of state provided welfare
provisions has been recognised, supported and in some instances realised (Peattie and Morley
2008). As Engelke et al. (2016, p. 56) noted, many communities have now become accustomed
to social enterprises stepping into “address social welfare issues” that can no longer be served by
the public, private and the third (charity) sector.
Over the past decade SEs have experienced considerable growth both in number and diversity.
This is possibly due to societies having to find novel ways to respond to the systemic
consequences of rapidly emerging issues such as economic inequality, social justice/equality
(Cornelius et al. 2008), post-industrial decline and community deprivation (Teasdale 2010),
access to employment (Defourny and Nyssens 2008), consumer goods and services (Allan 2005),
and health and wellbeing (Munoz et al. 2015).
Between 2012 and 2015 the number of UK SEs grew by 33%, and are now active in various
sectors that include education, healthcare, farming and manufacturing (Villeneuve-Smith and
Temple 2015). Consequently, these organisations are becoming noteworthy contributors to
economic participation, social justice, individual/ community wellbeing and ecological business
1031
practices/stewardship. Thus interest in their ability to succeed and grow is of increasing interest
to policymakers, and academics alike.
Despite a groundswell of academic attention and various public sector initiatives SEs are still
struggling to deal with a multitude of complex challenges. These challenges are well documented
in academic literature, (see for example Doherty, Haugh, and Lyon 2014). In the main they are:
Dealing with the demands of ‘dual mission’ (Santos et al. 2015), measuring & reporting social
value (Doherty, Haugh, and Lyon 2014), sourcing income and investment (Doherty, Haugh, and
Lyon. 2014; Lehner and Nicholls 2014), working with the public and private sector (Peattie and
Morley 2008, Jenner 2016), and attaining stakeholder validity (Liu et al. 2015).
Responding to these challenges in 2014 Social Enterprise UK rolled out the Social Enterprise
Places Programme (SEP). They describe SEPs as geographical areas where social enterprise
activity and investment is thriving and stipulate five goals an area must meet to be awarding the
SEP label, these are:
1. Significant social enterprise activity occurring in the area
2. An established SEP stakeholder group must be active
3. Commitment to support and grow social enterprises in the area
4. The measurement of social enterprise activity in the area
5. Opportunities to share knowledge and best practice with other SEPs.
Social Enterprise Places UK (2017)
The programme ultimately aims to promote, raise awareness, and build markets for social
enterprise at a local and national level. This is presently happening in twenty-three SEPs across
the UK including the six places explored for this study, Oxfordshire, Plymouth, Wrexham,
Digbeth, Cardiff and the world’s first SEP the village of Alston Moor (Social Enterprise Places
UK 2017).
Methodology: grounded theory
Despite SEs obvious connection with macromarketing, for example, both seek to contribute to
issues pertaining to quality of life, social justice, access to markets and economic regeneration
very little attempt has been made by the discipline to understand their unique characteristics and
challenges faced. Subsequently, this paper responds to Peterson’s (2016) call to address the
1032
shortfall of research dedicated to meso level marketing dynamics (the spaces and places of SEPs)
and different industries (SEs). Given the ‘newness’ of SEPs and the lack of academic work
dedicated to them they were deemed suitable to explored through a pragmatic application of
Grounded Theory (GT). Therefore, it appeared suitable for data collection and analysis to follow
the same macromarketing research procedures that Samuel and Peattie’s (2016) used to develop
grounded theories from their research into Fairtrade Towns. Data was collected through
ethnographical participation (helping Cardiff become a SEP) and semi-structured interviews with
key representatives of the six SEPs mentioned previously. Data analysis involved line by line,
focus and thematic coding to build four initial core categories that helped make empirical strides
towards theorising SEPs place based marketing. However, this paper recognises further research
must be conducted for a valid GT to emerge. Subsequently the next stage of the research process
will be to triangulate the various emergent codes with other published material from Social
Enterprise UK and the six SEPs studied. It is hoped this will help develop the strength of the
emergent core categories to help unearth a GT. As Glaser (1978) indicates, theory is generated
around core categories whose primary function is to integrate theory.
The data collected and the four core categories that emerged following this study are yet to
establish a theoretically sensitive and valid GT (Glaser 1978), IE one that describes the
relationships between all core categories (Gibson and Hartman 2014). However, the core
categories presented in this paper offer novel empirical evidence of a macromarketing eco-system
working to assist SE’s in their quest to advance their social impact from commercial activity.
Findings: four core categories
Core Category 1: SEPs use place attachment and place branding to leverage SE possibilities,
geographical attachment and responsibility is used to gain financial, structural and political
support for SEs. A similar strategy is used to promote SE’s suitability to engage in business
procurement and to stimulate consumer demand in the area. Thus, individual’s and institution’s
sense of place is central to SEPs marketing dynamic.
Core Category 2: SEPs lead new actors to the sector, the pronunciation of various SE activity
taking place in SEPs is suggested to have increased people, organisation and support agency
awareness of what SEs are and how they offer an alternative to business start-ups or the
reconfiguration of charities and commercial business alike.
1033
Core Category 3: SEPs develop Inter-trade and collaboration, as membership of the network
increases SEs knowledge and trust in one another is acknowledged for creating a collaborative
environment where SEs support one another through SE to SE trade and scale up collaborations
that enabled ‘outsourced’ government contacts and tenders to be won.
Core Category 4: SEPs are a natural extension of communities of practice, much of the
interaction that happens between SEs who belong to SEPs is concerned with sharing their passion
for SEs with their wider community. This is demonstrated through novel community based
activities that are run to promote the work, products and services of SEs. SEPs also hold frequent
meetings/ social events where SE interaction is organised around specific subjects relevant to
improving their ability to function and grow (Wenger 1998).
1034
References
Allen, Bob (2005), “Social enterprise: through the eyes of the consumer,” Social Enterprise
Journal, 1, 57-77.
Cornelius, Nelarine, Mathew Todres, Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj, Adrian Woods, and James
Wallace (2008), “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Social Enterprise,” Journal
of Business Ethics, 81(2), 355-370.
Defourny, Jacques and Marthe, Nyssens (2008), “Social Enterprise in Europe: recent trends
and developments,” Social Enterprise Journal, 4 (3), 202–228.
Doherty, Bob. Helen Haugh, and Fergus Lyon (2014), “Social Enterprises as Hybrid
Organisations: A review and Research Agenda,” International Journal of Management
Reviews, 16(4), 417-436.
Engelke, Henning, Stefanie Mauksch, Inga-Lena Darkow, and Heiko von der Gracht (2016),
“Heading Toward a More Social Future? Scenarios for Social Enterprises in Germany,”
Business and Society, 55(1), 56-89.
Gibson, Barry and Jan, Hartman (2014), Rediscovering Grounded Theory. London, SAGE.
Glazer, Barney, G. (1978), Theoretical Sensitivity. Mill Valley, California, The Sociology
Press.
Lehner, Othmar, M. and Alex Nicholls (2014), “Social Finance and Crowd funding for Social
Enterprise: A Public Private Case Study Providing Legitimacy and leverage,” Venture
Capital: An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance, 16(3), 271-286.
Liu, Gordon, Teck-Yong Eng, and Sachiko Takeda (2015), “An Investigation of Marketing
Capabilities and Social Enterprise Performance in the UK and Japan,”
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 39(2), 267-298.
Munoz, Sarah-Anne, Jane Farmer, Rachel Winterton, and Jo Barraket (2015). “The social
enterprise as a space of well-being: an exploratory case study,” Social Enterprise
Journal, 11(3), 281 – 302.
1035
Peattie, Ken and Adrian Morely (2008), “Eight paradoxes of the social enterprise research
agenda,” Social Enterprise Journal, 4(2), 91-107.
Peterson, Mark (2016), “Think Macro,” Journal of Macromarketing, 36 (2), 124-125.
Samuel, Anthony and Ken Peattie (2016), “Grounded Theory as a Macromarketing
Methodology Critical Insights from Researching the Marketing Dynamics of Fairtrade
Towns,” Journal of Macromarketing, 36 (1), 11-26.
Santos, Filipe, Anne-Claire Pache, and Christopher Birkholz (2015), “Making Hybrids Work:
Aligning Business Models and Organisational Design for Social Enterprise,” California
Management Review, 57(3), 36-58.
Social Enterprise Places (2017), Available from:
https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/Pages/Category/social-enterprise-places,
[Accessed: 09/10/2017]
Teasdale, Simon (2010), “What’s in a name? The construction of social enterprise,” Third
Sector Research Centre, Working paper 46, University of Birmingham.
Tuan, Yi-Fu (2001), Space and Place, 23rd edition. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Villeneuve-Smith, Frank and Nick Temple (2015), “State of Social Enterprise Survey,
Leading the World in Social Enterprise,” Social Enterprise UK. Available:
Socialenterprise.org.uk, [accessed 12/11/ 2017].
Wenger, Etienne (1998), “Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity,”
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
1036
Ethics, Equity and
Social Justice II
Track Chair: Ann-Marie Kennedy
Joya Kemper
Co-Chair(s): Nicky Santos
1037
Equilibrium of marketing systems
concept and reflection on animal-
based industries
Stephanie Ingrid Souza Barboza, Federal University of Paraiba, Brazil
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to make some progress on the theoretical discussions about marketing
systems in relation to the construction of the concept of equilibrium. To this end, an argumentative
basis regarding the dominant logic of services was adopted, as well as the stakeholder theory,
distributive justice, and the discussion of externalities to consider the product as an agent of the
marketing system. With this construction, a product typology that sees life as a material basis for
delivering a performance was developed, arguing that systems based on this kind of materiality
require a different moral consideration. To conclude the reflections, there is an illustration of the
food marketing system and the case of meat industry.
Keywords: marketing systems, equilibrium, distributive justice, stakeholders, externalities,
product, animals
1. Introduction
This paper presents an essay on macromarketing and equilibrium of marketing systems,
emphasizing the need to consider the element “product”, especially in those products whose
material basis is centered on life forms. Whilst an object within the macromarketing disciplinary
field, the “aggregate marketing systems” (or simply, “marketing systems”) are associated with the
whole set of elements gathered around the process of exchanges, including the set of applicants,
suppliers, the regulating agents (being them from the State or not) and society in general. All these
elements are referenced to the phenomenon of exchange.
The studies on marketing systems take a broad perspective when considering the impacts
1038
of these systems on society, as well as the impact of society on the systems of exchange (Wilkie
and Moore 2006). However, these studies consider human and organizational actors as a
priority,overlooking the consequences of the practices of a marketing system on other non-
contemplated stakeholders, such as those associated to it or materialized in the form of a product.
This paper is in the field of research on and of the product. It is in line with the disciplinary
context of macromarketing and is meant to propose the fundamental principle of equilibrium in
these systems. It is believed that there is a movement in favor of verifying a valid morality of these
systems, and of the way that the ethical question is analyzed from the moral standards practiced by
their direct and indirect agents.
Therefore, a brief characterization of the marketing systems is given in this paper in order
to develop an argument recognizing the aspects associated with the product and the necessity of its
moral consideration. Taking the product as an object that centralizes the exchange, it is advocated
that it must have its peculiarities considered in the practices of production and consumption. There
is a choice here to report the concept of product through the classic view of marketing studies and
the perception of the “dominant logic of services”, as well as a presentation of a classification of
the product that considers life as a characterizing element of a given material basis.
A discussion based on the concepts of justice, stakeholders and externality of marketing is
carried out in order to advance theoretically around the concept of equilibrium in marketing
systems. With this construction, a product typology is developed by arguing that systems based on
a material platform of living product require a different moral consideration. Finally, there is a
reflection on animal-based marketing systems as a special focus on their use as food.
2. Marketing systems: the theoretical object of macromarketing
Throughout their history, and especially since the 1970s, marketing activities and analyses have
been the subject of theoretical considerations associated with the exchange and the elements that
surround them (Bartels 1968 1974, Kotler and Levy 1969, Hunt 1976). It was during this same
period that the first systematic studies of macromarketing were developed, which began to adopt
an epistemological stance aimed at understanding the phenomena around the exchange from the
perspective of society (Bartels and Jenkins 1977, Hunt and Burnnet, 1982).
The purpose of macromarketing is to understand the exchanges in the social system, so the
interests of all subjects participating in the exchange are preserved (Layton and Grossbart, 2006).
Thus, the unit of analysis of macromarketing would be characterized as a system, with its inputs,
1039
processing activities and outputs. That would impact demanders and suppliers of exchanges,
generating positive and/or negative externalities for society. This is the understanding of Hunt
(2011), for whom the purpose of macromarketing is to analyze the exchange in marketing systems,
the impact and the consequences of them in society and vice versa. The question that arises, as a
result of this understanding, is related to what these marketing systems are.
Layton (2007) defined the aggregate marketing system as a network of individuals and
organizations related directly or indirectly through participation in exchanges, which create, order,
transform and make tangible and intangible products available, as a response to the demanders.
Such delimitation emphasizes the level of complexity that marketing systems encompass, since the
various actors operating within the system play roles both as suppliers of products and services as
well as demanders.
In general, the demanders are the public or private agents who receive, filter and consume
the available offers according to the assessment of their needs. The suppliers present, as a priority
role, the elaboration of products and services with performances aligned to the interests of their
demanders, in the sense of reaching their objectives. Such offers can be characterized as products,
services or ideas that companies, people and/or the State offer to society in search of a specific
counterpart. Alternative performances are offered to demanders. There is a search for offers that
generate, in most cases, positive results for the entities involved (Costa 2010).
Based on this perspective, it is appropriate to interpret the exchange in the view of the
dominant logic of services, which presupposes that the basis of the exchange process is the
performance associated with what it submits to the exchange, going beyond materiality itself
(Vargo and Lush 2004). The product, which is at the center of the marketing system, is considered
in a characterization based on the performance of what is consumed, independent of the material
support aspects.
That being said, several questions about the design and the elaboration of products are
elementary in the definition of an offer and in the efficiency of its performance. A brief discussion
of the product characterizing factors as a central element of the exchange will take place below.
3. The product as an operational platform for marketing systems
3.1. The classic product perspective
Central product discussions began in the mid-1920s under the assumption of a need to classify the
1040
commodities proposed by the school of thought of marketing commodity (Winzar 1992). It was in
the 1950s, with the school of Marketing Administration, that the product debate consolidated,
especially around the marketing composite in the sphere of micromarketing, including questions
regarding differentiation, segmentation, and the product life cycle (Hyman 2004, Shaw and Jones
2005).
In this context, it was Neil Borden with his article The Concept of Marketing Mix, published
by the Journal of Advertising Research in 1964 and reissued in 1984, who grouped a composite of
microelements (product planning, pricing, branding, distribution channels, personal sales,
advertising, promotion, packaging, presentation, service, use or handling and analysis of results) to
simplify the marketing management activity. These directions were the forerunners of McCarthy's
theoretical construction, which reduced the categories of analysis proposed by Borden to four
components (Product, Price, Promotion and Place), establishing the dominance of each of these
elements (Constantinides 2006).
It is possible to admit some flaws in the marketing mix model. Specifically, regarding the
product, it is primarily mentioned and offered individually, but most organizations offer the product
to consumers from a set of other products and services, making it the component that presents the
greatest amount of increasing peculiarities or incremental aspects in consumption (Van
Waterschoot and Van Den Bulte 1992, Goi 2009). However, independently of these conceptual and
managerial difficulties, the product assumes its centrality. Whenit comes to pricing, a value is
defined in relation to the product; when it refers to the place, the process of distribution and delivery
of the product is established; when communication (promotion) is mentioned, the product and its
benefits are disclosed to the market (Kent 1986).
In the context of product discussion in marketing theory, Murphy and Enis (1986) stated
that the product could be individually conceived as a physical good, a service or an idea,
emphasizing the alternative of a product if it is constituted through the convergence of some
possibilities of supply. Envisioning the need to expand the product concept, Saren and Tzokas
(1998) contributed with a perspective that fit the context of macromarketing analysis when
approaching the product as a construction within a process of signification and re-signification
among the participants in the exchange process.
This perspective brings light to a current debate about the product as the triggering element
of the exchange, which determines its centrality in the marketing system. According to this view,
the product would reach a level of subjective comprehensiveness that would surpass the
1041
transactional view between seller and buyer, insofar as the object is included in its definition,
understanding the inputs of materials to the process of product meaning as object.
3.2. The product and the dominant logic of services
The initial criticism made by the academic scholars to the marketing mix and, therefore, to the
marketing management school of thought, dealt with the need to expand its components, including
elements that characterize the services, with emphasis on the characterization of the component
product (Brunner 1989). Until the mid-1970s, there was a predominantthinking regarding the
dominant logic of goods, whose preoccupation was oriented towards production, that is,
understanding the marketing aspects of manufacturing and the transaction of physical goods (Vargo
and Lusch 2004, Vargo and Morgan 2005) of industrialized character.
In this context, from 1950 to 1970, marketing scholars promoted a debate about the
distinction between product and service, which was justified because the classic characterization
of services as intangible offers – inseparable in terms of production and consumption, perishable
and heterogeneous – would not be adequate to the adaptation of the managerial marketing tools of
the time (Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry 1985, Fisk, Brown and Bitner 1993). It was in the mid-
1980s, with the consolidation of the service marketing field, that such discussion became obsolete
in the new context of service organizations (Fisk, Brown and Bitner 1993).
For the marketing science, it is clear that this dichotomy could compromise the
understanding of its object, which is the exchange, and the process by which it occurs (Vargo, Lush
and Morgan, 2006). However, until the 2000s, the service marketing area remained academically
analyzed as a separate field of study of physical goods. Thus, the product could be defined based
on three elements of service: the primary, with material based on the good; the secondary, based
on performance to achieve the result; and the tertiary, based on the service execution process itself
(Moller 2006).
In parallel to this analysis, Vargo and Lusch (2004) recognized that marketing thinking was
undergoing a process of reconception, wherein a new dominant logic would be established and
would abandon the difficulty of distinguishing the exchange between tangible and intangible goods
for a perspective of integrative marketing of goods and services. Thus, the dominant logic of
services could be understood as a philosophical and conceptual reorientation of marketing offers,
insofar as the tangible and intangible elements would act together in the process of providing
services or of the product performance.
1042
The central premise of Vargo and Lush’s (2004) argument concerns the positioning of the
exchange process. According to the authors, the central element of the exchange is the performance
offered and demanded characterizing the service. This performance may or may not be based on
some material platform, but regardless of the level of materiality involved, what is actually in the
transaction is the performance and not the material content itself. For this reason, the authors argue
that the physical good or the merchandise are distribution mechanisms to provide services, and the
materiality of the good is the means by which the service delivers its performance.
In this way, the product conception by the dominant logic is amplified so that the exchange
becomes based on the service (on the transactional performance). This obviously has implications
inthe stakeholders’ view of the marketing system, including those directly involved in the
exchange(those who receive the externalities of the process).
Vargo (2011) understands that it is necessary to identify the stakeholders involved in the
exchange process, evaluate the desired performances in order to generate knowledge sharing
among these stakeholders of the marketing system, and establish a process of value creation. Given
this, it is clear that, by bringing together goods and services under the same logic, the authors
change the status of consumers of passive agents in the exchange relationship, positioning them as
operative resources, as subjects with skills to create and co-create value (Gummesson, Lush and
Vargo 2010).
The proposal of the dominant logic of services is based on the idea that the product is
generated from the transformation of specialized skills (knowledge and skills) into performances
(services) that generate benefits to the participants through the act of exchange (Lush and Vargo
2006). In this sense, we can affirm that the dominant logic of services leads to an understanding of
marketing activities and, consequently, of the marketing system, to a perspective in which
performance is the center of the exchange (Vargo 2011).
Critical judgment should be given to the means of conception and use of materiality in
marketing systems, considering the role of each of the stakeholders in the analysis of the
externalities generated by the consumption of a given performance. It is possible to understand that,
if there is inadequacy in the use of a certain material base, consequently, there is the generation of
the imbalance in the exchange. To counter this inadequacy, the marketing system must seek to meet
these demands with alternatives that guarantee the maintenance of its equilibrium and the reduction
of negative externalities for all the stakeholders within it.
1043
3.3. A typology of the product: classifying the material bases and the case of the animals
In view of the issues discussed above, it is necessary to expose the main classifications published
by marketing scholars for the product, considering the classical logic as an imperative for the
analysis of this as a physical good or as a service. Although this perspective has been surpassed by
the dominant logic of services, this discussion is necessary because it dominated the marketing
academy until the 1990s, and it is of fundamental importance for industrial and commercial
companies.
At first, it was in Copeland's work (1923) that the need to categorize products as purchase,
specialty and convenience goods was introduced. Referring to these products (physical goods),
Murphy and Enis (1986) made a historical survey about classification in the marketing literature
and, from this, developed their own typology. The authors’ proposal was to develop a product
taxonomy encompassing physical goods, ideas and services, whose perception included the classic
characteristics of inseparability, intangibility, perishability and heterogeneity. In this way, four
categories were created: convenience products, preferred products, purchase products and specialty
products.
With regard to the classic categorization of services, Lovelock (1983) developed a set of
groupings in order to specify the level of materiality employed in the nature of the service. In this
view, we have: a) actions that affect the bodies of people; b) actions that affect physical goods; c)
actions directed to the cognitive formation of people; and d) actions focused on intangible goods.
These four groupings directed the classification of services that the author developed and, from
then on, it was possible to observe the definition of a typology based on the degree of tangibility,
the intensity of use of the human resources, the objective of the service provider, at the level of this
ability and the degree of contact with the client.
Although these classifications have lasted (and there are still references in textbooks), the
fact is that they have proved to be insufficient, given the high level of complexity of the offers in
the marketing systems. Moreover, since materiality presupposes any offer, it cannot be considered
as a central differentiating factor between physical goods and services, as the dominant logic of
services exposes. What the consumer wants is the use value of that offer (the performance),
regardless of the physical aspects it presents.
The need for a discussion about the product categorization that considers the arguments of
the dominant logic of services, demands an elaboration that explores the diversity of the material
bases to put on performances. Considering the dimensions of materiality presented in products on
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a daily basis, consumers notice how differentiated the service can be, depending on the resources
that gave rise to the material bases and the other elements that complement it. Thus, we propose a
classification that seeks to converge the dominant logic of services with analysis of the material
basis with life (Lush and Vargo 2006).
Any performance is based on the transformation of resources into physical goods whose
process imbues them with value of use for the consumer. Such resources are often extracted from
the environment, and their nature is a determining factor for the elaboration of products. It is a fact
that, if the condition of existence of resources is taken as a starting point, it is possible to classify
them according to their application. In this way, natural resources can be categorized according to
the possession of life.
From a philosophical perspective, it is adopted the concept of life as a characteristic that
certain natural phenomena possess, turning them apt to reproduce or govern themselves or the
totality of the two phenomena (Abbagnano 2007). Although such a definition has a descriptive
character and does not recognize that a characteristic of the phenomenon implies the recognition
of a principle or cause itself, it will be used as a reference for this study.
Adopting the existence of life as a presupposition for the definition of categories and
classifying the products according to the resources from which they originate, there will be products
with origin or material basis in vital resources, such as, those of plant and animal origin; and also
products of non-vital resources origin, such as those of mineral origin. It is interesting to discuss
products originating from vital resources, which can be subdivided into vegetable origin and animal
origin. Food products (oils, flour and beverages) are an example of the first group.
More specifically, the vital resources of animal origin will be dealt here, in view of the
debate about the balance in the marketing systems undertaken, and the purpose of evidencing the
imbalance by disregarding the product of animal origin. Then, a set of categories that place the use
of animals in the marketing systems that employ them is defined.
In the first category, there is the use of the animal as a resource for the workforce, as the
animals that carry load and are used for traction (cattle and horses) since the dawn of civilization.
The second category would be characterized by the use of animals as a resource for the
entertainment industry, which encompasses the most diverse entertainment organizations such
as film studios, theme parks, sporting events and zoos. The third category inserts the animal as a
resource for the fashion and aesthetics industry by encompassing organizations that use animal
skin in clothing, footwear and accessories. In the fourth, animal life would be a resource for
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science, as well as being an input for the production and testing of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
Finally, there is the fifth category, which places animal life as a resource for the food industry
and is responsible for sustaining a set of marketing systems that are based on the reproduction,
creation and slaughter of the most diverse animal species for human food consumption.
We can say that the categories mentioned can be reflected as problematic when considered
in the sphere of marketing systems. For example, in the analysis of the animal as an input of the
labor force, it is observed that animal traction and transportation are fundamental for the
subsistence of economies based on family farming, as it happens in many cities of the northeast of
Brazil. It can also be mentioned that, within the entertainment industry, there are cities that create
marketing systems around parks and zoos, which depend on the exposure of animal life to
conditioned behavior for visitors. In the sphere of the fashion industry, there is a global marketing
system that strengthens the consumption of animals as an input for the production of clothes of all
genders, in addition to the use of animal skins. One of the most ethically questioned categories is
the animal-based industry in pharmaceutical testing, which, like the fashion industry, has the most
powerful conduct among pharmaceutical organizations for a global marketing system.
Given this classification, the food industry is the object of discussion of this article, in order
to analyze the equilibrium of the food marketing system from the perspective of disregarding the
moral status of the animal stakeholder in the offer of performances to the consumer market. In this
way, the philosophical foundations of ethics in marketing are presented, exposing the different
aspects of the demanders and suppliers, besides conceiving a moral position to the product.
4. The equilibrium of marketing systems: considerations about justice, stakeholders and
externalities
The discussions about the establishment of balance in the marketing system raise considerations
about the need for a fair combination of interests between the parties involved in a given social
action. The equilibrium benchmarks in macromarketing are, as Ferrel’s (2008) recommend, the
theory of justice and stakeholder theory.
- The question of justice
Pelletier (2010) argues that justice is founded on the idea that social actors need to understand what
is good, making such an understanding a moral regulator of society. Under the scope of
macromarketing analysis, this article relates the concept of justice to the broader sense of morality,
involving evaluations that are performed by social actors who conduct comparisons of behaviors
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and seek to deal with their inadequacy in relation to the existing morality. Ferrel’s (2008) argue
that justice is established on the basis of a morality that defines the norms of application and
distribution of benefits, consequently corresponding to the maintenance of a balance between the
benefits and charges that are objects of a given situation (in this article, within the context of
consumption). The authors classify justice in three different spheres: procedural, interactional and
distributive.
In marketing, procedural justice is related to the application of procedural actions in solving
operational problems to the very operation of the processes of exchange in a more general way.
Interaction justice, however, concerns the interpersonal dimension, considering the individuals
involved in the exchange relationship, including the subjects indirectly impacted by the practices
of the actors involved. Distributive justice is perceived as the maintenance of the most adequate
distribution in the processes and results of a marketing system, with the stakeholders being the unit
of analysis of the consequences of the actions of the participants.
The concept of distributive justice has been applied more broadly to allocation problems,
that is, to the obligation that certain agents have to define the proper distribution of benefits and
costs among all those affected by an exchange action in the marketing system (Klein 2008). Findlay
(1982) argues that the concept of distributive justice is guided primarily by the idea of giving the
social subject what belongs to them, resulting in the discussion that three grounds direct the
definition of belonging, namely: the right, the merit and what is needed.
The first ground is that of the right, which establishes a formally legitimized standard as
what is right. The second ground relates to the merit, which shows that each person is entitled to
compensation for their contribution. The third ground treats the notion of distributive justice as the
granting of what is necessary to the agent of the marketing system. In general, these three
approaches problematize the definition of distributive justice, given that each one of them directs
what is fair to different paths. In face of such uncertainty, it is up to the individuals involved to
evaluate and seek a common denominator that solves the conflicting alternatives to build a
relationship with a lasting equilibrium, minimizing the outputs that compromise the foundations of
distributive justice and maximize those that favor the maintenance of these principles. Obviously,
this view is perfectly applicable to the concept of marketing systems.
Given that the meaning and application of fair distribution must be based on the
interpretation of what is right or good for the individuals involved, the marketing system must be
operationalized from the best ethical-moral content of a society (Pelletier 2010). Distributive justice
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is a more present component of macromarketing studies (Seiders and Berry 1998, Laczniak and
Murphy 2008). The reference view is that a fair marketing system develops a view of its structures,
policies and practices, distributing benefits and penalties in the exchange process and considering
the nature and adequacy of the procedures of the system activities.
In general, the application of the concept of justice is not only based on the overall result of
the marketing system, that is, on the efficiency achieved by the system as a whole, but it is primarily
related to the way in which these results are distributed among agents. Thus, the impact of a given
action on the marketing system should be seen as a form of allocation of costs and benefits involved
in the action.
- The stakeholders’ view
Considering such statement, it is possible to characterize the equilibrium from the point of view of
the parties involved in the marketing system as the subjects that develop some type of legitimate
interest in the actions carried out in that context, which constitutes the concept of stakeholders.
This understanding justifies the view of Ferrel’s (2008) when considering that systems equilibrium
undergoes the view of the distributive justice theory and stakeholder theory.
The classical perspective understands a stakeholder as any individual (human being) or
entity that has an interest in building a direct relationship with organizations (Schwartz and Carrol,
2007). The broadening of the scope of stakeholder application was fundamentally due to the
adoption of diverse normative bases, such as moral rights, utilitarian philosophy, distributive
justice, libertarianism and equity. In this sense, the perspective indicated in Schwartz and Carrol
(2007), in which stakeholders are defined as any constituent entity that has an interest in the action
of an organization, is adopted here. It is known that there is a risk in this comprehension, which, as
indicated by Schwartz and Carrol (2007), has already included generic elements in the stakeholder
condition, such as society and nature; but the recurrent use of the stakeholder idea seems more
coherent to describe the agents involved in the trade than the view originally proposed by Freeman
in 1984, that focused the concept on the narrower dimension of economic agents.
Based on the understanding that the concept of stakeholders is part of the classic scope of
the exchange, when considering all the agents that are impacted by the exchange process, we can
affirm that the equilibrium in the marketing system is established when there is a match between
the offers and the needs of the various actors involved. Taking into consideration that organizations
need to make available offers that are consistent with the expectations and consumption needs of
1048
the social subjects or those interested in the exchange process, it is then assumed that, if this does
not happen, there may be a mismatch in the exchange system that triggers an imbalance impact on
the indirect agents of this relationship.
Within the scope of the marketing system, this vision expands beyond the equivalence
between the objects of the exchange, insofar as factors are included in the scope of the exchange
that can impact the direct participants themselves (suppliers and demanders), society and the other
stakeholders (among them, the State, social institutions and the environment).
Considering the stakeholders’ view, any of these stakeholders are agents of law in the
marketing system, and cannot, in a context of equilibrium, have an agent or subject in that system
that does not have their interests properly considered. In other words, equilibrium is established
when the interests of all agents of the marketing system are met, so that a balanced view cannot
fail to recognize, track, and incorporate the interests of these agents into the system itself, including
when agents are unable to verbally manifest them.
- A third element: the question of externalities
Externalities are a third component that is considered relevant in the view of the equilibrium of
exchange systems. In fact, the equilibrium can be characterized by the various externalities that are
constructed from the functioning of the marketing systems. Nason (1989) argues that externalities
are constituted as the unanticipated consequences of the exchange process, which impact direct
agents (demanders and suppliers) and indirect agents (society, animals, the environment and the
State). Thus, a balanced marketing system is also one that contributes with positive externalities
and minimizes negative externalities for all parts involved.
Although Nason (1989) strongly contributed to the studies of externalities, his view did not
address the complexity of the marketing system and the relationships that the stakeholders
established within it. As regards the evaluation of externalities by the scope of macromarketing,
Fry and Polonsky (2004) stated that, when the exchange is carried out, a set of stakeholders is
affected by its effects, and there may be great complexity and heterogeneity of these results, given
that the impact of these actions may depend on the proximity of the agents of the marketing system.
As Forsé and Parodi (2009) discuss, there are several criteria of stakeholders’ legitimation,
in the sense that the nature of the agent and the context of conflict in which they are inserted in the
marketing system determines which ones should have their interests considered. In this way, it is
possible to affirm that the equilibrium in the marketing system is based on the assumption that all
the stakeholders involved have their interests recognized and legitimized before the others and,
1049
therefore, the principles of distributive justice direct the externalities which belong to each of the
participating subjects.
Considering the orientations of this discussion and based on the ideas of distributive justice,
stakeholder and externality, a broad view on balance in the marketing system and the role of each
agent for the maintenance of this system are defined. Thus, we proceed to a conceptual debate about
the equilibrium of marketing systems when analyzing the main direct and indirect agents that act
in the institutional context of the exchange, with emphasis to the central nucleus of this process:
the product.
5. The equilibrium in marketing systems
In the light of the discussions above, the interpretation is that marketing systems are composed of
a set of interdependent parts that must be in balance so the idea of a fair distribution between
benefits and sacrifices reaches all stakeholders involved, minimizing negative externalities and
potentiating positive externalities.
To understand this idea and the idea of equilibrium in a more concrete perspective, it is
pertinent to analyze each of the agents of the exchange process. Considering first the supplier, the
role of this stakeholder in a balanced marketing system is related to the elaboration of offers that
are coherent with the socioeconomic, cultural and moral standards of the context in which it is
inserted and, obviously, the search for results that are compatible with the effort expended to make
this offer and to meet the demands.
In these terms, the suppliers (which can be companies, public or social organizations, as
well as other entities that develop offers in the marketing systems), to achieve good results in the
marketing system, elaborate offers that are in accordance with the needs identified in the
demanders. In return for sacrifices, the suppliers are rewarded with a set of benefits, such as
profitability and profit (as is the case of companies), scope of the purpose of social interest (in the
case of public and social organizations), improvement of moral conduct (as in the case of religious
organizations, for example), profits, among others.
Naturally, there are externalities arising from the performance of these agents. As positive
externalities, and taking as a reference the performance of companies, it can be cited the satisfaction
of the demanders with the “consumption” of the services produced by these subjects, besides the
payment of taxes, economic development, equilibrium in the distribution system, among others.
The conduct of suppliers may also trigger negative externalities for different stakeholders, as offers
made in the context of market exchanges may, for example, contribute to the spread of undesirable
1050
consumer behavior or be based on marketing management practices that seek to deceive the
consumer in some way.
Demand agents operate in the marketing system in search of offers that satisfy their needs
in terms of some performance of their interest and, on the other hand, offer their financial resources,
loyalty, satisfaction and adherence to the behaviors promulgated by the suppliers. Although the
consumer is sometimes one of the weakest parts of the marketing system, in order for their conduct
to ensure equilibrium in that system, it is necessary that the exercise of good morality is part of
their consumption actions.
Obviously, demander’s role in the marketing system can generate impacts for the other
stakeholders. For instance, positive externalities are exposedby the adoption of an idea or behavior
which is appropriate to a good morality, in the case of offering “social marketing”, for example; on
the other hand, negative externalities are generated by the consumption of products that cause
defects or damage to health (such as beverages) or that contribute to the dissemination of exchange
practices that have an impact on the State and society (such as consumption of pirated products).
In the institutional context of the exchange, the indirect agents of the marketing systems
were also identified. In this context, there is the example of the State. In this case, even if the State
is positioned as an indirect agent in the marketing system, given the complexity of the supply and
demand activities performed by this agent, the influence of the State on marketing systems is
evident when regulatory actions are carried out to adjust the activities of the demanders and
suppliers, enabling protection to society and individuals. To do so, the State and its representations
spend financial and technical resources to understand the cultural, behavioral and moral factors that
can destabilize the equilibrium of a given marketing system, in order to operationalize actions that
seek to resolve such conduct. There are several state actions to maintain the equilibrium in the
marketing system, with regulatory actions and social awareness programs that generate benefits at
the macro level both for the actors involved in the exchange itself and society itself in general,
including the reduction of risky behaviors of these subjects and/or by a greater collection of taxes.
From a macro perspective, “society” in generic terms can be taken as an indirect agent by
institutionalizing delimiters about consumption practices and organizational actions that cause
problems for the stakeholders involved in the marketing system being analyzed. In this way, it is
possible to designate consumption behaviors that promote externalities, such as welfare and quality
of life for society, while at the same time corroborating behaviors that harm other stakeholders by
incorporating elements of counterpoint to the actions of the State and organizations.
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Considering the construction presented in the previous item, including the more general
view of the concept of stakeholders, this article recognizes some agents associated specifically to
the product as stakeholders, especially in the case wherein these agents are “owners of interests”
(in the philosophical sense of interest) in the functioning of the system. The view associated, for
example, with respect to the environment when the “consumption” of a tourism product can be
framed as an aspect of “moral consideration” of the product of the tourism marketing system (if we
consider, for example, that destination and its peculiarities are the product of the touristic offer).
In general, little has been discussed about the imbalances of the marketing system related
to the product itself, mainly based on the analysis of the material basis of a performance of
consumption. It is argued here, however, that the equilibrium view of marketing systems is
developed from a moral consideration of the product. That is, it is understood that there is a real
need to build a well-defined analysis framework for incorporating product-related topics into a
more appropriate definition of a balanced marketing system.
Generally speaking, it can be said that the product as a component of the marketing system
may involve agents who receive benefits, if they are subjected to transformation and improvement
before and during the exchange. On the other hand, it is possible that elements or agents associated
with the product are strongly impaired in the functioning of the exchange systems, for example,
those marketing systems based on the use of animals, such as entertainment systems based on
animal suffering, like rodeos, or the meat-based food consumption system. In the following item,
some preliminary notes on this latter system are developed, trying to emphasize the imbalance
defect.
6. The (dis)equilibrium of the meat consumption system based on meat and its alternatives
Reflections on “meat” as a product are portrayed by most of the studies and discourses developed
with emphasis on hedonic (the pleasure of eating meat) and nutritional value (the nutritional benefit
that the meat has and which is necessary for human consumption). Obviously, these are
characteristics of “meat” which represent, in the above concept, the performances of interest of the
consumers, performances of which “meat” is the material base. The central problem of the use of
animal meat to attend these performances lies in the fact that such appropriation of the product is
derived from the extirpation of the life of a subject that participates in the system without having
any choice to be in it or not.
Obviously, if we take the referential of the associated performance and the assumption that
such performances can be tried from other material bases, then it is possible to suppose that there
1052
is no justification for the use of this resource, other than that associated to the ease of access, control
and tradition (of animal use). Indeed, in a preliminary analysis, in the case of the performance of
“nutritional benefit”, there are currently valid alternatives that allow the exclusion of the animal
from human food, insofar as it becomes nutritionally unjustified before the alternatives of
nutritional composition of plant origin. If there are alternatives for generating this benefit, it seems
that it is unjustifiable the argument in favor of maintaining meat consumption for its nutritional
value, since the adoption of vegetable-based diets can replace the animal being without depreciating
food consumption patterns.
As far as the hedonic dimension is concerned, most people prefer a diet that includes meat
for the taste of that food. However, vegetarianism and the various options of vegetable-based diets
appear to be hedonically viable. In other words, without losing the hedonic benefit, and apart from
a (small) cost of adaptation, pure vegetarianism and veganism are already consolidated options of
food with moral consideration of the right to life of animals. There are still in these food traditions
a concern with other socially relevant values, such as sustainable practices of production and
consumption, fair trade, ecological vision, and so on.
That being said, it is necessary to reconsider the ethical aspects that make “meat” a product
as its base is associated with the life of the animal and the need not to use a material base (the
animal) that must be killed to generate results that other alternatives can provide. It is a fact that
for a more in-depth discussion on the ethical aspects of moral consideration of animals in the food
marketing system, an analysis in the light of environmental ethics and animal ethics is fundamental.
7. A few more considerations
The present paper starts from the perspective of macromarketing to argue that marketing systems
need to be balanced a priori by the consideration of the product and its material bases. In the case
reported here, the product of animal origin as an (dis)equilibrium agent coming from the materiality
employed by the food industry. In fact, the approach to the marketing system explored in this paper
points to important issues for the concept of equilibrium, encompassing the interests of all
stakeholders from the standpoint of justice and efficiency, and recognizing that a product of animal
origin needs to be aligned with the increase of moral consideration to animals to ensure the
reduction of the externalities of those involved as the material basis of the food marketing system.
In a reflection of ethics in marketing, it is necessary to understand that, from the
qualification of the balance in the food marketing system, we can indicate levels of moralization of
the agents responsible for the supply of products and the adoption of a nutritional discourse that
1053
exclude animals as food base, to enable consumers to reflect on the moral problem that stems from
the consumption of meat. In this scope, it is fundamental to recognize the problems associated with
the practices of the meat industry and the treatment given to the animals, at the same time as there
are viable alternatives of feeding that favor the moral consideration of the animals and the
consequent search for the maintenance of a system of marketing food that meets the interests of the
agents directly and indirectly involved.
Still based on products of animal origin, it is possible to cite the entertainment industry and
the cosmetics industry as unbalanced marketing systems. The former uses animals as resources for
human entertainment and for this reason they need to maintain good living conditions. In this
marketing system, the animal is one of the elements that even benefit from the functioning of the
system, since the maintenance of its well-being, its quality of life and the reduction of the possibility
of extinction of certain animal species are decisive factors for the activity of the organization. Thus,
it is possible to affirm that this system is at some balanced level, although the moral foundations
that support this equilibrium are anthropocentric, in exposing the animal as an object of
consumption to be contemplated. But it is still a problematic context because of the coercive
condition imposed on animals, as is the case of zoos, whose severe cases of imprisonment and
enslavement of various species of animals are widely exposed in social media.
The medicine and cosmetics industries employ animals as an object for product generation.
In this field, animals are bred for tests that, while guaranteeing their lives for a certain period of
time, potentially generate pain and physical and psychological distress by the application of
substances that may impair some of their organic functions, such as vision, hearing and smell.
Although the animal does not constitute a direct material base, its use, often with non-animal
alternatives, defines a potentially unbalanced system, since it disregards the use of other resources
for the improvement of its product.
Thus, this paper is concluded by considering that the proposal brings advances in the
discussion on equilibrium in the marketing systems by emphasizing the need to consider all the
stakeholders involved in the exchange practices. Based on this, a product typology is proposed here
that evidences life as a characteristic to be considered in animal-based marketing systems, to
examine the food marketing system as a case of disequilibrium. Based on this proposal, new
analyzes aligned with the philosophical discussion of environmental ethics and animal ethics are
necessary, as well as empirical research to verify the equilibrium alternatives of animal-based
marketing systems.
1054
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Vargo, Stephen L. and Lusch, Robert F. (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing”.
Journal of Marketing, 68 (1), 1-17.
Vargo, S. L. and Morgan, Fred W. (2005), “Services in society and academic thought: a historical
analysis”. Journal of Macromarketing, 25(1), 42-53.
Vargo, Stephen. L.; Lusch, Robert. F. and Morgan, Fred W. (2006), “Historical Perspectives on
Service-Dominant Logic” in ME Sharpe (Ed.) The service-dominant logic of marketing: dialog,
debate, and directions. New York: NY.
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Macromarketing, 31 (125).
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mix revisited”. Journal of Marketing, 56, 83-93.
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Thought”. Journal of Macromarketing, 26 (2), 224-232.
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Management, 8 (3), 259-268.
Zeithmal, Valarie a.; Parasuraman, a. and Berry, Leonard L. (1985), “Problems and strategies in
services marketing”. Journal of Marketing, 49, 33-46.
