Jay M. Handelman

Adversaries of Consumption: Consumer Movements, Activism, and Ideology

This article focuses on consumer movements that seek ideological and cultural change. Building from a basis in New Social Movement (NSM) theory, we study these movements among anti‐advertising, anti‐Nike, and anti‐GE food activists. We find activists’ collective identity linked to an evangelical identity related to U.S. activism’s religious roots. Our findings elucidate the value of spiritual and religious identities to gaining commitment, warn of the perils of preaching to the unconverted, and highlight movements that seek to transform the ideology and culture of consumerism. Conceiving mainstream consumers as ideological opponents inverts conventional NSM theories that view them as activists’ clients.

Organizational legitimacy and retail store patronage

Abstract The objective of this study is to consider how symbolic acts, such as those emphasized by Wal-Mart, affect retail store choice. Acts with much symbolic meaning include support of community charities, frontdoor greeters, and patriotic displays. In logit analyses of survey data from low-priced department store shoppers in the Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Kingston, Canada markets, it was found that being identified as having a strong community reputation not only directly affected store choice, but also moderated the effect of the other determinant price, value, and location attributes.

Corporate identity and the societal constituent

Increasingly, the management of corporations’ identities is being conducted in the context of empowered, socially engaged, culturally adept social actors who present organizations with a range of conflicting societal and economic expectations. These social actors, referred to as societal constituents, claim moral legitimacy to influence the decisions and actions of corporations they feel have affected their personal and community space. Firms’ environments come to be regarded as complex webs of social groups whereby the cultural meanings embedded in their corporate brands come to be morphed across the range of social groups. As such, the management of corporate brands becomes a task of symbolic facilitation and managing contradictions.

Don’