1057
Distributive Justice and Dignity
Dimensions- Integrative Justice
Model and Commercial Surrogates
in India
Sujit Raghunathrao Jagadale114, Institute of Rural Management Anand
(IRMA), India
Marketing deals with the management of exchanges (Mascarenhas, Kesavan, and Bernacchi
2008) and, culminates when people decide to satisfy their needs and wants by engaging in
exchanges (Bagozzi 1975, Buzzell 1999), not without its’ effects on primary transacting parties
and, residual shaping force on society having ethical ramifications (Preston 1994). Exchanges
make an impact on the society (Laczniak and Murphy 2006) where exchange relations are
‘socially constructed’ and, are influenced by the cultural meanings of products bought and sold
(Zelizer 1983) and also by power relations (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). The relative power of
actors over supply and demand of what is being exchanged and by their relative dependence on
that (resource dependence) influences the exchange relationships. Exchanges, hence marketing
systems operate in a broader ‘social context' making it imperative to evaluate outcomes regarding
fairness and justness, or rightness on all marketplace parties (Laczniak and Murphy 1985,
Laczniak and Murphy 1993). However, the broader question of what constitutes ‘just' market
remains when engaged in an exchange with impoverished exchange partners. In these contexts a
formulation of models, frameworks, or protocols specify the nature of distributive fairness (Hart
2007, Rangan and McCaffrey 2004).
1058
The non-traditional exchange of commercial surrogacy that takes place in an open
marketplace (Rao 2003) is defined as “an arrangement in which a woman agrees to a pregnancy
achieved through assisted reproductive technology (ART), in which neither of the gametes belong
to her or her husband, with the intention to carry it and hand over the child to the person or
persons for whom she is acting as a surrogate” (The ART (Regulation) Bill 2014, p. 6).
Commercial surrogacy is the newer form of exchange occurring in an exacting socioeconomic
and cultural setting giving rise to a distinctive market systems and newer social relationships. An
exchange system in question is complex involving the multitude of stakeholders, in which,
market and contractual commercial transactions have been inserted into a domestic moral
economy of exchange and kin relations (Sama- Resource Group for Women and Health 2010).
Indian setting of commercial surrogacy is unusual with the enormous socioeconomic and
cultural differences between the buyers and sellers of surrogacy in India, and the laws regulating
the surrogate-client relationship missing (Pande 2011). There is consensus and concern among
scholars about the vulnerability of surrogates to exploitation and coercion (Sarvanan 2010).
Surrogacy potentialize surrogates’ bodies, entailing risks of surrogates’ health, stability of their
families, and their reputations (Vora 2013) and thus dignity. Surrogates' destitute socioeconomic
circumstances and desperation due to the household financial hardships add to the risk of
exploitation (Bardale 2009). Surrogate's life circumstances may dictate that health and reputation
risks associated with the contract pregnancy are worth taking for them (Bailey 2014). However,
as Nayak (2014) argues that in its current context, it would be difficult to envisage surrogacy
arrangements operating in a just and ethical manner- that is, arrangements that are equally
responsive to the interests of all involved parties. It ensue that justice and ethics must govern the
current framework of commercial surrogacy.
An unequal power relation between the parties involved raises a question of the
distributive justice, an obligation to accurately distribute benefits and costs among all affected by
an action or policy (Beauchamp and Bowie 2004), particularly, the weaker exchange partner. It is
concerned with the allocation of outcomes, i.e., the fairness of outcomes received (Crul and
Zinkhan 2008). Social location of surrogates plays a vital role in determining the distributive
justice in the process. Moreover, commercial surrogacy is stigmatized, it is compared with sex-
work, and baby selling, compromising the dignity of surrogates. However, the dignity dimension
in surrogacy remains to be appropriately addressed. Some argue that contract pregnancy degrade
1059
women, where their dignity is hold ransom, by treating their bodies as factories and by paying
them not to bond with the children they bear (Sandel 1998). The dignity “pertains to the intrinsic
humanity divested of all socially imposed roles and norms…it pertains to the…individual
regardless of her position in society” (Berger 1983, p. 176). Catholic social tradition underscores
the inherent worth of an individual and keeps people above the things. The gross utilitarianism
hampers the principle of human dignity (Kelman 1998) where human dignity is inviolable (Rosen
2012). Rosen (2012) distinguished four meanings of the concept: dignity as status, dignity as
behavior, dignity as inherent value, and dignity as respect.
Noting the changes in the global business horizon where the multi-national corporations
are increasingly engaging with impoverished consumers and producers, Santos and Laczniak
formulated the Integrative Justice Model (IJM) (2009). It is a normative framework to engage
with impoverished exchange partners. IJM underscores that the globalization and expansion of
markets create exchanges with the balance of power in favour of stronger partner. The condition
is apposite for an exploitation of a weaker. IJM aims at enhancing ‘fairness and equity’ in market
exchanges involving the impoverished consumer, and lay foundation of ‘prototype’ markets
building capablities of poor (Santos and Laczniak 2009). It comprises of ethical elements that
ought to be present when ‘justly’ exchanging with the underprivileged. Furthermore, IJM aims to
achieve surrogates’ dignity, restoring their worth as a human being, not tied to any outcome- a
child or an input-money.
Calibrating a policy response to commercial surrogacy should necessarily be preceded by
an understanding of what attributes each participant brings to a transaction. Exchange partners
and their agents may have different motivations and, contributions.
We, using constructionist approach, problematize distributive justice and dignity
dimensions of commercial surrogacy. Furthermore, using IJM, we endeavor addressing the public
policy issues involved so as to lay principles to create surrogacy exchange ‘just’ and ‘fair’ for
surrogates. We conducted 29 interviews with various stakeholders in two provinces of India. Data
analysis is work in progress.
1060
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1061
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Responsible Marketing,” Journal of Macromarketing, 26 (2), 154-177.
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1063
The German Tafel System’s
Missions and Conflicts:
Approaching a Context-Sensitive
and Discursive Understanding
Ingrid Becker115, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg,
Germany
Michaela Haase116, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Extended Abstract
This paper addresses the Tafel Deutschland e.V. (registered association) that runs food banks or
pantries in Germany. At present, 934 food banks are registered under the trademark of the umbrella
organization Tafel Deutschland e.V. (German Federation of Food Pantries). The expression “Tafel”
literarily translates as “dining table” or “meal.” The Tafel organizations provide more than 1.5
million people with excess food in 2,100 local distribution centers all over Germany (Tafel
Deutschland 2017). They rely on the work of 60,000 volunteers (Tafel Deutschland 2017) who
collect and redistribute wasted, but still edible food from private donors such as supermarkets or
bakeries. Sixty percent of the Tafel organizations are projects of charitable or churchly associations
such as the German Red Cross, Diakonie, or Caritas and operate under their sponsorship; forty
percent are independent registered associations (Tafel Deutschland 2017).
115 [email protected] 116 [email protected]
1064
The Tafel organizations are non-profit organizations, which integrate resources and are engaged in
value creation processes aiming at bringing economic, social, and ecological value about for their
stakeholders. We hold the view that there are two missions (Bechetti and Borzaga, 2010) pursued
by the Tafel organizations: a social mission and an ecological mission – nicely expressed by Tafel
founder Sabine Werth: “We take what is superfluous and forward it to those who are in need of it”
(ARD Mediathek, 2018; translation by the authors). The value-creation processes of the Tafel
organizations draw on an established network of relationships between the many single Tafel
organizations and their cooperation partners or stakeholders.
The Tafel organizations’ objectives and practices and what they mean for the Tafel organizations
themselves, their stakeholders, and the public are as essential for the development of the
provisioning system, its effectiveness and efficiency, as the resources gained from private and
public stakeholders. The flow of resources is dependent on the legitimacy of the Tafel organizations
and, with it, on the acceptance of their activities and the willingness of stakeholders to provide
resources for this work. If looming or actual conflicts among stakeholders or stakeholder groups
become visible to the public, stakeholders may restrict or stop the provisioning of resources. In
Germany, the media reported on several conflicts among Tafel customers or between Tafel
customers and volunteers (Rieck, 2017).
Conflicts of Tafel organizations mingle with criticism of welfare policies and cuts of the social
security system associated with increasing risks of sinking below the poverty line for the
unemployed, a rise in low income jobs, both accompanied by social fragmentation. A local conflict
at the Tafel site in Essen where food supply was scarce, and registration temporarily limited to
people holding a German passport, led to a national debate on interdependent phenomena such as
poverty, social segregation and integration. How the Tafel organizations manage to deal with
conflicts is important to their self-understanding and influences the public interpretation of their
activities or their legitimacy, respectively. As a consequence of conflict situations reported in the
media and of discussions about poverty and social segregation in Germany (Anthony, 2017;
Hildebrandt 2013; Selke, 2013), the Tafel organizations deemed it proper to explain themselves –
who they are, what they do and how they do it – to the public (ARD Mediathek, 2018).
About thirty years after the foundation of the Tafel organizations, we wonder if the two missions of
the Tafel organizations or their public perception might have changed and if such a change
influences the Tafel organizations’ performance and future perspectives. We analyze the
1065
understanding and acceptance of the two missions with regard to the conflicts taking place in Tafel
organizations and the ways these organizations tried to deal with their conflicts. Our empirical study
reveals challenges in the Tafel organizations’ work and how the Tafel organizations in our sample
tried to come to grips with them. The strength of our approach is based on a distinctive
consideration of Tafel work and conflict: through a socio-cultural lens, we conceptualize and
analyze the Tafel work on the basis of social context and symbolic meaning.
Thompson’s (1990, p. 151) model of meaning construction in social contexts guided our analysis.
As a theoretical grid, it paves the way to a systematic discussion of the Tafel system’s spacio-
temporal setting, fields of interaction, social institutions, and social structure, in combination with
studying critical patterns of discourse. Thompson’s methodological framework – called depth
hermeneutics (or depth interpretation) – allowed us to integrate aspects relevant for the
understanding and explanation of activities of the Tafel organizations and the potential threats to
their legitimacy. The adjective “depth” placed in front of the nouns “interpretation” or
“hermeneutics” expresses the connection of different levels of analysis required for the integration
of subjective and objective factors – or of understanding and explanation – in the analysis of the
social world.
For a context-sensitive analysis, we reviewed the Tafel literature, followed media coverage, and
conducted interviews with representatives of and/or volunteers in Tafel organizations in Berlin
(city), Brandenburg (country), Nuremberg and Erlangen. We identify how members in Tafel
organizations position themselves when they feel exposed to conflict. By way of example, we
analyze the discourse that followed the decision by the Tafel organization in Essen to limit
registration to people holding a German passport. The analysis focuses on critical patterns of
meaning construing social processes and views these findings against the background of the social
context and other organizational responses within the Tafel field.
1066
References
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Bechetti, Leonardo and Carlo Borzaga (2010), The Economics of Social Responsibility: The World
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1067
Challenges and
opportunities in the sharing
economy II
Track Chair: Nicole Koenig-Lewis
Co-Chair(s): Sabine Benoit
Kristina Wittkowski
Carmela Bosangit
1068
Changing roles – consumers’
transition from user to service
provider in the sharing economy
Bodo Lang 117-118,, University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand
Sobia Mughal, University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand
Introduction
Over the last decade, alternative platforms have emerged to deliver and experience goods and
services rather than through traditional ownership (Bardhi & Eckhardt 2012). Typically, these
alternatives are collectively known as the sharing economy (SE) (Benoit et al. 2017). The SE is
defined as a peer-to-peer-based activity of sharing the access to goods and services through
community-based online services (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Belk 2014; Ertz, Durif and Arcand
2016; Hamari, Sjoklint and Ukkonen 2015).
Importantly, the SE dramatically changes the roles typically played by consumers. In the SE,
consumers can fulfil two critical roles, namely “users” (who consume goods and services) and
“providers” (who provide goods and services). To our knowledge, this is the first study to focus on
the motives for the role switch from user (e.g. an Airbnb guest) to provider (e.g. an Airbnb host)
and to map this transition process. Investigating this role switch is important because the SE can
only be successful if the demand and supply for goods and services is well matched (Botsman
2010). Furthermore, users who have switched roles may be important mechanisms in improving the
quality of goods and services in the SE and they may also drive better social engagement across
117 Corresponding author 118 [email protected]
1069
these two critical roles in the SE. Lastly, this paper extends role theory by investigating the motives
of role switching (Broderick 1998).
Literature Review
The SE has attracted much research attention (e.g. Belk 2014; Hamari, Sjoklint and Ukkonen 2015)
including macromarketing (Campana, Chatzidakis and Laamanen 2017). However, important gaps
remain unexplored. Specifically, much research, particularly in marketing, has been conducted on
why consumers become users in the SE. Similarly, much research has been conducted, particularly
in management (Benkler, 2004), as to why consumers may decide to become providers in the SE.
However, to date no study has investigated the motives behind why consumers may transition from
user to provider in the SE.
Role theory is a useful framework for people-based services (Broderick, 1999; Broderick, 1998) as
it is derived from social psychology and studies the behaviour of people (Solomon et al. 1985).
Since the SE is heavily people-oriented, role theory is a relevant perspective to understand the
reasons why consumers may transition from user to provider in the SE. This paper aims to extend
the study of role theory by looking at the impacts and motives of role switching constructed by
Broderick (1998) in the context of the sharing economy where digital platforms are involved.
Methodology
Because of the lack of prior work in this area, an exploratory study was deemed most appropriate.
Qualitative data was gathered via ten in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a sample of Airbnb
hosts who were previously Airbnb guests. Interviewees came from a variety of backgrounds which
indicates that the roles of user and provider in the SE have a broad appeal (Table 2). Interviews
were recorded and transcribed to aid analysis. A series of pilot interviews had shown that Uber
drivers were predominantly taxi drivers, thus Uber drivers were excluded from this study.
Transcriptions were thematically coded using open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin, 1998).
Results and discussion
The first insight generated by this study is the “user-provider transition model” (Figure 1).
The model was built on consumers’ experiences and verified by participants. The top section of the
model depicts consumers’ role change from user to loyal provider.
1070
Thematic analysis revealed two main drivers of the role switch from user to provider: instrumental
and social-hedonic motivations. Instrumental motives include economic benefits and convenience.
Economic benefits can be received in both monetary form and via digital coupons for consumption
(Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Hamari et al. 2015). Convenience refers to consumers desire to earn “a
decent return without much effort” (Tom, male), which highlights the attraction of being relatively
passive and the appeal of leveraging assets, rather than engaging in labour. Social hedonic motives
on the other hand are experienced through prosocial behaviours and added value (Hwang and
Griffiths 2017). Consumers experience emotional rewards by building social connections (Aknin et
al. 2013) which was described by many study participants as a motivator for switching from user to
provider. Lastly, the SE role change is experienced through increased responsibilities such as an
expansion of tasks within the service encounter (Broderick 1998). This idea of role expansion was
seen as positive and was echoed by many participants.
Analysis revealed a ‘transformation of self’ taking place in stages 3 and 4 of the user-provider
transition model (Figure 1). This transition consists of financial transformation and personal
transformation. Financial transformation consists of goal-oriented income and supplementary
income. Both types of financial transformations imply more disposable income resulting in
increasing consumption level, especially for lower-income consumers. This, in turn, is seen as an
avenue to a better quality of life.
The second major factor – personal transformation –consists of three aspects: enrichment of life,
learning and vicarious living. Enrichment of life and learning are inextricably linked. Consumers’
role switch challenges traditional role theory and its assumption that service transitions result in
“mindless” or mundane behaviour. Participants shared various examples of having to learn new
things while playing the unfamiliar role of provider. Knowledge and skills gained from playing the
unfamiliar role of provider tended to have a positive effect on participants. Analysis also showed
that sharing an experience with new individuals enhances one’s own appreciation of the experience
(Russell and Levy 2012).
Airbnb also provides opportunities for storytelling to revive social life and reconstruct a positive
nostalgic memory (Rusell and Levy 2012). Such mechanisms allows participants to live vicariously
through the shared experiences of others (i.e. their guests): “…there are people that have travelled
around the world so we really kind of like seeing people, you know, it, it keeps us young. You
know, we’re not travelling anymore, we’re stuck here with mortgage and kids…” (Bri, female).
1071
Conclusion
This study investigated consumers which thus far had not been considered by SE researchers: users
who change roles and become providers. This paper proposes a four stage “user-provider transition
model” and the motives behind why consumers switch roles. Lastly, by having a better
understanding of role switchers, SE companies can tackle one of the key challenges of the SE:
matching supply and demand. Converting more users to becoming providers is one opportunity to
achieve this critical condition.
1072
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1075
Table 1: Studies investigating consumers roles in the SE
1076
1077
Figure 1: User-provider transition model
1078
Consume Less, and Share Better: A
Convivial Approach to the Sharing
Economy
Solon Magrizos119 120, University of Birmingham and IES London, UK
Jordon Lazell121, Coventry University, UK
Marylyn Carrigan122, Keele University, UK
Introduction
The Sharing Economy (SE) has emerged as a powerful restructuring force seeking more sustainable
and efficient use of resources in line with new prospects of ownership, consumption and
collaboration. This may represent a shift towards a more sustainable economy (Laurell and Sandstrom
2017) where stakeholders are motivated altruistically to share, help others and contribute to global
sustainability, rather than merely seek profit. It is widely believed that the SE has reduced
environmental impacts in comparison to traditional services, with the circulation of resources framed
as a means of allowing continued economic growth. The SE can overturn current unsustainable
practices of consumption, redirecting consumers away from the desire for material ownership towards
shared resources. At a local level, sharing facilitates resource distribution, and embeds sustainability
in the community (Shaw et al. 2015). However despite such a conceptualisation, the practical
implementation of the SE has created challenging conditions for the low wage economy, fractured
communities and delivered uneven income distribution (Ravenelle 2017) all of which are inherently
unsustainable and in conflict with the concept’s original premise.
119 Corresponding Author 120 [email protected] 121 [email protected] 122 m. [email protected]
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This paper acknowledges the opportunities such a SE has created and still promises, but does
not entirely accept that the SE should be celebrated as a new paradigm in sustainability. Instead, we
offer a critique of the current understanding of the SE by critically assessing its economics,
sustainabililty and sociability with regard to its practices and consequences. This paper argues for a
new framing that engages the positive, community aspects of the SE using the concept of conviviality
to re-establish and reposition this area of research.
Asessing the circular economy
The SE stands accused of creating economic harm to nonmembers resulting from issues such as
anticompetitive behavior (Malhotra and van Alstyne 2014) and the avoidance of insurance or pension
schemes for employees. This reinforces arguments that ‘sharing’ profits are driven by the exploitation
of a primarily contractor-based human workforce (Economist 2015), leading to increased inequality
within the bottom 80% of the population. This is exacerbated since many providers operating in the
SE are highly educated, with well paid ‘day jobs’, who use the SE to augment their income (Schor
2017). Negative externalities resulting from the SE include causing environmental damage, e.g. by
car sharing generating additional usage (Phipps et al., 2013), bypassing regulation and avoid paying
taxes (Edelman and Geradin 2016), posing a safety to health, safety or disability standards and,
finally, leading discrimination and exclusionary behaviors in the choice of collaborator (Frenken and
Schor 2017).
These above noted concerns are leading academics to take a more critical stance against the
for-profit SE platforms. Malhotra and van Alstyne (2014) have argued for the SE to be renamed the
‘skimming economy’ (p.25) and Belk (2014) distinguishes between ‘sharing’ and ‘pseudo-sharing’
which is renting out for mainly economic gains. Frenken and Shor (2017) also disagree with the
popular use of the word sharing suggesting that ‘renting’ is more appropriate, while Dredge and
Gyimóthy (2015, p.299) question whether the SE is a “business consultancy fad orchestrated by self-
interested intermediaries”.
Against this backdrop, we offer an alternative theoretical lens to understand and examine the
SE. We introduce and apply the concept of conviviality to frame a discussion about community and
sustainability within the SE, and by doing so extend knowledge and understanding of the
opportunities conviviality offers to current macromarketing literature.
The convivial economy
The concept of conviviality emerged from the Latin term ‘convivialitas’, and is associated with
“sociable, friendly and festive traits” (Nowicka and Heil 2015, p.1). Guercini and Ranfagni (2015,
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p.770) define conviviality as: “the propensity for sharing and a phenomenon that ….emerges from
the community and contributes to the strengthening of the bonds within a group, without
compromising individual freedom, but that gives rise to new possibilities deriving from the perceived
closeness and greater sense of community”. Conviviality represents a tool to grow and shape a sense
of belonging, and reap the benefits that belonging to such a community can deliver (Guercini and
Ranfagni 2016).
We propose that Illich’s (1973) notion of conviviality has parallels with the emergence and
growth of the SE. These alternative market arrangements – such as repair cafés, or social eating spaces
– challenge the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) that drives hyperconsumption and economic
growth detrimental to society (Kilbourne, McDonagh, and Prothero 1997). The SE is a context in
which conviviality could prove particularly valuable and significant as a determinant of benefits
beyond the functional and mundane aspects of community sharing. Case studies of sustainable and
convivial sharing practice are used to demonstrate skills, social relationships and connectivity in
practice. Theoretical and policy implications, as well as future research directions will be discussed.
References
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Quality of Life, Well-
being I
Track Chair: Alexandra Ganglmair-Wooliscroft
Co-Chair(s): Ahmet Ekici
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Macromarketing Implications of
Quality of Work Life
Debbie DeLong, PhD, Chatham University, USA
Quality of Life (QoL) is a complex topic spanning many decades of research across multiple
disciplines, methodologies and applications. There are more than 100 definitions for QoL noted in
the literature and over 600 measures available (Hacker 2010; Morais, Miguéis, and Camanho,
2011). Macromarketing has a long and storied tradition of research that has made important
contributions to the science, understanding, policies and endeavors of QoL (e.g., Ganglmair-
Wooliscroft and Lawson 2011; Hagerty et al. 2001; Nguyen, Rahtz and Shultz 2014; Peterson and
Ekici 2007; Shultz, Rahtz, and Sirgy 2007).
A subset of this stream, Quality of Work Life (QoWL), has generated a literature in its own
right, primarily within the human resources and management disciplines. The bulk of these studies
take a micro-level stance, with QoWL positioned as an end in itself. This perspective is not
surprising given that improvements to an individual’s QoWL experience are associated with higher
levels of job performance, organizational commitment and lower turnover, all worthy personnel
management goals (Mejbel et al. 2013). Similarly, formative models of QoWL tend to focus on
micro-level inputs related to working conditions, job characteristics and interpersonal dynamics.
This focus is again understandable given the manager’s relatively greater access and control over
aspects of the work environment as compared with forces at large. However, this limited view
excludes valuable insights regarding how QoWL may influence and be influenced by a variety of
macro-level inputs and dynamic mechanisms that offer profound benefits to participants across the
spectrum.
This paper examines QoWL from a macromarketing perspective, building upon its systems-
level contributions to QoL research. There are two objectives:
First, it is argued that QoWL should be more clearly positioned as a macro-level
construct, as evidence suggests its role in affecting other QoL dimensions and higher
1084
order outcomes (via horizontal and bottom-up “spillover” effects) rather than serving
only as an end in itself. The potential return on QoWL investment extends to a broad
array of positive outcomes and stakeholders that can and should be of greater interest to
employers.
Second, the concept of a “psychological contract” between the organization and the
individual is proposed as a possible mechanism underlying QoWL perception. The
psychological contract is conceptualized as higher order “needs-fulfillment” derived
from top-down “spill over” from higher order sources of influence. Formative models of
QoWL should include these higher order concerns to capture the full scope of individual
needs, organizational expectations, and the resulting QoWL experience.
Macromarketing Outcomes of QoWL
QoWL is important for the higher-order purpose of fostering wellbeing in other QoL
dimensions and overall. Models of QoL abound with varying numbers and types of critical
dimensions, for example: ecology, economics, politics and culture (Magee, James, and Scerri
2012), relationships with family and friends, emotional well-being, health, work and productive
activity, material well-being, feeling part of one’s local community, personal safety, and quality of
environment (Rahman, Mittelhammer, and Wandschneider 2005) and community and relationships,
freedom and opportunity, health and environment, living standards, and peace and security (Maridal
2017).
There is substantial evidence in support of QWL effects on other QoL dimensions via
horizontal spillover of work life on non-work life domains of family, friends, leisure, community,
and others (Rice et al. 1980; Rousseau 1978). QoWL effects on overall QoL are attributed to
vertical spillover of a positive workplace experience on “the most superordinate domain of what
quality-of-life (QOL) researchers call life satisfaction, personal happiness, or subjective wellbeing”
(Sirgy et al. 2001, p.244). These relationships may be mediated by a number of intervening
constructs such as job satisfaction (Danna and Griffin 1999), level or type of individual aspiration
(Pandy and Tripathy 2018), type and opportunities for achieving goals (Kasser and Ryan, 1993),
and other factors.
Regardless of a direct or indirect path between QWL and QoL, efforts to improve the
employee’s experience at work can generate rewards that far surpass the immediate value of
improved corporate returns. Happier employees in aggregate horizontally spillover their positivity
to foster happier families, which in aggregate could support more cohesive neighborhoods,
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communities, regions and ultimately an enhanced perception of societal wellbeing. Consideration of
these systemic inter-relationships are compelling, with potentially far-reaching impacts on
marketing and society. While professionals in all kinds of organizations are increasingly likely to
recognize QoL as an important point of reference (Sirgy et al. 2006), greater effort is needed to
emphasize the direct and indirect benefits of investing in quality of work life to make a stronger
business case for this expanded view of its value.
Macromarketing Determinants of QoWL
Similar to study of QoL, QoWL research initially focused on the economists’ view of social
indicators that presumed a linear relationship between the size of the pie and happiness (e.g., Fuchs
1983). Subsequent models included an array of subjective measures but still tend to focus on low
level needs of health and safety, physical environment, pay and benefits, training opportunity, etc.
(e.g., Diener 1984; Hackman 1980). An expanded view of QoWL is needed that takes the
increasing importance of higher order needs into consideration.
The notion of a Psychological Contract illustrates the positive effects that occur when an
employee is drawn to a company on the basis of shared values and these values are then reinforced
by the company’s mission and corresponding actions (de Campos and Rueda 2017; Polman and
Bhattacharya, 2016). This somewhat ‘‘eudaimonic’’ view of happiness departs from the
“hedonistic” pleasure principle (Ryan and Deci, 2001), whereby the individual values self-
realization, personal growth and development beyond the extrinsic or tangible rewards obtained on
the job. The degree to which the company upholds and acts on its professed promises fulfills the
Psychological Contract, reinforces trust in the organization’s conduct, generates a sense of
meaningfulness which can in turn foster employee engagement. Employee engagement is
associated with affective organizational commitment, job involvement, job performance and job
satisfaction, all highly values outcomes to the organization (Macey and Schneider, 2008).
Following the trend of worklife balance and expectation of living one’s values in all life
contexts, models of QoWL need to expand beyond micro-level inputs. Macro-level values within
the workforce translate to higher order needs that call for a different level of organizational
transparency and responsiveness. Alignment of employee and organizational values may help to
evoke a sense “shared commitments” that can affectively and relationally connect the employee and
the organization (Watson and Ekici, 2017). As stated by Sirgy et al. (2006), “Workers expectations
concerning work have changed significantly and will continue to change in the future. Work is no
longer viewed as a means to earn a living. Work is a lifestyle” (p. 435). This expanded scope of
1086
worker needs should not be viewed as threat or competing agenda for the employee’s time and
efforts, rather a shared commitment to macro-level concerns that offers a meaningful opportunity
for deeper employee engagement, positive outcomes for the company and society as a whole.
QoWL Research in Progress
The authors have work in progress to validate the effects of Psychological Contract
fulfillment versus breach within a large company in the mid-Atlantic region. This project and others
like it are supported by the Center for Sustainable Leadership, a foundation-funded applied research
center that the authors founded and have co-directed for the last several years as a joint venture
between the School of Sustainability (Macagno, environmental science & systems background) and
the School of Business (DeLong, I/O psychology & marketing background).
The company in question has an explicitly stated environmental sustainability mission and
wanted to assess and address the credibility of this mission within their ranks. Several phases of
survey research and targeted intervention indicate preliminary support for the predictions associated
with Psychological Contract. The highest levels of QoWL-related measures occur among
employees who report a high level of environmental concern and a favorable view of the
organization’s environmental sustainability performance (the “activated” segment). The lowest
levels of QoWL-related measures occur for those who report a high level of environmental
commitment and an unfavorable view of the organization’s environmental performance (the
“inspired” segment). Interestingly, employees with a low level of environmental concern but a
favorable view of the organization’s environmental sustainability (the “dutiful” segment) indicate
higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment as compared with those who report a low
level of environmental concern and an unfavorable view of the organization’s environmental
sustainability performance (“the unmoved” segment).
We hypothesize that the observed differences in commitment for “activated” versus
“dutiful” groups may reflect relational versus transactional commitment fostered by the
Psychological Contract. Further examination of attitudinal and behavioral differences as a function
of Psychological Contract fulfillment versus breach is in progress, as well as examination of similar
effects within other stakeholder groups. These results support the importance of higher order values
in the individual’s QoWL assessment and the importance of the organization to uphold its values in
both words and deeds.
In conclusion, it is proposed that QoWL affects and is affected by social, political and
economic conditions, the marketing systems, and the plethora of positive/negative marketing and
1087
consumption activities. These and other dynamic interactions arising in complex marketing systems
provide ample challenge and opportunity for advancing our understanding of QoWL phenomena.
Macromarketing principles has and can continue to broaden QoWL research to include its potential
for fostering and being fostered by wellbeing in other QoL dimensions, perhaps most importantly
societal wellness as a whole.
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Danna, K., and Griffin, R.W. (1999). Health and well-being in the workplace: A review and
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de Campos, M.I., , and Rueda, F.J.M. (2017). Effects of Organizational Values on Quality of Work
Life. Paidéia, 27(67), 65-75.
Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological bulletin, 95(3), 542.
Fuchs, V. (1983). How we live. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Ganglmair-Wooliscroft, A., and Lawson, R. (2011). Subjective well-being of different consumer
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Hacker, E.D. (2010). Technology and quality of life outcomes. Seminars in Oncology Nursing, 26,
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Hackman, J.R. (1980). Work redesign and motivation. Professional Psychology, 11(3), 445.
Hagerty, M.R., Cummins, R.A., Ferriss, A. L., Land, K., Michalos, A.C., Peterson, M., … and
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Kasser, T., and Ryan, R.M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: Correlates of financial
success as a central life aspiration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2),
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Macey, W.H., and Schneider, B. (2008). The meaning of employee engagement. Industrial and
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Magee, L., James, P., and Scerri, A. (2012). Measuring Social Sustainability: A Community-
Centered Approach. Applied Research in the Quality of Life, 7(3), 239–61.
Maridal, J. (2017). A Worldwide Measure of Societal Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research,
134(1), 1-38.
Mejbel, A.A., Almsafir, M.K., Siron, R., and Mheidi, A.S. (2013). The drivers of Quality of
Working Life (QWL): a critical review. Australian Journal of Basic and Applied
Sciences, 7(10), 398-405.
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Morais, P., Miguéis, V.L., and Camanho, A.S. (2001). Quality of Life Experienced by Human
Capital: An Assessment of European Cities. Social Indicators Research, 110(1), 1-20.
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Pandey, M.K., and Tripathi, P. (2018). Examine the relationship between level of aspiration,
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Peterson, M., and Ekici, A. (2007). Consumer attitude toward marketing and subjective quality of
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Polman, P., and Bhattacharya, C.B. (2016). Engaging Employees to Create a Sustainable Business.
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Rahman, T., Mittelhammer, R.C., and Wandschneider, P. (2005) Measuring the Quality of Life
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Ryan, R.M., and Deci, E.L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on
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Shultz, C.J., Rahtz, D.R., and Sirgy, M.J. (2017). Distinguishing flourishing from distressed
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Macromarketing, 37(2), 206-216.
1089
The relationship between fashion
and style orientation and well-being
Wencke Gwozdz, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany
Kristian Steensen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Shipra Gupta, University of Illinois, USA
James Gentry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Abstract
The present paper unfolds the conceptual distinction between style and fashion orientation – two trait-
like orientations of clothing consumption. We relate both concepts with subjective well-being and
expect to find a higher subjective well-being for consumers with a higher style orientation than a
higher fashion orientation. These assumptions were tested using survey data from four countries -
Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United States - with approximately 1,000 respondents per country.
Employing structural equation modelling, we found that style orientation was more strongly related
to subjective well-being than fashion orientation. We further found that materialism mediated the
relationship between fashion and style orientation and subjective well-being and that fashion
orientation was related more strongly to materialism than style orientation. When including
materialism as a mediator, fashion orientation was also positively related to subjective well-being.
This paper contributes to the current literature by further developing the two concepts, style and
fashion orientation, and by testing their relationship to materialism and subjective well-being.
Keywords
style orientation, fashion orientation, clothing consumption, materialism, subjective well-being
1090
Introduction
People have a need to wear clothing. The most obvious function of clothing is physical in the
sense that clothing helps protect the human body against variations in weather. The need for clothing
may also be psychological as clothing can function as a form of non–verbal communication to others
that sends important social signals. The clothes a person wears and how it is worn may provide a
signal to others about his or her identity, tastes, and individuality (Schaefer and Crane 2005). While
some consumers disregard this psychological aspect of clothing, many others attach a high degree of
importance to decisions relating to what clothes to purchase and wear. The present paper is focusing
only on consumers with an interest and involvement in clothing and clothing consumption. This
interest and involvement in clothing, however, can take many forms and translate into different
consumption patterns, which may have psychological implications. In an effort to understand and
carve out these psychological implications, we propose a trait-like distinction between clothing
consumers. Specifically, we distinguish between clothing consumers with a fashion orientation and
consumers with a style orientation. Fashion-oriented consumers emphasize the material and
possession component of clothing acquisition and view clothing as a means to achieve social
positioning and status, whereas style-oriented consumers see clothing as a way to express
individuality.
We expect that both clothing orientations have ties to well-being, but ones that differ between
the general types of well-being: hedonic and eudaimonic (Ryff and Singer 1998). The former deals
with pleasure and how good one feels about one’s life. Eudaimonic well-being also deals with
pleasure and life satisfaction, but also involves an explicit concern for meaning-making and growth.
While we do not investigate the relationships with these conceptual definitions, we expect that fashion
is more strongly related to hedonic well-being than style. At the same time we expect that style
orientation is more strongly related to eudaimonic well-being than fashion. The two clothing
orientations therefore differ in the extent to which they focus on outer and inner notions of self.
The present study explores this novel conceptual distinction between clothing consumers with a
fashion and/or style orientation by investigating the role of materialism in the relationships between
the two clothing orientations and subjective well-being. We find, through a four-country consumer
survey, clear support for the conceptual distinction between a style and fashion orientation. Moreover,
we find that fashion-oriented consumers report a higher endorsement of materialism and lower levels
1091
of subjective well-being than style-oriented consumers. Interestingly, the difference in subjective
well-being between the two clothing orientations is mediated by materialism.
Conceptual background
Fashion and style orientation
Previous research has identified two distinct trait-like orientations of clothing consumers that result in
different approaches to clothing acquisition: a style orientation and a fashion orientation (Cho, Gupta, and
Kim 2015; Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry 2017). Though style and fashion are often used synonymously, they
have divergent meanings (Bly, Gwozdz, and Reisch 2015; Gregory 1948). In relation to clothing, style is any
distinctive mode of tailoring, whereas fashion is the style prevailing at any given time (Gupta, Gwozdz, and
Gentry 2017). A style evolves slowly and is reflective of a person’s identity and way of life. Fashion, by
contrast, is temporary, ever-changing and resonating newness. Solomon and Rabolt (2004), for example,
suggest that fashion is ‘a style of dress that is accepted by a large group of people at any given time’. Fashion
can be regarded as symbolic resources that share some level of mutual social understanding, but exist in a state
of transience. Fashion is therefore less reflective of a person’s inner self and more oriented towards the outer
self that is portrayed to others.
The difference in meaning also extends to differences in clothing consumption between style- and fashion-
oriented consumers. Consumers with a style orientation often acquire clothing that reflects their individualized
style and whose design is perceived as classic while at the same time speaking about oneself (Cho, Gupta, and
Kim 2015). A style orientation is, thus, about expressing individuality in a way to reflect the relatively stable
and consistent aspects of one’s personal taste, interests and characteristics (Tai 2005). Some of the key
consumption characteristics of a style-oriented consumer are longevity, authenticity, and uniqueness (Bly,
Gwozdz, and Reisch 2015). Longevity refers to the preference for clothing items that are more timeless and
can be utilized for a long time. Authenticity relates to ensuring that the acquired clothes reflect one’s identity
and uniqueness through the distinctiveness and personalized style of the clothing. Style-oriented consumers
consequently tend to select clothing items that can be kept for years with little impact from changes in fashion
trends. This also means that style-oriented consumers are less likely to shop frequently than fashion-oriented
consumers (Cho-Che and Kang 1996).
A fashion-oriented consumer refers to a person with a high interest in and awareness of up-to-date trends
and the latest fashion (Shim and Gehrt 1996; Walsh et al. 2001). These consumers are more likely than style-
oriented consumers to read about fashion and trends relating to clothing, which also translates into more
frequent purchases of new fashion items (Beaudoin, Moore, and Goldsmith 2000; Darley and Johnso, 1993;
Goldsmith, Heitmeyer, and Freiden 1991). By purchasing new fashion items, fashion-oriented consumers are
1092
able to satisfy their need for keeping themselves current. The transient nature of fashion and fashionable
clothing styles means that the acquired clothing quickly becomes obsolete, thereby warranting further
consumption.
A recent study by Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry (2017) found that fashion-oriented consumers reported a
higher shopping frequency than style-oriented consumers. The authors also found that fashion-oriented
consumers acquired more of their clothing from 1st markets (e.g., high street stores) and less from 2nd markets
(e.g., secondhand stores) compared to style-oriented consumers. In contrast, style-oriented consumers reported
engaging in more environmentally friendly clothing consumption and were also more likely to consider the
environmental impact of clothing consumption. This corroborates and extends previous findings from Cho,
Gupta and Kim (2015). While these results are intriguing and provide indicative support for distinguishing
between style and fashion-oriented clothing consumers, only limited studies have investigated this conceptual
distinction.
The link to materialism
Belk (1988) noted that clothing is acquired as a “second skin” in which others may see us.
Similarly, O’Cass (2000) argued that fashion clothing tells others how much status an individual has,
and what the individual is like (e.g., professional, sexy, casual). The clothes a person wears, thus,
have an important function in the generation of first impressions and provide immediate, yet
superficial, insights into a person’s identity and personality. While both style- and fashion-oriented
consumers use clothing as a means of communicating to others, the underlying messages being
communicated may fundamentally differ. Style-oriented consumers mainly seek to communicate
their individualized style functioning as a mirror of their inner notions of self. Fashion-oriented
consumers, by contrast, aim to communicate newness as well as social positioning and status. The
acquisition of material possessions is therefore expected to be more important for fashion-oriented
consumers as it can help strengthen the portrayal of their outer self. This notion was supported in a
recent study where a fashion orientation was found to be more strongly related to materialism than a
style orientation (Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry 2017). Materialism is defined here as the importance a
person places on possessions and their acquisition as a necessary or desirable form of conduct to
reach desired end states (Richins and Dawson 1992). The materialism construct is further
characterized by three delineating facets. The first facet, acquisition centrality, refers to the extent to
which possessions and acquisitions are a central focus in life (Richins 2017). The second facet is
happiness through acquisition and entails the belief that acquiring additional or different things will
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result in increased happiness and well-being. The third facet, success, refers to the tendency to
evaluate the success of oneself and others by possessions (Richins 2017; Richins and Dawson 1992).
The strong association between fashion-oriented consumers and materialistic values is not
surprising given the typical characterization of a materialistic person. For example, Dittmar (2005)
describes a materialistic person as one believing that the acquisition of material goods is central to
self–definition and happiness as well as a prime indicator of success. Hence, the endorsement of
materialistic values reflects a commitment to identity construction through material goods (Dittmar
2005). Materialistic consumers tend to rely heavily on external cues, favoring those possessions that
are worn or consumed in public places. This suggests that consumers with strong materialistic
tendencies use clothing as an external cue for impression management (Richins and Dawson 1992).
Materialism has also been identified as an important predictor for time spent shopping (Fitzmaurice
and Comegys 2006) and is related to status consumption (Heaney et al. 2005; Eastman et al. 1997).
This characterization of materialistic consumers resonates well with fashion-oriented consumers, who
through purchasing novel and fashionable items, seek to communicate success and achieve social
status in the pursuit of happiness. It similarly aligns with the findings of Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry
(2017) that fashion-oriented consumers purchase more products overall and more often from 1st
markets than style-oriented consumers.
Despite the theoretical similarities and the expected stronger link between materialism and
fashion-oriented consumers as compared to style-oriented consumers, only limited empirical research
has been conducted on the association. We therefore find it important to replicate the finding by
Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry (2017). Hence, we make the following prediction:
H1. Materialism is more strongly related to fashion orientation than style orientation.
Clothing orientation, materialism, and subjective well-being
Previous studies have carved out the differences in acquisition behavior between fashion-
oriented and style-oriented consumers (Cho, Gupta, and Kim 2015; Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry
2017). Given the expected, and previously observed, difference in the endorsement of materialistic
values between fashion-oriented and style-oriented consumers, we also expect to observe differences
in subjective well-being. This expectation arises from the plentiful literature on materialism and
subjective well-being, where materialism has consistently been found to have a detrimental effect on
people’s subjective well-being (Burroughs and Rindfleisch 2002; Christopher et al. 2007; Dittmar et
1094
al. 2014; Kashdan and Breen 2007; Kasser 2016). In line with most research on the topic, we consider
subjective well-being as relating to how people feel and think about their lives (Diener 1984). It is
important to note in this context that subjective well-being is a composite measure comprising both
cognitive (i.e. cognitive well-being) and affective components (i.e. affective well-being). Cognitive
well-being refers to domain-specific and global evaluations of life, whereas affective well-being
refers to the frequency and intensity of positive and negative emotions and mood (Luhmann et al.
2012). A recent meta-analysis by Dittmar et al. (2014) found that materialism had a negative effect
on both cognitive and affective well-being (as well as most other indicators of well-being). Why is
this the case? First, materialistic consumers are more likely than non-materialistic consumers to
believe that acquiring products will bring pleasure, improve the impression one makes on others, and
facilitate relationships with others (Richins 2011). This makes them want what they do not already
have, which undermines well-being (Larsen and McKibban 2008). Second, because materialistic
consumers are oriented toward money, expensive products, and image, they often pay attention to
advertising messages, thus increasing the likelihood that they are exposed to messages suggesting
that they, or their current possessions, are insufficient (Dittmar et al. 2014; Kasser and Kanner 2004).
Exposure to advertisement messages can result in upward social comparison causing negative self-
evaluations (Collins 1996) as well as an increased discrepancy between current and ideal selves
(Halliwell and Dittmar 2006; Higgins 1987). Negative self-evaluations and large self-discrepancies
may similarly persist among fashion-oriented consumers resulting from ongoing comparisons
between their current clothing items and the most recent looks and trends. The same consequences
are less likely to emerge amongst style-oriented consumers as they use new clothing purchases to
further strengthen their individualized style, which is more inwardly focused. An outwardly focused
identity relying on material resources for development likely results in a less stable and confidently
held identity compared to a more inwardly focused identity (Chang and Arkin 2002; Frost et al. 2007;
Gountas et al. 2012; Noguti and Bokeyar 2014). One reason is that the meanings of the material items
that outwardly focused individuals acquire to construct their identity are continuously being revised.
For the fashion-oriented consumer, this means that what is considered fashionable clothing one week
may be reinterpreted as outdated the next week. Thus, extensive efforts must be dedicated to staying
on top of current trends as well as insuring that one’s wardrobe is updated with new items
communicating the appropriate meaning. This is both emotionally and financially demanding, yet
promises highly uncertain payoffs (Richins 2017).
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Another negative aspect of materialism is its association with dysfunctional consumer behaviors
including compulsive consumption (Dittmar 2005). Compulsive consumption may also be a risk for
certain fashion-oriented consumers who, through their strong interest in acquiring knowledge about
the latest fashions, are continuously seeking to acquire the newest and trendiest clothing items to
improve their status and image. For example, Park and Burns (2005) found that a strong interest in
fashion was positively linked to compulsive consumption. While not a direct indication of compulsive
consumption, Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry (2017) also found a higher shopping frequency among
fashion-oriented consumers as compared to style-oriented consumers, which might suggest a higher
likelihood of developing unhealthy consumption patterns for this group of consumers.
Though compulsive consumption and overconsumption (Alexander and Ussher 2012) might
have a detrimental effect on well-being, more moderate clothing consumption patterns may actually
contribute positively to well-being. Shopping for clothing can, for example, elicit pleasure, hedonic
enjoyment and satisfy self-expressive needs (Michaelidou and Dibb 2006; Ekici et al. 2014).
Shopping has also been associated with excitement and delight (Oliver, Rust, and Varki 1997;
Wakefield and Baker 1998), and enjoyment (Beatty and Ferrell 1998). Shopping activities have been
described as a form of “recreation” (Backstrom 2006; Guiry, Magi, and Lutz 2006), entertainment
(Moss 2007), or related to enthusiasm that creates emotional arousal and joy (Jin and Sternquist 2004;
Pooler 2003). The extent to which people derive positive affect from clothes shopping activities may,
however, differ between consumers with style and fashion orientations. While both style- and
fashion-oriented consumers may gain pleasure from the sense of desire and wanting prior to a
purchase as well as the expected joy and excitement being elicited from the process of acquiring a
clothing item, we expect the two consumer groups to differ in their emotional experiences after the
purchase. Here we would expect, in line with findings by Richins (2013) on materialistic consumers,
that fashion-oriented consumers exhibit a faster demise in the pleasure associated with the purchase
than style-oriented consumers. This reasoning builds on the finding that materialists often show
hedonic elevation prior to a purchase as they expect the desired product to elicit significant and
meaningful life changes (Richins 2013). The hedonic elevation evoked by the desired object is,
however, often followed by hedonic decline after the acquisition of the object due to its inability to
meet the anticipated life changes (Richins 2013). The same pattern is not observed among low-
materialistic individuals, who generally exhibit no decrease in pleasurable feelings after purchase.
We similarly assume that style-oriented, unlike fashion-oriented, consumers are less likely to exhibit
1096
a decrease in the pleasurable feelings associated with a clothing purchase due to their preference for
identity-linked clothing items that express longevity, authenticity, and uniqueness.
In sum, the expected difference between consumers with a style and fashion orientation in the
endorsement of materialism leads us to predict that style-oriented consumers exhibit higher subjective
well-being than fashion-oriented consumers. With this in mind, we formulate the following
hypotheses:
H2. Consumers with a style orientation exhibit higher levels of subjective well-being than fashion-
oriented consumers.
H3. Materialism mediates the relationship between fashion as well as style orientation and subjective
well-being.
Figure 1. The model
1097
Data and method
The sample
The data stems came a large scale online survey that was carried out in four countries, namely,
Germany, Poland, Sweden and the United States. The survey was developed to collect information
on clothing consumption behavior and related social-psychological factors for consumers aged 18-65
years. The data were collected between October 2016 and January 2017 by the market research
company Qualtrics. Prior to that, we had developed the survey and pilot tested it. The original English
version was translated by ISO17100 certified translators into the three remaining languages and then
proofread by native speakers. The resulting sample consisted of 4,617 respondents with 1,174 from
Germany, 1,116 from Poland, 1,182 from Sweden and 1,145 from the United States. More
information about the full survey can be found in Gwozdz, Nielsen and Müller (2017).
Measurements
To measure fashion orientation, we draw on items from Sproles and Kendall (1986), who
developed an instrument for measuring the fashion consciousness of consumers (all items are shown
in Table 1). The answer scales range from 1 ‘strongly disagree’ to 7 ‘strongly agree’. We use the
original seven-item scale; carrying out a confirmatory factor analysis, we deleted one item due to its
low factor loading.
Style orientation is measured by two dimensions from the style confidence scale developed by
Armstrong et al. (2017): longevity and authenticity. Moreover, we draw on scales developed by Tai
(2005) and Tiggemann and Lacey (2009) to measure uniqueness as a third dimension of style
orientation. Specifically, we use one item from Tai (2005) and two items from Tiggemann and Lacey
(2009) scale on the individuality function of clothing (see Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry 2017). The
answer scales range from 1 ‘strongly disagree’ to 7 ‘strongly agree’. The items per style orientation
dimension are presented in Table 1.
Subjective well-being is measured by affective as well as cognitive well-being. For affective
well-being, we use the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) developed by Diener et
al. (2010). The measurement consists of 12 short items assessing positive and negative experiences.
The overall question is: “Please think about what you have been doing and experiencing during the
past four weeks. Then report how much you experienced each of the following feelings” followed by
1098
the items and an answer scale ranging from 1 ‘very rarely or never’ to 5 ‘very often or always’. The
positive and the negative affect items are treated as two individual measurements of affective well-
being.
Cognitive well-being is measured by the Satisfaction with Life Scale developed by Diener et al.
(1985). The measurement consists of five items addressing the cognitive aspects of well-being. The
answer scales range from 1 ‘strongly disagree’ to 7 ‘strongly agree’. All three well-being measures
are presented in Table 1. While we did not use measures of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, we
believe that the affect measures come closer to hedonic well-being whereas the cognitive measures
come closer to eudaimonic well-being.
To measure materialistic values, we employed Richins and Dawson’s (1992) materialism scale.
Like Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry (2017), we also used a short scale consisting of only the positively
phrased items and neglecting the reversed items. Wong, Rindfleisch, and Burrroughs (2003) noted
that the Richins and Dawson materialism scale has worked well psychometrically in the United
States, but encounters problems in cross-cultural contexts due to the use of mixed (positively-worded
versus negatively-worded) Likert statements. Thus, we used ten out of the original 18 items. The
answer scale ranges from 1 ‘strongly disagree’ to 7 ‘strongly agree’.
Control variables are sex, age, country and income. Income is measured in 11 comparative
categories (more information see Gwozdz, Nielsen, and Müller 2017).
The measurement model
In a first step, we validated the measurements for our data set across the four countries.
Exploratory factor analyses (extraction: principal component, rotation: varimax) were carried for each
of the measurements. The next step was a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) of all measurements
in one analysis using IBM® SPSS® Amos 24.0. All latent variables were allowed to correlate. The
correlation matrix of the latent variables used in the analyses is presented in the Appendix (Appendix
A2).
Respondents with missing values in one of the various items included in the model had to be
deleted because AMOS is not able to handle missing data. This results in a sample of 4,079
respondents where 1,068 are from Germany, 978 from Poland, 1,040 from Sweden and 993 from the
United States.
1099
The measurements of style orientation and materialism were multi-dimensional and, hence,
modelled in as a second-order CFA. For style orientation that means that the dimension uniqueness
was measured through its three items (like longevity and authenticity) and style orientation is then
measured by the latent variables uniqueness, longevity and authenticity. The same is true for
materialism where the individual dimensions of centrality, success and happiness serve as factors of
materialistic values. The first-order and second-order CFA results are presented in Table 1 including
the factor loadings per item as well as Cronbach’s Alpha, the composite reliability (CR) and the
average variance (AVE) explained per measurement. All factor loadings are satisfactory as are the
overall criteria for the individual measurements. CR – the measurements reliability – meets the
threshold of 0.7 for all latent variables (Hair et al., 2010). AVE – the convergent validity – meets the
threshold 0.5 for all but one latent variable (style longevity).
The overall model fit is excellent with Χ2=17,161.73; df=4,395; p≤.001; Χ2/df=3.91; CFI=.944;
TLI=.940; RMSEA=.02.
Table 1. The measurement model
Factor
loading
P-
value
Cronbach’s
Alpha
Composite
reliability
Average
variance
explained
Endogenous variables
Fashion orientation .95 .97 .76
Fashionable, attractive clothing is very important to
me.
.831 ***
Keeping up with the latest fashion is important to
me.
.892 ***
I spend considerable time and effort to learn about
the latest fashion.
.831 ***
I keep my wardrobe up-to-date with the changing
fashions.
.899 ***
I usually have one or more outfits of the very new
fashion.
.871 ***
I consciously choose something that reflects the
current fashion.
.895 ***
Style orientation (2nd order) .63 .70 .50
Style longevity .592 ***
Style authenticity .894 ***
1100
Style uniqueness .583 ***
Style longevity (1st order) .76 .82 .44
I prefer to purchase clothing I know I can utilize for
a long time
.554 ***
I typically purchase clothing I know will fit my
personal style for a long time
.779 ***
When purchasing clothing, I like to know it will
work with my personal style
.786 ***
I prefer to purchase clothing that is more timeless .459 ***
Style authenticity (1st order) .88 .93 .81
My clothing style matches the real me .715 ***
What I wear reflects my inner self .878 ***
Who I am is clear in my clothing style .782 ***
My inner self shows in what I wear .855 ***
Style uniqueness (1st order) .91 .95 .87
I prefer clothes that are unique/rare .934 ***
I prefer clothes that have a distinctive mode of
tailoring
.791 ***
I tend to select clothes that are rare .898 ***
Exogenous variables
Cognitive well-being .90 .94 .66
In most ways my life is close to my ideal .881 ***
The conditions of my life are excellent .821 ***
I am satisfied with my life .867 ***
So far I have gotten the important things I want in
life
.777 ***
If I could live my life over. I would change almost
nothing
.688 ***
Positive affect .91 .95 .62
Positive .843 ***
Good .699 ***
Pleasant .782 ***
Happy .845 ***
Joyful .801 ***
Contented .743 ***
1101
Negative affect .87 .92 .53
Negative .803 ***
Bad .781 ***
Unpleasant .726 ***
Sad .776 ***
Afraid .613 ***
Angry .643 ***
Mediator
Materialism (2nd order) .91 .94 .86
Centrality .974 ***
Success .934 ***
Happiness .665 ***
Materialism centrality (1st order) .66 .75 .62
I enjoy spending money on things that aren't
practical.
.493 ***
Buying things gives me a lot of pleasure. .650 ***
I like a lot of luxury in my life. .721 ***
Materialism success (1st order) .82 .89 .73
I admire people who own expensive possessions
(such as homes, cars and clothes).
.768 ***
Some of the most important achievements in life
include acquiring material possessions.
.701 ***
The things I own say a lot about how well I’m doing
in life.
.647 ***
I like to own things that impress people. .790 ***
Materialism happiness (1st order) .84 .90 .64
My life would be better if I owned certain things that
I don’t currently have.
.754 ***
I’d be happier if I could afford to buy more things
(possessions).
.872 ***
It sometimes bothers me quite a bit that I can’t afford
to buy all the things I’d like.
.760
Model fit: Χ2=17,161.73; df=4,395; p≤.001; Χ2/df=3.91; CFI=.944; TLI=.940; RMSEA=.02
1102
The structural model
In total, we estimate two structural models: first, a simple one without the mediation of materialism to
assess the direct relationship between fashion and style orientation and well-being (Model 1). We estimate this
in one model including all three well-being measures (cognitive as well as positive and negative affect) at once
as dependent, endogenous variables. In a second step, we add the mediation of materialism between style and
fashion orientation and well-being (Model 2, see also Figure 1). Again, we include all three subjective well-
being measures as dependent variables in one model. For both models, we imputed the factor scores for the
SEM from the CFA described above.
All control variables including sex, age and income are related to subjective well-being and materialism.
Additionally, we employed a multi-group comparison by country to account for the nested data structure, i.e.,
respondents are nested within country. The control variables are included in both models in the same way.
Again, we used IBM® SPSS® Amos 24.0 to run the analyses using the maximum likelihood estimator.
All results are presented in Table 2 and Table 3, where the direct effects represent the direct associations
between two latent variables such as style orientation and subjective well-being and the indirect effects reflect
the relationships between style and fashion orientation and subjective well-being mediated by materialism.
The total effects are then the sum of the direct and the indirect effects. The overall goodness of fit measures,
which are excellent for Model 1 and Model 2 (Hair et al., 2010), are also presented in Table 2 and Table 3.
Results
The relationship between style and fashion orientation and materialism
For the sample of 4,079 consumers, we find a mean style orientation of 4.57 (SD=1.08), mean
fashion orientation of 2.76 (SD=1.64), and a mean materialism of 3.18 (SD=1.32) – all on an answer
scale ranging from 1 to 7. The Pearson correlation between style and fashion orientation is r = .47
(p<.001), between style orientation and materialism r = 0.33 (p<.001), and between fashion
orientation and materialism r = 0.58 (p<.001). The stronger correlation in the sample indicates a
stronger relationship between fashion orientation and materialism.
Testing whether materialism is more related to a fashion orientation than to a style orientation
(H1), we use selected results of the SEM models (Model 2 and Model 3) and compare the direct,
standardized path coefficients for style and fashion orientation on materialism. We find that both style
and fashion orientation are positively related to materialism, but that the coefficient for fashion
orientation on materialism with β = 0.586 is significantly larger than the one for style orientation with
β = 0.132 (no 95%-CIs overlap, see also Table 2 – direct effects). Hence, H1 is supported.
1103
Table 2. Style and fashion orientation on materialism (part of SEM Model 2 & 3)
DV Style sig. difference
Fashion (95%-CI intervals)
Model 2 Materialism .132*** < .586***
[.104;.157]
[.562;.611]
Model 3 Materialism: Happiness .046*** < .299***
[.010;.083]
[.261;.332]
Materialism: Success .124*** < .550***
[.094;.153]
[.524;.578]
Materialism: Centrality .135*** < .579***
[.105;.163]
[.553;.606]
Model fit Model 2: Χ2=52.83; df=15; p≤.060; Χ2/df=3.52; CFI=.999; TLI=.984; RMSEA=.02
Model 3: Χ2=37.74; df=10; p≤.001; Χ2/df=3.52; CFI=.999; TLI=.988; RMSEA=.02
The relationship between style and fashion orientation and subjective well-being
To measure the relationship between style and fashion orientation and subjective well-being, we
carry out two steps: first, we measure a simple SEM model where style and fashion orientation are
only directly related to subjective well-being. As we assume the relationship between style and
fashion orientation and subjective well-being not being as straightforward, we include a mediation
by materialism in a second step (Model 2). The standardized coefficients for style and fashion
orientation on the three subjective well-being measures as well as the bootstrapped 95%-Confidence
Intervals (CI) for both models are presented in Table 3.
In Model 1, the standardized coefficients for the relationship between style orientation and the
subjective well-being measures are for cognitive well-being: β = 0.191, for positive affect: β = 0.254
and for negative affect: β = -0.079 (all p<.001). The directions of the relationships are also as
predicted, i.e., style orientation is related to a higher subjective well-being. While style orientation is
statistically significantly associated with all three well-being measures, we find no relationship
between fashion orientation and subjective well-being. Hence, we find support for H2 with style-
oriented consumers exhibiting higher levels of subjective well-being than fashion-oriented
consumers.
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Table 3. Estimated coefficients for the relationship between style/fashion orientation and the subjective well-being measures
Direct effects Indirect effects Total effects
CWB PAWB NAWB
CWB PAWB NAWB
CWB PAWB NAWB
M o
d e l
1
Style b .197*** .256*** -.081***
95% CI [.154;.238] [.214;.295] [-.124;-.039]
Fashion b .025 .016 -.010
95% CI [-.017;.065] [-.026;.057] [-.052;.033]
X2 difference
test
t-value 5.792 8.082 2.391
(p-value) (.000) (.000) (.017)
R2 .098 .101 .071
Model fit:
Χ2=17.49; df=10; p=.064; Χ2/df=1.749; CFI=.999; TLI=.995; RMSEA=.01
M o
d e l
2 w
it h
m a te
ri a li
sm
Style b .246*** .298*** -.133***
-.054*** -.044*** .054***
.192*** .254*** -.080***
95% CI [.210;.282] [.264;.334] [-.170;-.096]
[-.068;-.043] [-.055;-.034] [.042;.066]
[.155;.229] [.219;.291] [-.118;-.042]
Fashion b .269*** .213*** -.251***
-.242*** -.194*** .239***
.027 .018 -.012
95% CI [.227;.312] [.169;.255] [-.293;-.207]
[-.268;-.216] [-.22;-.17] [.213;.264]
[-.012;.063] [-.021;.055] [-.052;.026]
X2 difference
test
t-value .809 2.357 4.060
13.132 1.771 12,923
6.141 8.748 2.465
(p-value) (.418) (.018) (.000)
(.000) (.000) (.000)
(.000) (.000) (.014)
R2 .180 .154 .150
Model fit:
Χ2=52.83; df=15; p≤.001; Χ2/df=3.52; CFI=.999; TLI=.984; RMSEA=.02
M o
d e l
3
w it
h
in d
iv id
u a l
m a te
ri a li
sm
d im
e n
si o
n s Style b .208*** .267*** -.109***
-.015 -.011 .029***
.193*** .255*** -.080***
95% CI [.174;.243] [.229;.301] [-.145;-.072]
[-.032;.001] [-.026;.002] [.015;.044]
[.156;.230] [.217;.292] [-.117;-.040]
Fashion b .141*** .107*** -.166***
-.106*** -.082*** .149***
.035 .025 -.017
1105
95% CI [.099;.183] [.063;.151] [-.212;-.12]
[-.135;-.077] [-.108;-.053] [.12;.178]
[-.002;.073] [-.012;.063] [-.055;.023]
X2 difference
test
t-value 2.246 5.629 1.911
5.354 4.537 7.250
5.881 8.561 2.228
(p-value) (.025) (.000) (.056)
(.000) (.000) (.000)
(.000) (.000) (.026)
R2 .254 .191 ,185
Model fit: Χ2=37.74; df=10; p≤.001; Χ2/df=3.77 CFI=.999; TLI=.988; RMSEA=.02
Note: *** p≤.001; standardized coefficients, bootstrapped standard errors n=5,000, bias-corrected bootstrapped 95%-Confidence Intervals in parentheses, controls: age, income, sex, multi-group
comparison by country to account for data structure
1106
Figure 1. Direct effects of style/fashion orientation on subjective well-being (Model 2)
How materialism mediates the relationship between style and fashion orientation and subjective
well-being
Testing whether materialism is a mediator for both style and fashion orientation on well-being,
we used the bootstrapping method (n=5,000) as recommended by Hayes (2013). As the indirect
effects from both style and fashion orientation through materialism on well-being are statistically
significant (with the bootstrapped standard errors), we accept that a mediation for both style and
fashion orientation exists.
While the indirect effects from style and fashion orientation on subjective well-being are all
statistically significant and are in the same direction, the path from fashion orientation over
materialism to subjective well-being is much stronger than the one from style orientation over
materialism to subjective well-being. One example is the relatively small indirect effect from style to
cognitive well-being with β = -0.052 (p<.001) compared to an indirect effect of β = -0.230 (p<.001)
from fashion orientation to cognitive well-being with no overlap in the 95%-CIs (see Table 3).
1107
Figure 2. Style and fashion orientation on subjective well-being mediated through materialism
(Model 2)
Table 4. Indirect effects of style and fashion orientation on subjective well-being through materialism
(Model 2) and its dimensions (Model 3)
Materialism
dimension
CWB PAWB NAWB
Model 2
Style orientation Materialism b -.102*** -.099*** -.054***
p-value (.000) (.000) (.000)
Fashion orientation Materialism b -.111*** -.071*** -.102***
p-value (.000) (.000) (.000)
Model 3
Style orientation Happiness b -.020** -.016** .013**
p-value (.005) (.005) (.005)
Success b .025*** .006 -.033***
p-value (.000) (.55) (.000)
Centrality b -.021** .000 .049***
p-value (.001) (.996) (.000)
Fashion orientation Happiness b -.129*** -.102*** .084***
p-value (.000) (.000) (.000)
Success b .113*** .028 -.145***
1108
p-value (.000) (.555) (.000)
Centrality b -.090*** -.008 .210***
p-value (.001) (.996) (.000)
Note: *** p≤.001; standardized coefficients, bootstrapped standard errors n=5,000, bias-corrected bootstrapped 95%-
Confidence Intervals in parentheses, controls: age, income, sex, multi-group comparison by country to account
for data structure
Model 2: partial mediation – all direct and indirect effects are significant; competitive
mediation for style/fashion – materialism – CWB/PAWB (i.e., direct effect positive, indirect
effect negative); complementary mediation for style/fashion – materialism – NAWB (i.e.,
both in same direction) (Zhao, Lynch & Chen, 2010, JCR)
Model 3: all direct effects significant
o Partial mediation, competitive (different signs):
Style/fashion – happiness/centrality – CWB (direct: +, indirect: -)
Style/fashion – happiness – PAWB (direct: +, indirect: -)
Style/fashion – happiness/centrality – NAWB (direct: -, indirect: +)
o Partial mediation, complementary (same signs):
Style/fashion – success – CWB (direct: +, indirect: +)
Style/fashion – success – NAWB (direct: -, indirect: -)
o No mediation: Style/fashion – Success/centrality - PAWB
This mediation changes the remaining direct effects between style and fashion orientation and
subjective well-being. Fashion orientation is now also positively related to subjective well-being with
standardized coefficients of β = 0.267 on cognitive well-being, β = 0.211 for positive affect and β =
-0.249 for negative affect (all p<.001). While style still has a stronger relationship to positive and
negative affect, the association is equal with fashion orientation on cognitive well-being (see
overlapping 95%-CIs in Table 3). Compared to Model 1, the direct effects of fashion orientation on
subjective well-being in Model 2 are positive and statistically significant. The total effects (direct +
indirect effects) of Model 2 resemble then again the direct effects in Model 1. The role of materialism
needs explanation.
This means that fashion orientation is similarly strongly related to subjective well-being as is a
style orientation when controlling for materialism. Put in other words, a strongly fashion-oriented
1109
consumer with low materialistic values exhibits a similar well-being as a strongly style-oriented
consumer, whereas a materialistic, fashion-oriented consumer exhibits a lower well-being compared
to a style-oriented consumer. Note that there is no causality implied as we cannot measure any causal
relationship with the used cross-sectional data.
Results Model 3 (including materialism dimensions as mediators); direct effect between
style/fashion orientation and CWB/PA/NA, standardized effect, 95%-Confidence intervals
(bootstrapped, n=2,000), by age group. We focus on age given the statistics indicating that younger
consumers spend a larger part of their discretionary income on apparel.
1110
1111
By gender
CWB PAWB NAWB
Model fit: Males Females Males Females Males Females
Model 3 Hapiness b -0,448 -0,431 -0,344 -0,343 0,304 -0,343
with individual
materialism dimensions 95% CI [-0,512;-0,384] [-0,488;-0,375] [-0,411;-0,28] [-0,403;] [0,234;0,374] [-0,403;-0,284]
z-score 0,799 0,432 -0,769
Success b 0,112 0,251 -0,035 0,092 -0,035 -0,309
95% CI [-0,081;0,313] [0,078;0,412] [-0,235;0,161] [-0,084;0,263] [-0,235;0,161] [-0,484;-0,141]
z-score 1,097 0,953 -1,162
Centrality b -0,069 -0,196 0,028 -0,027 0,313 0,437
95% CI [-0,291;0,146] [-0,379;-0,002] [-0,198;0,252] [-0,214;-0,027] [0,076;0,543] [0,245;0,636]
z-score -0,874 -0,365 0,839
Style B 0,214 0,196 0,297 0,239 -0,113 -0,112
95% CI [0,16;0,269] [0,151;0,241] [0,239;0,352] [0,194;0,287] [-0,169;-0,052] [-0,159;-0,064]
z-score -0,076 -1,111 -0,199
Fashion B 0,205 0,239 0,157 0,073 -0,189 -0,156
95% CI [0,142;0,271] [0,194;0,287] [0,093;0,227] [0,015;0,135] [-0,26;-0,121] [-0,214;-0,096]
z-score -2,346** -1,866* 0,666
obs. 1772 2307
Cmin 46,611
DF 21
p-value 0,001
1112
Discussion and Conclusion
First of all, we can replicate the strong negative relationship between materialism and
subjective well-being that many other studies already found (e.g., Burroughs and Rindfleisch 2002;
Christopher et al. 2007; Kashdan and Breen, 2007; Dittmar et al. 2014; Kasser 2014). This strong
relationship is true for both cognitive and affective well-being. Explanations include that people
who have high materialistic values believe that acquiring products comes with pleasure and signals
success to others (Richins 2011), but also makes them want things they do not already have which
finally undermines well-being (Larsen and McKibban 2008).
As fashion orientation is defined as aiming to represent the outer self and enhance social
positioning through following the latest fashion trends and hence shares some characteristics with
materialism, we assumed that the relationship between fashion orientation and subjective well-
being is mediated by materialism. As expected, we find that the indirect effect from fashion
orientation mediated by materialism on subjective well-being (cognitive and affective) is also
negative. The negative relationship towards subjective well-being could stem from comparisons to
suggested images by advertisement and the current image as well by the upward comparisons with
other consumers (Collins 1996; Halliwell and Dittmar 2006). There could also be a comparison of
the current wardrobe and the most recent trends. However, the positive direct relationship between
fashion orientation and subjective well-being, speaks against the latter argument. It could mean
that following the latest trends to present a chosen outer self to others can be positively associated
with subjective well-being as long as the materialistic aspect is not considered.
Next to materialism, clothing consumption has also been related to hedonic enjoyment,
pleasure and the satisfaction of self-expressive needs (Ekici et al. 2014; Micheaelidou and Dibb
2006), with excitement and delight (Oliver, Rust, and Varki 1997; Wakefield and Baler 1998) or
as a form of entertainment and recreation (Backstrom 2006; Guiry, Magi, and Lutz 2006; Moss
2007). While both fashion and style-oriented consumers might gain pleasure from wanting and
desire prior to the acquisition of clothing, fashion-oriented consumers would experience a lower
subjective well-being after the acquisition due to newly emerging trends that have to be followed
(Richins 2013). This would be different for style-oriented consumers who are interested in
longevity, authenticity, and uniqueness to express their inner self (Bly, Gwozdz, and Reisch 2015).
Hence, the positive relationship of style orientation with subjective well-being does not come as a
surprise.
1113
The fashion industry has received much criticism from macromarketers for its harmful effects
on the environment (see Gupta, Gwozdz, and Gentry 2017 for a review). Our results indicate that
the encouragement of style orientations versus fashion orientations would increase consumer well-
being. At the same time, those consumers who are not extremely materialistic can see increases in
their well-being due to fashion. So fashion is not entirely without merit.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the Mistra Future Fashion Project Phase II funded by the Swedish
Mistra Foundation. The funding source does not hold any competing interest.
References available upon request.
1114
Appendix
Appendix A1. Descriptive statistics
Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
Endogenous Variables
Style orientation 4,079 4.573 1.076 1 7
Fashion orientation 4,079 2.763 1.644 1 7
Exogenous variables
Cognitive well-being 4,079 4.279 1.481 1 7
Negative affect 4,079 14.768 4.641 6 30
Positive affect 4,079 21.236 4.486 6 30
Mediator
Materialism 4,079 3.181 1.324 1 7
Controls
Income (11 categories) 4,079 4.687 3.145 1 11
Female (dummy) 4,079 .566 .496 0 1
Germany 4,079 .262 .440 0 1
Poland 4,079 .240 .427 0 1
Sweden 4,079 .255 .436 0 1
United States 4,079 .243 .429 0 1
Appendix A2. Correlation between latent variables
style
orientation
fashion
orientation materialism
cognitive
well-being
negative
affect
positive
affect
Style orientation 1
Fashion orientation .618* 1
Materialism .498* .686* 1
Cognitive well-being .225* .177* -.073* 1
Negative affect -.058* -.044* .186* -.618* 1
Positive affect .275* .197* -.013 .787* -.729* 1
Note: *** p<.001; latent variable are imputed scores based on the CFA described in the measurement model.
1115
Marketing &
Development IV
Track Chair: Andes Barrios
Co-Chair(s): Cliff Shultz
1116
The Peril and Promise of Peace
Marketing: Perspectives from
Lebanon
Walid Abou-Khalil, St. Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Georges Aoun, St. Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Abstract
The marketing concept is broadening over time to include in addition to the business
function, other societal activities (e.g., AMA 2013; Shultz 2017), covering thus non-business
areas (Kotler 1972); including, for example, peace marketing. Nedelea and Nedelea (2015) state
that peace marketing is not a selling activity and that it entails the development of programs
destined to impose and sustain causes and ideas that save humanity from self-destruction. This
conceptualization coincides with macromarketing ideas. According to Shultz (2007),
Macromarketing is a mechanism that surpasses simple commercial transactions between buyers
and sellers or between companies and customers; it is a mechanism to study the opportunities and
failures of marketing and its planned positive effects and unintentional detrimental effects. It is
clear from the foregoing text that peace marketing falls within the scope of Macromarketing.
Conflicts have many facets and are of different natures - social, ethnic, religious, political
and intercultural to name a few. Conflicts may be armed and generate damages at the human,
social, economic and infrastructure levels, which makes it important to undertake peace
marketing actions to resolve such engagements (Barnett et al.; 2007; Shultz 2016). Peace
marketing could be also used to put an end to war consequences in post-war situations. Indeed, a
number of peace-marketing initiatives were provided for peace development in conflicted regions
1117
such as Colombia (Barrios et al. 2016), the countries of the former Yugoslavia (Shultz et al.
2005), Georgia (Todua and Jashi 2016) and Vietnam (Shultz, Pecotich, and Le 1994).
Inferred from the above cases, key objectives of peace marketing include having as
primary goal to resolve (social) conflict, conflict-solving actions that embrace effective
communication strategies and providing satisfaction through these means to all concerned parties.
Lebanon, is a diverse country where eighteen religious groups coexist (US Department of
State 2015). Its confessional political system, which allocates the state offices to some major
religious groups’ representatives, was consecrated through the National Pact (Rabil 2011; Harb
2006). This sectarian consociationalism has created through time a tension and culminated in the
civil war which started in 1975 and lasted fifteen years (Kisthardt 2013). This multifaceted
armed-confrontation, which ended-up being a long-term sectarian conflict between Christian and
Muslim parties (Halliday 2005), resulted in more than 100,000 fatalities (World Factbook 2016;
Makdisi and Sadaka 2003), with tens of thousands of displaced persons and the emergence of
areas with residents belonging to the same religious group, often turning to extremism. It also
caused huge economic losses, among which: the destruction of downtown Beirut (Makdisi and
Sadaka 2003).
Soon after the end of the civil war, many reconstruction projects that intended to return
Beirut to its previous standing as a center point of finance and tourism, took place (Etheredge
2011). The then Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri planned to reconstruct the city through Solidere123,
in which he and his associates were shareholders. The threefold objective was to make downtown
Beirut the symbol of unity of Lebanon and an area of common interest for all Lebanese citizens,
to reestablish the prior grandeur of the city and to revive the branding theme of “Paris of the
Middle East” (Beyhum 1995; Le Billon 2012; Masri 2009).
123 “Solidere is a French acronym for Lebanese Company for Development and Reconstruction”
(Nagel 2000). It “is a Lebanese development company founded by Rafik Hariri in 1994, and in
charge of planning and redeveloping Beirut’s Centre-ville after the devastation of war”(Larkin
2009).
1118
Solidere’s marketing actions, which primarily showed Beirut as the center of the nation
through different means, among which were pervasive television commercials with footage of
buildings brought back to their previous splendor, showed also the project as being the only
possible choice to rebuild Beirut downtown and portrayed the project’s objectors as displaying
“favoritism to destruction” (Mango 2004).
Notwithstanding all the marketing efforts spent, the project never reached its objective
and was unable to contribute fully to post-war reconciliation and reintegration of Lebanese
society, but enhanced instead social inequity, and led to widespread suspicion of conflicting
interests and corruption (Le Billon 2012; Makarem 2014). Following this failure and in a new
attempt to rebuild unity, many initiatives led by NGOs and other private entities were launched,
however unsuccessfully, at different periods of time.
The objective of this research is threefold. We will (1) scrutinize the Lebanese context as
a living case and define if the peace marketing actions that were undertaken by Solidere meet the
peace marketing objectives as stated above, and in case they do not, uncover the reasons,
determining thus why Solidere, as a reconciliation project, was not able in this context to fulfill
the aforementioned objective. We will also (2) conduct a survey to find out how Lebanese
citizens perceive Solidere’s actions and their view concerning the failure of these actions to reach
a successful post-war reconciliation. Based on these findings, we will (3) propose appropriate
innovative and alternative marketing strategies, which have potential for more positive results in
the Lebanese context and possibly other conflict or post-conflict countries/regions.
1119
References
AMA (2013), “Definition of Marketing,” American Marketing Association, Chicago, IL,
www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx, accessed January 22,
2018.
Barnett, Michael, Hunjoon Kim, Madalene O’Donnell, and Laura Sieta (2007), “Peacebuilding:
What Is in a Name?,” Global Governance, 13 (1), 35 –58.
Barrios, Andrés, Kristine de Valck, Clifford J. Shultz, Olivier Sibai, Katharina C. Husemann,
Matthew Maxwell-Smith, and Marius K. Luedicke (2016), “Marketing as a Means to
Transformative Social Conflict Resolution: Lessons from Transitioning War Economies
and the Colombian Coffee Marketing System,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 35
(2), 185-197.
Beyhum, Nabil (1995), Construction and the Public Benefit in Society and Culture: Citizens and
the City. Beirut: Dar El-Jadeed.
Etheredge, Laura (2011), Middle East, region in Transition: Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. New
York: The Rosen Publishing Group.
Halliday, Fred (2005), The Middle East in international relations: power, politics and ideology.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harb, Imad (2006), “Lebanon’s confessionalism: Problems and prospects,” United States Institute
of Peace.
Kisthardt, Laura (2013), “Confessionalism in Lebanon: Reflection and an analysis of issues,”
Senior Honors Projects, Paper 15.
Kotler, Philip (1972), “What consumerism means for marketers,” Harvard Business Review, 50
(3), 48–57.
1120
Larkin, Craig (2009), “Reconstructing and deconstructing Beirut: space, memory and Lebanese
youth,” Conflict in Cities/Contested States Working Paper Series. 8: 1-22.
Le Billon, Phillipe (2012), “Corrupting Peace? Corruption, peacebuilding and Reconstruction,” in
Corruption and post-conflict peacebuilding: Selling the peace?, Dominik Zaum and
Christine Cheng, eds. Abingdon: Routledge.
Makarem, Hadi (2014), “Actually existing neoliberalism: the reconstruction of downtown Beirut
in post-civil war Lebanon,” PhD dissertation, The London School of Economics and
Political Science (LSE).
Makdisi, Samir and Richard Sadaka (2003), “The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990,” Lecture and
Working Paper Series. No. 3.
Mango, Tamam. (2004), “Solidere: the battle for Beirut's Central District,” PhD dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Masri, Ghada (2009), “Resurrecting Phoenicia: Tourist Landscapes and National Identity in the
Heart of the Lebanese Capital,” in City tourism: National capital perspectives, Robert
Maitland and Brent W. Ritchie, eds. UK: Cabi.
Nagle, Caroline (2000), “Ethnic conflict and urban redevelopment in downtown Beirut,” Growth
and Change 31(2): 211-234.
Nedelea, Alexandru-mircea and Marilena-Oana Nedelea (2015), “Peace marketing,” Ecoforum 4
(2), 188–192.
Rabil, Robert (2011), Religion, national identity, and confessional politics in Lebanon: the
challenge of islamism. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
1121
Shultz, Clifford J. II (2007), “Macromarketing,” in Explorations of Marketing in Society, Gregory
Gundlach, Lauren Block and William Wilkie, eds. Cincinnati: ITP / South-Western
Publishers, for the American Marketing Association, 766-784.
Shultz, Clifford J. II (2017), “Marketing: The Next 40,000 Years,” Journal of Macromarketing,
37 (3), 328-330.
Shultz, Clifford J. II (2016), “Marketing an End to War: Constructive Engagement, Community
Wellbeing, and Sustainable Peace,” Markets, Globalization and Development Review,
1(2), http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/mgdr/vol1/iss2/2/, accessed January 22, 2017.
Shultz, Clifford J. II, Timothy Burkink, Bruno Grbac, and Nataša Renko (2005), “When policies
and marketing systems explode: An assessment of food marketing in the war-ravaged
Balkans and implications for recovery, sustainable peace, and prosperity,” Journal of
Public Policy & Marketing, 24(1), 24-37.
Shultz, Clifford J. II, Anthony Pecotich, and Khai Le (1994), “Changes in marketing activity and
consumption in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” Research in consumer behavior, 7(1),
225-257.
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https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/le.html [accessed 11
January 2017]
Todua, Nugzar and Jashi, Charita (2016), “Conceptual and practical aspects of peace marketing
in tourism (Georgian case),” Ecoforum 5 special issue.
United States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. (2015).
Lebanon 2015 International Religious Freedom Report.
https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/256489.pdf [accessed 11 January 2017]
1122
The Negative Sentiment towards
Syrian Refugees in the Workplace
and the Use of Marketing as a
Facilitator for their Acceptance
Karine Aoun Barakat, St. Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Introduction
Driven by globalization, the increase in migratory flows from South to North, and the
growing number of regional conflicts, the past few years have witnessed a surge in the number of
refugees across the world (UNHCR 2017). This has changed established paradigms and left
governments to face a new reality, notably due to the impact of refugees’ presence on local
communities in terms of pressure on resources and the job market. Lebanon lies at the heart of
this changing reality, having hosted over one million refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict since
2011, and constitutes a fertile ground for understanding local population attitudes towards
refugees in the workplace and testing marketing strategies that can be used to alleviate tensions
between the two.
Country Context
Historically, Lebanon and Syria, have shared common denominators including language,
traditions and history that favored positive interactions and balanced exchanges between the two
neighboring nations. This changed however, following the occupation of Lebanon by Syrian
forces between 1976 and 2005, and led to the appearance of active pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian
movements within Lebanon which were subsequently neutralized after the withdrawal of Syrian
troops in 2005. Regained tensions appeared between the people of the two countries following
1123
the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, which led to the displacement of Syrians and their
settlement in neighboring countries most notably Lebanon.
To further understand the relationship between Lebanon and Syria, the international
relations image theory can be applied (Alexander, Levin, and Henry 2005). A mutually
incompatible goal-interdependence is noticed between the two neighboring countries that differ
in power and status, which creates an asymmetric relationship. The resulting image is referred to
as barbarian, whereby the stronger of the two, Syria is portrayed as destructive, intimidating, and
irrational, led by highly emotional leaders. The weaker country, in this case Lebanon, sees its
resources and position severely threatened by Syria, which is perceived as a potential invader;
however, there appears to be no immediate chance of fighting and the Lebanese are inclined to
insulate themselves by appeasing their Syrian neighbor, until capabilities change in the
Lebanon’s favor. Within this context, the appearance of Syrian refugees - considered to be the
out-group - in the Lebanese workplace has generated non-violent negative sentiments attributed
to ethnocentrism, prejudice or a tendency to discriminate.
Ethnocentrism and Discrimination
People readily though not inevitably develop strong loyalties to their own ethnic group
and discriminate against outsiders (Cashdan 2001) based on observable characteristics such as
language, accent, physical traits, or religion regarded as indicators of common descent
(Hirschfeld 1996; Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides 2001). Intergroup discrimination is a feature of
most modern societies, even though varying intensities of discrimination are observed. In
countries with long-standing intergroup challenges – whether racial as in the U.S., religious as in
Northern Ireland or linguistic-national as in Belgium – heightened volatility is commonplace and
tensions become combustible more easily than they do elsewhere (Tajfel 1970). Similarly in
Lebanon, a religiously divided country, racial, religious and ethnic discrimination is widespread.
Adding to the complex, local social-fabric, the arrival of Syrian refugees in the Lebanese
workplace was met with massive rejection; calls for boycott were common. Despite the fact that,
in the past, Syrians have had a long history of working in the Lebanese construction and
agriculture sectors, taking up jobs that were considered undesirable by the Lebanese. Hence, the
objective of our research is to understand the underlying causes of such attitudes and explain
1124
firstly the discriminatory behavior towards Syrian refugees (intergroup level) by mobilizing the
social identity theory (Hogg 2016) and secondly ethnocentrism within the Lebanese workforce
(intrapersonal level) and establishing a possible relationship between the two. It is only after
understanding the origins of such behaviors, that effective marketing strategies aimed at
appeasing existing tensions can be successfully implemented and pave the way for building
bridges between the two communities.
Methods
A quantitative research methodology is applied; it uses a questionnaire-based survey,
which allows us to measure the underlying factors driving negative sentiments towards Syrian
refugees in the workplace. The questionnaire is built around an adapted version of the
ethnocentrism scale and also tests for the determinants of discrimination including perceived
difference, frequency of contact as well as the proclivity for discrimination (Becker 2010). Based
on the initial findings of the survey and once the primary reasons behind the negative sentiments
are clear, targeted marketing strategies aimed at improving the acceptance of refugees within the
workplace can be applied. Such a macromarketing approach is in this case used as a tool that
facilitates the resolution of a societal challenge, with potential marketing-based tools and
solutions.
1125
References
Alexander, M. G., Levin, S., & Henry, P. J. (2005), “Image theory, social identity, and social
dominance: Structural characteristics and individual motives underlying international
images”, Political Psychology, 26(1), 27-45
Becker, G. S. (2010), The economics of discrimination. University of Chicago press.
Cashdan, E. (2001), “Ethnocentrism and xenophobia: A cross-cultural study”, Current
Anthropology, 42(5), 760-764.
Hirschfeld, L. (1996), Race in the Making, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hogg, M. A., (2016), “Social identity theory”. In Understanding Peace and Conflict Through
Social Identity Theory (pp. 3-17). Springer International Publishing.
Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L., (2001), “Can race be erased? Coalitional computation
and social categorization”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(26),
15387-15392.
Tajfel, H. (1970), “Experiments in intergroup discrimination,” Scientific American, 223(5), 96-
103.
UNHCR (2017), Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016. Geneva: UNHCR.
1126
A Stocktaking Report about
Corruption in Lebanon and Ethical
Marketing to fight Corruption
Carole Doueiry Verne, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Abstract
Corruption ravages the economies of many developing countries. In Lebanon, where
political and economic instabilities are usual, the level of corruption is alarmingly high: Lebanon
ranks 136 among 176 countries on Consumption Perceptions Index and may be trending toward
more rather than less corruption (Transparency International 2016). While data and trends tend to
be unsettling, they also present opportunities for Macromarketing interventions.
Studies regarding the impact of corruption on growth, revenue and political factors are
numerous (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny 1999; Gerring and Thacker 2004;
Fan, Lin and Treisman 2009; Beekman, Bulte and Nillesen 2014). For instance, Mauro (1995),
Gymimah-Brempong (2002) and Apergis, Dincer and Payne (2010) investigate the empirical
relationship between corruption and economic growth, based on data from several developing
and developed countries. Other authors have analyzed the link between corruption and political
factors (Gerin and Thackler 2004 and Henderson and Kuncoro 2011) or/and corruption and
political instability (Fredikkson and Svenson 2003).
Most of these studies found that corruption has a negative impact on the economic growth
or on revenue. However, some findings argue that corruption could be an accelerator of economic
growth because it might “greases the wheel” of an inefficient bureaucracy, which constitutes an
impediment to investment (Leff 1964; Huntington 1968; Leys 1965). Such affirmation is not
verified by Shleifer and Vinshy (1993) and Méon and Sekkat (2005); according to these authors,
1127
ineffective public governance causes an increase in corruption, reduces investment and
consequently, economic growth.
More generally, the empirical evidence shows that corruption has a negative influence on
economic growth. Moreover, the ineffective public governance and political instability may
compound such negative impact.
Surveys conducted in Lebanon shed light on the increase of corruption, especially in
public sectors (Doueiry Verne 2004; 2016).
To fight corruption and to increase growth, ethical procedures and individual ethics are
considered effective weapons (Lam and Hung; 2005).
In this presentation, we will share examples of successful international companies to show
how companies and public institutions can enhance ethical conduct via ethical marketing
initiatives and strategies, to fight corruption and thus to sustain success, over an extended period.
Macromarketing ideas, theories, models and practices will help Lebanese companies to
implement appropriate policies, tactics and strategies to fight corruption within an ethical
framework, systemically and in ways to enhance corporate, consumer and societal well-being
(Laczniak and Murphy 2006).
References
Apergis, N. Dincer, O. C., and Payne, J. E. (2010), “The relationship between corruption and
income inequality in US states: evidence from a panel cointegration and error correction
model”, Public choice, 145 (1-2), 125-135.
Beekman, G., Bulte, E., and Nillesen, E. (2014), Corruption, investments and contributions to
public goods: Experimental evidence from rural Liberia. Journal of Public Economics,
115, 37-47.
Doueiry Verne C. (2018), “Culture et Ethique- Regard sur le Japon et les grandes entreprises
japonaises”, VA Press, Versailles - France, January 2018. (Culture & Ethics - Focus on
Japan and Big Japanese Companies”, VA Press, Versailles, France, January 2018)
Doueiry Verne, C. (2005), “Ethics, Corruption and Clientelism: The case of Lebanon”, in Naudet
Jean-Yves (sous la direction), Corruption, Edition: Library of the University of Aix-en-
Provence.
1128
Doueiry Verne, C. (2006), “Business Ethics and Anti-Bribery Policies in Selected Middle East
and North African Countries”; MENA Task Force on Business Integrity and Combating
Bribery of Public Officials-Working Group 1, OECD Report, under the Direction of M.
Frédéric Wehrlé: http://www.oecd.org/mena/investment/36086689.pdf
Fan, C. S., Lin, C., and Treisman, D. (2009), Political decentralization and corruption: Evidence
from around the world, Journal of Public Economics, 93(1), 14-34.
Fredikkson, P.G. and Svensson, J. (2003), “Political Instability, corruption and policy formation:
The case of environmental policy”, Journal of Public Economics, 87, 1383-1407.
Gerring, J., and Thacker, S. C. (2004), “Political Institutions and Corruption: The Role of
Unitarism and Parliamentarism,” British Journal of Political Science, 34(2), 295-330.
Gyimah-Brempong, K. (2002), “Corruption, economic growth, and income inequality in Africa”,
Economics of Governance, 3(3), 183-209.
Henderson, J. V. and Kuncoro, A. (2011), “Corruption and local democratization in Indonesia:
The role of Islamic parties,” Journal of Development Economics, 94(2), 164-180.
Huntington, S. (1968), Political Order in Changing Society, New Haven CT: Yale University
Press.
La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F., Shleifer, A., and Vishny, R. (1999), “The Quality of
Government”, Journal of Law, Economics, and organization, 15(1), 222-279.
Laczniak, G. and Murphy, P. (2006), Normative Perspectives for Ethical and Socially
Responsible Marketing, Journal of Macromarketing, 26 (2), 154-177.
Leff, N. (1964). “Economic Development through Bureaucratic Corruption”, The American
Behavioral Scientist, 8-14.
1129
Leys, C. (1965), “What is the problem of corruption?” Journal of Modern African Studies
Corruption, 215-230.
Mauro, P. (1995), “Corruption and Growth”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 681-712.
Méon, P-G and Sekkat, K., (2005), “Does corruption grease or sand the wheels of growth?”
Public choice, 2005, vol. 122, no 1-2, 69-97.
Shleifer, A., and Vishny, R., (1993), “Corruption”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 3, 599–
617.
Transparency International (2016), “Lebanon,” https://www.transparency.org/country/LBN,
accessed January 31, 2018.
1130
Macromarketing
Measurement and Methodology
III
Track Chair: Ben Wooliscroft
Co-Chair(s): Francisco Conejo
1131
Visual Data Sources for Marketing
and Consumption History
Terrence H. Witkowski124, California State University, Long Beach, USA
Abstract
Visual images can serve as valuable primary data sources for research in the related fields of
marketing and consumption history. This paper describes types of visual data, considers their
advantages and limitations, and provides a brief introduction to visual theories and analytic
methods. It also discusses search processes and some important visual repositories, and
addresses the important concepts of the public domain and fair use under U.S. law, and in
comparison to laws in the UK and other countries.
Keywords
marketing history, consumption history, visual data sources, public domain, fair use
1132
Introduction
Research on marketing history emphasizes different actors and practices than do studies of
consumption history, but the two areas clearly overlap, making it difficult to investigate one
without at least some reference to the other. The provisioning of product assortments, the main
purpose of marketing systems (Layton 2007), usually has depended upon the needs and interests
of consumers, but also has influenced their demand through new designs, attractive packaging,
astute pricing, convenient distribution, and incessant promotion. Consumer research has acquired
an important place within the field of marketing. Marketing faculties in American universities,
who had produced a modicum of consumer studies from early in the twentieth century through
the 1950s, took much greater interest in the subject during the 1960s and 1970s and continuing up
to the present (Witkowski 2018a). They and faculties worldwide have institutionalized consumer
behavior courses within marketing curriculums. Thus, the two areas can reasonably be
considered together when writing about historical data sources.
Marketing and consumption historians have contributed a number of fine accounts about
pre-modern times (Eckhardt and Bengtsson 2010; Karababa and Ger 2011), but most of their
writing has concentrated on the consumer societies that emerged in the West over the past two
hundred years (Slater 1997). This research has consulted both primary and secondary data
sources. Primary sources are forms of evidence produced during the time in question, whereas
secondary sources consist of the literature about the period written at a later date. Primary
sources place the historian closer to the people and events of the past than do secondary sources,
and thus offer greater possibilities for producing original insights. Still, knowing the history
literature is crucial because it can provide necessary context for understanding original data and
thus should help the researcher avoid making mistakes in interpretation.
Primary sources for marketing and consumption histories can be divided into five major
categories: 1) numerical data, 2) written records, 3) visual images, 4) artifacts, and 5) memories
elicited via oral history interviews (Witkowski 2018a; Witkowski and Jones 2006).
Traditionally, academic historians have focused upon numerical data (e.g. tax and probate
records, business accounts) and especially upon written records (e.g. published books and
articles, personal letters and diaries), whereas art historians have analyzed visual images (e.g.
paintings, prints, and photographs) and material artifacts (e.g. architecture and decorative arts).
Oral historians create their data by recording spoken memories and personal commentaries on the
1133
past (Davies 2011; Ritchie 1995; Witkowski and Jones 2006). A particular piece of evidence can
straddle more than one category. For example, government reports, business accounts, and
probate records of estates frequently consist of both text and numbers. Print advertising usually
includes headlines, body copy, and visual content. Paintings, engravings, and photographs are
images, but also sometimes highly desirable physical objects that can be of great market value.
This paper focuses on visual images as a primary data source. Historical writing often
includes visual material, but generally as a way of illustrating narrative. This application is
valuable. Illustrations in many different forms can engage readers and stimulate their
imaginations, while providing a moment’s respite from reading text. Here, however, a case will
be made for marketing and consumption historians to more aggressively search for and
interrogate visual sources in their research. The following sections describe different types of
visual data, consider their advantages and limitations in historical research, and provide a brief
introduction to visual theories and analytic methods. Later sections take a more practical tack by
suggesting some search strategies and good archival sources and by addressing the important
concepts of the public domain and fair use in the publishing of visual images.
Types of Visual Data
Visual data can be categorized in different ways, such as by subject matter or by date and culture
of creation. This section classifies visual data sources according to their mediums or the methods
through which they were created and distributed. Major categories include paintings, prints,
photographs, film, and video.
Paintings are usually one-of-a-kind images applied by hand to walls, wood panels, canvas,
paper, and other materials. Their colors come from pigments – mineral, biological, or synthetic –
applied directly in powder or stick (pastel) form or mixed with oils, acrylics, watercolors, and
additional mediums. Paintings date to perhaps 40,000 years ago when early humans used earth
pigments, such as red ochre, to leave pictures of animals and abstract designs on cave walls.
Works representing trade and consumption have been produced since ancient times by many
different cultures. Examples include the market and domestic scenes found on the walls of
Egyptian Tombs, on the surfaces of Greek amphorae, and on the interiors of Roman villas (Figure
1). Dutch “Golden Age” paintings from the seventeenth century frequently depicted household
consumption and a variety of scenes from everyday life (Franits 1993; Schama 1988). American
1134
genre paintings from the mid nineteenth century, which drew inspiration from the earlier Dutch
works, featured scenes that commented upon market exchange (Witkowski 1996) and the
evolving consumption roles of men and women (Witkowski 2004). In the 1800s, artists in
Canton, Macau, Hong Kong, and Shanghai borrowed European oil on canvas or wood painting
techniques – as opposed to traditional Chinese ink on paper or silk – to render depictions of ships
and ports, prominent merchants, and scenes from daily life. Known today as China trade
paintings, they enabled western expatriates to share images of where they had been with curious
folks back home. Usually unsigned and originally more souvenirs than serious art, these works
are now highly valued by collectors. They provide visual documentation of past trade relations.
Prints are images reproduced from a template, usually by pressing an inked surface onto
paper. Major printing techniques include woodblocks, copper and steel engravings, lithography
and chromolithography, and various types of screen printing (aka silk-screen or serigraphy).
Rudimentary forms of printing from the application of seals and stamps date back to China’s
Shang Dynasty three thousand years ago. Woodblock printing, the first to apply ink to paper,
originated in China’s Han Dynasty around the third century CE, many centuries before it caught
on in Europe. The technique of transfer printing was developed in the 1750s to place images on
ceramics more quickly and with less expense than hand painting. It also has been used on cloth.
For a good two hundred years or more print advertising has combined illustrations with text on
broadsheets and posters (Figure 2), in newspapers and magazines, and on out-of-home media
(billboards, car cards). Printed images also have been applied directly to tangible goods and their
packaging, to promotional ephemera (trade cards, posters), and to direct mail catalogs (Sears
Roebuck, Montgomery Ward). Much historical research has investigated advertising images
(see, e.g., Belk and Pollay 1985; Branchik 2007; Schroeder and Zwick 2004) and some has
analyzed government sponsored poster campaigns (Hupfer 1997; Witkowski 2003).
Photographs are a third visual data source. Photographic technology advanced rapidly in
the nineteenth century (Darrah 1981; Newhall 1982). Daguerreotypes (invented in 1839),
ambrotypes (introduced in the 1850s), and tintypes (popular in the 1860s-1870s and even later)
were all one-of-a-kind direct positives. These technologies covered small sheets of metal or glass
with various combinations of chemicals. When exposed to light, the panes revealed an image
that was flipped (mirrored) on its vertical axis. Other photographic processes made use of
negatives on glass plates that could yield multiple positive prints on paper. Collodion wet plates
1135
(invented in 1851) required coating, sensitizing, exposing, and developing within about 15
minutes. For outdoor work, photographers needed a portable studio. Improved gelatin dry plates
(1870s) could be stored and so greatly simplified the process. From such plates, albumen silver
prints achieved commercial success as small, approximately 4 x 2.5in. (101.6 x 63.5mm), cartes-
de-visite (first made in 1854) and later as slightly larger cabinet cards (1870s-1890s).
Stereographs (1850s-1920s) consisted of two, almost identical, side-by-side photos. When
viewed through a stereoscope, they gave consumers the sensation of three-dimensional depth.
All these early techniques started to become outmoded after George Eastman (1854-1932)
patented the first practical roll film in 1884, founded the Eastman Kodak Company in 1888, and
launched the simple and inexpensive Brownie camera in 1900. He made photography available
to the American mass market, which his brand dominated for a century. Meanwhile,
photography and printing came together through the invention of halftone processes, where
continuous images are broken down in patterns of various sized dots that allowed photos to be
published in books, newspapers, and magazines. Introduced in the late 1800s, these processes
took the forms of letterpress, photolithography, and rotogravure. In the early twenty-first
century, digital photography replaced film as the dominant technology for capturing still images.
Marketing and consumption historians have frequently called upon photographs to illustrate
narrative accounts, but also have interrogated them more directly. In their wonderfully illustrated
book, Designed for Hi-Fi Living, Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder (2017) show how
brilliantly colored photos on vinyl LP covers conveyed aspirational modernity to postwar
American consumers (Figure 3).
The images discussed above are all static, but motion pictures and television across many
genres are potentially rich, but underutilized data sources for marketing and consumption history
(Belk 2011). In 1894 the Black Maria studio of the Thomas Edison Company in West Orange,
New Jersey, filmed 20-second shorts, intended to be seen via a kinetoscope, a device where one
person at a time could peep at the moving picture through a viewer on its top. The first
kinetoscope parlor had two rows of machines when it opened in New York City in 1894. Similar
establishments quickly materialized from Chicago to San Francisco. The first public screening of
a film via projection did not occur until late 1895 in Paris when the Lumière Brothers presented a
program 20 minutes in length. By 1915 feature length movies dominated the market. After
World War II, television in America rapidly emerged as a powerful new medium for
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entertainment and advertising (Barnouw 1976). TV’s diffusion in other countries was more
gradual.
Cinema and television created for entertainment purposes provide an incredibly rich
source of data for marketing and consumption historians. For example, themes of materialism
and how goods do not bring happiness have been at the heart of many films, above all Orson
Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane (Figure 4), although others, such as Ingmar Bergman’s
Fanny and Alexander (1982), suggest that “possessions can make the world magical and add
childlike joy to life” (Belk 1986, p. 18). Entertainment media frequently recreate past marketing
and consumption practices. The acclaimed television series Mad Men (2007-2015), for instance,
revolved around a fictional Manhattan ad agency in the 1960s and its star creative director, Don
Draper (played by Jon Hamm). Because the advertising business was at the heart of the
narrative, and because the show received accolades for its stylishly authentic set decorations,
period marketing and consumption were recurring topics on Mad Men.
The first documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922), recorded a staged version of
Inuit life near Hudson’s Bay (Belk 2011). More recent documentaries that address issues in
American and global consumption, such as Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002),
Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004), PBS’s The Merchants of Cool (2004), and Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017), may become
valuable data sources for future historians. These entertainment and documentary media have an
ephemeral quality, are usually produced by non-academics, and have a strong point of view
rather than the usually more balanced approach of scholarly writing (Belk 2011).
Advantages and Limitations of Visual Data
Visual data can reveal things about past marketing and consumption that cannot be adequately
conveyed by other data sources (Belk 1986; Witkowski 1994, 1996, 2004). Period images can
show what sellers and buyers, their merchandise and accouterments, and their physical activities
actually looked like. Visual data can depict color, form, movement, and other details people once
took for granted and failed to mention in texts (Burke 2001). Through narrative content and
allegory, images can express social attitudes and, hence, validate or challenge written sources
such as diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, or probate records (Witkowski 1994). Visual
representations are qualitatively different from written sources. “Photography deals with the
images of real people, whereas writing is made of words: the photograph seems closer to lived
1137
experience than words ever can be” (Hamilton 1997, p. 87). Burke (2001) points out that unlike
written documentary evidence, where usually only the investigator has had an opportunity to visit
an archive and read source materials, when images are reproduced in research reports, both
authors and readers have access to the data and can examine it together. Links to YouTube and
other online videos increasingly enable the shared interpretation of past moving images.
Visual data can be misleading. Past artists and other image makers selected only certain
subjects and rendered the world the way they personally perceived or remembered it. Burke
(2001) aptly describes these choices as their “painted opinion.” Visual conventions influenced
and structured how artists interpreted the world around them. Artists also created works that
satisfied the expectations of their immediate patrons or anticipated those of their potential
audiences and customers. Consequently, art can sometimes be a better guide to past social
attitudes and cultural conventions than to the exact nature of people, things, and consumer
behavior. American genre paintings, for example, sometimes have distorted actual behavior in
order to instruct or entertain the viewer and artists drew upon stock social characters that fulfilled
the expectations of their patrons (Hills 1974; Johns 1991; Williams 1973). The lithographic
prints of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, typically hung in Victorian parlors, depicted a
popular, but sentimental, nostalgic, and often didactic version of nineteenth century American life
(Le Beau 2007; Peters 1942; Rawls 1979). Similarly, past photography may not be as objective
as it might appear on first examination. Commercial photographers and photojournalists chose
what to put in front of the camera lens and often have managed their image creation to convey a
particular point of view. In the gruesome scenes of battlefield dead taken by Mathew Brady
(1822-1896) and his assistants, rifled muskets may have been repositioned to emphasize their
lethal consequences. The carefully staged photos for the 1950s album cover art in Borgerson and
Schroeder (2017) stressed modernist furniture and design over other forms of décor. Black and
white prints, photos, and films have their own aesthetic appeal, but what they show usually was
lived in full color.
Works of fine art, but also more pedestrian and commercial pictures, may possess
aesthetic qualities and polemical content that can elicit powerful, possibly biased emotional
responses from overly enthralled, or viscerally repelled, researchers. Visual images must be
interpreted carefully and the analyst needs to distinguish a contemporary reading from a historical
or period reading. The meanings attributed to visual images, and the feelings they elicit, almost
1138
always change from one period and culture to another (Hall 1997a). For example, viewers today
may find it difficult to appreciate nineteenth-century sentimentality because its character and
language of expression have changed (Bolton-Smith and Truettner 1973). In contrast, art
celebrated in the present, such as Van Gogh’s paintings, did not necessarily resonate with
audiences when first shown. The meanings viewers unearth from visual data depend upon their
specific historical context. The challenge for historians is to recreate the “period eye.”
Visual Theories and Analytical Methods
Visual theories bring a deeply cultural perspective to understanding images created in the past.
These theories emphasize multiple perspectives, such as the artist versus the audience or past
versus present viewers, and the influence of race, gender, and social class. They stress how
image creators and viewers have negotiated and generated meaning (Barnard 2001; Mirzoeff
1999; Rose 2012; Schroeder 2002; Sturken and Cartwright 2002). In marketing and consumption
history, visual theories and data have been the foundation of the research of Schroeder and
Borgerson (1998) who applied the analytical conventions of art history to gendered images in
advertising. In their exploration of masculine identities and consumption, Schroeder and Zwick
(2004) meld visual theory and historical perspective to produce a visual genealogy of advertising
images. Witkowski (1996, 2004) recounted the depiction of buying and selling and the re-
gendering of consumer agency in mid-nineteenth century American genre painting. Witkowski
(2003) examined frugality appeals in American poster campaigns from the Second World War.
Visual theorists have advanced several key analytical concepts. Perhaps most important
is representation, which refers broadly to how images (or any other system using signs) produce
meaning within a culture (Hall 1997a). Company sponsored advertising, along with popular
culture intermediaries and customers, have visually assembled brand meanings within specific
historical contexts at least since the mid nineteenth century (see, e.g., Witkowski 2018b).
Interpellation (aka appellation) describes how images, such as advertisements, political posters,
and even bumper stickers, hail or summons consumers and recruits them into an ideological
position. In the U.S., for example, right-wing activists have been deploying a variety of visual
ephemera to advocate for unbridled gun rights (Witkowski (2013). Intertextuality describes how
images self-consciously refer to or “quote” previous texts or images (Sturken and Cartwright
2002; Witkowski 2013). Hall (1997b. p. 232) called this a regime of representation: “… images
do not carry meaning or ‘signify’ on their own. They accumulate meanings, or play off their
1139
meanings against one another, across a variety of texts and media.” Gaze consists of acts of
looking, usually from the point of view of the image producer or audience, but also by a character
within an image. It can be motivated by desire for something or someone and can be affected by
power relations, such as those between men and women (Schroeder and Borgerson 1998;
Schroeder and Zwick 2004).
Informed by a number of theoretical approaches, visual analysis can be pursued in several
different ways. Following the steps outlined by Rose (2012), visual analysis should ask questions
about the: 1) circumstances of production, 2) image content, and 3) intended audiences. The
circumstances of production refer to who created the image, the medium(s) used, and what may
have been the intended purpose. This stage of the analysis requires learning a bit about the
history of the technology at the time when the image was created. Inquiry about the content of
the images involves careful consideration of their composition and their historically and
theoretically relevant features. The likely audience can be deduced from internal evidence, such
as the medium itself (original oil paintings, mass produced prints and photographs) and, when
available, a history of ownership or provenance. More difficult to determine is how viewers in
the past may have understood images and, through processes of intertextuality, related them to
other texts, images and ideologies. Many images have received mention in the secondary
historical literature and these discussions can be very helpful in advancing the analysis.
Visual understanding of marketing and consumption history can be gained by blending
approaches and interests from art history with concepts and methods from the fields of visual
culture and postmodern theory. Art history has long been concerned with elements intrinsic to
images, such as their shape, line, color, texture, and composition. The term style refers to how
these elements are treated by individuals and artistic movements (Barnard 2001). Art historians
also have examined the lives of the artists, using biographical accounts to gain insight into the
intentions and meanings behind visual representation. However, much current art historical
writing, like research in the closely related field of material culture, perhaps focuses less on
artists and their works per se, than on using images and artifacts as analytical points of departure
for raising questions about the original owners and audiences, and about the societies and cultures
that produced and received them (Fernie 1995; Prown 1982). In effect, visual images can be used
as evidence for investigating larger historical questions including inquiries into past marketing
and consumption thought and practice.
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Giving this burgeoning field and its many theoretical and methodological perspectives a
thorough review is well beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that a visual culture
orientation, and application of its rich theoretical concepts and varied analytical approaches,
should provide a distinctive flavor to research and writing on marketing and consumption history,
and should yield original insights.
Accessing Visual Data
Visual data can be accessed in multiple ways. Traditionally, marketing and consumption
historians have searched books, journals, and consumer magazines for reproduced images and
have visited museums and archival collections to see original paintings, prints, photographs, and
videos. In the present day, institutions have been digitizing many of their holdings and posting
them on their websites. Individuals also have been saving visual images online. Researchers can
now conduct Internet searches, via Google Web and Google Images, based upon a number of
different keywords suggested by the secondary literature and by prior searches. Though
informed, deliberate, and iterative, this discovery process depends in part upon serendipity.
Seeing a historically significant, but previously unknown image for the first time can be an
exciting occasion in the research process. After assembling a set of visual data, the researcher
typically will select a few works for more detailed analysis. To some extent, researcher judgment
about aesthetic and iconic qualities will guide the process. Some images have greater resolution,
better composition, and simply more charisma than others. This is not the only method for
gathering primary source material. Studies of advertising content sometimes consist of a pre-
determined sampling at regular intervals from a particular universe of visual data, such as a run of
issues from one or more magazines (Belk and Pollay 1985; McQuarrie and Statman 2016).
Good repositories of digitized visual material in U.S. collections include the Library of
Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, the New York Public Library Digital
Collections, Wikimedia Commons, the websites of dozens of major art and history museums, and
various university libraries, such as the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising &
Marketing History at Duke University and the University of California, San Francisco “Truth
Tobacco Industry Documents.” Auction company catalogs featuring paintings, print ephemera,
and vintage photographs are also very informative. Almost all are available online and
auctioneer websites frequently archive past auctions and prices realized. For gun culture
historians, the Internet Movie Firearms Database contains hundreds of screenshots keyed to gun
1141
types, manufacturer brands, actors, movies, television series, and video games. Relying upon
some 300 volunteers for contributing uploads, the site is searchable and has become a resource
for Hollywood prop masters, gun collectors, and fans (Keegan 2012). Pinterest boards are
frustrating for research purposes because the image pins usually lack specific information about
when and where they were originally published.
The Public Domain
Researchers using visual images may at some point wish to publish these sources within a book
or article. However, when protected by copyright, which is a type of property granted by law,
authors and/or their publishers may have to secure permission from copyright owners. That can
get expensive. Getty Images and Associated Press, for example, may charge hundreds of dollars
to reprint just one of the photos from their archives. In some cases, copyright owners may refuse
to grant rights of reproduction. Tobacco companies, for example, may not want people today
reminded of the blatantly false claims made by their past cigarette advertising or documents
catalogued in the UCSF “Truth Tobacco Industry Documents.” In other instances, finding the
copyright holder may be difficult or the owner may not be responsive to inquiries. However,
copyright does not last forever, and many works are not entitled to its protection at all. Thus,
whenever possible, marketing and consumption historians should emphasize using and publishing
images within the public domain.
The public domain consists of creative works not protected by copyright, trademark, or
patent laws (Stim 2018). These works can be reproduced and repurposed. As Fishman (2008, p.
6) eloquently states, “The public domain is, in essence, our intellectual and artistic commons.”
Under current U.S. law works enter the public domain when:
1. Their copyright has expired. Works published before 1923 are in the public domain.
On 1 January 2019 the date will change to before 1924 and in 2020 to before 1925.
2. The copyright owner failed to provide copyright notice or follow copyright renewal
rules. Works published after 1922 but before March 1, 1989 that did not include
“Copyright” or © and the name of the owner are in the public domain. Works
published after 1922 but before 1964 are in the public domain if the owner did not
renew copyright. The U.S. Copyright Office has estimated “that only 15% of all
works published during 1923-1963 were ever renewed” (Fishman 2008, p. 329).
1142
3. The copyright owner deliberately places it in the public domain, a “dedication.” For
example, photographer Carol M. Highsmith has donated tens of thousands of her
American views to the Library of Congress. Wikimedia Commons hosts tens of
millions of media files including a great many dedicated works.
4. Copyright law does not protect the type of work. For example, works created for the
U.S. government are ordinarily in the public domain.
Furthermore, U.S. courts have ruled that “faithful reproductions” of two-dimensional
images not under copyright, such as a photograph of an old master painting, are in the public
domain. Some museums assert copyright to the faithful reproductions they post on their
websites, but they do not appear able to legally enforce their claim. In 2009 a UC Berkeley
graduate student, Derrick Coetzee, wrote a program that enabled him to download image tiles
from the website of the National Portrait Gallery in London. He reassembled them into high-
resolution images and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The museum wrote a demand letter
asserting copyright, but never took legal action (Petri 2014). A number of top American
museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, as well as the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London,
now willingly share good quality reproductions of images they own in the public domain. They
do charge extra for high-resolution copies, but even then do not assert a copyright claim. This
appears to be the emerging best practice (Petri 2014). Museums have a responsibility to serve the
public and disseminate knowledge of their collections. Sharing digital images also can garner
good publicity.
In the UK, copyright law works differently. Works do not enter the public domain until
70 years after the death of the author or creator. Other countries have similar laws with the
period after death usually ranging from 50 to 70 years, but as long as life plus 100 years in
Mexico. For researchers living outside the U.S. who want to use works in its public domain, the
“rule of the shorter term” applies (Fishman 2008). The Berne Convention for the Protection of
Literary and Artistic Works, to which 172 nations are parties, allows those using foreign works to
operate under the copyright in the country of origin. Thus, someone in the UK using visual data
from the U.S. can operate under American law. Needless to say, international copyright law
regarding the public domain can be very complicated.
1143
Fair Use of Visual Data
A free-culture movement has emerged that challenges copyright law in the U.S. and worldwide
for stifling innovation and preventing the transmission of crucial information (see, e.g., Lessig
2004). Critics say generous increases in the scope and duration of copyright protections over the
past few decades, such as the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act in the U.S. and similar
legislation in Europe, cater to the demands of big media, especially the Walt Disney Company,
and other business interests. Enacting longer and stronger copyright protections may benefit the
few at the expense of society at large. Thus, a number of groups and organizations have formed
to educate about the public domain, to preserve it from further encroachments, and to encourage
dedications from copyright owners (Fishman 2008). For example, Creative Commons, a
nonprofit organization founded in 2001, aims to expand the public domain and foster sharing.
The goal of QuestionCopyright.org, launched in 2007, is to reframe the way people think about
copyright. Technology has empowered countervailing forces. The Internet, for example, has
undermined copyright to the extent it allows individuals to easily disseminate protected works via
Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, and other social media. A full analysis of this serious debate and
the disruptive potential of digital technologies would digress from the topic of data sources for
marketing and consumption history. For present purposes, the takeaway should be that the rights
and protections afforded by copyright are limited in practice.
Fair use is a U.S. legal doctrine that permits unlicensed use of copyright-protected works.
According to the U.S. Copyright Office (2018), to determine whether something is fair use, four
factors need to be considered:
1. Purpose and character of the use. The use must be transformative in that it helps
create a new and different work. Criticism and comment, news reporting, and
research and scholarship constitute transformative uses (as does parody). A nonprofit,
educational application would be more defensible as fair use than a repurposing
whose sole intent is commercial.
2. Nature of the copyrighted work. Images that are factual in nature will be more
eligible for fair use than entirely fictional creations. This distinction helps preserve
the free flow of information that ultimately advances human knowledge.
3. Amount and importance of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a
whole. The more of a work that is used, the greater the potentially adverse impact on
1144
its value to the owner. A cropped section from a photograph or one frame from a
motion picture may be seen as relatively unimportant samples when compared to
works as a whole
4. Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Fair
use can be easier to justify when the redeployment of visual data does not cannibalize
sales from the copyrighted version or damage the reputation of the original material.
Courts and judges may need to be persuaded. “Since fair use is simply a defense to a
copyright infringement lawsuit, it is up to the defendant—the copier—in an
infringement case to show there is no harm to the potential marketing for the original
work” (Fishman 2008, p. 413).
Fair use is a solely American term and the doctrine it summarizes gives far more latitude
to reuse copyrighted works without permission than is possible in other legal systems (Fishman
2008). In the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, India, and South Africa various
concepts of “fair dealing” provide some defense against copyright infringement, but are more
limited than the fair use exception under U.S. law. In the experience of this writer, U.S.
publishers may be more relaxed about copyright issues and open to fair use than are British
publishers. Sage Publishing, for example, appears to have a laissez-faire attitude regarding the
reproduction of images. The Journal of Macromarketing has published articles that include
many print ads still under copyright (see, e.g. McQuarie and Statman 2016). Emerald Publishing
Limited, on the other hand, has been very conservative, perhaps even paranoid, about publishing
works not clearly in the public domain, at least based upon my interactions with the UK
production staff. These policies are probably driven in part by differences in legal systems. Fair
use in the U.S. appears to be a stronger defense than fair dealing in the UK. But one wonders if
cultural differences – say, something like American audaciousness (chutzpah) versus a rigid, self-
regulatory British mindset – are in play. After all, national culture would appear to influence the
development of legal systems.
Conclusion
Marketing and consumption historians should become more aggressive in locating, analyzing,
and publishing visual data. Images can supplement and validate the other four types of primary
sources and even become the lead source in their own right. The Internet and search engines,
along with constantly growing online repositories, have greatly increased access to visual
1145
sources. Copyright restrictions are sometimes a barrier to publishing images, but many recently
created works in the public domain can be found. The doctrines of fair use and fair dealing
provide legal justifications for publishing visual data still under the protection of copyright.
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1153
Macromarketing Insights Ninety
Minutes at a Time: A Season with
Forest Green Rovers, the World’s
Greenest Football Club
Anthony Samuel, Cardiff University, UK
“The world of soccer has had its ups and downs in history but there is no doubt of its
power to influence billions of people for good. Forest Green Rovers is showing that what
few thought could be possible – soccer as a fully sustainable sector increasingly free from
climate-warming emissions - is not only a realistic but a desirable future for fans and
clubs alike.”
Forest Green Rovers (2018)
Abstract
Peterson (2016) in his first publication as the editor of the Journal of Macromarketing called for
more research into marketing dynamics and practices functioning at a meso / place-based level.
This paper responds to this call by embedding its research in the places and spaces of the worlds
greenest football club, Forest Green Rovers (FGR). Through the application of visual
ethnographical participatory research FGR is empirically explored as a place capable of
educating, influencing and changing consumption choices to favour sustainability. The study
offers a novel macromarketing perspective on the practices of a football club and demonstrates
the potential of its ‘tangible symbols’ to stimulate sustainable consumption. It shows how
specific ‘in place’ symbols of sustainability are perceived as normal and thus lack any real
impact, while others such as vegan only food are more significant. It also indicates that the
1154
symbols of sustainability functioning at FGR play a role in reaffirming the authenticity and
genuine commitment that the football club and its owner have to promote sustainability and
veganism. Subsequently, the paper presents both empirical and theoretical contributions to
macromarketing by demonstrating the workings of a meso level place to facilitate sustainable
consumption and theorising a football club’s commitment to sustainability as a macromarketing
phenomenon.
Introduction
Glennie and Thrift’s (1992) recognise the importance attributed to understanding consumption
practices as everyday situated activities taking place in the urban places and spaces that people
occupy and socially construct. Consumer knowledge and consumer choice, they argue is not
necessarily informed by advertising, but rather from participation in urban life. Subsequently, the
many ‘places and spaces’ of the urban environment are argued to be capable of playing a
significant role in assisting consumer knowledge and consumption choice (Barnett et al. 2011,
Amin 2002, Mansvelt 2005). From the personal places of home, the public places of government
and private/public organisations to the openly social third places such as parks, public houses and
coffee shops (Oldenburg 1999), consumption discourse and choice is part of everyday life
(Glennie and Thrift 1992, Harvey 1973). Subsequently, Soja (1989) calls for greater insight into
place-based social geographies that encourage distinct social practices such as sustainable
consumption.
The Journal of Macromarketing (JMK) has made a valuable contributed to the field of sustainable
consumption. It is considered from the perspective of anti-consumption (Chatzidakis and Lee
2013, Hunter and Hoffmann 2013), the transformation of consumer culture (Assadourian 2010),
Quality of life (Kilbourne, McDonagh, and Prothero 1997), green commodity discourse
(Prothero, McDonagh, and Dobscha 2010), environmentally friendly products (Samli 1998),
brand narratives (Ourahmoune, Binninger, and Robert 2014), recycling (Ekstrom and
Salomonson 2014), mobilizing slow fashion (Odometer and Atik 2014) and self-interest (Naderi
and Strutton 2015).
Despite this significant contribution, Macromarketing scholars have paid limited attention to the
agency of everyday places and spaces to influence sustainable consumption. Indeed Peterson
(2016) in his first publication as the MKT editor asked macromromarketers to address this
1155
shortfall, calling for more research dedicated to meso level (place-based) marketing dynamics
and the behaviour of crowds/audiences. This paper responds to his call by embedding its research
in the novel places and spaces of ‘The World’s greenest Football Club’, FGR (Newsroom 2017,
Forest Green Rovers 2018).
This paper explores the application of visual ethnography and participatory research (McCarthy
and Muthuri 2016, Pink 2001) conducted through lead author participative ethnography (became
part of FGR’s ‘crowd’) and ‘crowd’ based focus groups. Through data collection consisting of
photographs, ethnographical observation and focus group discussions, thematic coding was used
to generate novel insights into the significance of FGR’s potential to influence sustainable
consumption. The paper concludes by theoretically grounding FGR's place-based practices as
novel macromarketing.
Literature Review
Macromarketing: Towards a place-based understanding
Place-based studies in macromarketing are often focused on countrywide or regional
development studies. Examples included Layton (2015) use of Coral bay (Western Australia) as
a backdrop for his work on formation, growth and adaptive change in marketing systems, Sredi,
Schulz II, and Brecil (2017) insights into the creation of communities in post conflict Bosnia,
Nguyen, Rahtz, and Schutz II, (2014) suggestion that tourism can be the catalyst for transforming
Ha Long in Vietnam, Guszak, and Grunhagen (2016) work on food deserts in Croatia, Schutz II
(2012) and Sandikci, Peterson, and Ekici (2016) application of marketing systems to deliver
development goals and Wooliscroft, Gangimair –Wooliscroft, and Noone (2014) hierarchy of
ethical consumer behaviour in New Zealand. Recently place-based macromarketing studies have
been considered through the lens of ‘alternative economies’ (Campana, Chatzidakis, and
Laamanen, 2017) with remote indigenous communities in Australia providing a backdrop to help
us understand that money in some places lacks symbolic value (Godinho, Venugopal, and Singh,
2017). While Watson and Ekici ‘s (2017) research conducted on a small farm in Ocakli, Western
Turkey found that alternative food networks are dependent upon stakeholders sharing congruent
values. Such work suggests an emerging macromarketing interest in understanding the role of
meso / place-based marketing dynamics to ‘save the world’ and solve societies ‘wicked
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problems’. This is also outlined by work from Kemper and Ballantine (2017) who argue that
meso level social marketing has a significant role to play in addressing obesity, Samuel and
Peattie’s (2015) application of grounded theory to investigate the marketing dynamics of the
Fairtrade Towns Movement and Gau, Ramirez and Barua (2014) insights into market orientation
through community philosophy. However, despite this contribution, there is still a recognised
shortfall in macromarketing studies that have empirically explored meso level marketing systems
attempts to influence sustainable consumption (Peterson 2015).
Work from the broader discipline of marketing and sociology exists in this area, for example,
Alexander and Nicholas (2006), Peattie and Samuel (2016) Malpass et al. (2007) and Lyon
(2014) have all considered the role of the Fairtrade Towns movement in enacting meso level
institutions to improve Fairtrade consumption. These studies add empirical depth to Jackson’s
(2006) work on sustainable consumption and Mckenzie- Mohr’s (2000) approaches to fostering
sustainable behaviour. All these scholars along with others such Seyfang (2005) directly or
indirectly confer that the places and spaces of our everyday life have agency in educating and
influencing sustainable consumption.
Promoting Sustainable Consumption
Agenda 21 of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (UNCED 1992) outlines the importance of better
promotion of sustainable products and the need for a better understanding of the consequences of
consumption (Jackson 2006, Sayfang 2005). Jackson (2006, p. 4) suggests that the accepted
institutional view of sustainable consumption is ‘more consumption of more sustainable
products’. Sustainable consumption asks consumers to consider the social, economic and
environmental impact their consumption habits support or create (Hobson 2002). Thus
consumption can be viewed as an agent of change in a macromarketing system where the
connectivity of consumption, production and disposal can be used to stretch and deepen spatiality
and social relations (Amin 2002). This process involves consumers and institutions alike
factoring the direct and indirect impacts of their consumption choices into their buyer decision-
making process (Jackson 2005).
Jackson (2005) suggest that we learn from observing others and often model our behaviour on
what they do. As humans, we need to belong, and subsequently, much of our consumption is
1157
motivated by a desire for approval and the need to interact with our family, friends and
community (Durning 1992). Learning through social engagement is therefore suggested to have
a positive impact on sustainable consumption intentions and desires (Jackson 2004). As
McKenzie-Mohr & Smith (1999, p.77) confer:
‘Conformity that occurs due to the individuals observing the behaviour of others, to
determine how they should behave, can have long-lasting effects’
Thus place-based marketing functions have the potential to make a significant contribution to
engaging people in sustainable consumption. Understanding marketing communications that
socially function in the places and spaces we occupy should, therefore, be seen as equally
important as mass marketing communications. McKenzie-Mohr and Smith (1999) posit that
social marketing is often dependant on media advertising to create public awareness and
understanding of issues related to sustainability despite this method often proven to be limited in
its ability to foster behavioural change. They further imply that most information campaigns that
seek to improve knowledge or changing attitudes have very limited or even no effect upon
behaviour at all. Alarmingly Stern et al. (1984) identify that many campaigns seeking to foster
more sustainable behaviour have failed as a direct result of paying scant attention to the cultural
practices and social interactions that influence human behaviour. For example, Beverland (2014,
p. 372) indicates that ‘most consumers do not view reduced meat consumption as environmentally
relevant', suggesting that more research needs to be carried out on the effectiveness of marketing
communication that aims to promote ‘plan-based diets’.
The practice of community-based social marketing draws upon the discipline of social
psychology, which McKenzie-Mohr and Smith (1999) argue, can be used to develop direct
community level contact initiatives to promote behavioural change. Subsequently narratives of
community-based social marketing recognises the importance of places and spaces to help
develop personal connections, credibility and trust, to influence behavioural change, telling us:
‘The techniques that are used by community-based social marketing are carried out at a
community level and frequently involve direct personal contact. Personal contact is
1158
emphasised because social science research indicates that we are most likely to change
some behaviour in response to direct appeals or social support from others.'
McKenzie-Mohr and Smith (1999, p.16)
Thus, people and organisations that deliver sustainability messages ‘can have a dramatic
impact upon how it is received’ (McKenzie-Mohr and Smith 1999, p.89).
The sustainable consumer relies on an array of sources of information about the goods or
services they may consume. Past consumer surveys have delineated that the most influential
contributor is the recommendations of friends and colleagues (Arnold 2009). In support, Lewis
and Bridger (2001) convey that the greater sense of identity consumers have with an individual or
group, the more likely they are to ‘wear its symbols’. In support, McKenzie-Mohr and Smith
(2006,p. 95) state:
‘Research on persuasion demonstrates that the major influence upon attitudes and
behaviour is not the media, but rather our contact with other people.’
Tallontire, Rentsendorj and Blowfield (2001) and Arnold (2009) agree that ethical
consumers often trust, listen, and believe the people they interact with. Subsequently, the role of
social acceptance, belonging and relationships (Murphy et al. 2006) to influencing consumers to
think and act more sustainably cannot be ignored. As Jackson (2006, p. 120) suggest:
‘Consumers are also employees. As employees, people are immersed daily in
certain sets of behaviour, values and logic. In particular, they are exposed to a
variety of environmentally important practices. There is evidence to suggest that
behaving in certain ways in one context can have a knock-on effect in another
context. If I’m encouraged to recycle at work, it is more likely that I will attempt
to recycle at home.’
1159
Research Context
Operationalising Sustainability: Forest Green Rovers changing the rules of the game.
Since1889 FGR has been an integral part of the small Cotswolds town, Nailsworth and in 2017
for the first time in the club's history, it won promotion to Division Two of the English Football
League. Since then it has attracted an onslaught of media interest that ironically and
disappointingly for some has had nothing to do with its footballing prowess. Mainstream media
has awoken to the fact that FGR is following triple bottom line sustainability practices in every
facet of its day to day operations as a professional football club. This season, their actions have
become big-ticket news in the British mainstream media, with the BBC, The Guardian and The
Times all reporting on the club's unique 'sustainable' practices. For example, The Times (2017)
ran the headline ‘Forest Green Rovers- the club where meat is off the menu, and the pitch is fed
seaweed'.
FGR's holistic approach to sustainability is evident for all to witness from their organic pitch,
solar panel floodlights, recycled water system, underground heating, charging points for electric
cars, solar-powered robot mowers, eco-meadow and eco trail to the more novel practices of all
staff and visitors only being served vegan food (FGR Sustainability Report 2017). Reinforcing
this commitment the club has achieved Eco-Management and Audit Schemes (EMAS)
accreditation (FGR Sustainability Report 2017) and in October 2015 they became the world’s
first accredited vegan football club (Forest Green Rovers 2018). Recently FIFA the sport
governing body labelled FGR as ‘the worlds greenest football club’ (Newsroom 2017).
“FIFA recently described us as the greenest football club in the world. That’s quite an
accolade, and it shows how we’ve been able to bring together football and environmental
consciousness at the highest levels of the game.
No other football club in the world has put the environment at the heart of what it does,
embedded it into its DNA. We’re the only club in the world to have EMAS accreditation –
the gold standard of environmental management – and we’re the first and only vegan
football club in the world.”
Forest Green Rovers (2017)
1160
How FGRs sustainability practices are communicated/reinforced to its stakeholders are of
paramount interest to the football club as FGR’s Owner / Chairman Dale Vice stated in an
interview with The Guardian (2017),
“I thought it was an opportunity to take our message to a new audience," he says. "The
world of football doesn't get spoken to on environmental issues. I thought we could use it
as a new channel, and quite an unexpected one, to talk about sustainability."
FGR Sustainability Report (2017) also states;
“An important outcome of this policy is, we hope, long-term behavioural change, within
the club of course, but also from our supporters and the rest of the sporting world.”
Therefore this paper seeks to use macromarketing as a lens to help empirically explore the
possibility of FGRs place to change stakeholder behaviour to favour sustainable consumption.
Methodology
This studies theoretical perspective is informed by a desire to engage and generate meaning from
‘those involved’ with FGR football club. Through the theoretical perspective of symbolic
interactionism data was derived from the social interactions and interrelationships experienced by
FGR’s crowd (Blumer 1969). From collecting visual representation, and observing, what is
happening in the ‘natural setting’ of FGR on match day the research captures visual
representations (photos), perceptions, attitudes and actions directly from ethnographical
engagement as one of FGR’s crowd. The data collected specifically sort to understand visitors’
interactions with the symbols ‘in play’ at FGR (Starks and Trinidad 2007, Dey 2007). As
Goulding (2002, p.39) explains:
‘Symbolic interactionism is both a theory of human behaviour and an approach to an
enquiry about human conduct and group behaviour.'
The study starts from the position of recognising FGR as marketing system consisting of many
interdependent ‘abstract objects’ (Blumer 1969, p.10) seeking to discover ‘from within' how
participants see, describe and act towards the symbols of sustainability while attending a football
1161
match at FGR. To capture this data and in line with the central doctrines of symbolic
interactionism the researcher put himself in the place of those studied (Crotty 1998). This paper is
therefore based upon capturing a rich mosaic of data that tells us how FGR symbolically interact
with their crowd to promote sustainable education and consumption. Following the lead of Blumer
(1969 p. 39) the study’s approach aimed to ‘lift the veils that cover the area of group life that one
proposes to study’ by getting as close as possible to the lived experience of those involved. Data
collection took a pluralistic approach through:
Visual ethnographical participation (Pink 2013) from attending matches home and
away ‘as one of the crowd’ and becoming a supporter of FGR during the 2017/18
season.
Engaging other participants (football supporters) to share their experiences
through pictorial representation (Pink 2013) and participating in post-match focus
groups to ‘see things from the perspective of others’ (Crotty 1998, p. 76). Two
focus groups consisting of football supporters (see Table 1: Focus group
participants) were conducted. Each focus group was taken to a game at FGR and
asked to engage in visual participatory research by making, sharing and
commenting upon photographs that captured their imagination and thoughts
before, during and after the football match (Pink 2013). These photos were further
reflected upon in post-match focus group discussions.
1162
Focus Group One Participants
Match attended: FGR V Swansea
Date: 31/10/2017
Score: FGR 0 V Swansea 2
Post-match focus group: FGR,
Carol Embrey Suite
Focus Group Two Participants
Match attended: FGR V Morecambe
Date: 28/10/2017
Score: FGR 2 V Morecambe 0
Post-match focus group – The Egyptian
Mill, Nailsworth
Male age 40-50
Swansea City supporter
Female age 40-50
Cardiff City supporter
Male age 18-20
Wigan Athletic supporter
Female age 30-40
Swansea City supporter
Male age 18-20
FGR supporter
Male age 70-75
FGR supporter
Female age 40-50
Swansea City supporter
Male age 40-50
Liverpool supporter
Male 25-30
Wolverhampton Wonderers supporter
Male age 18-20
Manchester City supporter
Female 25-30
Wolverhampton Wonderers supporter
Table one: Focus group participants
Data Capture and Processing
Via the application of visual participation, rich data was collected through the process of all
participants taking, sharing and commenting upon photographs of significant symbols
1163
functioning on a match day at FGR (Pink 2013). In support of this approach Pink (2013, p. 1)
argues that;
‘Images are indeed part of how we experience, learn and know as well as how we
communicate and represent knowledge.'
Datasets (visual and commentary) from ethnographic participation and focus groups were
processed through thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) to help,
build a pictorial mosaic of the significant symbols of sustainability at FGR
determine the possibility of the key symbols in FGRs marketing system to educate and
incrementally influence sustainable behaviour/consumption practices.
This studies application of thematic analysis helped examine both sets of data to conceptualise
the meanings and experiences of all participants (Braun and Clarke 2006). The analysis of
datasets for this study followed Braun and Clarke (2006) six-phase approach to thematic analysis
as outlined in Table 2: Thematic Analysis at FGR.
Phase Description of the process
1 Familiarising yourself
with the data:
Photographic data was processed for initial ideas and concepts
to emerge.
2 Generating initial codes: Photographic data was systematically coded for outlining
features in the data. Photographs were subsequently coded and
reviewed for relevance to each other and the emerging codes.
3 Searching for themes: Codes were collated into potential themes, by merging all data
(photographs, focus group discussions and ethnographic
participation journal notes) relevant to each potential theme.
4 Reviewing themes: Themes were examined to consider their validity and relevance
using the entire data set, form this process a thematic ‘map’ of
the analysis was produced. At this stage, the process facilitated
1164
the emergence of three key themes upon which the findings of
this paper are presented:
1. Clean energy
2. Interpretative geography
3. Vegan Plus
5 Defining and naming
themes:
Data analysis was furthered refined to the specifics of each
theme, uniting the data into an overall integrated story.
6 Producing the report: The last review of a selection of vivid, compelling extract
examples was analysed again and related back to the research
question.
Table 2: Thematic Analysis at FGR
Findings
Findings are presented through the three key themes that emerged from the research process.
Theme 1: Clean Energy
First introductions to FGR's football stadium is dominated by two significant and novel (at a
football ground) symbols of sustainability, the electric car charging ports and solar panels at the
entrance to the stadium (see Image 1: Solar Panels). The solar panels were noteworthy enough
for several participants to photograph them. However, their significance was limited. While it
was uncommon to see these symbols at football grounds their presence in our urban landscape is
now commonplace and perhaps one of the most accepted symbols of clean/sustainable energy
1165
consumption we come across. Subsequently, solar panels were considered to be a visible symbol
of ‘the very least of what they should be doing’ in the name of sustainability.
More significant was the sight of electric car charging ports available in FGR’s carpark.
Participants showed a high level of interest in these symbols, capturing numerous photographs of
them both in and out of use (see Image 2: Electric Car Ports). Before all games attended informal
groups of fans could be observed congregating around them, deep in conversation and intrigue
regarding their application and cost. These discussions were also captured during the focus group,
all participants expressed a desire to learn more about electric cars but were concerned that their
‘newness'. They additionally expressed a fear of the lack of a supporting infrastructure for
electric cars indicating it was a little off-putting to commit to purchasing one. This was despite
some participants recalling previous observation of seeing Ecotricity car charging ports at service
stations on the M5 motorway network that some used to get to the game.
However, the novelty of seeing a Tesla car hooked up to a car charging port proved to be a shared
symbol captured and commented upon (see Image 3: Tesla) by many. The cars desirability and
potential as a symbol of conspicuous consumption unquestionably captured the imagination of
lots of football fans going to the game. This included research participants who indicated it to be
a desirable symbol of sustainable transport that ‘if affordable’ had the potential to dissolve the
previous concerns of adopting electric cars.
Having taken the initial steps into FGR's 'place' observations natural turn to the dominance of
FGR's official sponsor and holding company Ecotricity. Avoiding symbolic interaction with the
Ecotricity brand was deemed near impossible, given billboards adorn the pitch (see Image 4,
Ecotricity) supported by the ubiquitous use of Ecotricity green as colour schemes throughout the
ground. This includes the team’s official kit and the Union Jack being transformed to embrace
Eccentricity's unique shade of green, while also brazened on the front of every player's chest
during the game is the Ecotricity logo. Even the crowd of FGR supporters often sing ‘Who Are
We! Green Army!’
The data collected suggest that the Ecotricity brand and the subtle nuances that support its
communication amount to several symbols that ensure it is ubiquitously transmitted to everyone
who watches the game (see Image 5: Everything is Green.) Following symbolic exposer to the
1166
Ecotricity brand, it was a natural progression for some to carry out post-match internet research
into the company's consumer proposition to transfer energy supplies to the ‘greener and cleaner
Ecotricity'. However, the onslaught of Ecotricity symbols at FGR for some was a little distasteful
and a reminder of the ‘crass commercialisation of the game, that many a ‘true supporter of
football’ find distasteful’. More positively for others, its dominance was seen as a reminder that
clean domestic energy is now ‘easily available’ and ‘worth consideration if the price was right’.
This attitude was followed up by some participants suggesting they would consider visiting the
Ecotricity website for more details.
Finally, the Hydremx underground heating system although identified by a limited number (see
Image 6: Hydremax Heating) was the least photographed and considered clean energy venture
promoted by FGR. Arguably this is because the ‘innovation is not on view’ and is only
represented by interpretation boards outside several turnstile entrances. The time necessary to
read and digest this interpretation board was described as ‘off-putting', and the information on it
was suggested to be ‘not very relevant’ to peoples normal lives.
Theme 2: Interpretative Geography
It is somewhat novel as a football fan to be exposed to interpretation boards at a football ground
that move beyond the tourist gaze of documenting a club’s history and past players. However, at
FGR interpretation boards communicate the benefits of both organisations and individuals
embracing sustainable behaviours. It is hard to escape the main interpretation board on view at
the entrance to FGR’s ground. This proudly invites visitors to take the FGR ‘eco trail’ (see Image
7: FGR Eco Trail) and uncover ten points of interest in around the ground that explain FGR’s
commitment to sustainability.
The novelty of such an approach can be observed on match day as people can often be observed
stopping to read FGRs sustainability commitments. Observations made and focus group
participants’ views suggest that the initial impact of seeing FGR’s multiple commitments to
sustainability helps ease sceptical worries of FGR possibly ‘over-egging their commitment’ and
engaging in the well-known process of greenwashing. Positive comments were expressed for
FGR’s ‘holistic’ approach to sustainability, and ‘the extent the club has taken it’. Each of the ten
sustainability commitments on FGR ‘Eco Trail’ is signposted around the ground via the strategic
1167
placement of interpretation boards at specific points of reference, helping FGR’s sustainability
commitments to be easily recognised. Having all ten of the interpretation boards on display in the
members’ bar is possibly a key symbol of FGR ‘taking sustainability seriously’.
The most significant interpretation board observed, photographed and commented upon was
FGR’s commitment to veganism and other sustainable food sources such as Fairtrade (discussed
in Theme 3: Veganism Plus). However, a variety of different interpretation boards were also
photographed and considered with the ‘electric highway' and the ‘organic pitch' being of interest.
Although many positive interactions with the interpretation boards were discussed questions were
raised about the ‘real value’ of FGR’s wildlife interpretation board given the amount of actual
ground that was dedicated to it near the stadium. Image 8: Interpretation Boards, demonstrates
the most common images capture of interpretation boards.
The eco trail and it's interpretation boards that are strategically placed around the ground help
endorse FGR’s commitment to sustainability as ‘authentic’. However, while the interpretation
boards were recognised for their novelty and strategic positioning, they arguably carry a lot of
information that only the ‘very interested’ or ‘board while I was in the queue for food’ will read.
Subsequently, the findings posit that their role goes little beyond legitimising the actions of the
club. They suggest that interpretation boards at the ground struggle to keep peoples interest long
enough to matter because they have ‘better things to do’ and more ‘important things’ (meaning
the game) to think about’ when at a match.
Theme 3: Veganism Plus
As Image 9: Food Interpretation, demonstrates, the very notion that a football club can be
‘entirely vegan’ proved to be intriguing even before visiting FGR. Picking up on FGR's recent
publicity as the only football club in the world to carry the endorsement of the Vegan Society
observing how FGR has enacted policies and procedures to adopt this was of prime interest for
both the ethnographer and the focus group. Subsequently, it comes as no surprise that all
participants noted the interpretation boards dedicated to food consumption on display wherever
food and drink were available in the ground. However, despite the strategic placement of these
interpretation boards resulting in prominent recognition little value was attributed to them beyond
reinforcing a belief that FGRs commitment to veganism and socially responsible food
consumption was sincere. Much more recognition and novelty was attributed to the actual food
1168
and drink available, both to buy and sample (for example a free Vegan based bag of food samples
was distributed at the Morecambe game on October 28th 2017) while at FGR. Recognition of a
vegan only menu with a limited offering, biodegradable containers and food packaging, Fairtrade
tea, coffee and cola were all captured in Image 10, and they all provoked a variety of reactions.
Highly significant was the possibility of trying different vegan brands through the offer of free
samples (see image 10: free samples) and the removal of so called ‘normal food and drink’
options such as cows' milk, meat-based food and big brands like Coca-Cola and Cadbury from
FGR food outlets. Thus trying ‘new and different things such as soya milk in my tea’ became the
norm, and was actually ‘ not that bad’ . Many people who visit FGR will quite possibly indulge
in new sustainable food consumption experience and consumer learning that only happened as a
consequence of a visit to FGR to watch a football match.
Image 9 and 10 capture the critical symbols of food supporters interact with while watching a
football match at FGR.
Personal experience, significant observations and experiences monitored suggest that reactions to
the food and drink captured in image 9 and 10 manifests itself through six different
conceptualisations of visitor reactions to FGR’s vegan only menu.
1. The Admirer who is thoroughly committed to what FGR are attempting to do with food
and drink at the ground. They are likely to be vegans or vegetarians or on a lesser scale
understanding of the impact of their consumption habits and thus interested in making as
many changes as possible to become more sustainable.
2. The Supporter who like what FGR are doing and despite having a lot of food based
knowledge is keen to learn more about the food they eat and the impact of their
consumption behaviour, thus mirroring previous conceptualisations of ethical/sustainable
consumers. While at FGR they warm to experimentation (trying food samples etc) with
their food and are likely to experiment with vegan, vegetarian and ethically sourced food.
This group is also supportive of FGRs commitment to veganism, believing it gives the
club and its supporters a ‘different identity to all the other football clubs around.’
1169
3. The Intrigued are often amongst FGR’s ‘new visitors' and demonstrate a certain level of
intrigue, wishing to find out more about vegan food. The availability of samples and the
possibility of ‘trying something different for the day’ is novel. This group of visitors seek
out more education on veganism and subsequently attempt to experiment with their food
choices in a safe place.
4. The Humourist is most often found amongst travelling away fans who on occasion burst
into comic chanting mocking FGR’s status as a vegan football club. It is not uncommon
to here away fans taunt the clubs food policy. Songs such as ‘feed the vegans let them
know it's Christmas time', ‘where's your burger van, where's your burger van’ and other
more profane are often sung by opposition fans. The humourist is suggested to engage in
a vegan diet for the duration of time they spend in and around the FGR on match day. On
leaving FGR they are very likely to swiftly move back to their usual consumption habits
without a second thought.
5. The Unconcerned believe that FGRs commitment to veganism has ‘nothing to do with
football’ and is an unnecessary distraction to the game. They only consume the food on
offer because their preferred options of meat-based products and branded snacks have
been edited out. This group has no interest in the education on offer or to change their
consumption habits as they ‘only come for the football’.
6. The Defiant resents the vegan stance made by FGR and refuse to consume any of the
vegan based products on offer, preferring to bring their own tea/ coffee and snack to the
ground. Much like the unconcerned they also view veganism at FGR as an unwanted
distraction from the football and will often attempt to subvert the policy by publicly
denouncing their support.
A topography of FGR visitors’ symbolic interaction with veganism is mapped in Figure 1: A
Typography of FGR Visitors. This helped further understand FGR’s place’s ability to educate
and change visitors consumption practices. Each of the six conceptualisations is mapped to build
1170
a topography of the different attitudes, behaviour and levels of engagement demonstrated when in
a particular place IE FGR’s football ground ‘The New Lawn’.
Conclusion: Towards a Macromarketing Theory of FGR
The findings of this paper add empirical depth to Glennie and Thrift’s (1992), Barnett et al.
(2011) and Mansvelt’s (2005) suggestion that physical places are capable of assisting consumers
in knowledge and choice. It demonstrates how a place is interpreted through the symbols it
displays. The study offers a novel macromarketing perspective on the practices of a football club
illustrating the potential of critical symbols to stimulate interest and behavioural change to favour
sustainability. It shows how specific symbols are perceived as usual and thus lack any real
impact while others such as vegan only food can cause much more significant more emotive
reactions that will vary from visitor to visitor as figure 1 demonstrates. Importantly it also
indicates that the many symbols of sustainability functioning in FGRs place play a role in
reaffirming the authenticity and genuine commitment of the club towards sustainability and
veganism.
FGR's holistic meso level application of sustainability is complementary to each of Hunt’s (1981)
core dimensions of macromarketing. The football club represents a novel marketing system that
seeks to bestow influence and change its visitor's behaviours by applying a ‘place-based' meso
level marketing dynamic dedicated to sustainability. As FGRs Footprint Report (2015, p.1) states:
"Forest Green Rovers (FGR) is dedicated to becoming a truly sustainable football club, a
world first. We aim to make it a place where we can demonstrate eco-thinking and
technology to a new audience, football fans. Indeed, we believe that we have the
opportunity to introduce sustainability to the wider world of sport, not just football.”
Forest Green Rovers (2018)
FGR is an entire production and consumption system where their core product ‘football' and all
its associated operations and augmented services are positioned and practised based on the
principles of social and ecological sustainability. Their actions demonstrate (all be it via a case
study) the potential impact and consequence a meso level marketing systems can have on
1171
changing societal outlooks and behaviour. Along with their focus on changing consumer
attitudes, beliefs and behaviours (particularly regarding the deep promotion of a vegan diet) FGR
also ensure every facet of their stadium operations is ecologically and socially sustainable. FGR
is, therefore, more than a football club! This paper argues FGR's novel approach to ‘sustainability
in sport' afford the football club the status of a meso level marketing dynamic that has direct and
indirect social and ecological macro consequences. Thus, this study demonstrates how a football
club understands its impact by proactively responding to increasing societal concerns for
ecological sustainability and consumer interest in healthy and ethical lifestyles. The strength of
these linkages means that FGR’s meso level conduct and operations are inherently
macromarketing in nature.
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1177
The Power of Marketplace
Mythologies in Transforming
Energy Marketing Systems
Petra Berg125-126, University of Vaasa, Finland
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to construct an integrating framework that enables uncovering “hidden
logics and drivers” embedded in the dominant social paradigm of marketing systems. Especially
sustainability transitions have received a lot of interest lately, and to enable theorizing about their
dynamics this framework combines approaches from the fields of Macromarketing; marketing
systems theory, transition management; multi-level perspective and sustainability transitions and
consumer behavior; socio-cultural research on discourses and marketplace mythologies. The focus
here is upon dominant institutional logics and their representations through discourses circulating
in the marketplace, more specifically the role of power discourses and possible marketplace
mythologies in the Finnish energy transition.
Key Words; dominant social paradigm, institutional theory, marketplace mythologies, marketing
systems sustainability transitions, multi-level perspective
125 Corresponding author 126 [email protected]
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Introduction
Lately, energy transitions to sustainability have received a lot of interest from different academic
fields. From a marketing viewpoint these can be considered as multilevel, systemic challenges
calling for both micro and macro level exploration. With the aim to understand and theorize about
dynamics in transitions to sustainability, the multi-level perspective (MLP) (Geels 2004) supports
answering the call for scholars at the Macromarketing and TCR intersection to use markets as the
central organizing principle (Figueiredo et al., 2015, Kadirov, Varey and Wolfenden 2016) and
thus also the need for including socio-cultural research into transition studies (Sarrica et al., 2016,
Speed 2016).
To capture and analyze often “ubiquitous and opaque” institutional structures in marketing
and consumption systems (Kilbourne and Mittelstaedt 2012, Varey 2012), an integrating
framework is constructed (see Fig.3) by combining the Marketing systems theory (Layton 2011)
and the Multi-level perspective approach (Geels 2004). This multi-level perspective enables
unveiling power discourses and the possible existence of so called marketplace mythologies
(Thompson 2004) by discerning multiple levels of discourses produced by social actors in different
positions or roles. These levels are: (a) macro-level institutional forces (economic, political and
legislative), (b) meso-level company and research, and (c) micro- or consumer-level, all present in
socio-technical systems (Verbong and Geels 2007, Späth and Roracher 2010). Thus, the main focus
is on power discourses that either maintains or challenges the institutional structures of the regime
and thus the “ruling” marketing system. More specifically, in this study it means finding and
analyzing different levels of discourses and possible marketplace mythologies circulating in the
Finnish energy marketing system.
The contribution of this paper is in using the above mentioned discourses to reveal socially
constructed immaterial drivers in socio-technical and material transitions. In other words, the logic
of marketing systems theory to link micro choices with macro outcomes (Layton 2011, p. 259) is
used to enable theorizing about transition dynamics.
Discussion
Macromarketing as a discipline studies the interdependency of different provision systems in a
society which affect the market. It tends to emphasize social, cultural, or policy orientations,
placing emphasis on the systems of transactions rather than individual exchanges. According to
scholars in the field of Transformative consumer research (TCR) and Macromarketing, new
1179
greener pathways towards sustainable production and consumption require us to move away from
the profligate consumption styles of the Western industrial societies and its dominant social
paradigm tied to materialism (McDonagh et al 2012). One way to enable transitions towards
sustainability could be uncovering and understanding how current socio-technical, marketing
systems and their institutions molds consumer behavior to be consistent with their own
requirements tied to materialism and growth (Giesler & Veresiu 2014, Kilbourne and Mittelstaedt
2012, Varey 2012).
As social structures are given legitimacy at the institutional level that (Berger and
Luckmann 1966, Dacin 1997), uncovering systemic barriers to sustainable (energy) production and
consumption choices calls for understanding how and why institutional power influence on
people’s perceptions and behavior (Negro et al 2012, Andrews-Speed 2016). The institutional
structures maintaining marketing systems are reinforced or challenged through discourses, where
the most powerful ones might become marketplace mythologies, strengthening public perceptions
of what is considered acceptable or not. Humphreys and Thompson (2014) follow a post structural
perspective in their discourse analysis positioning social actors and the way they talk about things
into particular sociocultural and institutional positions. This way, social actors are seen as
constructing narratives that draw from a broader legacy of culturally established discourses and
metaphors. Following the logic of the construct of marketplace myths (Thompson 2004) cultural
archetypes, or myths, are used to create distinctive marketplace mythologies that in their turn serve
diverse and often competing ideological interests.
The different discourses can be seen as circulating in marketing systems which are “multi-
level, path dependent, dynamic systems, embedded within a social matrix, and interacting with
institutional and knowledge environment” (Layton 2011, p. 259). Marketing systems are defined
as networks where buyers, sellers and other actors meet and where the exchange happens, being
either tribal societies or western mature economies. In this network the elements consist of
specialization, exchange logics, flows, roles, networks, governance, assortments, buyers, growth
and well-being (Layton 2009).
Sustainability transitions are concerned with how to promote and govern fundamental
transformation of socio-technical systems towards more sustainable modes of production and
consumption (Markard, Raven and Truffer 2012). The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) approach
(Geels 2004) supports this systems view, offering an overarching view of the dynamics leading to
a structural change of a socio-technological system e.g. the co-evolution of technology and society
1180
through interplay between landscape, regime and niche level processes. A socio-technological
system consists of societal functions which are fulfilled by a cluster of elements involving
technology, science, regulation, user practices, markets, cultural meaning, infrastructure,
production and supply networks (Verbong and Geels 2007).
Framework
An energy marketing system can be seen as a meeting place, an agora, where the different interests
and goals of various stakeholders are represented as discourses that either tries to reinforce or
transform the current regime. Using marketing systems (see Figure 1.) means that individual
exchanges and market acts are a part of a structure, forming a complex system of market
interactions, interdependencies and relationships (Kadirov et al 2016). The Marketing Systems
theory places quality of life as the outcome of an exchange network (Layton 2009). So, even if the
social matrix where the network is embedded does not automatically include sustainability
dimensions it can be argued that the expected outcome of such a system, the future growth and
well-being are directly interlinked with sustainability.
Marketing systems, with emphasis on interactions, adds a socio-cultural layer onto the MLP
approach (see Figure 2.) in analyzing socio-technical systems transitions. Using the MLP approach,
marketplace mythologies could be located at the landscape, ‘intangible’, level of a socio-technical
system (see Figure 3.). The landscape’s effect on the collective and institutional beliefs often
remains opaque in day to day interactions and decisions on the regime and niche levels. This might
be due to the fact that individuals have been socialized into taking them for granted (Giesler and
Veresiu 2014), but it could be unveiled by analyzing discourses.
Figure 1. Marketing Systems Theory - The elements of a marketing system (Layton 2011: 267).
1181
Figure 2. The multi-level perspective (MLP) framework, based on Loorbach and Wijsman (2013,
p. 23 in Hörisch (2015, p.290).
1182
Figure 3. Marketplace Mythologies in Multi-level Marketing Systems
1183
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Consumer Research – For Personal and Collective Well-being, David G. Mick, Simone
Pettigrew, Cornelia Pechmann, and Julie L. Ozanne, ed. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC,
USA: Routledge, 267 - 281.
Mittelstaedt, John D., William E. Kilbourne and Robert A. Mittelstaedt (2006), “Macromarketing
as Agrology: Macromarketing Theory and the Study of the Agora,” Journal of
Macromarketing, 26(2), 130 - 142.
Negro, Simona O., Floortje Alkemade and Marko P. Hekkert (2012), “Why does renewable
energy diffuse so slowly? A review of innovation system problems,” Renewable and
Sustainable Energy Reviews, 16, 3836 - 3846.
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as Megatrend II,” Journal of Macromarketing, 35 (1), 7-10.
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hundred thousand energy transitions in Europe: The quest for cultural approach,” Energy
Research & Social Science, 13, 1-14.
Smith, Adrian, Andy Stirling and Frans Berkhout (2005), “The governance of sustainable socio-
technical transitions,” Journal of Energy Policy, 34, 1491-1510.
Späth Philipp and Harald Rohracher (2010), “Energy regions: The transformative power of
regional discourses on socio-technical futures,” Journal of Research Policy, 39, 449 - 458.
Thompson, Craig J. (2004), “Marketplace Mythology and Discourse of Power,” Journal of
Consumer Research, 31, 162 -180.
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Varey, Richard J. (2012), “The Marketing Future beyond the Limits of Growth,” Journal of
Macromarketing, 32(4), 424 - 433.
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Policy, 35, 1025-1037.
1187
Ethics, Equity and
Social Justice III
Track Chair: Ann-Marie Kennedy
Co-Chair(s): Joya Kemper
Nicky Santos
1188
Ethical Social Marketing: An
Integrative Justice Approach
Ann-Marie Kennedy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Nicholas Santos, Marquette University, USA
Abstract
Social marketing does not have a coherent code of ethics. While there have been suggestions for
guidelines, checklists and frameworks, these provide contradictory guidance to practical ethical
issues. These contradictions stem from the varying philosophical bases of current approaches
which are present without being reconciled. An approach that provides such reconciliation can be
found in the Integrative Justice Model. Applying the Integrative Justice Model, this article
develops it further for social marketing contexts. Finally, a coherent and practically applicable set
of normative ethical guidelines for social marketing is presented.
1189
Solving the Financial Problems of
Consumers: The Social Market
Economy through Sustainable
Finance
Heejung Park, University of Wyoming, USA
"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it
begins to rain." - Robert Frost
Introduction
Recent decades have seen financial crises in various countries around the world. In the
1990s, many countries in East Asia experienced the foreign exchange crisis. Also, in the late 2000s,
the financial crisis occurred in the United States, and in 2010 there was a financial crisis in Europe.
These various financial crises have also caused consumer financial problems. Some of previous
researchers mentioned that emphasize the lack of innovation and they suggest on applying
incentives to companies for innovation (Hausman, and Johnston 2014). But will economic growth
through innovation help to solve the financial problems of the normal people not the bourgeoisie?
Behind economic growth, there are always elements that deepen consumer financial problems
(Arcand, Berkes, and Panizza 2015). According to Thomas Piketty (2014), the rate of return on
capital, which is higher than the economic growth rate, is the cause of the income inequality. This
income inequality adversely affects economic growth (Ahuvia and Friedman 1998). In a society
where income inequality is a serious problem, it is difficult to expect sustainable growth due to
high political and economic uncertainty (Eckersley 2006). Notable is that today's financial crisis is
more than just an economic one, affecting a broader area. The global financial crisis has achieved
1190
quantitative growth in the market, but it has a negative impact on qualitative growth (Baek, Kang,
and Park 2004). Furthermore, the financial crisis does not only affect consumers’ material life, but
also has a comprehensive impact on politics, the economy, and culture (Davies 2012).
Based on these problems, we can confirm that existing financial systems and market
systems do not guarantee financial stability in the market. In particular, it can be seen that existing
financial systems and market systems have a negative impact on the market, especially in
sustainable finance (Fatemi, and Fooladi 2013). Sustainable finance is a win-win capitalist engine
that allows us to consider sustainable development in all aspects of our investment, promote
sustainable management of the enterprise, and achieve better return on investment over the long
term. (Jeucken 2010). More specifically, it is a voluntary initiative in the financial sector for
sustainable development that considers sustainability in its financial activities. However, the
development of sustainable finance through the voluntary initiative in the market economy is still
challenging. We also can find many indicators that show economic problems.
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate and explain the social market economy
based on factors of the financial market on a macroscopic level. These studies are expected to
identify the problems of existing financial systems and encourage discussion on how to adopt a
new alternative. This study will also cover how social market economy can be a key to sustainable
finance.
In particular, we suggest that we can provide a future research model for sustainable finance
through social market economy. The new research model is a cultural and social environment that
is not addressed in the existing financial environment. As researchers of macromarketing, our
duties should contribute to improved welfare and sustainability through financial stability.
Furthermore, we should make societal suggestions to make this system stable.
Problems with Existing Financial Systems: A Brief Overview
Freedom of self-determination applies to all areas of life. The economic life is no exception.
Specifically, people should decide for themselves what, how, for whom, and under what conditions,
if possible. It is the principle of the market economy to let humans decide for themselves what to
spend and how much. In other words, humans must decide what role they will play in the market,
i.e., what role they play in the commodity, labor, and capital markets (Engals 1976).
1191
Based on this concept, the existing financial market has developed with an emphasis on
efficiency (Shiller 1999). The ultimate goal is economic rationality. However, this market economy
has caused many problems (McKinnon 1993). One example of this is the gap between labor
productivity and real wages (Fleck, Glaser, and Sprague 2011). Figure 1 shows this gap in the
United States, which is typical of free markets. In the United States, since 1973, the gap between
labor productivity and real wages has continued to expand. In 2014 the gap was amplified 2.14
times (Economic policy institute, 2016).
These results show that the wage increase in the modern capitalist countries is undergoing
rapid globalization, which does not result in a significant increase in labor productivity (Hibbs Jr,
and Locking 2000). This also confirms a cumulative increase in inequality. Furthermore, it is
anticipated that the consumer demand base will weaken and the global low growth will be
prolonged, resulting in difficulties with economic, social, and sustainable development (Firebaugh
2003).
Figure 2 shows the increase in income inequality. In the 1940s, it can be seen that the US,
Sweden, and Denmark all share about 35% of the income of the top ten quintiles. It can be seen
that since 1980 when Korea's data were surveyed, the four countries divided into two groups, with
the United States and Korea at the top of the graph, and Sweden and Denmark at the bottom. The
United States and South Korea can confirm that the top 10% of them earn about 45% of their
income in 2010. In Denmark and Sweden, however, income distribution is better than in Korea and
the United States.
The causes of such economic inequalities vary (Venkatesh 1999). However, as shown in
Figure 2, countries differ in the degree of economic inequality. This can be attributed to differences
in public policy (Stiglitz 1999). Denmark and Sweden are social market economy countries, unlike
the US and Korea. This demonstrates that the social market economy solves some of the problems
of the financial system (Swenson 1991).
The repeated cyclical large-scale economic crises, such as the Great Depression of 1929 in
the United States and the massive financial crisis of 2008, is attributed to the characteristics of a
free market model that promotes employment instability and increases inequality (Reich 2016;
Krugman 2007). This phenomenon confirms that it is difficult to have fair competition in a market
economy system in the same context as Piketty’s (2014) diagnosis that modern capitalism has a
1192
strong tendency of inheritance capitalism. All the problems and phenomena mentioned above are
caused by lack of social and cultural understanding.
A New Alternative to the Financial Market: Social Market Economy
Social market economies are often perceived as social systems adopted in special countries
such as Germany and Sweden. However, it can be thought of as an economic system with an
ideology and ideals to realize true human dignity (Heise, and Heise, 2013). The social market
economy is a combination of two concepts in a totally different field (Müller-Armack 1978). The
word “social” is an ethical concept, and “market economy” is an economic concept. Thus, the
concept of social market economy is not merely an end in economic theory, but an ethical and
social system (Koslowski 1998). The social market economy can be distinguished from the liberal
market economy of the nineteenth century. It was formed in the nineteenth century by witnessing
various “non-social” forms of the liberal market economy (Wolf 1982):
1. Exploitation and unfair wage levels for industrial workers. The inhumanity of the
conditions of labor.
2. Those who do not have the ability to work or those who have lost the ability to work
have been left at risk without income.
3. The market was manipulated by monopoly and business collusion. In other words,
price and production were manipulated by means of harming the common good or the
public good.
The social market economy can be said to overcome the problem of the liberal market
economy. Social market economy aims to achieve social justice (Peacock, Willgerodt, and Johnson
1989). Social market economics must be done within the framework of a market economy. In other
words, it is the social market economy that realizes social justice in the market economy. To
practice social justice, the social market economy emphasizes social understanding (Goldschmidt,
and Wohlgemuth 2008). How can this social market economy solve the problems of financial or
economic systems?
1193
Sustainable Finance: Cultural Intervention in Finance
As described above, the existing liberal market economy causes problems such as
inequality of income, or financial inequality (Clarke, Zou, and Xu 2003). In other words, finance
is described as an invisible force separated from the social context. For this reason, the everyday
life of an individual is subjected to passive and indiscriminate influences by the operation of
abstract finance (Langley, 2008). In other words, finance cannot achieve sustainable finance within
a financial system that is consistent with many actors in a free economic market (Jeucken 2010).
Unrealistic financial operations lead to passive financial markets.
The formation of the investor and debtor identity relates to the ‘financialization of
households,’ or ‘financialization of daily life’ that have proceeded after 1980’s. The
financialization of daily life does not merely mean that people started to participate in capital
marketplace via consumer credit. This phenomenon involves a broader sociocultural change. The
individual financial practices such as speculative investment and debt, used to be considered as
unethical and greedy behaviors, becomes new a financial lifestyle and the means of self-realization
(Martin, 2002). The financial market armed with a cutting-edge financial engineering was viewed
as the absolute marketplace and free market system advocates has insisted only finance can provide
best opportunities to build wealth for not only business but also individuals (Shiller, 2013).
However, consumers are likely to have an inequal position in financial market. Consumers with
low credit rankings are hardly protected from the institutionalized financial system so that they are
forced to use other less-preferred alternatives including payday loans. This again makes the
consumers to be exposed to another risk such as illegal collections. Thus, the existing financial
system deteriorates, rather than improves consumer inequality issues in the free market.
In order to solve this problem, it is important to realize social justice in social market
economics. In other words, social ethics emphasized by social market economy is important. Many
existing researchers argue that ethical management affects sustainable business (Fowler, and Hope,
2007). In the case of existing finance-related research, we have studied the system, flow,
movement, and circulation that operate without reality and society. Social market economy that
emphasizes social ethics would help to solve issues the current financial system has. Likewise,
social market economy would be the first step to achieve sustainable finance based on humanitarian
capitalism. The nation and society can solve the problems within the financial market system. In
other words, financial system should change while the market system is secured. Sustainable
1194
finance is practicable within this change. Sustainable finance has been defined in various ways in
academic literature and business world. The most frequently used definitions are as follows:
“Sustainable finance refers to any form of financial service integrating environmental,
social and governance (ESG) criteria into the business or investment decisions for the lasting
benefit of both clients and society at large (Cooperman, 2016).”
According to this definition, sustainable finance emphasizes the harmonious values of
environment, society, and the nation and sustainable benefits for all sectors. Since the values are
shared and supported by the society and nations as well as individuals, the financial system can be
sustained. One of examples of sustainable finance is green finance.
The UNEP Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) summarized green finance as having two
directions. The first is to support sustainable development by funding the production of goods and
services that improve the environment by raising resources and energy efficiency throughout all
economic activities. Second, it effectively prevents the supply of funds to environmentally
destructive activities (UNEP FI 2014). In addition, the UNEP FI (2014) is an independent review
and surveillance system. According to another conceptual definition, green finance means financial
support for sustainable development and environmental improvement through various green
financial products. It is also defined as a new form of finance that simultaneously pursues the
development of the financial industry due to the development of new financial products and the
improvement of risk management techniques (Perez 2007). One such social market economy in
financial market, green finance, is attracting interest in the financial market, and many countries
are interested in spreading it. As explained above, green finance differs from simple finance. It is
a financial market that countries, markets, and consumers can achieve together. This cannot be
explained at the micro level; rather, it must be understood at the macro level. Green finance shows
how countries and society transform financial markets and sustainable finance based on social and
cultural identity.
The existing financial system reinforces exploitations as it extends the capitalism principles
to the households and individual level. However, the financial system through social market
economy raises individuals’ autonomy by emphasizing diverse ethical values of happiness,
success, safety and responsibility. It affects the hegemony of power distribution in capitalism
through establishing new social and cultural identity. Therefore, we need to apply the meaning of
1195
social and cultural identity in a free market economy (Aitken, 2007; Langley, 2008; Preda, 2007).
Sustainable finance can be achieved through the social and cultural identity mentioned in
macromarketing in the existing market economy (Dolan 2002). This will result in the sustainable
development of humanity that has not been achieved in the existing free market economy.
We need to build a double balance clusters for social and cultural identity model within the
market system, based on financial safety net. First, flexicurity is certainly necessary to secure the
sustainable finance of the national economy. As mentioned earlier, free market economy involves
some issues; however, we cannot overlook the current market system. Thus, financial safety net
should be established in a way that enhances the economic flexibility and increases institutional
safety simultaneously. The financial safety net acknowledged by the society and the nation should
protects consumers from being deteriorated by the current market system and help to achieve
sustainable finance from the double balance cluster for social and cultural identity model.
This should be different from merely offering financial support. Rather, it means learnfare.
In other words, improving the quality of financial force and enhancing the financial market
adaptability will help people make a balance of social and cultural identity again in the financial
market. The nation helps people raise the ability to recover by themselves within the safety net
and achieve the sustainable finance of the social and cultural identity based on new financial system
such as financial credit union. It does not the matter of choice between market-oriented financial
system and relation-oriented financial system. According to the Amable(2003), there is
complementarity between the two systems if the existence of one system increases the efficiency
of the other system. Rather, it is important to incorporate the both system pertinent to the
characteristics of each financial domain. For doing this, it is necessary to establish financial
infrastructures based on social and cultural circumstances.
Conclusion
The free market economy has not solved problems such as income inequality. These
inequalities in income are causing social problems in many countries (Pontusson 2005). The
financial market has resulted in many negative social impacts on consumers through this inequality
of income (Krueger and Perri 2006). For example, low-income households are bankrupt because
of debt (Birkenmaier, and Curley 2009), and many students are stressed by student loans (Joo,
Durband, and Grable 2008). Moreover, many investors have fallen into difficulties between the
1196
uncomfortable relationship of risk and profit. All these phenomena occurred in the process of ruling
under the capitalist power relations without social understanding in the liberal market economy.
Since 2000’s, credit delinquents and persona bankruptcy has grown due to the excessive
indebtedness. In addition, household debt and the economic polarization is becoming worse. The
expansion of consumer credit turned out to be the tool that takes a benefit from poverty, not the
solution that reduces poverty (Soederberg, 2014). This phenomenon ultimately shows that financial
market should change based on the ethics of public welfare and social solidarity, beyond the
individual responsibility. Stressing social values is the core value of social market economy.
Understanding cultural and social changes in the financial environment could have solved
a financial environment full of uncertainty and anxiety. The existing financial market focuses on
the present value derived from market economy. However, a certain financial market that focuses
on the future value needs to be established based on the social and cultural change. Through this,
sustainable finance can be achieved. Figure 3 propose a model that how green finance can solve
the problems market economy has. It is possible that some economists believe financial problems
can be self-resolved within the market economy system. However, sustainable finance based on
social market economy does not intend to collapse the existing market economy system. Rather, it
attempts to improve a certain sector that cannot be done by the existing market economy. Moreover,
convergence of two different disciplines would generate a better outcome than a single policy.
Therefore, the significance of this study overweighs its limitation. In conclusion, sustainable
development of humanity, emphasized in sustainable finance, could enhance social stability. For
this purpose, this study suggests that by enhancing cultural and societal understanding in the
financial environment, it can produce the results of economic growth and social integration as
claimed in social market economy.
1197
Figures
Figure 1. The gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation
Source: Economic Policy Institute (2016)
Figure 2. Top 10% National Income Share
Source: World Wealth and Income Wealth Database (http: //wid.world)
1198
Figure 3. The green finance model and its effects
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1202
Challenges and
opportunities in the sharing
economy III
Track Chair: Nicole Koenig-Lewis
Co-Chair(s): Sabine Benoit
Kristina Wittkowski
Carmela Bosangit
1203
Two sides of one coin: customer
misbehavior and identification –
A multilevel study in the context of
carsharing
Nadine Pieper127 128, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany
David Woisetschläger129, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany
Introduction
A growing body of literature indicates that customers do not always act in line with existing rules
of conduct (e.g., Fisk et al. 2010). Examples include trashing (Huefner and Hunt 2000), vandalism
(Fullerton and Punj 1997), and verbal or physical aggression against employees or other customers
(Rose and Niedermeyer 1999). In marketing science, such behavior is mainly subsumed under the
term misbehavior, which occurs when generally accepted norms of conduct are violated
(e.g., Fullerton and Punj 1997, 2004), and this deviation from expected behavior causes harm to at
least one of the involved actors: the service provider and its property, employees or other customers
(e.g., Fisk et al. 2010; Fan et al. 2012).
Hence, misbehavior comes along with negative consequences. However, little is known
127 Corresponding author 128 [email protected] 129 [email protected]
1204
about how misbehavior comes into effect outside of pure market exchange settings. The emerging
sharing economy provides alternative consumption modes besides ownership, like (traditional)
sharing, lending, trading, renting or swapping (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Belk 2010). Instead of
owning goods, temporarily accessing them is becoming more and more popular (Bardhi and
Eckhardt 2012). Such services basing on the idea of collaborative consumption are characterized
by a higher proportion of – at least indirect – customer interaction and, therefore, seem to be prone
to spreading of misbehavior among co-consumers with its related negative consequences
(e.g., Schaefers et al. 2015). Against this background it is questionable, if especially access-based
services suffer from customer misbehavior, and thus, selfish individual behavior ultimately leads
to a tragedy of the commons as Hardin (1968) suggests. A well-known example of acccess-based
services is carsharing, the organized shared use of passenger vehicles. The increasing number of
carsharing users confronts providers with the challenge to manage their service in order to avoid
misbehavior and its related negative effects. For this, it is important to gain a better understanding
of determinants and consequences of misbehavior. However, relevant research questions still
remain unanswered. Therefore, the current study contributes to literature in at least three ways:
First, the study provides empirical evidence for customer misbehavior and quantifies its impact on
important outcomes such as customer satisfaction and loyalty. Second, the study assesses if the
occurrence of misbehavior can be counteracted by customer identification. Third, the study
examines if differences between customers can be traced back to provider-specific characteristics.
Multilevel Conceptual Model
To account for individual- as well as provider-specific determinants this study uses a
multilevel approach. Figure 1 depicts the corresponding conceptual model. On the individual
(consumer) level, the social identity theory (Tajfel 1982) offers a framework to explain positive
and negative consequences resulting from interactions with other co-consumers. Such kind of
social groups (in terms of co-consumers as group members) naturally strive for positive group
distinctiveness, which in turn serves to protect, enhance, preserve or achieve a positive social
identity for members of the group (Tajfel 1982). Identification with other co-consumers implies
high levels of affective engagement regarding the group (Algesheimer et al. 2005) which should
result in positive effects on attitudes and behavioral intentions.
H1: Community identification is positively related to (a) satisfaction and b) loyalty.
1205
Social groups often do not come without negative consequences. Negative behaviors of
other co-consumers can raise the issue of legitimacy (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001), if others behave
against accepted norms of conduct. Failure of others to comply with group standards could lead to
attempts of group members to isolate these members – which is often not possible or at least not
desired by firms – or even might lead to a questioning of group values as a whole. Consequently,
consumers experiencing misbehavior of other co-consumers should lower their attitudes and
behavioral intentions.
H2: Perceived Misbehavior is negatively related to (a) satisfaction and (b) loyalty.
In addition to these hypothesized relationships, other variables – on the individual as well
as on the provider level – might provide alternative explanations for any of the effects observed.
For example, consumer characteristics like the time the users had to get familiar with the system
may also play an important role. It can be assumed that the longer a user participates in the system,
the higher is his own level of identification, satisfaction and loyalty and, thus, the more sensitive
is his perception towards the misbehavior of other users. Therefore, we controlled for the
relationship age of the carsharing users.
Likewise, the provider age might have a similar impact on the dependent variables. With
increasing experience in running such a service, the providers might have learned to handle forms
of customer misbehavior and to create a feeling of identification in a more effective way.
Furthermore, the system size, or the underlying service concept with its respective framework
conditions might also foster or hinder the emergence of customer identification and misbehavior
as well.
Data and Measures
This study uses multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the hypothesized
relationships. The empirical analysis is based on an online survey among 1029 carsharing users
(level of consumer perceptions) from 23 different carsharing providers (level of objective
characteristics), resulting in an average cluster size of around 39. The respondents are on average
38.41 years old (std.-dev. 11.201) and 73.1% of them are male. The data was collected via an
impersonalized online-questionnaire and the survey link was distributed via online forums like
autoplenum.de or carsharing-forum.de, with support of some carsharing providers or by directly
contacting persons dealing with carsharing-related topics on the social media platform Facebook.
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The measures on the individual (consumer) level were taken from existing literature and
adapted to the carsharing context. Loyalty was operationalized as reusage intention and was
measured by one single item using 11-point Likert scale from 0 = very unlikely (0%) and 10 = very
likely (100%) as suggested by Juster (1966). The remaining items were measured on 5-point Likert
scales, with anchors of 1 = totally disagree and 5 = totally agree. Customer satisfaction was
measured in accordance with Homburg, Koschate, and Hoyer (2006) with a three-item scale and
operationalized as overall satisfaction with the carsharing provider. The measurement of
community identification with three items is adopted from Algesheimer et al. (2005). Perceived
misbehavior of other co-consumers was measured with a three-item scale referring to Jambulingam
and Nevin (1999) like: “I think that other car sharing users sometimes withold important
information about the condition of the cars.”
Results and Implications
The results on the individual level provide evidence for the proposed effects. Misbehavior
is negatively and significantly related to customer satisfaction, whereas customer identification
shows significant positive effects. Moreover, identification with the carsharing provider increases
with growing relationship age, while perceived misbehavior of other carsharing users decreases.
Consequently, it is advisable to pay special attention to new customers, since their behaviors are
more likely to cause negative effects to other customers and higher costs for providers.
On the provider level, results indicate that provider age has a strong significant effect on
customer misbehavior. Thus, especially younger providers suffer from such undesired behavior.
Therefore, younger providers could learn from the experiences of older providers in terms of
implementing measures to avoid the occurrence of misbehavior. Moreover, the number of users
per vehicle significantly reduces customer satisfaction and enhances the perception of misbehavior.
Consequently, providers should take care of a reasonable user-vehicle-ratio. The results also prove
evidence that the spatial distribution of the operation area affects the consumption experience.
Providers, which limit their offer regionally, show a higher level of identification and a lower level
of perceived misbehavior. As an implication, regional-specific features could be included
especially in trans-regional service provision. Providers, which limit their offer regionally, show a
higher level of identification and a lower level of perceived misbehavior. Thus, especially
nationwide providers should implement suitable measures to avoid negative effects of misbehavior.
These novel findings provide evidence how individual- and provider-level variables contribute to
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the improvement of important customer metrics such as satisfaction and loyalty. Managerial
actions derived from these findings can contribute to improved levels of effectiveness of access-
based services and higher levels of efficiency in service provision.
Limitations and Further Research
This article improves the understanding of perceived misbehavior outside of pure market
exchange settings like carsharing and how it is affected by provider-specific characteristics.
However, the empirical study has limitations as well offering avenues for further research. For
instance, only one point in time is considered. To account for temporal dependencies and to explain
consumers’ intention and behavior in more detail, longitudinal studies should be conducted.
Furthermore, further research could contrast our findings to the context of peer-to-peer carsharing,
where the users interact directly with the car owners.
References
Algesheimer, René, Utpal M. Dholakia, and Andreas Herrmann (2005), “The Social Influence of
Brand Community: Evidence from European Car Clubs,” Journal of Marketing, 69 (3), 19-
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Bardhi, Fleura and Giana M. Eckhardt (2012), “Access-Based Consumption: The Case of Car
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Botsman, Rachel and Roo Rogers (2010), What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative
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The review of antecedent research on customer misbehavior,” Proceedings of the 2012
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Russel-Bennet, and Jochen Wirtz (2010), “Customer behaving badly: A state of the art
review, research agenda and implications for practitioners,” Journal of Services Marketing,
24 (6), 417-429.
1208
Fullerton, Ronald A. and Girish N. Punj (1997), “What is consumer misbehavior?” Advances in
Consumer Research, 24, 336-339.
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Homburg, Christian, Nicole Koschate, and Wayne D. Hoyer (2006), “The Role of Cognition and
Affect in the Formation of Customer Satisfaction: A Dynamic Perspective,” Journal of
Marketing, 70, 21-31.
Huefner, Jonathan C. and H. Keith Hunt (2000), “Consumer retaliation as a response to
dissatisfaction,” Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Disssatisfaction and Complaining
Behavior, 13, 61-82.
Jambulingam, Thani and John R. Nevin (1999), “Influence of Franchisee Selection Criteria on
Outcomes desired by the Franchisor,” Journal of Business Venturing, 14 (4), 363-395.
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effects of customer misbehavior in access-based services,” Journal of Service Research, 19
(1), 3-21.
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1209
Figure 1: Multilevel Conceptual Model
Objective Characteristics
(Provider Level)
Loyalty
(Reusage Intention)
Community
Identification
Perceived
Misbehavior
Consumption Experience
Customer Satisfaction
Relationship Age
Control Variable
Consumer Perceptions
(Carsharing User Level)
H2 (a)
H2 (b)
H1 (b)
H1 (a)
Number of years
since start-up
Number of vehicles
Number of users
Stationary vs.
free-floating
Spatial distribution
Number of competitors
Provider Age System Size Operating Concept Framework Conditions
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The sharing economy: Providers
and stakeholders
Tara J. Radin130, George Washington University, USA
Marilyn Liebrenz-Himes131-132, George Washington University, USA
Terri L. Rittenburg133, University of Wyoming (Emeritus), USA
The sharing economy: providers and stakeholders
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new phenomenon often referred to as the “sharing
economy” (Davidson and Infranca 2016). The sharing economy essentially was started by finding
secondary uses for underused assets (Cohen and Zehngebot 2014). What distinguishes today’s
business activities in the sharing economy from secondhand stores and traditional sharing of assets
is that these activities create value by leveraging peer-to-peer (P2P) activities through online
community-based platforms (Shuford, 2015; Wilhelms, Merfeld and Henkel 2017).
History: Emergence of P2P activities
The Internet makes P2P activities possible by introducing strangers to each other. In creating an
online “community,” the Internet turns strangers into “peers.” Essentially, the Internet expands a
person’s reach beyond the people he or she can physically reach (Bateman, Valentine and
Rittenburg 2013).
While today’s Sharing Economy’s common examples are often Airbnb or Uber (among other
similar sharing companies), the P2P activities date back to the turn of the current century. One of
the first P2P activities made possible by the Internet was file-sharing. The introduction of Napster
130 [email protected] 131 Corresponding Author 132 [email protected] 133 [email protected]
1211
in 1999 represented the first major adventure into the power of P2P activities. Napster was a
sharing application that employed a central set of servers to link people who had files with those
who wanted files. Napster focused on the sharing of audio files generally in the MP3 format.
People did not need to know anyone else. People who wanted to share simply indexed the files
they were willing to share on the central index server. People looking for files could then search
the index. Files were then transferred directly between the two computers. The transfer could take
place between next-door neighbors or people halfway around the world from one other. The peers
often had no direct contact with one another; their only connection other than the file transfer was
their common membership in Napster, the same online community, i.e., and their willingness to
share. The Napster community was built on the value of sharing; if everyone in the community
shares, people will be able to obtain the content they seek. The goal of Napster was therefore to
include as many peers as possible (Hughes, Lang, and Roumen 2008).
The beauty of P2P is that it transcends traditional barriers, such as time, space and language
(“How the likes…” 2006). Peers in an online community do not have to share the same language,
or, at least, they do not have to communicate with one another in the same language. They also do
not need to share values, professional goals or any similarities. Unlike physical communities where
people typically come together because of shared personal values, online platforms focus on
activities. Considering Napster, for example, people only needed a willingness to share (Spitz and
Hunter 2005).
Ironically, Napster’s tremendous success in demonstrating the power of the Internet led to its
very demise. The activity that Napster embraced, i.e., the sharing of MP3s, is illegal (Kwok and
Yang 2004). Napster was found liable for copyright infringement and shut down in July 2001
(Kurtzman 2016; Levin, Dato-on and Rhee 2004; Webb, Tihanyi, Ireland and Sirmon 2009).
Napster represented merely the first installment of sharing P2P (Strahilevitz 2003). During
the past 15 years, a variety of other services have come and gone. The P2P file-sharing has evolved
significantly in terms of what is shared, how it is shared and where it is shared. Many files and
other services today are stored “in the cloud” for sharing. These offerings are stored on remote
servers; sharing is controlled through permission-based or password-controlled access. Dropbox,
for example, requires that permission be granted; Rapidgator requires a password or a protected
link.
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Expansion beyond file sharing
P2P file sharing revolutionized both community and collaboration (Chandna and Salimath 2018).
It has created new opportunities for personal and professional collaboration. Although the P2P
activities have not been designed solely or specifically for business purposes, they inherently have
clear business value. The Internet creates a market liberated by the physical constraints of
geography and familiarity.
Another prominent early example of a P2P business is eBay. Its existence has continued and
has burgeoned only because of the Internet. Founded in 1995, it quickly became one of the leading
success stories of the dot.com bubble. At its core, eBay is an online auction website. It became an
almost immediate success because it enabled buyers and sellers to overcome the challenge of
geography. Without the Internet, many items would have gone unsold, and many probable buyers
would remain unsatisfied. Today, eBay has an almost global reach. It is a multi-million-dollar
business with operations in more than 30 countries (Stemler 2016).
Like Napster, the eBay community brings together strangers. Unlike, Napster, however,
eBay enables peers to learn information about one another. Because eBay is transactional, the
company collects and reports information about the potential reliability of those transactions.
Buyers, for example, can find out what other items a seller is offering, how many items that seller
has sold and whether other buyers view the seller positively (and why or why not) (Stemler 2017).
Development of the sharing economy
In the past 20 years, a number of businesses have followed the lead set by Napster, eBay and others
and have entered e-commerce as “sharers.” The connection between businesses in this economy
seems to be the online community-based platform that connects strangers and turns them into peers.
“Sharing economy” is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of activities including co-
working, lending, fashion (sales and/or rentals) and general freelancing. It represents a formidable
and growing force in the economy (Scott and Brown 2017). Estimated at $14 billion in 2014, the
sharing economy is projected to top $335 billion by 2025.
The explosive growth of this economic phenomenon can be explained by several key factors.
First, there is access. Sharing provides access to goods and services that people might not otherwise
be able to monetize. Second, there is efficiency. The goods and services are typically exchanged
at a lower rate because they are typically secondhand or are being shared. Additional cost savings
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are achieved because of the absence of cumbersome corporate bureaucracies and traditional
regulatory oversights (Kochan 2017).
A key challenge to business operations in the sharing economy has to do with uncertainty.
Everything about these businesses is characterized by uncertainty. It is not always clear who is
connecting with whom and how (Finck and Ranchordas 2016; Murphy 2016). In addition,
questions remain as to the impact on the rest of the economy as an increasing number of customers
opt to share vs. buy new goods (Benoit et al. 2017). At a fundamental level, the real uncertainly
involves who is responsible for what. Businesses offering rental services are typically regulated
by federal, state or other local authorities. But who regulates unlicensed “sharers”? And what
about the increased information being shared online? Who is responsible for maintaining the
security of that information and ensuring that that information is used properly (and only for its
intended purpose) (Dyal-Chand 2015)?
The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges inherent in the sharing economy.
Building on the early P2P offerings, two more recent examples of prominent P2P businesses,
Airbnb and Uber, will be discussed. The paper begins by tracing the development of such
businesses. It then categorizes the types of abuses to which stakeholders are vulnerable. There are
three types of harm that have been identified: physical, property and privacy. The paper also
explores the nature of responsibility and proposes how such businesses and stakeholders should
understand the nature of their responsibility as members of the sharing economy. This information
is then used to offer guidance as to how businesses in the sharing economy should address their
responsibilities.
1214
References
Bateman, Connie; Sean Valentine, Sean; and Terri Rittenburg (2013), “Ethical Decision Making
in a Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Situation: The Role of Moral Absolutes and Social
Consensus,” Journal of Business Ethics 115 (2), 229-40.
Benoit, S.; T. Baker; R. Bolton; T. Gruber; and J. Kandampully (2017), “A Triadic Framework
for Collaborative Consumption: Motives, Roles and Resources,” Journal of Business
Research 79, 219-27.
Chandna, Vallari and Manjula S. Salimath (2018), “Peer-to-Peer Selling in Online Platforms: A
Salient Business Model for Virtual Entrepreneurship,” Journal of Business Research 84,
162-74.
Cohen, Molly and Corey Zehngebot (2014), “Heads Up: What’s Old Becomes New: Regulating
the Sharing Economy,” Boston Bar Journal 58, 6.
Davidson, Nestor M. and John J. Infranca (2016), “The Sharing Economy as an Urban
Phenomenon,” Yale Law & Policy Review 34, 215.
Dyal-Chand, Rashmi (2015), “Regulating Sharing: The Sharing Economy as an Alternative
Capitalist System,” Tulane Law Review 90, 241.
Finck, Michele and Sofia Ranchordas (2016), “Sharing and the City,” Vanderbilt Journal of
Transnational Law 49, 1299.
(2006), “How the Likes of Napster and Kazaa Went so Far so Quickly: Network Innovators? The
New Robin Hoods of Business”, Strategic Direction, 22 (4), 11-13.
Hughes, Jerald; Karl Lang; and Roumen Vragov (2008), “An Analytical Framework for
Evaluating Peer-to-Peer Business Models,” Electronic Commerce Research & Applications
7 (1), 105-18.
Kochan, Donald J. (2017), “I Share, Therefore It’s Mine,” University of Richmond Law Review
51, 909.
Kurtzman, Tamara (2016), “The Day Big Music Died,” Journal of Internet Law 20 (1), 1-11.
Kwok, Sai Ho and Christopher C. Yang (2004), “Searching the Peer-to-Peer Networks: The
Community and Their Queries,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science
& Technology 55 (9), 783-93.
Levin, Aron; Mary Conway Dato-on; and Kenneth Rhee (2004), “Money for Nothing and Hits
for Free: The Ethics of Downloading Music from Peer-to-Peer Web Sites,” Journal of
Marketing Theory & Practice 12 (1), 48-60.
1215
Murphy, Meaghan (2016), “Cities as the Original Sharing Platform: Regulation of the New
‘Sharing’ Economy,” Journal of Business & Technology Law 12, 127.
Scott, Inara and Elizabeth Brown (2017), “Redefining and Regulating the New Sharing
Economy,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law 19, 553.
Shuford, Joseph (2015), “Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn + And Peer-to-Peer Rentals: The Sharing
Economy, North Carolina, and the Constitution,” North Carolina Journal of Law &
Technology 16, 301.
Spitz, David and Starling Hunter (2005), “Contested Codes: The Social Construction of Napster,”
Information Society 21 (3), 169-80.
Stemler, Abbey (2016), “Betwixt and Between: Regulating the Shared Economy,” Fordham
Urban Law Journal 43, 31.
Stemler, Abbey (2017), “Feedback Loop Failure: Implications for the Self-Regulation of the
Sharing Economy,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 18, 673.
Strahilevitz, Lior Jacob (2003), “Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of
Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks, Virginia Law Review 89 (3), 505.
Webb, Justin W.; Laszlo Tihanyi; R. Duane Ireland; and David G. Sirmon (2009), “You Say
Illegal, I Say Legitimate: Entrepreneurship in the Informal Economy,” Academy of
Management Review 34 (3), 492-510.
Wilhelms, Mark-Philipp; Katrin Merfeld; and Sven Henkel (2017), “Yours, Mine, and Ours: A
User-Centric Analysis of Opportunities and Challenges in Peer-to-Peer Asset Sharing,”
Business Horizons 60 (6), 771-81.
1216
Quality of Life, Well-
being II
Track Chair: Alexandra Ganglmair-Wooliscroft
Co-Chair(s): Ahmet Ekici
1217
Growing compassion: the case of
CEOs sleeping rough for a night
J. Montgomery134, School of Humanities & Communication Arts, Australia
L. Young, Penrith, Australia
A. Khan, Penrith, Australia
Abstract
This research examines the concept of compassion, and proposes that compassion may be
developed in a corporate leader through their active participation in a corporate social
responsibility (CSR) initiative. The authors interviewed twenty-two high level executives who
had participated in the Vinnies (St Vincent de Paul) CEO Sleepout, in Sydney, Australia.
Thematic analysis was conducted, revealing insights from the stories of their experiences.
Findings indicated that the development of compassion was substantial, and impacted not only
the well-being of the participants, but also employees, close and distant networks, and the
community. This study demonstrates the far-reaching impact of enhancing compassionate
leadership through CSR. This in turn has positive ramifications for organizational health and
profitability.
Keywords: Quality of Life, Well-Being, Leadership, CEO, Corporate Social Responsibility,
Storytelling, Compassion, Pro-Social.
Track: Quality of Life and Well-Being
1218
Introduction
“Let’s ensure that Davos 2018 is just the beginning of a movement where we globalize
compassion and ensure a world in which no-one is left behind.”
Sharan Burrow, Co-Chair, Close of the World Economic Forum 2018,
Davos, Switzerland (as cited in Mathuros 2018)
We live in a world that is crying out for more compassion. Governments lack the capacity to
meaningfully address the progressive increases in inequality, homelessness, poverty and social
isolation. Increasingly, it is the private sector that is visibly stepping up its compassionate
response to improve the quality of life of those in need. Corporate volunteer programs, corporate
social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and the emergence of socially-driven businesses are some
examples of this response. It can often be the founder or CEO who inspires the compassionate
response of an organization. The concept of compassion as an important cornerstone of
leadership is not a novel idea. History gives us many examples of compassionate leaders: Jesus
Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela. Similarly, in the corporate world,
strong compassionate leadership exists. These are leaders who are driven to improve the quality
of life of others, whilst securing returns for stakeholders. For example, TOMS founder Blake
Mycoskie created the ‘one for one’ business model: for every pair of shoes sold, the company
donates a new pair to children in need; Cascade Engineering CEO Fred Keller initiated ‘welfare-
to-career’ programs to break the poverty cycle in local communities; and Virgin Group founder
Sir Richard Branson has long committed his organisation to tackling challenging social and
environmental issues. These leaders share an ability to understand an issue, and a subsequent
compulsion to fix the problem by using their networks and corporate resources.
Compassion within the private sector does not automatically negate productivity, efficiency and
profit, nor does it alienate employees and stakeholders (key concerns of CEOs). Empirical
research has shown that compassionate leadership can positively impact organisational culture
(Ilies, Morgeson, and Nahrgan 2005), productivity (Cameron, Bright, and Caza 2004), and
employee morale (Vianello, Galliani, and Haidt 2010). It can also affect future recruitment,
1219
particularly of socially-conscious millennials (Weber Shandwick and KRC Research 2017).
Clearly the CEOs’ key role is to maximise returns to shareholders. Yet they are in a prime
position to drive and/or significantly influence socially-responsible marketing initiatives. These
socially-responsible initiatives have the potential to improve well-being and quality of life on a
number of levels.
Participating in a socially-responsible initiative may improve the CEO’s own well-being, that is,
it may enhance their own sense of purpose, personal achievement and mental health. We propose
that compassionate leadership and purpose-driven initiatives can also play a key role in
improving the well-being of employees, community and the socially disadvantaged. As
compassionate leaders become ‘shining lights’ in their mission to act compassionately and
alleviate suffering (Grant 2008), they may inspire other leaders to follow suit. This may lead to
improving the quality of life of many more. Indeed, Adam Smith, father of capitalism, advocated
the important role of morality and benevolence in economic growth (cited in Werhane 2000).
Nobel Laureate Economist Amartya Sen (1997) argued that moral ideas and sentiment can have a
critical impact on business. More recently, Sir Richard Branson called for more business leaders
to use their business skills to effect change:
“In the past we’ve left it up to government and the social sector to try to achieve a lot of
this…But let’s use our entrepreneurial skills to adopt at least one problem in the world — it could
be a local problem, it could be a national problem, or it could be an international problem…I
think if we can get every business in the world to do that, most of the problems in this world will
be solved.” (cited in Wainewright 2016)
There is limited research to date exploring the impact to well-being resulting from social and
environmental initiatives driven by compassionate leaders. In particular, our focus is on the
impact to the leader’s well-being, and the subsequent wide-reaching impact to others’ well-being.
Layton and Grossbart (2006) describe one of the future challenges in macromarketing research as
understanding “how well marketing systems serve societal and disadvantaged persons’ needs”
(ibid p. 200). Our research seeks to build on current literature, by exploring how significantly a
1220
CSR initiative, driven by a compassionate leader, serves society and impacts on quality of life.
We propose that leadership is key; indeed, Lee and Sirgy (2004) nominate ‘leadership’ - by
highly moral, intrinsically motivated, caring individuals, as an important antecedent for
organizations likely to invest in quality of life (QoL) marketing.
The objective of this study is to gain insight into the impact on CEOs from actively participating
in a CSR initiative, and the subsequent outcomes. The research questions focus on CEOs’
practices of compassion, and how this affects the well-being of others. We explore research on
compassion and quality of life, drawn from the fields of psychology, social science and
neurology. Next we outline our approach to data collection, within the context of the Australian
CSR initiative: the Vinnies (St Vincent de Paul) CEO Sleepout. Analysis is conducted through
the lens of storytelling. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings, and present thoughts
for future research.
Compassion and QoL
Compassion plays an important role in individual and societal well-being. For centuries,
compassion has been upheld as a fundamental virtue by world religions and secular ethics, and
recognised for its central role in cohesive societies (Singer and Ricard 2015). There are many
definitions of compassion in academic literature; most describe variations of three interconnected
components: cognitive, affective and behavioral (Kanov et al. 2004, Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-
Thomas 2010). In other words, first one understands, considers and respects the plight of another,
then one feels empathy - an emotional response to their suffering, and finally, one is propelled to
act to relieve the suffering. According to the Dalai Lama, compassion begins with intelligence
and is motivated by a commitment to relieve suffering (Dalai Lama XIV 1995). This central tenet
of Buddhist philosophy appears to resonate with academics, perhaps because firstly, the Buddhist
compassionate response is based on reason and wisdom, not empathy alone. Secondly, reason
and wisdom dictates that for maximum impact, it must be extended not just to close others, but
also to self, and others we do not know (Gilbert 2009, Strauss et al. 2016). Compassion plays an
important role in individual self-realization and mental well-being, and is key to a harmonious
and cohesive society.
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The amount of compassion one expresses, and experiences, can impact an individual’s quality of
life. Most aspects of quality of life are captured within three categories: hedonic well-being -
involving feelings of pleasure, joy, contentment; eudaimonic well-being – reaching one’s full
potential, leading a moral life, mental and psychological health, contributing to society; and
prudential well-being – a personal belief that life is good (Sirgy 2012, Ganglmair-Wooliscroft
and Wooliscroft 2017). It is likely that the act of compassion impacts all three categories of well-
being, as one feels a sense of contentment and gratification in helping others (hedonic), one
fulfils a sense of purpose in contributing to the greater good (eudaimonic); and one achieves a
sense of overall satisfaction in life (prudential).
Compassion is likely an inherent quality. It may have evolved as a biological response to ensure
survival, through familial bonding and co-operation with others (Darwin 1871/2004). One of the
earliest indications that compassion was operative amongst ancestors of Home Sapiens can be
inferred from the analysis of the remains of a female Homo Ergaster, dated 1.5 million years ago.
Excessive vitamin A in the skeletal remains suggests that she would have suffered long-term pain
and incapacitation and would not have survived without sustained care from others (Deane-
Drummond 2017). Gilbert (2009) suggests that compassion witnessed in primates involves
cognitive, affective and behavioral elements. Compassion, it appears, may be an innate response
to ensure the survival of kin and certain non-kin; coined by Keltner, Marsh, and Smith (2010) as
‘compassionate instinct’.
More recently, neurological studies have found that compassion may also be nurtured. Various
forms of compassion-based training have been developed, where participants learn strategies,
breathing techniques and visualisations, and are encouraged to practice daily meditation. The
focus is on feeling more compassion toward loved ones, strangers, antagonists, and themselves.
In a study examining the effects of nine weeks of Compassion Cultivation Training, participants
reported a significant increase in compassionate feelings and attitudes (Jazaieri et al. 2013).
Scientists exploring neural effects of long term compassion-training demonstrated that
compassionate response can be seen in distinct areas of the brain via fMRI scans: perspective
1222
taking in the temporal parietal junction, empathy primarily on the insula, and action in the basal
ganglia of the brain (Lutz et al. 2008). Even in a 2-week compassion training study, which also
included an fMRI scan, participants showed increased engagement of neural systems implicated
in compassionate response (Weng et al. 2013). Leiberg, Klimecki, and Singer (2011) developed
the Zurich Prosocial Game, which measured various kinds of prosocial behaviour in a computer
game, before and after short-term compassion training. Those participants who received training
did show an increase in prosocial behaviour, compared to those who did not receive the training.
In another study, Reddy et al. (2013) assessed the impact of cognitively-based compassion
training conducted with troubled adolescents. Participants reported using learned strategies to
respond more compassionately toward others. Stronger, closer relationships enhance well-being,
which in turn augment co-operation and trust (Tov and Diener 2009). If individuals can learn to
be more compassionate, as these studies indicate is possible - through instruction, meditation, or
another kind of compassion intervention; then clearly the ramifications to individual and societal
well-being would be significant. As follows, if individuals leading corporations can learn to be
more compassionate, they may also experience positive benefits: to themselves, their
organisation, and associated communities.
Recent studies show that when leaders within an organisation promote a culture of compassion,
the organization benefits from a positive impact to productivity, employee recruitment and
engagement, and customer satisfaction. Cameron, Bright, and Caza (2004) conducted an
empirical study of 18 organizations, and found that ‘virtuousness’ in organisations, where the
focus is on fostering trust, compassion, integrity and forgiveness, not only has a positive impact
on organisational performance, but strengthens resilience in challenging conditions. Boedker et
al. (2011) analysed 77 organisations from the services sector and found that higher-performing
organisations – in terms of innovation, productivity, turnover and customer satisfaction; reported
higher measures of positive emotion from employees (feeling valued and loved) and lower
measures of negative emotion (anxiety, fear, depression). The higher-performing organisations
also tended to exhibit ‘authentic leadership’, from upper management through to the CEO.
1223
These kinds of leaders are driven by deeply held values, and are intrinsically motivated to serve
the greater good (Shamir and Eilam 2005). Self-determination theory holds that our intrinsic
needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness contribute to our personal growth and
fulfilment. That is, satisfying these needs will enhance our eudaimonic well-being (Ryan and
Deci 2000). Naturally, as competitive business leaders, these individuals are motivated by
extrinsic influences: recognition, status and rewards. However, it is their strong intrinsic
motivations, more fulfilling to them than extrinsic motivations, which set them apart. These give
their life a sense of meaning: they are keen to help others, take on social causes, and truly make a
difference (George et al. 2007). For example, John Thain, CEO of the New York Stock
Exchange: “I am motivated by doing a really good job at whatever I am doing, but I prefer to
multiply my impact on society through a group of people.” (ibid. p.6). Leaders who live their
lives consistently with these authentic values, are more likely to experience high levels of
eudaimonic well-being.
Compassion within an organization also applies to policy development and treatment of
employees. This is evidenced in a case study of Cascade Engineering, a global manufacturing
organization based in Michigan, USA (Worline & Dutton 2017). In attempting to break the cycle
of poverty amongst the local Grand Rapids community, former CEO Fred Keller developed
‘welfare-to-career’ programs, hiring the chronic unemployed, homeless, and former inmates, and
providing ongoing systematic support. These programs have been extended under current CEO
Mark Miller and include ‘poverty simulation’ training for the leadership team, to heighten their
sensitivity and empathy to the difficulties faced by those trapped in poverty. Employee
behaviours that may have previously been misconstrued as hostile or irresponsible, are now
interpreted through a more compassionate lens, and support rather than discipline is provided.
Employees benefit with a positive impact on health and well-being, the organisation benefits
through lower hiring costs, higher retention rates and employee satisfaction; and society benefits
from reduced welfare dependence (Cascade Engineering n.d, Bradley 2003, Worline and Dutton
2017).
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Compassionate leaders can elicit the moral emotion of ‘elevation’ amongst their employees.
Elevation is the uplifting emotion and response to moral excellence (Haidt 2006). When we
witness someone we admire acting in a compassionate or self-sacrificial manner, we experience
elevation – we feel inspired and uplifted, and are more likely to emulate their example and act
with compassion ourselves. Algoe and Haidt (2009) found that witnessing compassionate acts
can elicit the emotion of elevation, with participants reportedly inspired to be a better person, and
do good for another. Vianello, Galliani, and Haidt (2010) explored the effect of elevation in the
workplace and found that leaders’ virtuous behaviour was positively related to an increase in
employees’ prosocial behaviour and affective organizational commitment. Leaders’ acts of
compassion become amplified through a ‘mutually reinforcing cycle’ – and a replication of
virtuousness throughout the organization occurs (Cameron, Bright, and Caza 2004). As
employees begin to mirror the behaviours of authentic leaders, their hedonic and eudaimonic
well-being may improve, as they experience greater positive emotion, enhanced self-concept and
social connectedness (Ilies, Morgeson, and Nahrgan 2005). Social Learning Theory suggests that
an individual learns values and behaviours from those around them, directly or vicariously, and
the consequences of experience and social learning shape future behaviours (Bandura and
Walters 1977).
Another important outcome to a CEO’s compassionate and altruistic behaviour is the impact it
has on recruitment. A key factor motivating new recruits today - especially the millennial cohort,
is the understanding that the organisation is led by a purpose-driven CEO, who is actively
engaging with social issues. A recent industry survey reported 56% of millennials wanted their
CEO to engage with social issues, compared to 36% of Gen X, and 35% of Baby Boomers, and
44% of millennials said that they would feel more loyal to the organisation, with just 16% of Gen
X and 18% Baby Boomers feeling the same (Weber Shandwick and KRC Research 2017). CEO
of Starbucks, Kevin Johnson says: “It helps us attract great talent, but it also shows that we care
about helping create opportunities for people.” (Jargon 2017). Employees are attracted to CEOs
who “walk their talk”, particularly when their values align (Worline and Dutton 2017). The
accessibility of information in today’s digital ecosystem means that prospective employees (and
other stakeholders) can quickly determine the authenticity of the CEO. A new generation of
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purpose-driven employees will likely flow on to impact corporate culture and values, as they
bring their social and consumer values into the workplace.
CEOs are in a position to use their authority to add legitimacy to an issue and apply business
principles to help solve social problems. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives are
often the result of leaders championing a cause which is close to their deeply held values and
beliefs (Hemingway and Maclagan 2004). Whilst the initiatives are intended to “enhance
society’s welfare and improve the quality of life” (Lantos 2001, p.609) the positive flow on
benefits to the company can be significant. This may include higher employee morale and lower
turnover, which can lead to higher productivity (Lee et al. 2012, Bradley 2003). It may also
include enhanced brand value and competitive advantage, leading to stronger community support
and increased value for shareholders (Melo and Galan 2011, Hur, Kim, and Woo 2014).
From a macromarketing perspective, clearly CSR initiatives have ramifications that extend far
beyond the organisation’s boundaries (Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne, and Mittelstaedt 2006). The
present study explores the significant impact of one strategic Australian CSR initiative, the
Vinnies CEO Sleepout, which aims to raise funds for the homeless services provided by St
Vincent de Paul, and generate awareness. Having raised over $40 million in Australia since its
inception in 2006, it is a key source of funding, and as a CSR initiative, is clearly effective in
achieving its main purpose. However, little is known about the initiative’s broader impact – on
participating CEOs, their organisations, and society. Through the lens of storytelling, we explore
the development of compassion in CEOs resulting from their participation in the Sleepout. We
assess the impact of their compassionate response on the quality of life of others.
Methodology
Initial interviews were conducted in October/November 2016 with the St Vincent de Paul
Director of Fundraising, and the Founder of the Vinnies CEO Sleepout. Desk research was
conducted, reviewing previous studies commissioned by St Vincent de Paul, participant surveys,
industry and fundraising reports, and academic journal articles. CEOs were invited to be involved
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in the research via: an email from Vinnies (12 participants), subsequent referrals from
interviewed CEOs (6), CEOs met by the researcher at the CEO Sleepout on 22 June 2017 (3), and
a referral from a University colleague (1). Twenty-two interviews were conducted between Feb
2017 – August 2017 with CEOs/Executives who had participated in the Vinnies CEO Sleepout.
The informants had attended the CEO Sleepout between 1-8 times. They represented a range of
private industry sectors, from small to large-sized businesses, as well as the public sector. Of the
research informants, four were female. This proportion (18%) is in line with the CEO-level
positions currently held by females (16.5%) in Australia (Workplace Gender Equality Agency
2018). The interviews were conducted face-to-face in Sydney, with an average interview time of
53 minutes. With a view to experience the event first-hand, the researchers volunteered at the
Vinnies CEO Sleepout in Sydney on 22 June 2017.
The interviews were semi-structured. To allow for a richer individual construction of the
subjective experience to surface, informants were encouraged to tell stories of their experiences
during the interviews. It was anticipated that storytelling would provide insight into their
experiences, from their unique perspective. Stories reflect who we are and serve as sensemaking
devices: “the constitutive process by which human beings order their concepts of self and of the
world around them” (Worthington 1996, p. 15). Examples of story-based research include
understanding corporate relationships (Hansen and Kahnweiler 1993), collaboration (Young and
Denize 2006), leadership (Shamir, Dayan-Horesh, and Adler 2005), brand loyalty (Fournier
1998), and consumer guilt (Dahl, Honea, and Manchanda 2003).
Content analysis was undertaken in line with the procedure outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006),
and all stories were initially identified from transcribed interviews. The researchers developed a
classification system to code and examine stories for themes, and a list of 33 themes was
developed. Two researchers read and re-read the transcripts, with the goal of identifying the
impacts from participating in the CEO Sleepout. Next, the researchers focused on the underlying
themes that captured insights relating to compassion and well-being. This is in line with the
approach of ‘theoretical’ thematic analysis which allows for a more detailed analysis of a
particular aspect of the data, driven by the research questions (Braun and Clarke 2006). This is in
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contrast to a more inductive approach to thematic analysis, which is more data-driven and bears
some resemblance to grounded theory (Patton 2015).
From the 33 themes, those relating to compassion were grouped under the headings of cognitive,
affective, and behavioral (in line with our earlier definition of the key components of
compassion). The ‘cognitive’ component of compassion was reflected in CEOs’ human capital
(gaining of knowledge and experience related to homelessness); the affective component was
reflected in CEOs’ empathic response (personal awareness and feelings of empathy for others);
and the behavioral component was reflected in CEOs’ pro-social attitudes/actions (company
support for homelessness, CEOs volunteering in the community, CEOs undertaking other pro-
social activity).
Findings and Discussion
The practice of compassion results in numerous outcomes – both to the giver and receiver. An act
of compassion requires the individual to understand and consider the plight of another (cognitive
response), feel empathy (affective response), then take action to relieve the suffering (behavioral
response). In this section we explore the themes identified in the data that relate to the key
components of compassion, and discuss how they contribute to the enhancement of well-being.
Cognitive Component: Enhancing CEOs’ Human Capital
The first step in developing compassion is acknowledging another’s perspective - being open and
receptive to their suffering. Listening and learning are key to fostering a better assessment of
complex situations. The first category of themes identified from the data which related to
cognitive response was termed ‘human capital’. Human capital is defined as “the attributes of
individuals in terms of knowledge, skills, competencies, and attitudes conducive to personal
development and societal well-being” (Lee, Cornwell, and Babiak 2012, p. 26). Whilst human
capital may be developed through formal education and training, it can also be gained through
experience. Indeed, increasing individual human capital can lead to greater empowerment,
freedom of choice, and more opportunities for economic and social engagement (Lanzi 2007) and
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the development of pro-social attitudes, i.e. a more altruistic orientation towards others
(Eisenberg et al. 2003). Human capital plays a key role in economic success and well-being. As
individuals improve their skills, knowledge, expertise and competencies, they gain in confidence,
feel more in control, and are inspired to contribute futher (Parris and Peachey 2012, Davies
2011). These changes positively impact the individual’s eudaimonic well-being. By improving
their cognitive abilities and well-being, they are also broadening opportunities to enrich the lives
of others.
Mick, Bateman, and Lutz (2009) provide insight into executives’ thirst for knowledge, whereby
informants relished opportunities to understand the intricacies of a problem and human patterns
of behaviour: “knowing what you don’t know and being willing to seek help and close the gap.”
(ibid p.102). Making wise decisions affect both micro- and macromarketing outcomes, which
then affect the well-being of an organisation’s stakeholders and society. However, without
knowledge, executives feel somewhat incapacitated. They are keen to rectify this, to enable them
to make informed and considered decisions. As one informant said: “Knowledge is important. I
want to know and continue to know more about it”. Every informant interviewed in this study
valued ‘knowledge’ as a critical outcome of their experience in the initiative. One informant
described how gaining knowledge about homelessness was key in gaining a clear understanding
of the extent of the problem:
It was very educational – the breadth of the problem, the stigmas, what different parts of the
government and charity are doing about it… the depth and the nuance of the problem. It really
quite changed my perspective.
For some, the knowledge was a revelation, and this was accompanied by somewhat of a sense of
embarrassment over long-held stereotypes of homeless people, as ‘hobos’ or ‘winos’:
Knowledge – the facts, the figures and the realisation that they’re [the homeless] just normal
human beings, who’ve had the misfortune of losing a job, whole family disintegrates, mental
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illness as well. I really understood that you have to have compassion in everything you do. And
that changed me personally.
Such a significant shift in the assumptions that underlie an individual’s perspective can be
explained by Transformative Learning (TL) theory. TL theory posits that effective learning,
particularly in adults, requires a disorienting event that will challenge and transform one’s
worldview, moving the learner toward “…a frame of reference that is more inclusive,
discriminating, self-reflective, and integrative of experience.” (Mezirow 1997, p.5) Role-play
simulations have the potential to foster transformative learning (Chen and Martin 2015) and were
recently introduced at Vinnies CEO Sleepouts. The organisers used role-play simulations to help
CEOs understand the difficulties and challenges of being homeless. On one occasion the CEOs
were each assigned an identity of a homeless person (e.g., 55 year old single father, recovering
alcoholic, recently unemployed, currently couch-surfing), and instructed to talk to individuals
‘representing’ government departments, so they could extricate themselves from their situation.
The CEOs soon realised how difficult it was to break the cycle, in this case, when faced with a
long waiting list for housing – which they couldn’t join until they’d undertaken the alcohol
treatment program, a program which had no places available for another three months etc.
Informants recalling this experience expressed frustration “going from pillar to post”, unable to
solve the problem (problem-solving being key to their role as a CEO):
The role-play experience – that really gave me the s#@!s. You can now understand why
homeless people feel the way they feel. You just want someone to say: ‘Mate, no worries at all’.
If I had to do this day in, day out – how on earth could I get myself out of this downward spiral?
It wasn’t until I had to go through the role-play that it really kicked in.
After this experiential component, the CEOs shared their frustrations during the Sleepout with
each other, reflecting on their biases and discussing perspectives - which further enhances
learning, according to TL theory.
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Nussbaum (2017) suggests that a true understanding and respect for another’s suffering requires
three ‘judgements’: a judgement of seriousness, that the suffering is important and nontrivial; a
judgement of non-fault, that the individual’s predicament was not chosen or self-inflicted; and a
judgment of similar possibilities, that it is possible that the same may occur to one self (as
expressed in the quote above). Once these ‘judgements’ are made, the individual is able to move
to the next phase in the development of compassion. The second critical step in the compassion
process is feeling empathy for others, which stems from the comprehension of an individual’s
state or condition (Davidson and Harrington 2002). It is less likely that we will feel empathy for
another unless we have made the three judgements as outlined by Nussbaum. For example, in
relation to homelessness, one might initially believe that the individual has chosen to sleep
outdoors, or that they could easily extricate themselves from being homeless if they made the
effort to get a job, or that it could not possibly happen to me.
Affective Component: Enhancing CEOs’ Empathic Response
The next step in developing compassion is feeling empathy. The second category of themes
identified from the data which related to the affective component was termed ‘empathic
response’. Nussbaum (2017) conceptualises empathy as the ability to imagine and feel the
situation of the other, whilst remaining separate. That is, we share the positive or negative
feelings of the other, whilst not confusing the feelings as our own – feeling for the other, not with
the other. Maslow (1962) considered the ability to relate to others and have strong feelings of
empathy, to be qualities of the self-actualised individual. The ability to relate to others in this way
plays a central role in an individual’s psychological or eudaimonic well-being (Ryff and Singer
2008). Studies have shown that the ability to demonstrate enhanced empathy is correlated with
higher levels of individual well-being (Shanafelt et al. 2005, Novak et al. 1997)
A fast-track to cultivating empathy for the homeless was the CEOs’ experience of sleeping
outdoors, on concrete, in the middle of winter. CEOs are instructed to bring their own sleeping
bag, and no other creature comforts. They are supplied with two sheets of cardboard – one to
sleep on, and one to form shelter. For many, this is an awakening of the reality of ‘sleeping
rough’; uncomfortable, interrupted sleep, with a feeling of vulnerability:
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One year it rained, and I woke up and literally had to peel the cardboard off my face. I thought –
that’s what it’d be like every night. Freezing, raining. And not feeling safe. The experiences are
making it very real. There but for the grace of God go I. It sort of stays with you for a while
afterwards.
Whilst the literature reports empathy as a trait lacking in some narcissistic leaders (Friedman and
Weiser Friedman 2014) the researchers note that the third most commonly mentioned outcome
post-sleepout, was a greater feeling of empathy toward the homeless. Every Vinnies CEO
Sleepout includes video footage of individuals relaying their experience of homelessness, as well
as live speakers telling their stories. To shatter the myth of the stereotypical homeless person, the
organisers ensure that a cross-section of individuals are represented: in terms of a mix of age,
gender, education, sexual orientation, and vocation. CEOs felt most empathetic towards the
individuals who had held professional roles, and had become homeless. This may be because it
was unexpected, or it may be that they were able to empathise with individuals who were more
like them:
The stories were extraordinary. You don’t think how easy it is for someone who’s got a good job
and steady family relationship to become homeless. What happened that led to homelessness…
especially the professionals, well-qualified. We never really pause to think about the experience
which led them there.
The guy who was a middle manager in insurance. Incredibly brave to get up and tell his story.
Marriage broke up. Living in the car with his kids, trying to get them to school – it’s just tragic.
All of a sudden you felt very fragile.
There were also strong feelings of empathy towards those who experienced a traumatic home life
and had escaped. Their stories were recollected most often:
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I’m just thinking, what are mothers doing out on the street? It just didn’t occur to me, the link
with domestic violence. And that was a very strong feeling that I had. Oh God, coupled with the
rough sleep… if I was going through all those problems, plus I had to sleep like that every night..
it.. it would be like a downward spiral. I don’t know how I’d get out of that.
The guy who was obviously a lot more challenged, from out in the bush, with so many issues. It’s
sad. And that’s just a tiny tip of the iceberg.
A concept which may explain this is ‘social empathy’. Segal (2011) proposes social empathy as
the “ability to more deeply understand people by perceiving or experiencing their life situations
and as a result gain insight into structural inequalities and disparities” (ibid. p.266). It is this
deeper awakening of the unjustness of humanity that moves individuals to action. This leads us
into the third component of compassion: behavioral response. This phase involves taking action
to help solve the problem and relieve the suffering. CEOs confront issues and solve problems on
a daily basis, and taking action is their modus operandi.
Behavioral Component: Enhancing CEOs’ Pro-social Attitudes/Actions
The final step in compassion is taking action. The third category of themes identified from the
data which related to the behavioral component was termed ‘pro-social attitudes/actions’.
According to Martinek, Schilling, and Hellison (2006) the acts of a compassionate leader can be
expressed in three ways. Firstly, the leader may encourage compassion in others. The CEOs
expressed how the Sleepout had changed the way they thought and felt about homelessness, and
how it had inspired them to take action. Some expressed this as taking collective action,
collaborating and inspiring each other:
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There was such positive energy around the group that things can be done – I like feeling like part
of a can-do group. I go away every year thinking, ‘how can we raise the bar a little more on what
we do?’
As a group of CEOs, use our contacts, knowledge, do something as a block. Then more things
can get done.
You just kind of feel like you’re part of a group of people who’ve all had a shared experience.
You’ve bonded over it, in a sense connecting us to the issue.
The more one identifies with a group, the greater the likelihood of engaging in collective action
(Lalonde and Cameron 1994). Social Identity theory proposes that strong identification with can
group can help boost individuals’ self-esteem and increase increases feelings of belonging and
pride (Tajfel and Turner 1979). Research indicates that participation in group activities not only
generates positive attitude towards the group, but results in greater levels of well-being
afterwards (Krane, Barber, and McClung 2001, Lu and Aegyle 1991). This identification with
CEOs as a group, appears to contribute to individual CEOs’ eudaimonic wellbeing.
Some CEOs were keen to encourage compassion in their immediate family, following their
participation in the sleepout. Interestingly, this was only raised by the female CEOs interviewed.
They wanted their children to learn to be more compassionate, and grow up to be more involved,
caring social citizens:
I asked how my family could learn more, get involved. They talked about preparing housing for
new tenants – helping to set up furniture and spruce the place up a bit. I want my boys to
understand that we have not an obligation but a desire as a society to help those less fortunate.
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The message it sends to my daughter. That’s another benefit for me. How do you open the eyes
of a child who is going to private schools? Living a sheltered and fulfilling life. How do you
expose them to the fact that there are some unfortunate issues and make them more socially
aware? So I think doing this is good role modelling for kids.
Secondly, Martinek, Schilling, and Hellison (2006) propose that the leader may enact compassion
at a local level, for example, within the organisation. The CEOs spoke of more compassionate
treatment of employees, upon returning from the Sleepout:
After the Sleepout, we added an employee support program. Any employee can call this
anonymous hotline and get free support – marital stress, mental stress, health disorders. We pay
for it. I think it’s particularly hard for males [to ask for help].
I got to Milson’s Point Station [the morning after] and there were two other CEOs… I just joined
the conversation. We were just talking about how this experience affected all of us. One was
saying “Next time before I make someone redundant, I’m going to think twice.”
I’ve become more compassionate. Decisions we make here may affect or contribute to the spiral.
I give my managers a talk once a quarter to remind them. It’s changed how I talk to employees, in
disciplinary committees and the like. Whatever support our staff need, we give it to them.
Practising compassion in the workplace enhances employee hedonic and eudaimonic well-being,
which has positive flow-on effects not only to the lives of employees, but to the organisation
itself. Studies indicate that employee well-being can have a broad impact on work-related
outcomes: “It is likely that the positive effects of well-being at work on performance go beyond
the effects of personality. The well-being of workers results in positive organizational citizenship,
customer satisfaction, and perhaps even greater productivity” (Diener and Seligman 2009, p.223).
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In addition to demonstrating more compassion in the workplace, CEOs developed corporate
volunteering programs, partnering with Vinnies. In a sense, the CEO acts as the ‘compassion
architect’, driven to shift the social architecture of the organization to enhance welfare and
alleviate suffering (Frost et al. 2006). From a macromarketing perspective, authenticity in
business is demonstrated by actions taken to enhance community welfare, and achieve outcomes
that are mutually beneficial (Kadirov, Varey, and Wolfsen 2014). In planning and taking
compassionate action, the CEO can positively impact the well-being of those within the
organization, as well as external communities associated with the cause.
We involve our whole company. We partner with three non-profit organisations and Vinnies is
one. It ties into our purpose and values. We give our time and experience, beyond donations.
Vinnies is our key charity as a business. I personally vouch for Vinnies and tell staff “I’ve seen
where the money goes, I’ve seen what they actually do. We need to do our part.” Social
responsibility – it’s that type of think that I sort of entrench in our staff.
Now we involve our whole company. So we’ve partnered with Vinnies – that happened after my
first Sleepout. We’re a recruitment company, and we give our time and experience to help them
[homeless men and women] find work. Everybody in our business – we’ve got 25 people,
contributes. At workshops, at the shelter. It’s not forced. It’s embedded in our organisation. And
we’ve helped 30 or so [homeless] people find a job.
As discussed earlier, the actions of a compassionate, authentic leader can give rise to the moral
emotion of ‘elevation’ amongst employees. By following the CEOs’ lead, and volunteering to
effect change, employees can feel as if they are making a difference. This can increase
employees’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Several studies have documented the positive
effect of volunteering or altruistic activities on wellbeing (Plagnol and Huppert 2010, Schwartz et
al. 2009, Thoits and Hewitt 2001).
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Thirdly, according to Martinek, Schilling, and Hellison (2006), the leader may act
compassionately outside their organisation, inspired to undertake volunteer work or other
prosocial activity. In this study, the CEOs emerged from the Sleepout feeling more
compassionate toward the homeless:
When I used to see homeless people, I put money [in their cup]. Don’t make eye contact and
walk away very quickly. But now I do it differently. I put money in. I pause. I look in their eyes
and smile and say something to them.
It was very easy, prior to the Sleepout, to walk by homeless people and keep that safe assumption
that it was their choices that brought them there. Now I can’t look at a homeless person and be
cynical and think, “Oh gees, what a shame that you’ve wasted your life”. Now I’d like to know -
how did you get there?
They also felt more compassionate toward those within their social networks. Interestingly, they
considered practicing compassion to serve as a buffer against stress. Practicing compassion has
been shown to reduce depressive symptoms (Taylor and Turner 2001), and it appears that the
stories of homelessness provoked this response:
Reminds me to keep our local ‘roving men’s shed’ going. We talk about things important to
business, and things we’re struggling with. Good for mental health.
Every year it’s like a mental health event as well – realising how important my relationships are.
Reminding me to make sure I work on those.
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It opens up an understanding that you do actually need to talk to people about things. I’ve got a
business partner who is very high risk in that regards [depression]. And so I’m going to manage
that issue.
It also became clear that the CEOs’ altruistic behaviour outside their organisation was impacted
by their participation in the Sleepout. Many increased their prosocial activity and became
personally involved with other initiatives and causes:
I’ve volunteered more since my first Sleepout. We started doing barbeques in Martin Place, three
or four a year. On the night we get between 200-400 people. While we’re cooking food, we try to
get around to talk to as many people as we can. The loneliness is tough. They just like coming to
talk to people. It becomes a little community. So they feel part of something. Which they don’t
any other day.
Now I teach them [young women] how to make it easier for their donors to donate. They can role
model on you.
Since the Sleepout I’ve become more involved. I’ve joined Rotary. One of the projects we’re
working on is a children’s playground, for the local community. I’ve also been working with a
19-year old quadriplegic to help him with a career, so he can one day be independent.
We’ve now taken the Sleepout to South Africa, and The Philippines. South Africa has a whole
different meaning of homelessness, but we got 200-300 of South Africa’s leading CEOs to
participate.
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Conclusion, Limitations, Future research
Sirgy (2012) proposes that QoL philosophy should guide marketing thought and practice, in order
to benefit society. A strong, compassionate leader is in a prime position to influence and guide
marketing thought and practice. Such a leader possesses a paradoxical mix of great ambition and
personal humility, and an ethical concern for relationships with others (Collins 2001).
Compassionate leaders are driven to improve both the returns to shareholders, and the well-being
of others. Leaders who act with compassion are not showing weakness, nor are they giving away
power; rather their courageous actions serve to enhance the well-being of employees, society and
those in need. This in turn has positive ramifications for organizational health and profitability.
Of course, not all leaders are compassionate. There is no doubt that some leaders possess a
narcissistic pre-occupation with self-aggrandizement and choose to surround themselves with
sycophants. The authors are under no illusion that many CEOS who participated in the Vinnies
CEO Sleepout may have done so for reasons other than altruism or compassion. These
individuals are difficult to capture in a study such as this, as there is little incentive for them to
participate. There were indications during some interviews that CEOs initially participated for the
purpose of networking, or because of peer-pressure, and after the fact, rationalised the wider
benefits of their involvement. Regardless of the reasons driving the CEOs to participate, the
research indicates many positive outcomes, from personal growth to acts of compassion.
The researchers also recognize that those who did participate may have overstated their
compassion and contributions in line with theories of social desirability bias. Nevertheless, a
clear trend has emerged and the observed similarities in impacts confirms that compassion is
important, can be enhanced by experience, and facilitates valuable activity. At a time when
employees (and consumers) expect CEOs and their organizations to exhibit a social conscience,
encouraging CEOs to become actively involved in CSR initiatives which provide such positive
outcomes is critical. Perhaps for those CEOs who are dismissive of such initiatives, they need to
be made more aware of the positive ramifications for organizational health and profitability.
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Non-profit organizations face an ongoing challenge in fundraising and awareness. Despite the
difficulties of engaging with CEOs – managing egos and channelling their energy and will; and
maintaining momentum with the initiative, year after year, Vinnies has achieved remarkable
success in raising awareness of the plight of homelessness and raising over $40million since
2006. The Australian initiative has also inspired similar CEO Sleepout events around the world:
in the USA, UK, South Africa, Japan, and The Philippines. The high visibility of CEOs has
certainly helped raise the profile of the event. Within some organisations, CEOs can often be the
linchpin, the inspiration driving social change, and they are in prime position to take up a cause,
generate awareness through their networks, and effect more significant change through their
position of power.
This study demonstrates the far-reaching impact of enhancing compassion in leaders through
active participation in a CSR initiative. Like the participants in the Compassion Training
programs described earlier, the CEOs emerged from the Sleepout acting more compassionately
and positively impacting the well-being of others. Whilst our sample size was small, it is
consistent with similar qualitative discovery-oriented research.
This research contributes to two streams of academic research – compassion and leadership. The
findings are informative for both scholars and practitioners. Future researchers may apply
storytelling analysis to other socially-oriented initiatives and consider broader application of the
technique to social marketing, non-profit marketing and quality of life research. There is also an
opportunity to explore the impact of CEO Sleepouts held in other countries, in relation to local
expressions of compassion. Given that the evidence is strong that compassion can be cultivated
and enhanced, researchers could examine the potential of other initiatives to do similar, and
positively impact the well-being of society.
1240
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Hedonic Consumption Practices Of
The Disadvantaged And Their
Influence On Their Psychosocial
Well-Being:A Qualitative Study in
the Context of Syrian Refugees in
Turkey
Zeynep Baktır135, Bilkent University, Turkey
Ahmet Ekici136, Bilkent University, Turkey
According to UN, today a record number of people topping 22.5 million live as refugees,
out of which is 5.5 milion Syrians. Turkey, with over 3.5 million of the overall Syrian refugees, is
the single largest refugee hosting country in the world (UNHCR 2017), and thus provides a good
context to study the role of consumption on refugee well-being. Whether in camps or in self-
arranged neighborhoods, refugees face difficult lives with some ongoing challenges of uncertain
duration. Very little research has examined how refugees deploy different practices to assert their
rights and cope with the daily difficulties in these spaces of long-term displacement (Klein,
2003;Oka 2014). This is an area worth investigating in an attempt to understand the ideosyncratic
135 [email protected] 136 [email protected]
1249
needs of one of the most disadvantaged consumer populations worldwide, and hopefully
contribute to their well-being through better marketing and policy making.
Well-being, which is studied as consumer well-being in marketing, is an important
component of quality of life. Consumers strive to increase their quality of life through
consumption to fulfill both “micro and macro needs” that increase happiness and life satisfaction
in general. While micro needs refer to immediate individual experiences, macro needs deal with
the broader society ( Ryan, Dooley, and Benson 2008; Sirgy, Lee, and Rahtz 2007 ). Well-being
of refugees, however, is highly related with their adaptation to a host country. Refugee adaptation
is the process of seeking ways to satisfy needs, pursue goals and manage the demands of a new
socio-cultural context and it requires the fulfillment of both micro and macro needs. But, the
main concern of the majority of studies on refugee well-being is mental health due to the wide
range of traumatic experiences prior to migration (Fazel, Wheeler, and Danesh 2005). While such
past experiences take a toll on refugees’ well-being, and thus are worth studying, they are only
part of the picture. Indeed, the excessive use of trauma discourse in refugee studies overshadows
many post-migration issues such as adaptation that directly affects refugee well-being in a host
country ( Ryan et. al. 2008).
We argue that resilience factors that ease adaptation in a post-migration environment
could have a bigger influence on refugee well-being than past traumatic events (Carswell,
Blackburn, and Barker 2011). With this study, we explore consumption practices of refugees as a
potential source of resilience based on the Resource-Based Model of Migration, which focuses
on forced migration. This model draws a picture of migrant psychosocial well-being building on
the works of Lazarus & Folkman (1984), Berry (1997) and Hobfoll (1998, 2001). We aim at
contributing to this line of literature by studying refugee consumption not as mere use of
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resources, but rather as a potential coping tool for some “personal, material, social and/or
cultural” benefits ( Mathur, Moschis, and Lee 1999; Ryan et. al. 2008).
Coping is the combination of the behavioral and cognitive attempts to manage the
demands of some stressful situtations (Folkman 2013). In this regard, hedonic consumption
comes forward with its soothing function for refugees who are in much need for mood
management and positive emotions (Atalay & Meloy 2011; Luomala 2002; Luomala &
Laaksonen 1998).
Hedonic consumption, in general, refers to the use of products and services to fulfill
fantasies and satisfy emotions through some pleasurable experiences (Alba & Williams 2012;
Hirshman & Holbrook 1982). Utilitarian consumption, on the other hand, is related with the
products and services needed for survival, As Wertenbroch and colleagues (2005) bring up,
literature on hedonic consumption is often about the use of luxuries for hedonic pleasures such as
fun, excitement and/or arousal, while utilitarian consumption highlights basic necessities for
utilitarian goals, both of which has a distinct function on consumer well-being in general, and on
refugee well-being, in particular. Our aim with this research is to see whether, how and why
refugees engage in hedonic consumption, and whether and how hedonic consumption contributes
to their efforts to cope with the adversities of displacement.
We are studying refugees in four big cities, namely Ankara, Gaziantep, Istanbul and
Kayseri, which host the vast majority of refugees in Turkey. Data collection and analysis will be
completed in two cities during the 4-months’ period between March and June, 2018. In light of
the data to be collected and the subsequent analysis to follow, we aim at better understanding the
role of hedonic consumption on refugees’ psychosocial well-being.
1251
References
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consumption. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 23(1), 2-18.
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mood. Psychology & Marketing, 28(6), 638-659.
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46(1),5-34
Carswell,K., Blackburn,P.,& Barker,C.(2011).The relationship between trauma, post-
migration problems and the psychological well-being of refugees and asylum
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Fazel,M.,Wheeler,J.,&Danesh,J.(2005). Prevalence of serious mental disorder in 7000
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Hirschman,E.C.,&Holbrook,M.B.(1982). Hedonic consumption: emerging concepts,
methods and propositions. The Journal of Marketing, 92-101.
Hobfoll, S.E.(2001). The influence of culture, community, and the nested-self in the stress
process: advancing conservation of resources theory. Applied Psychology, 50(3), 337-421.
Luomala,H.T.(2002).An empirical analysis of the practices and therapeutic power of
mood-alleviative consumption in Finland. Psychology & Marketing, 19(10), 813-836.
Mathur,A.,Moschis,G.P.,&Lee,E.(1999). Stress and consumer behavior: Coping strategies
of older adults. Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science, 5(6/7/8), 233-247.
Oka, R.C.(2014). Coping with the refugee wait: The role of consumption, normalcy, and
dignity in refugee lives at Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. American Anthropologist, 116(1), 23-
37.
1252
Ryan,D.,Dooley, B.,&Benson,C.(2008). Theoretical perspectives on post-migration
adaptation and psychological well-being among refugees: Towards a resource-based
model. Journal of Refugee Studies, 21(1), 1-18.
Sirgy,M.J.,Lee,D.J.,&Rahtz,D.(2007).Research on consumer well-being (CWB):
Overview of the field and introduction to the special issue. Journal of Macromarketing, 27(4),
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Wertenbroch,K.,Dhar,R.,& Khan,U.(2005). A behavioral decision theory perspective on
hedonic and utilitarian choice. In Inside consumption (pp. 166-187). Routledge.
1253
Reconnecting Consumers with
Producers to Improve Life
Satisfaction
Forrest Watson137, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Ahmet Ekici138, Bilkent University, Turkey
In a recent article published in the Journal of Macromarketing, Watson and Ekici (2017)
provided an inductive model depicting how consumer well-being can be enhanced in an
alternative food network context. Alternative food networks (AFNs) are alternative means of
provisioning to the traditional food system (Murdoch, Marsden, and Banks 2000; Jarosz 2008),
shortening the distance between producers and consumers. The authors argue that shared
commitments, or “a choice of a course of action in common with others” (Watson and Ekici
2017), are a means through which AFNs can improve life satisfaction. Rather than commitment
being primarily to an organization (Mowday, Steers, and Porter 1979) or an exchange partner
(Morgan and Hunt 1994), shared commitment is to the producer’s and consumer’s mutual well-
being. The shared commitment of the consumers is to the human employees and owners rather
than primarily to the firm’s longevity or financial prosperity. Adapting the main themes of
commitment in the literature (Gundlach, Achrol, and Mentzer 1995), shared commitment is
characterized by the following three dimensions: a) collective action (behavioral), b) congruent
values and goals (attitudinal), and c) concern for the future welfare of other actors (temporal).
This paper aims to advance the contribution made by Watson and Ekici (2017) by
presenting measurement-based empirical evidence that shared commitment between consumers
137 [email protected] 138 [email protected]
1254
and producers enhances consumer life satisfaction. Figure 1 depicts a proposed model of the
impact of shared commitment on life satisfaction. Customers can experience shared commitment
with employees and/or the owner of an AFN, which in turn influence each other. As shared
commitment increases, we propose that it will increase the overall connection that the customer
feels with the network. As overall connection increases, we propose that the customers’ life
satisfaction will improve.
Figure 1 Conceptual Model of The Impact of Shared Commitment on Life Satisfaction
To test the conceptual model shown in Figure 1, we conducted a survey among the
customers of Miss Silk’s Farm (MSF), a predominant AFN located in an agricultural area of
western Turkey. Turkey is a developing economy with growing urbanization and more people
buying their food through supermarkets and long supply chains as they move away from villages
and agricultural lifestyles. In the face of the industrialization of food (Witkowski 2008), MSF
grows and produces traditional foods and ships them to the homes of urban consumers. MSF has
experienced high growth over its decade of existence, and has an estimated 10,000 regular
customers. In order to test whether shared commitments can be formed when not just a small,
local farm (as is typical in community supported agriculture), a large-scale AFN with substantial
distance between the farm and urban customers was intentionally chosen. The online survey of
MSF customers resulted in 1,404 usable surveys.
There were eight constructs measured in the survey. Six of the constructs deal with the
three components of shared commitment (Collective Action, Congruent Values and Goals, and
Concern for the Future Welfare of Others) (Watson and Ekici 2017) that customers have with the
employees and owner. Several items were developed for each of these six constructs based on
qualitative data analysis of extensive field notes and transcripts. The items were evaluated,
pruned, and refined based on multiple independent reviewers’ feedback on construct, content, and
discriminant validity (Sapsford 2007). The final two scales were concerned with the outcomes of
1255
shared commitments. Overall Connection served as a proxy for a higher level feeling of
connection to the ethos of the farm. Life Satisfaction is measured by the standard five-question
life-satisfaction scale (Diener et al. 1985).
The measurement model, derived by using a second-order factor analysis approach, was
tested through structural equation modeling utilizing SPSS Amos 24. Fit indices for the model are
acceptable: Chi-square (283, N=1404)= 1169.41, Chi-square/df=4.13, GFI= .94, RMSEA= .047).
The results revealed there is a simple structure among the items, with each construct measured by
its own set of three unique items. Our expectation that the three underlying components would be
significant in measuring shared commitment was confirmed. All the predicted paths between the
Shared Commitments constructs, Overall Connection, and Life Satisfaction, as shown in Figure
2, were confirmed to be significant. Overall, there is strong support that shared commitments
with both the owner and the employees have a positive impact on life satisfaction for the
customers of MSF, as mediated through Overall Connection. Although the relationship between
Overall Connection and Life Satisfaction is relatively low (.09) because many factors contribute
to someone’s global assessment of their life (Diener and Suh 1997), it is still significant, and
indicates that shared commitments in an AFN can create an improvement in one’s life
satisfaction.
Figure 2 Customer Model with Standardized Path Coefficients (N=1404)
1256
The empirical findings show that shared commitments between consumers and producers
enhance consumer life satisfaction. Furthermore, our findings show that the three underlying
components of Collective Action, Congruent Values and Goals, and Future Welfare are
significant in measuring shared commitment between customers and both the owner and
employees of a food provisioning system, suggesting that each of these constructs can be a
principle around which policies are based. Shared commitments are an example of how human
welfare can be improved through the reconnection of actors in a marketing system. The findings
have theoretical and practical implications for the Macromarketing community.
References
Diener, E.D., Emmons, R.A., Larsen, R.J. and Griffin, S. (1985), “The Satisfaction with Life
Scale,” Journal of Personality Assessment, 49(1), 71-75.
Diener, Ed, and Eunkook Suh (1997), “Measuring quality of life: Economic, social, and
subjective indicators." Social Indicators Research, 40(1-2): 189-216.
Gundlach, Gregory T., Ravi S. Achrol, and John T. Mentzer (1995), “The Structure of
Commitment in Exchange,” The Journal of Marketing, 59 (January), 78-92.
Jarosz, Lucy (2008), “The City in the Country: Growing Alternative Food Networks in
Metropolitan Areas,” Journal of Rural Studies, 2(3), 231-244.
Morgan, Robert and Shelby Hunt (1994), “The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship
Marketing,” The Journal of Marketing, 58 (3), 20-38.
Mowday, Richard T., Richard M. Steers, and Lyman W. Porter (1979), “The Measurement of
Organizational Commitment,” Journal of Vocational Behavior, 14(2), 224-247.
Murdoch, Jonathan, Terry Marsden, and Jo Banks (2000), “Quality, Nature, and Embeddedness:
Some Theoretical Considerations in the Context of the Food Sector,” Economic
Geography, 76(2), 107-125.
1257
Sapsford, Roger (2007), Survey Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Watson, Forrest and Ahmet Ekici (2017), “Well-being in Alternative Economies The Role of
Shared Commitments in the Context of a Spatially-Extended Alternative Food Network,” Journal
of Macromarketing, 37(2), 206-216.
Witkowski, Terrence H. (2008), “Global Food Marketing Systems and Local Cultural Change in
the Developing World,” in William E. Kilbourne and John D. Mittelstaedt, eds. Macromarketing:
Systems, Causes and Consequences (263-278). Clemson, SC: The Macromarketing Society.
1258
Marketing &
Development V
Track Chair: Andes Barrios
Co-Chair(s): Cliff Shultz
1259
Lebanon: Preliminary
Explorations of a Complex and
Conflicted Political Economy and
Marketing System
Clifford J. Shultz, II, Loyola University Chicago, USA
Walid Abou-Khalil, St. Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Abstract
Lebanon is a complex and often conflicted political economy and marketing system. As
such, macromarketing research of various societal phenomena and systemic complexities may be
useful to the country’s future and the well-being of its citizens, by facilitating the development of
policies and the delivery of various goods and services to meet the needs of interconnected and
often adversarial stakeholders – that is, distressed communities and people who would benefit
from cooperation rather than conflict (Shultz, Rahtz and Sirgy 2017). This special session is
organized to begin a macromarketing assessment of Lebanon, and implicitly a call for
constructive engagement to facilitate peace-making and a sustainable marketing system, as an
alternative to simmering hostilities, sectarian violence and war (Shultz 2007; 2016).
A geographically small country, located on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean Sea,
and sharing borders with Syria and Israel, Lebanon is both ancient and modern. The city of
Byblos, on Lebanon’s coast, has archaeological remains dating back more than 7000 years
(UNESCO 2018), yet the country of Lebanon with which most people are familiar has been a
sovereign political state for less than a century (Barr 2012). Since its inception, the country has
been a cauldron of political turmoil; despite various tensions, threats and disruptions, Lebanon
1260
produced impressive economic growth and high life-quality for most citizens, due to important
contributions from many sectors, e.g., banking, tourism, agriculture, education, health care, and
various forms of marketing related thereto. Its economy was dynamic and in many respects a
model for the region. The model fractured however during 15 years of civil war, from 1975-1990.
The human carnage coupled with damage to the infrastructure and economy were devastating,
and Lebanon still struggles to move forward. Progress is stymied by sectarianism, which was/is
an integral part of Lebanese political life; systemic stresses resulting from more than a million
refugees (by some estimates as much as one fourth of the total population); and larger external
forces in the region and beyond – which play on religious differences and are driven by vested
interests, some nefarious and some noble – and which greatly affect Lebanese policy and many
aspects of this dynamic marketing system (CIA 2018; World Bank 2017).
While Lebanese resolve, and a delicate peace, offer hope – promising new developments
in many sectors are visibly impressive – Lebanon remains racked by social and political
instability and external pressures. It is a barometer of sorts for the broader Middle East, as more
powerful players in the region use Lebanon as a crucible for proxy wars, to play-out the Arab-
Israeli conflict, and a testing ground for periodic bouts of Saudi/Sunni and Iranian/Shia
coexistence (Malley 2017).
Participants of this session are keen to explore macromarketing solutions to affect
sustainable peace and prosperity in Lebanon and the region. The session includes a very brief
introduction to Lebanon, featuring some factors that make it a compelling topic for
macromarketing study, followed by four presentations on (1) the perils and promise of peace
policies and the marketing plans to execute them; (2) the refugee crisis and challenges wrought
by Syria and Syrian displaced persons; (3) the hope and promise for marketing some of
Lebanon’s magnificent historical and recreational treasures such as Byblos, and potentially other
sites, destinations, and social/cultural/economic assets; (4) corruption and opportunities for
Macromarketing interventions. In the tradition of Macromarketing Conference, succinct
presentations are encouraged; each presenter therefore will be allotted 12-15 minutes to present.
The session will end with discussion and explorations for further research and collaboration.
1261
References
Barr, J. (2012), A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914-1948,
New York: W.W. Norton.
CIA (2018), The World Factbook, “Lebanon,” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-
world-factbook/geos/le.html, accessed January 23, 2018.
Malley, R. (2017), “The Middle East Is Nearing an Explosion,” The Atlantic, November 8,
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/lebanon-saudi-iran-
hezbollah/545306/, accessed January 23, 2018.
Shultz, C. (2016), “Marketing an End to War: Constructive Engagement, Community Wellbeing,
and Sustainable Peace,” Markets, Globalization and Development Review, 1(2),
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/mgdr/vol1/iss2/2/, accessed January 23, 2017.
Shultz, C. (2007), “Marketing as Constructive Engagement,” Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 26 (2), 293-301.
Shultz, C., D. Rahtz and M. J. Sirgy (2017), “Distinguishing Flourishing from Distressed
Communities: Vulnerability, Resilience, and a Systemic Framework to Facilitate Well-
Being,” The Handbook of Community Well-Being, R. Phillips & C. Wong, eds. Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Springer, 403-422.
UNESCO (2018), “Byblos,” http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/295, accessed January 23, 2018.
World Bank (2017), Lebanon Overview,
http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/lebanon/overview#1, accessed January 23, 2018,
Washington: World Bank.
1262
The Experiential Perception of a
Tourist Destination in Foreign
Visitors’ Minds: The Case of
Byblos, Lebanon
Walid Abou-Khalil, St. Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Eliane Khalifé, St. Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Abstract
The attractiveness of a given tourist destination is a complex reality that depends on
several attributes. Positioning is the main attribute that affects this attractiveness (Harrison-
Walker 2011). It fits into the consumer's mind, influences choices, and presents the product or
destination as a distinctive choice (Perry 1988). The tourist destination, in particular, which is
subject to supply and demand (Murphy et al. 2000), is a combination of various provisions of
services, which, by being combined, can define the experience of the site visited (Hu and Ritchie
1993). This consumption experience of tourist destination, is a temporal activity of intangible
nature. Thus, a tourist destination could differentiate itself by offering at each stage of the
customer experience a higher relational value vis-à-vis four primary determinants of perceived
experiential quality: interaction quality, physical environment quality, outcome quality and
access quality (Wu and Li 2017; Langlois and Maurette 2003). This long-term approach is
fraught with challenges, especially given that destinations – or, more accurately, those
responsible for them – must think and act like brand-managers, to attract and to maintain
1263
customers and customer relationships in an increasingly competitive local and global tourist
market (Wells and Wint 2000).
Lebanon is a country that is characterized by a fragile context manifesting itself in an
almost chronic state of tangled crises of all kinds that have been lasting since the 1970s. Even in
such an unstable context, Byblos, a historic tourist town in Lebanon, has shown significant
growth during the last decade. Byblos resembles many other Lebanese cities, but it has shown a
unique success that has made it one of the most important and most visited tourist cities in the
region, and perhaps in the world. Indeed, Byblos was recognized by the World Tourism
Organization (NNA 2013) as the best Arab tourist city for 2013.
The main objective of this study is to measure the tourists’ perceptions about the city of
Byblos. In addition, this research will allow us to detect the existing relationship between the
positioning and the four determinants of experiential quality. The results will be obtained mainly
from quantitative research conducted on a sample of 200 tourists and will highlight the primary
determinants of experiential quality which is perceived as important by the visitors of Byblos,
and which will constitute the competitive advantage(s) of the city.
Finally, the present research will allow us to better understand the tourists’ perceptions of
the Byblos tourist destination through the determinants of experiential quality, to suggest the
appropriate positioning of the city. As the positioning aspired by the company – i.e., those
responsible for marketing Byblos – does not always correspond to the positioning perceived by
customers/tourists (Viot 2011), it is essential to adapt the marketing strategy to position the
Byblos according to objectives.
Shultz (2007) states that macromarketing includes an optimistic perspective and that it
seeks functional mechanisms to enhance marketing processes, to the benefit of the largest number
of stakeholders. Following this line, the results obtained should produce a model of destination
marketing for the city of Byblos. This model should help other communities and more
specifically the municipalities of tourist cities that exist in an unstable environment, to
differentiate themselves, increase their local development, and build an offer that best meets the
expectations and perceptions of potential tourists. This will also allow them to review, improve
1264
and especially develop a better positioning of their cities and adopt marketing strategies that will
increase their visibility and reputation, and make their cities more competitive at both the
regional and international levels.
References
Harrison-Walker, Jean (2011), “Strategic positioning of nations as brands,” Journal of
International Business Research, 10 (2), 135.
Hu, Yangzhou and Ritchie J.R. Brent (1993), “Measuring Destination Attractiveness: A
contextual Approach,” Journal of Travel Research, 32 (2), 25-34.
Langlois, Michel and Inès Maurette (2003), “From product destination to medium destination:
the five strategic issues of the management and positioning of tourist destinations,” ESG-
UQAM.
Murphy, Peter, Mark Pritchard, and Brock Smith (2000), “The destination product and its impact
on traveler perceptions,” Tourism Management, 21(1), 43-52.
Perry, Michael (1988), “Conceptual overview and applications of international marketing
positioning,” European Management Journal, 6 (4), 420-424.
Shultz, Clifford J. II (2007), “Macromarketing,” in Explorations of Marketing in Society, Gregory
Gundlach, Lauren Block and William Wilkie, eds. Cincinnati: ITP / South-Western
Publishers, for the American Marketing Association, 766-784.
Viot, Catherine (2011), E-marketing at the time of web 2. 0. Paris: Gualino.
Wells, Louis T. and Alvin Wint (2000), “Marketing a country: promotion as a tool for attracting
foreign investment,” The World Bank, Washington.
1265
Wu, Hung-Che and Tao Li (2017), “A study of experiential quality, perceived value, heritage
image, experiential satisfaction, and behavioral intentions for heritage tourists,” Journal
of Hospitality & Tourism Research, 41(8), 904-944.
NNA (2013), "Byblos crowned best Arab tourist city," National News Agency, Ministry of
Information, Lebanon. http://www.nna-leb.gov.lb/en/show-news/7801/Byblos-crowned-
best-Arab-tourist-city, accessed January 26, 2018.
1266
The Middleman Myth:
Understanding the Role of Small-
Scale Intermediaries in System
Resilience in Impoverished
Contexts
Stefanie Beninger, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Stephanie Bertels, Simon Fraser University, Canada
June N.P. Francis, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Many people in impoverished contexts run small businesses (Banerjee and Duflo 2007),
with many of them acting as intermediaries. Intermediaries facilitate transactions by linking
buyers and sellers (Spulber 1996). While intermediaries are viewed as critical actors in marketing
systems in general, marketing literature is conflicted about the role of small-scale intermediaries
in impoverished contexts in particular. Many marketing academics have viewed them as
problematic and have argued for their removal from the marketing systems (i.e. Ansari, Munir,
and Gregg 2012; Hart and Christensen 2002; Ireland 2008; Prahalad and Hammond 2002).
This approach seems to reflect an agenda of modernization, where literature has routinely
argued for the replacement of local, and often traditional, systems with modern and formal
alternatives (Araujo 2013). In this way, small-scale actors are encouraged to be replaced by
aggregated providers (Escobar 1997) such as multinationals (Ireland 2008) through a process of
disintermediation. This focus has resulted in a lack of attention on cultivating understanding of
these in situ systems prior to replacing local actors with the so-called modern options, with few
1267
exceptions. Local intermediaries in impoverished contexts are one such understudied actor in the
marketing literature (Endo 2014).
This study targets this gap by seeking to understand the role of small-scale intermediaries
in an in situ local system in an impoverished context. In particular, our study takes an inductive
approach that employs both observational and interview data in the Republic of the Union of
Myanmar. We found that these intermediaries engage in activities, conceptualized through the
theoretical concept of work, that support their systems resilience. Resilience is defined as a
systems ability to absorb and recover (van der Vegt et al. 2015). While resilience is an important
concept in other literatures and considered a major development goal (Béné et al. 2014), it has
received limited attention in both business (Hutton 2016) and marketing, with few exceptions.
This gap remains despite recent acknowledgement that it is critical to foster an increased
understanding of resilience in business (van der Vegt et al. 2015).
This study first presents the theoretical background of the role of intermediaries in
marketing. Their benefits – and noted drawbacks – within their marketing systems are described
prior to turning our attention to intermediaries in impoverished contexts in particular and the state
of the literature regarding resilience. Given what we know about intermediaries, it is possible that
they may contribute to resilience in their system. This was found in our empirical work of a
‘green grocery’ vegetable supply chain in in the country of Myanmar.
Myanmar is a country that experiences extensive poverty (World Bank 2015). The
marketing systems in Myanmar, especially in food sectors, are comprised primarily of traditional
markets, lack branded chains, and are increasingly targeted for modernization. Until recently, this
country was largely isolated globally. Given these elements, Myanmar was theoretically an
appropriate context to understand local intermediaries in an in situ traditional system.
Data collection was qualitative and was chosen to better understand the lived experience
of the intermediaries (van den Hoonaard 2012). Observations resulted in detailed field notes and
30 semi-structured interviews of small-scale intermediaries were interviewed. This data was
analyzed taking an inductive approach through coding using an iterative process (Charmaz 2014).
This resulted in the creation of the categories of systems disturbances and forms of work of the
intermediaries related to resilience.
Our findings contribute to marketing and business literature through creating a typology
of disturbances and identifying three forms of work that support resilience, which we have called
meshing, pooling, and mobilizing. This three are defined and described, supported by rich and
1268
detailed fieldnotes and the words of the small-scale intermediaries themselves. Our findings
contribute to resilience theorizing. In particular, we expand on the theoretical work of Sutcliffe
and Vogus (2003). We conclude with questioning reigning local system disintermediation
recommendations in impoverished contexts and challenge the modernization paradigm.
References
Ansari, Shahzad, Kamal Munir, and Tricia Gregg (2012), “Impact at the ‘Bottom of The
Pyramid’: The Role of Social Capital in Capability Development and Community
Empowerment,” Journal of Management Studies, 49 (4), 813-842.
Araujo, Luis (2013), "What Have Markets Ever Done for the Poor?." Marketing Theory, 13 (3),
385-388.
Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Esther Duflo (2007), “The Economic Lives of the Poor,” The Journal of
Economic Perspectives, 21 (1), 141-167.
Béné, Christophe, Andrew Newsham, Mark Davies, Martina Ulrichs, and Rachel Godfrey‐Wood
(2014), “Resilience, Poverty and Development,” Journal of International Development, 26
(5), 598-623.
Bhamra, Ran, Samir Dani, and Kevin Burnard (2011), “Resilience: The Concept, a Literature
Review and Future Directions, “International Journal of Production Research,” 49 (18),
5375-5393.
Charmaz, Kathy (2014), Constructing Grounded Theory, 2nd edition. London: SAGE
Publications.
Endo, Gen (2014), “The Key Role of Intermediaries in Thailand's Fresh Food Distribution
System,” The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 24 (5),
544-563.
Escobar, Arturo (1997). The Making and Unmaking of the Third World Through Development.
The Post-Development Reader, in Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree, eds., London: Zed
Books, 65-93.
1269
Hart, Stuart L. and Clayton M. Christensen (2002), “The Great Leap,” Sloan Management
Review, 44 (1), 51-56.
Hutton, Martina (2016), “Neither Passive nor Powerless: Reframing Economic Vulnerability Via
Resilient Pathways,” Journal of Marketing Management, 32 (3-4), 252-274.
Ireland, John (2008), “Lessons for Successful BoP Marketing from Caracas' Slums,” Journal of
Consumer Marketing, 25 (7), 430-438.
Prahalad, Coimbatore K. and Allen Hammond (2002), “Serving the World's Poor,
Profitably,” Harvard Business Review, 80 (9), 48-59.
Spulber, Daniel F. (1996), “Market Microstructure and Intermediation,” The Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 10 (3), 135-152.
Sutcliffe, Kathleen M., and Timothy J. Vogus (2003), “Organizing for Resilience,” in Positive
Organizational Scholarship, Jane E. Dutton, Jane E., and Mary Ann Glynn, eds., San
Sutter.
van der Vegt, Gerben S., Peter Essens, Margareta Wahlström, and Gerard George (2015),
“Managing Risk and Resilience,” Academy of Management Journal, 58 (4), 971-980.
World Bank (2015), Building Resilience, Equity and Opportunity in Myanmar: The Role of
Social Protection, Overview,” (accessed November 24, 2017, [available at
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/22318].
1270
Macromarketing
Measurement and Methodology
IV
Track Chair: Ben Wooliscroft
Co-Chair(s): Francisco Conejo
1271
Towards a Bhaskarian Metatheory
for Marketing Systems in Crisis
Hamish Simmonds139, Victoria University, New Zealand
We live in a world of unfulfilled potential. We can produce enough to satisfy the needs of everyone
on the planet, yet, millions of lives are stunted by profoundly inequitable resources and life
opportunities, while the consumption of others jeopardises our natural life support systems
(Bhaskar and Hartwig 2010). Societal systems are characterised by the reproduction of highly
complex mechanisms of economic and social self-regulation, yet we are unable to control their
unintended and often undesirable side-effects, including widening inequalities and vulnerabilities
(Wallis and Valentinov 2017). The recent financial crisis illustrates this perfectly as the drive of
financialisation lead to a collapse which saw billions of dollars’ worth of assets, millions of jobs
and pillars of industries simply disappear (McNally 2009).
Overcoming the problems and crisis’ we face requires alternatives trajectories based on actualising
possibilities, changing the way we use resources and act while subject to constraints (Bhaskar
2016). Macromarketing is an important knowledge producing system for reconstructing and
enacting sustainable relationships between self, society, markets and our natural environment
(Shultz 2016; Varey 2012). This emancipatory agenda is best seen through the articulation of
marketing as a social science (MASS), and systems-oriented outlooks (Layton 2016; Löbler 2016;
Shultz 2016). Together these mandates provide the basis for broadening and deepening
macromarketing’s contributions to other disciplines, practice and policy and their influence can be
seen in research addressing problems of poverty, exploitation and development.
While the dominant social paradigm and a range of ideologies have been scrutinized and critiqued
1272
(Eckhardt, Dholakia and Varman 2013; Hirschman 1993; Kilbourne, McDonagh and Prothero
1997), multiple competing interests and interacting relationships necessitate continued critical
reflexivity to avoid a vast meshwork of false or inadequate ideals and social practices (Hartwig
2015). Fundamental to such a proposition is the concept of worldview, defined as the ‘overarching
systems of meaning-making that to a substantial extent inform how humans interpret, enact, and
co-create reality’ (De Witt and Hedlund 2017). For research, metatheory provides the basis for
explicating, critiquing and reproducing worldviews as a synthetic apprehension or enactment of
the world (Edwards 2016; Hedlund-de Witt 2013). Metatheory addresses the sociological and
philosophical grounds through which we problematize social functioning and adjudicates between
practices of research and the discourse and praxis of the lifeworld.
This paper aims to build on the work of critical scholars whose own projects pursue and theorise
alternatives and reflexivity in addressing marketing systems, adding to the synthesis and
reconstruction of metatheory (Mittelstaedt, Kilbourne and Shultz 2015; Tadajewski 2010; Varey
2012). My intentions are threefold; 1) to establish the need for integrative metatheoretical work
and illustrate crisis in relation to marketing systems; 2) set out a metatheoretical position drawing
from the work of Bhaskar and others, and; 3) provide considerations for research. In pursuit of
these aims, this work-in-progress draws from the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar, notably his
dialectical critical realism and the four-planar model of social being and the structured, processual
and laminated systems of interdependency it presupposes (Bhaskar 2008, 2016). This integrative
outlook provides the scaffolding to look at the world as levels of relational structures which assume
different conditions or modes of coexistence producing potentials and tendencies, sometimes
towards crisis, as these are actualised in the interpretation and enactment of agents and the
exchange-change processes of marketing systems.
Crisis and imbalance and the symptoms in marketing systems
Our current time is marked by complex interrelated problems operating across a full spectrum of
ecological, economic, political, social and existential domains. These problems reveal deep
interdependencies, such that they demand new understandings, approaches and interventions
(Bhaskar et al. 2010). Dominating ideologies, operational modes, and practices, found under
multiple headings; neoliberalism, capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, marketisation, etc., have
long been suggested as the conditions and forces of many of our current problems (Harvey 2014;
Jackson 2009; Klein 2014; Moore 2015; Roberts 2013; Speth 2008). Moreover, critical scholars of
1273
marketing have argued the academic discourse of marketing has at times served to, reproduce, often
implicitly, the negative features of these (cf. Eckhardt et al. 2013; Tadajewski 2010). Regardless,
marketing ‘as the study of prerequisites, processes and consequences of exchange-change
processes induced by needs and attractions in the context of institutions, norms, cultures, values
and their impact on society and nature as a whole’ and the marketing systems that describe, and
organize these, are implicated in these problems and therefore the search for possible alternatives
(Löbler 2016). While this positioning opens up a range of complexity, the theme that runs across
crisis and the critique of outlooks, worldviews and organising structures, is the issue of imbalance.
The next section looks, non-exhaustively, at examples of these imbalances under the premise that
these are both a factor of the reality of marketing systems and enfolded in the disciplinary discourse.
Imbalance in institutions and dominant actors
The politicisation of issues of finance and the institutionalisation of market logics privilege and
reify the economic system into operational closure without regard to its environment (Harvey
2014). Examples of the imbalances these cause are clear. Economic analysis creates an exclusory
dialogue one in which goals of well-being, quality of life and environmental quality are supplanted
by goals of growth and productivity. The functions of debt-based monetary and financial systems,
profit motives, consumerism and the use of GDP as a measure of progress allow states and other
actors to conflate growth with wellbeing and better outcomes without considering either
distribution or qualitative aspects of prosperity (Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi 2011). Increasingly, GDP
fails to reflect progress and quality of life, and the drive towards growth is becoming detrimental,
in which the benefits, are being exceeded by environmental and social costs (Buchs and Koch 2017;
Jackson 2009; Stiglitz et al. 2011; Xue 2016). Costs such as the pollution of air, water and land are
not accounted for or disincentivised, and contributions to wellbeing and communitarian relations
are not incentivized under the growth mindset emphasising individual gain and competition (Buchs
and Koch 2017; Hamilton 2003; Roberts 2013).
Moreover the adherence to economic growth and its spread from developed to developing nations,
increasingly reveals a contempocentrism, built on stripping future generations of the natural
environment and creates increasing levels of debt (Gosseries and Meyer 2009). Moreover, it pays
little attention to the past ignoring the cheapening and exploitation of planet and people, that have
aided in the conditions of possibility for the ongoing expansion of consumption and ‘growth’ and
1274
‘development’ (McNally 2009; Moore 2015). Examples of loose environmental standards, the
permittence of deplorable work conditions, and substantial tax incentives in the guise of friendly
business ‘climates’ are cause for concern.
Financialization is a consequence of these operational modes and goals and the effort to maintain
economic closure . The financial crisis revealed the abstracted and intra-systemically complex and
operationally closed nature of the financialised economy, leading to its collapse and the ripples of
impact across different systems (Helland and Lindgren 2016; McNally 2009). Financialisation also
drives inequality – ordinary workers have seen their wages stagnate as firms downsize and reduce
the wage share of earning, while finance professionals and those with disposable capital benefit
increasingly disproportionally (Piketty 2014). The confinement of the benefits of rising incomes to
a small group has lead to a rise in a debt-led consumption and a wide range of consumer credit and
financial products as inducements for people to go further into debt (Stockhammer 2015; Sturn and
van Treeck 2013). Inequality is recognised as a central driver of crisis in personal, social and
cultural malintegration linked to lower life expectancy, decreases in educational performance,
mental illness, imprisonment, drug and alcohol addiction, worse healthcare outcomes and social
and political distrust and conflict (Nolan et al. 2014; Pickett and Wilkinson 2009).
Commoditization and the language of prices also reveal the dominance of the economic system
over natural and social systems. Particularly worrying are attempts to rationalise and devise means
of economic valuation for ecosystem services and social impacts, vindicating describing life and
nature in monetary terms, and allowing the ‘buying’ of harms by those who have no relationship
(spatially or temporally) with the people harmed (Speth 2008). Corporate power tied with the
dominance of the economic system drives much of the imbalance represented by the overwhelming
access of industry lobbyists to political officials, the misrepresentation of health effects and
environmental impacts by corporations, and the billions of dollars of ‘perverse’ subsidies
facilitating environmentally and socially destructive practices (Harvey 2014; Klein 2014; Speth
2008). Similar patterns exist in the viation of the transformational character of corporate
citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability (Moncrieff 2015). These discussions are often
reduced to how firms can benefit financially from these issues, dismissing their complex and multi-
faceted nature (Banerjee 2008; Carbo et al. 2014). Similarly, the emphasis is also placed on
consumers, allowing responsibility to be attributed to the isolated individual in an abstract, de-
1275
socialised way in efforts to reproduce marketing rhetoric of the sovereign consumer and green
consumption.
Imbalances in our systems of exchange manifest as exploitation and concentrations of extreme
wealth and inequality (Buchs and Koch 2017; Piketty 2014). The exploitation of resources benefits
those who can avoid its most adverse consequences, while the most vulnerable are the poorest,
benefit from it the least and contribute to the problem the least (Gore 2015). These effects emerge
acutely across the world in displacement, food shortages and the withering away of livelihoods and
thrive on rendering costs invisible by spatial or temporal displacement on to others (Lacey 2015;
Roberts 2013).
The discourse of consumption and individualism
Consumerism is seen as a particularly important organising function, goal and practice that defines
marketing systems and is linked to freedom and social being, but also crisis. Consumption beyond
basic needs is tied to, particularly in a rich of marketing literature, a range of issues in self-
definition, happiness, social communication, pleasure and the path to identity construction (Firat
and Venkatesh 1995). This positive side of consumption, however, is against many problems.
Problems of consumption are of course tied to issues of debt and waste (Stockhammer 2015), but
there are deeper problems such as the criticism of the freedom associated with consumption (e.g.
Schwarzkopf (2011) and Fırat (2013)). Much of this critique recognises the power of the market
and the role of corporate media programming, research and cultural institutions which although
may produce a range of meanings promote, privilege, and suppress others.
Fromm (1962/2006) and Baudrillard (1969), saw this as a one-dimensional ordering of society,
whereby certain ‘false’ needs are promoted that serve the interests of the system, not the self-
development of the individual, reproducing itself through integrating people into a spiral of never-
ending and never totally satisfactory consumption (Bauman 2007). This cycle leaves people
drained by their role as consumers, substituting addictive consumer behaviour, in place of fulfilling
demands of realising one’s potential and support the complexity of human motivation (Buchs and
Koch 2017; Hamilton 2003; Jackson 2009). It is unsurprising that research in consumer psychology
and decision science shows free choice and consumption fail to deliver happiness and optimal
outcomes (Markus and Schwartz 2010; Schwarzkopf 2011). However a free and developing
consumer absolves marketing, corporations and our social structures from charges of seduction,
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coercion, and manipulation, and discourses of value and co-creation serve as the justifying
discourse for the reproduction of the extant order (Hietanen, Andéhn and Bradshaw 2018).
A fundamental problem recognised in these criticisms is the ideological individualism, materialism
and egoism (Adorno 2000). The illusion of the autonomous subject collapses the world into the
field of activity where individuals labour to self-satisfaction and become the source of all
awareness, meaning and value, disenchanting the world outside of its instrumental utility. Research
shows the dissolution of ethical attitudes, higher rates of mental illness and instances of violence,
prejudice and anti-social characteristics associated with individualistic consumption and
materialism (Kasser 2003; Mullainathan and Shafir 2013; Tadajewski 2016). Finally, there is a host
of problems that exist within the realm of consumption that reflects problematic relations, including
obesity and addiction (Assadourian 2010; Reith 2004).
On the need for integrative metatheory
What emerges in these examples are the various characteristics that feature as both the discourse
of modernity and as objects of critique including egoism, individualism, anthropocentrism,
contempocentrism, fetishism, among others reductions and centrisms140 (Hartwig 2011).
Fundamentally, these problems, and the crisis’ they are contained within, reveal imbalances in our
social being and the systems which support and characterise it and the means by which we
understand and intervene in these. The problems are multifaceted, existing in objective and
complex manifestations, such as a changing climate, but also in the inter and intrasubjective context
of meaning-making, conflicting interests, worldviews and subsequent construal and responses, e.g.
the affordance of rights to corporations over individuals or material consumption as a measure of
well-being and social worth (Jessop 2015; Scharmer 2009). The enactment and reproduction of
socio-cultural reality is actualised cumulatively in these dimensions, influencing our identities,
interpersonal relations and providing political, moral and rational legitimacy to the reproduction
and reconstruction of more macrostructures.
Imbalance produces fractures and tensions which create harmful trajectories for individuals, our
interaction, social structures and marketing systems. Subsequently, this work argues that we need
corrective metatheories which can both understand imbalance and search for unity in the subjective,
intersubjective, interobjective and objective domains of being while providing a regulative function
140 Centrism refers to any view which takes human being or aspects of human being (the atomistic ego, a way of knowing, a language, a politics, a party, a nation) as the centre or goal of the/its universe (Hartwig 2007)
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for discourse and research. An integrative approach will unify multiple perspectives, encompassing
the complexity of our socio-ecological existence, provide a basis for critique of pathology, injustice
and ineffectiveness and importantly help us redress the spectrum of crisis grounding alternative
trajectories in real structures. It is here that the work of Bhaskar and the subsequent intwinement
of systemic approaches is valuable.
Towards a Metatheory
I draw from Roy Bhaskar’s work to assert a metatheoretical position that serves as an orientating
framework. Bhaskar, most notable as the founder of Critical Realism, has left a substantial and
expansive body of work and this paper does not aim to expound the intricacies of critical realism.
Bhaskar’s work is dedicated to articulating a metatheory that provides an orienting general
conceptual framework, clearing the ground for the work of substantive social science and the praxis
of emancipation. Bhaskar’s philosophy is expressed in a multidimensional ontology that provides
an ontological – axiological chain of being (Bhaskar and Hartwig 2010). The seven dimensions of
this chain are; being as structured, being as process and change, being as involving totalities, being
as incorporating transformative human agency, being as incorporating reflexivity, being as re-
enchanted and being as non-dual. I will focus on the first four dimensions, which together make up
the MELD framework141 and characterise dialectical critical realism, as they provide the basis of a
systemic metatheory. The remaining three are the extension of the philosophy of meta-reality and
while being reflexively enfolded into the others, take us beyond the present works aims.
Firstly, (1M) being as structured refers to two key premises of Bhaskar’s revindication of ontology;
the necessary stratification and differentiation of the world (Bhaskar 2008). These claims present
a stratified ontology of three nested domains, which consists of entities/structures and mechanisms
(The Real), events (The Actual) and experiences (the Empirical) (Bhaskar 1989). Together these
points provide the basis of an ontological position that reality exists in the operation of powers of
different and emergent levels of structures which come together to produce events which are then
experienced empirically, providing an ontological hiatus between the noumenal and phenomenal
and emphasising the possible along with the contingently actual. This is a challenge to reductionism
141 The acronym comes from the names Bhaskar gives to each dimension of his ontology - 1M first moment, 2E second edge, 3L third level, and 4D fourth dimension. While the names and their referents help systematize the development of critical realism and Bhaskar’s philosophy this explanation is superfluous to the intentions of this paper.
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which would collapse the world into people’s meaning-making or provide only for their empirical
relations. Bhaskar advocates an emergentist position which sustains an ontology of structures in a
layered reality, in which structures, as nexuses of relations, have their own irreducible mechanisms
and emergent powers by virtue of the structure of the relations (Collier 1994). These include
tendencies, countertendencies, capacities, affordances, liabilities and vulnerabilities. For example,
we see see how exchange neccessitates a structure of markets which produces competitive
behaviour which can lead to vulnerabilities in the inequality of power and capacity for domination,
subsequently requiring the countertendencies of government regulations, (i.e., social rules—
antitrust legislation—structuring the market).
Individuals to the overarching economic, cultural and social structures may be understood this way,
with individual’s agency being a power of their emergent psychosocial relations and institutions,
norms and social processes emerging in the structural relations of an economy for example.
Emergent stratification resonates with the understanding of marketing systems, and we can
attribute causal efficacy to 1) the power of cognition and sense-making to shape relationships and
networks; 2) the power of strategic action to shape the institutional environement; 3) the power of
network relationship to determine opportunities for individuals and to shape the perceptions of trust
and commitment; 4) the power of overarching institutions to shape relationships and create new
markets, industries and social groupings, etc. (Simmonds and Gazley 2018).
This layered complexity makes room for Bhaskar’s second dimension - being as process and
change (2E). Here there is an emphasis on the diachronic process of change, in the formation and
dissipation of layered structures. The world is driven by a process of absenting absences, just as
Löbler (2016) describes the type of transformative negation, the exchange and change induced by
the need for change and the attractions available, that drives marketing systems. The world is
compelled by the tendencies, countertendencies, capacities, affordances liabilities and
vulnerabilities that a particular set of structures hold in relation to each other at any given time,
given form to the actual in place of the absence that is the possible.
Diachronic emergence, the process by which structures, and subsequently their properties and
powers come to be, is a centrally efficacious feature of being. This implies that structures are not
simply a static situated context but have a history of development, and are always ‘caught up’ in
this process. That is, the world is not a ready-made system, nor is it simply enacted, the world is
necessarily intertwined in both being (that it is structured, layered and differentiated) and
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becoming, drvien by the absenting of absence (that is tensed, existing through rhythmic flows). In
tandem with the first dimension, our focus moves away from the flux of events or the interactions
of stable objects, entities or subjects (such as technologies, firms, and consumers) and towards the
causal mechanisms, that describe the relationship between structures and powers and govern the
way of being’s becoming. Many combined forces work as if to open certain doors and close others.
The forces expand the power, momentum and hegemony of some pathways and relational forms,
while they restrict and deter others. Alternatives do not become impossible, but they become much
harder to imagine or achieve, changing the balance of powers in open systems. We can see how
marketing systems and the actors within them are influenced by a strung out process of
conditioning by the ‘past’ necessarily creating (non-determinative) path-dependencies. Emergent
properties of relations in the ‘past’, such as the formation of institutions, stretch into the ‘present’
of lower-levels upon activation in order to condition and influence actors.
Being in process, subsequently, designates the world ontologically as many overlapping,
converging or contradicting rhythmics (causal processes), allowing us to see beyond the here and
now and the privileging of surface experience, intentionality, contempocentrisism and the
ahistorical fallacy. The world is processual, not contained only in its actuality, but rather as a
manifestation of the manner in which the powers of structures are realised, part realised, or blocked
this defeats the notion of linearity, determinism and the focus on actualism.
Together, these two assertions lead to the third dimension of being – being as a whole (3L). Here
the world is seen in relations of dependency and interdependency - a complex of continuing
interaction between parts and parts, parts and a whole, and whole and parts (Norrie 2009). This
notion is referred to as holistic causality, describing the way within a totality the elements can co-
cause and co-create themselves, even while the totality itself conditions and creates the elements
that form it. Our systems are not merely the progression of development or the interaction of
vertical layers, rather they are dialectic diffractions of their history and each element exists as a
refraction of a wider system of which it is an integral part, creating different modes of unity-in-
difference, whereby structures produce complementarities, tensions and historically accumulated
splits. We must think of both how the world is caught in a structured flow of being and becoming
in which the totality of past (as caused and determinate), present (as a moment of becoming) and
future (system trajectories, social attractors, goals etc. as modes of possibility) relations is
implicated (Norrie 2009).
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For example, the financial crisis illustrates how an economic crisis is not just an economic problem
but rather its origins, outcomes and trajectories depend on coalescing social, political and
ideological structures requiring that to understand the phenomenon adequately we need to integrate
these social conflicts and antagonisms. The multi-levelled converging rhythmics can be highlighted
including; 1) the explosive growth of fictitious capital with little relation to the growth potential of
the ‘productive economy’; 2) stimulated by the internalization and de-regulation of increasingly
financialized markets and financial innovation; 3) continuous intervention encouraged by lobbying
efforts; 4) practices of de-regulated and fraudulent financial institutions, including rating agencies
helping distribute billions of dollars worth of poor quality, high-risk investments and incentive
structures in organisations encouraged short-term returns, and taking advantage of low-income
individuals and information asymmetry; 5) more broadly, the crisis of neo-liberalism as an
economic and state project and the market ideologies which created the context for these problems
and saw subsequent efforts to assert control denied; 6) economic and political decision-makers who
exploited the crisis to promote their own interests and enabled the bailout of investment banks at
the expense of increased public and sovereign debt (Bellamy Foster and Magdoff 2009; FCIC 2011;
Morgenson and Rosner 2011).
This totalizing outlook provides the need to assert the final dimension of the MELD framework,
which recognises being as incorporating transformative practice (4D). The basis of this dimension
is the irreducible notion of agency, reflexivity and the crucial role of discourse as interwoven in
the reproduction and transformation of the structures of social being. Subsequently, attention is
directed to both the dependence of structures on their actualisation and reproduction by actors in
their interactions (the exchange-change process that characterise marketing systems (Löbler 2016))
and their ability to modify these, maintaining the open and indeterminate nature of systems. We
are central to the potential of the social world and the future is neither deterministically projected
or a flow of senseless events in flux, what we do matters, but requires an adequate understanding
of where we are. Moreover, in line with the preceding dimensions, it emphasises that in both theory
and the lifeworld of praxis we are often unaware of the structures around us, how they inform or
condition us, and how our actions serve to reproduce them.
These four dimensions provide the ontological foundation for understanding what reality must be
like if we are to view it as a complex system and totality and allows us to address the subjective,
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intersubjective, interobjective and objective domains of being. From their assertions manifest
orientating principles and values:
(1M) – Requires opening our perspectives beyond reflecting and accommodating the surface
forms of contemporary society, necessitating a depth beyond immediate social situations and
the constructions of our theories in use
(2E) – Emphasis is placed on the processual nature, the constant conditioned and contingent
becoming of social being, focussing on the causal efficacy on the diachronic nature of structures
and the massive presence of the past
(3L) – Recognises the importance of reassembling the world from our abstractions and
approaching phenomena not in isolation but holistically as components of wholes and as
themselves complexes nexuses, re-embedding inner and outer complexity and seeing the
diffractions of the past and the refractions of the outside.
(4D) – Sets the performative nature of research and discourse and compels theory to ‘constitute
a moral intervention in the social life whose conditions of existence the theory seeks to clarify’
reaffirming that although the ground of knowledge is real, there is no such thing as value-free
social science (Bhaskar 2008; Giddens 1993).
Centrally, the MELD framework allows Bhaskar to put forward the four-planar model of social
being (Bhaskar 2008). Bhaskar argues that social being, qua totality, is constituted by four
dialectically interdependent planes: of material transactions with nature, interpersonal interaction,
social structures, and intra-subjectivity’. More specifically;
The plane of material transactions with nature– we are parts of, and agents of, nature. Not only
is nature necessary for our existence but we shape it – this is the domain of the objective
material world.
The plane of intersubjective relations- interactions between people – this is the domain of
shared meanings, communication and exchange.
The plane of social structure – this is the domain of the interobjective organisation macro-social
structures, industries and organisations. Actors find themselves as incumbents of roles and of
institutionalised practices
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The plane of the stratification of the embodied personality - individuals are ‘existentially
constituted by their rhythmics and the totality of their physiological and socio-experiential
relations. This is the domain of subjectivity and identity.
Bhaskar et al. (2010) argue that every social happening involves the interaction of these four
planes. Social life exists in this laminated whole as ‘a complex configuration of the physical
embodiment, social and relational situatedness, cultural constructions and subjective identities’
(Bhaskar et al. 2010). This framework provides the basis for a worldview that overlooks the
world as a whole - an interdependent and interconnected system in which humans, their social
structures, and their biophysical environment, form one integrated social-ecological system
giving motion to the trajectory of being through interactions within systems at all scales and
levels of existence. Moreover, this position begins to illustrate the errors and tendential
reductionisms which characterise our discourse and practice, for example in denying
emergence, de-stratifying reality, anthropomorphising and actualising reality, positivising and
deprocessualizing it, subjectivising and splitting it and reifying and fetishising structures. This
scheme provides the basis for understanding the structural relations and the subsequent
generative mechanisms that distort equality, justice, wellbeing and sustainability as the basis
of crisis, and acts as the basis for social action. Subsequently, the ontological-axiological chain
provides the platform to both critique and reconstruct discourse, practices and organising
structures, and build four types of knowledge:
1. knowledge of what is and what is not (i.e. knowledge of the power relations, absences,
structures and mechanisms of the world we live in);
2. knowledge of what could be (i.e. seeking possible alternatives, building on the
knowledge of what is and what is not);
3. knowledge of what should be (i.e. drawing on our human sentiment, moral imagination
and reasoning to consider what the world should be like, freed from repressive
relations); and
4. knowledge of what can be (i.e. synthesising the previous forms of knowledge and
drawing on people’s agency to know what to do and how to do it, in the light of their
unique contexts).
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Integrating the MELD framework and the four-planar model into a metatheory of
marketing systems, crisis and emancipation.
An ontology built on the intertwinement of the subjective, intersubjective, interobjective and
objective as existing in a stratified structured/systemic world, in the continual process of becoming
through the compatibilities, contradictions, and complementarities of the interchange of their
powers has been presented. I argue that this overarching metatheoretical position can serve as an
orientating lens for marketing systems research and provide a basis for understanding, responding
to and intervening in the problematic relations, processes and outcomes of the crises we face.
Firstly, the framework resonates with the overarching understanding of marketing as a social
science put forward by Löbler (2016) - ‘as the study of prerequisites, processes and consequences
of exchange-change processes induced by needs and attractions in the context of institutions,
norms, cultures, values and their impact on society and nature as a whole’. Secondly, it enables the
systemic orientation of marketing by providing scale consistency - allowing the integration of
micro, meso and macro phenomena and relations through a common framework while allowing
the idiosyncrasies at each scale to be articulated (Layton 2008). The framework could be applied
to understanding the individual decisions and trajectories of a single person as a structure right
through to the development of an overarching marketing system. Similarly, it allows for the
integration of other disciplines and the theoretical ideas and frameworks that are contained within
economics, anthropology, sociology etc, which help uncover structures and their subsequent
powers and mechanisms. The metatheoretical position advocated in this framework necessitates
multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding, recognizing that uncovering
mechanisms at different emergent levels as well as within the intra-action of the different planes
requires genuinely synthetic integration of different domains of knowledge. The basis for meeting
these criteria is contained within a common underlying ontological reference that the focus on
structures, powers, processual interactions and emergence provides.
This leads to the basis of the framework as a comprehensive account with which to approach,
diagnose and work towards sustainable marketing systems, integrating the self, society, markets
and natural systems. Our interest lies in how marketing systems are constituted diachronically and
synchronically as an ongoing process which produces outcomes based on the nature of the
coexistence of the relations that create structures across the different planes of social being. It is
the nature of the modes of coexistence which the subsequent actualisation of powers and
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possibilities which constitute the processes and outcomes of our systems. Relations in systems
coexist within modes: conflict – (force, resistance and divergence), hierarchy – (submission,
acquiescence, provision for)-, niche – (fulfilling a role, unity-in-diversity), and cooperation –
synergism, mutuality (Ackoff and Emery 1972; Nechansky 2007, 2016, 2017). Viewing structures
as existing in these modes relative to their constituting relations, co-existing structures and
emergent wholes give us a basis to understand the processes of systems as well as the potentials
and tendencies of the containing structures and totalities that produce the systems of crisis. An
understanding of crisis becomes an account of the diachronic emergence of structures of imbalance,
their conditioning on action and interaction and the subsequent concrete actualisation of the
possibilities and liabilities of these structures.
For example, we can address how the development of a hierarchical relationship between our
economic systems and the natural world produces a number of problems in different structures.
This coexistence produces conflict in the relationship between ecosystem services and our rate of
extraction, production, consumption. The hierarchical relationship has allowed our experience of
nature to be stripped of the continuities and connections, fundamentally changing our human
relation to nature, whereby we have come to think of ourselves as subjects opposed to the natural
world. This outlook facilitates wasteful practices and the activities that contaminate soil, air and
water and the unsustainable use of resources facilitating the intra- and the intersubjective basis for
allowing us to reach the point of crisis and continue to reproduce it (De Witt and Hedlund 2017;
Hedlund-de Witt 2013). This relation has invaded our mentalities and institutions, so much so that
we now undermine our basis in the natural world creating not only conflict but actual cooperation
to reproduce systems of exchange which exacerbate these problems.
The establishment of the individual and the egoistic consumer as the dominant life role provides
another example. As noted possessive individualism leads to conflict as individuals compete for
positional goods, whose value is built on the fact that other people are not able to own or consume
them (Bonaiuti 2012; Xue 2016). This helps create the conditions for inequality and the means
through which new class structures are constructed and pave the way for stigmatisation and social
exclusion (Bauman 2007). Moreover, as the previous discussion asserts it is more than contingently
linked to the exploitation of others and resources. The establishment of these hierarchical
arrangements between people become the basis for conflict, tension and malintegration and the
obligation for individuals to subjugate aspects of themselves in favour of assimilating social and
1285
cultural forms (Hietanen et al. 2018; Reith 2004). The establishment of a hierarchy of the ego,
status and the role of the consumer over other parts of the embodied personality can be diagnosed
as a cause for social and personal ills which are then exacerbated by their cooperation with
embedding social structures such as consumer culture.
This outlook can be used to address and understand all the problems introducing this paper, both
the overarching crisis and the symptoms and outcomes existing in our marketing systems.
Fundamentally, we aim to understand the typical modes of coexistence within the system, their
conditions of existence and relative constitution and embedding in a wider social formation. We
focus on the reproduction of the relevant relations and the manner in which they may be
contradictory, conflictual or antagonistic to our potential to enhance and sustain societal well-being
and individual quality of life, working towards an understanding of the trajectories and outcomes
of different social forms. This requires looking for causes (agential, structural, discursive and
technical) at different scales, and mechanisms over different time horizons, in different fields of
social practice and for powers actualised within individuals networks, institutional arrangements
and the ways in which these have come to be. Moreover, we then must consider how the practices
and possibilities our research advocates or constructs may serve to reproduce, accelerate or
antagonise structures.
Issues of practice, response and intervention
The developing framework put forward in this paper can provide a basis for theory practice
consistency in the face of complex problems and systems. For example, the ontological-axiological
chain found within the framework permits a critical approach to an underlying ‘there is no
alternatives’ ideological positioning that seeks to be purposively restrictive, and exclusionary, in
advocating the belief that technical and managerial approaches will simply solve the environmental
crisis. It may also facilitate, more broadly, a move away from impressionistic change and
attributing greater significance and generality than might be justified, in addressing the imminent
potentials arising from new social practices and technologies, discouraging superficial and non-
reflexive realism. Examples of this are found in the increasing medicalization of being (and the
reliance on overprescribing for every condition and problem), ‘innovative’ and networked
corporate structures (which lay behind growing income inequality, tax avoidance and increasingly
oppressive power-over relations). Similarly, as marketing researchers look into the ‘bottom of the
pyramid’, the marketization of poverty and alternative economies critical reflection must be taken
1286
on projecting elitism, judgementalism, unilinearity and the incorrigible principles of endism and
market fundamentalism. These errors exist as part of an abstract universality and promote sectional
interest such as those who see the world’s poorest communities as profitable growth markets and
suggest that ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ are not only superior to anything inconsistent with themselves
but present a model that others must follow.
The orientating metatheoretical lens allows us to escape the various centrisms which create
reductionist tendencies and tunnel visions, providing for re-embedding our outlooks in all four
planes of social being and the irreducible stratified totality of our systems. The pursuit of many
marketing systems in addressing ecological modernisation as a basis for decoupling strategies to
dematerialise economic growth provides an important example (Xue 2016). Many of these
solutions reveal various tendential centrisms and reductionisms, for example, the focus on biofuel
production. Biofuels, which are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions, can actually produce increases,
in the emissions of other greenhouse gases through their means of production, e.g. artificial
fertilisers and land use (Naess 2010; Searchinger et al. 2008). This negative process reveals a
fundamental contempocentrism and static deprocessuralisation of our material transactions with
nature. Similarly, it reveals the reductionism associated with analysis based on addressing the cost
and benefits at a micro-level, e.g. at the level of output per vehicle. Moreover, the required biomass
to produce a significant amount of biofuels creates pressure to convert natural forests and areas
currently used for food production into energy crops. This has the effect of further damaging the
environment, impacting food security and availability particularly for the world’s poor (Lacey
2015). Again this reveals reductionisms as well as the hierarchical relationship between the needs
of developed countries and developing countries and vulnerable people. Finally, this ties into a
reductive market logic and economic centrism, recognising that much of the change to production
in cropland are based on the market value of the product and are driven by the increasing control
and consolidation of corporate agribusiness often facilitated by government subsidies (Helland and
Lindgren 2016; Lacey 2015).
Conducting analysis and critique using the dimensions of the MELD framework and the four-
planar model as a corrective metatheory provides a basis for overcoming these issues and
developing alternatives based on constructing relations, structures and systems in modes of
coexistence which maximise the state of possibilities for sustainable outcomes.
1287
Conclusions and future directions
This paper has aimed to establish the need for integrative metatheoretical work and illustrate crisis
in relation to marketing systems while offering one particular interpretation built on the work of
Roy Bhaskar and systemic critical realism. As work in progress, the emphasis has been on
illustrating the MELD framework and the four planar model, articulating a maximally inclusive,
systemic ontology that integrates worldview and metatheory. The paper suggests the narrow and
reductionist inadequacies of some parts of our orientations and the ethos, activities and aspirations
these produce (Edwards 2016). Moreover, the broadening and deepening of the study of marketing
under macromarketing, marketing as a social science and the systems-orientation, provide the
grounds to address the relationship between self, society, markets and our natural environment and
engage in critical reflexive discourse regarding the sociological and philosophical grounding of our
research and theory development.
The central premise of working towards metatheoretical grounding is to provide normative,
organising and regulating constructs which allow for a comprehensive approach to research,
critique and developing alternatives. Together intertwined with marketing systems theory and
macromarketing research approaches this metatheoretical position can work on the problems of
imbalance, facilitate integrative modes of research, bringing together combinations or synthesis’
of different theoretical or methodological approaches and various domains of knowledge. The
orientating and regulating function then serves to create (self) reflexive and (self) critical functions
as part of a dual role of both analysing and directing real-world problems and societal practice.
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Applying the STIRPAT for
Macromarketing
Bill Kilbourne, Clemson University, USA
Anastasia Thyroff, Clemson University, USA
Introduction
Despite the increased awareness of the devastating consequences of consumption (e.g., oceanic
garbage patches, global warming, air pollution), it is difficult for marketing researchers to holistically
quantify the consumer network contributing to the environmental damage. This can largely be attributed to
the fact that macromarketing is very difficult to measure and to understand (Wooliscroft 2016). Specific to
sustainability, most research has been conducted at the micro or single actor level. Micro sustainability is
interesting, but incapable of demonstrating the dynamics between consumption actors. Therefore, we have
been unable to pinpoint or rank the consumption actors that need to be targeted to slow or prevent further
environmental destruction. Further, it is easy for each actor (e.g., researchers, producers, transporters,
marketers, consumers) to pass the blame and/or responsibility for environmental destruction.
To summarize the previous work done in marketing sustainability, McDonagh and Prothero
(2014) suggest that marketing continue to move away from sustainability with a small micro-marketing
“s,” to macro-level critical sustainability with a big “S.” However, for this to happen, marketers must
develop research techniques that can be used to test the exact environmental impact of consumption.
Therefore, in this research we propose a STIRPAT (stochastic estimation of impacts by regression on
population, affluence, and technology) model for macromarketing.
The STIRPAT was originally used in the natural sciences, including biology and physics to
understand the relationship between environmental impact and its driving forces to determine which
driving forces are most damaging to the environment (Harrison 1993). By expanding and applying the
STIRPAT model in the field of marketing, marketing researchers can examine sustainability at a tangible,
macro-level, as consumption undoubtedly has a global impact. Further, consumption actors can be ranked
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on their environmental impact which will provide stronger policy and managerial implications within
marketing research.
STIRPAT for Macromarketing
The original STIRPAT model is formulated as:
Ii = aPi b Ai
c Ti
d ri
where a is the constant term, b, c, and d are exponents of the driving forces, and r is the residual for each
observation. Affluence is measured by using GDP per capita. Technology is measured indirectly through
the residual (York, Rosa and Dietz 2003). The two most common dependent variables are carbon dioxide
emissions (CO2 emissions) and ecological footprint (EF). The STIRPAT model is difficult to solve.
Therefore, the equation is converted into its log-log form by taking the natural log of both sides.
Therefore, STIRPAT is ultimately measuring the ecological elasticity of the forces in the equation much
like price elasticity of demand is measured in economics.
Waggoner and Ausubel (2002) began the expansion of the STIRPAT identity to render it more
useful in sustainability research. Similarly, we expand the STIRPAT specifically for macromarketing. We
do this by keeping the dependent variable EF measured in global hectares. For the independent variables,
we started by keeping population (POP), but then expand affluence. Affluence in STIRPAT represents
GDP per capita, but in our updated macromarketing model, we include consumer spending, (CS/GDP),
and the consumption of material goods, (MG/CS). This approach removes GDP related to industrial goods
and separates material goods from services. To refine the model further, we take two specific aspects of
technology, namely energy intensity of consumption (EN/CS) and CO2 intensity of energy (CO2/EN) into
consideration. We deconstructed r by providing two measures of technological impact of consumption
yielding the testable log-log model:
EFi = a x (POP) b x (GDP/POP)
c x (CS/GDP)
d x (MG/CS)
e x (EN/MG)
f x (CO2/EN)g x ri
We also assign an actor to each driving force. Specifically, people represent POP, workers represent
GPD/POP, consumers represent CS/GDP, markets represent MG/CS, producers represent EN/MG, and
scientists represent CO2/EN.
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Findings & Conclusion
We analyzed and solved the STIRPAT for macromarketing equation with the needed variable data
found in the World Bank (2016) and Global Footprint Network (2016). Data used was from 2011 and
included 113 countries, making up 90% of the world’s population. The log-log regression results indicate
that the STIRPAT for macromarketing model explains 97.70% of the cross-national variance in EF
(results in Table 1). The results explain the effect that a 1% increase in each driver will have including the
other drivers constant. For instance, the coefficient of POP is 0.95 indicating that for every 1% increase in
population, the EF increases by 0.95%.
The STIRPAT for macromarketing is not only useful in identifying the relevant ecological
drivers, but in prioritizing them as well. It also helps identify different segments of society that maintain
some responsibility for each of the drivers in the change in global EF. This allows for policy or strategy to
be designed and directed at specific actors affecting changes in the EF. In the future, more complex
approaches (e.g., incorporating longitudinal estimates for parameters) to the STIRPAT should be
undertaken. Future research should also explore STIRPAT’s use in other areas of macromarketing.
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References
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Table 1: STIRPAT for Macromarketing Log-Log Regression Results
Ecological Drivers Log-Log
Coefficients P-values
CONSTANT -0.20 0.611
People: POP 0.95 0.001
Workers: GDP/POP 0.58 0.001
Consumers: CS/GDP 0.70 0.001
Markets: MG/CS 0.43 0.001
Producers: EN/MG 0.36 0.001
Scientists: CO2/EN 0.00 0.961
R2 .98
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Social Tagging Networks: A new
Method for #Hashtag Clustering
and Networking on Instagram
Lena Cavusoglu, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey
Melike Demirbag-Kaplan, Yasar University, Turkey
As a famous feature of Web 2.0 technology, social tagging is an increasing phenomenon to
categorize and describe a particular content on a social network through user-generated keywords
in the form of hashtags (Lin and Chen 2012; Pan et al., 2016). Hashtag, which is a metadata tag,
is visually represented by the pound sign (#), usually appear in the form of a word or a short
phrase (i.e., #Hashtag or #ThisIsAHashtag), and its use is most common on Instagram and
Twitter. Hashtags are a unique source of data for marketing research not only for being practical
to reach to a large group of like-minded people but also because they provide invaluable insights
about social interpretation, mental representation and knowledge structure of a specific content
(Fu et al. 2010; Nam and Kannan 2014).
Previous research on social tagging has dominantly been published in information sciences and
focused on several key areas such as the emergence of collaborative social tagging (Macgregor
and McCulloch 2006), bibliometric analysis of social tagging as a research field in academia
(e.g., Trant 2009; Xu et al. 2013), suggestions for improving the efficiency of social tagging
(Rawashdeh et al. 2013), and the relativity of privacy preservation in social tagging (Lee et al.
2014). Within this vein, there has been a recent interest in hashtag clustering, with the aim of
classifying text and exploring possible links and relationships between hashtag clusters (Javed
2016). In principle, it is evident that marketing will benefit the most from such a tool, as it will
allow consumer researchers to, for instance, analyze the links between brands, experiences,
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feelings, and any other type of associative data that is related to consumption. However, this
literature is still in its infancy, mainly due to the short history of hashtags, and of those available,
the majority deals with the computational methodology of hashtag clustering and networking, by
using data that is extracted from only Twitter. As a result, some valuable user-generated social
tagging data remains unworkable to typical consumer researchers unless they have prior
background or expertise in computer science. This fact is also reflected in the limited number of
studies in the marketing field that relates to social tag networking (e.g., Nam and Kannan 2014;
Cavusoglu and Demirbag-Kaplan 2017).
Schlesselman-Tarango (2013) argues that the user-generated tag is a valuable data source that
provides contextual information about the perception and experience of the specific content and
allows viewers to understand better the aboutness of the image posted. Various forms of online
content such as web links (links to a video, photo, blog post, or news article), photos, videos, and
tweets can be tagged via hashtags. Hashtags are associated directly and explicitly with brands,
products, thoughts, perceptions, and feelings regarding various concepts (Nam and Kannan
2014). Nam, Joshi, and Kannan (2017) proposed an approach to harvest and analyze social
tagging data for marketing research, and mentioned that tags are especially useful to understand
perceptions about non-textual content such as pictures, music, and video and suggested future
studies on that research area. For this purpose, this article proposes a novel and uncomplicated
methodology to collect and analyze a broad set of rich associative textual data in the form of the
user-generated tags on Instagram.
The contribution of this study not only lies in the fact that it makes user-generated data more
accessible and workable to consumer researchers but also in its pioneering status to work with
Instagram hashtags, as previous research only offered some guidelines for data drawn from
Twitter. The choice of Instagram is a deliberate one: It is the fastest growing major social
network since 2014 (Balakrishnan and Boorstin 2017), and it supremely combines visual and
textual imagery, which makes it an unrivaled data source to demonstrate the proposed
methodology. Instagram’s image-driven data provides a holistic perspective to understand the
phenomenon at hand and offers social, economic, and racial diversity as compared other social
networking platforms (Duggan 2015). Also, Instagram encourages users to be as specific as
possible when describing an image by explaining its content with hashtags (Schlesselman-
Tarango 2013).
1301
Our methodological framework begins by identifying the most suitable hashtag(s) to study the
topic of interest. While familiarity with Instagram is preferable at this point, we propose some
rules of thumb that will help inexperienced researchers. Next step involves systemized extraction
images and their respective hashtag sets using Supermetrics Pro add-on for Google Sheets,
followed by an arrangement of data for analysis on a spreadsheet, such as identifying inclusion
and exclusion criteria and noise removal. We then introduce NodeXL Network Graphing Tool, a
free and open add-in for Microsoft® Excel, which offers practical and easy-to-use solutions to
identify key associations about a phenomenon, clustering, and classification patterns, as well as
mapping relationships between them. In this context, NodeXL can be utilized as a functional and
efficient tool to perform textual cluster and network analysis, allowing for better visualization of
text structures and fields of meaning in addition to metrics of their formation, particularly when a
massive corpus of text as obtained from social media needs to be investigated. To better
demonstrate the systematic workflow of our methodological approach, we offer an illustrative
example that relates to particular domains of macromarketing, #pregnancy. We also provide a
step-by-step description of how to create such hashtag clusters and networks, to evaluate and
interpret graphical outputs, and to assess network metrics. A discussion of triangulation
measures, which involve visual matching and investigator triangulation, is also provided at the
closing, along with opportunities and limitations that will pave the way for future research.
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Reference
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dissertation, The University of Vermont and State Agricultural College.
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preservation based on social tagging. Information Sciences, 288(0), 87–107.
Lin, C.S., and Chen, Y.F. (2012), “Examining social tagging behaviour and the construction of an
online folksonomy from the perspectives of cultural capital and social capital,” Journal of
Information Science, 38(6), 540– 557.
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Pan, X., He, S., Zhu, X., & Fu, Q. (2016). How users employ various popular tags to annotate
resources in social tagging: An empirical study. Journal of the Association for
Information Science and Technology, 67(5), 1121–1137
Rawashdeh, M., Kim, H.N., Alja’Am, J.M., & El Saddik, A. (2013). Folksonomy link prediction
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Systems, 40 (2SI), 307–325.
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Footnotes in reference of: “How to Address Culture in Marketing Studies: An Analysis Using
the Example of the Marketing-Systems Approach” by Michaela Haase , Freie Universität Berlin,
Germany
i This is the result of a “complex understanding of culture” (DiMaggio 1997, p. 264). ii http://www.americananthro.org/AdvanceYourCareer/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2150 (accessed on 1/24/2017). iii I refer to scientific knowledge in this analysis. iv Geertz (1973) characterizes anthropological writings as fictions or something that “has been made.” v Note that sociology of culture, cultural sociology, and cultural studies are not the same.
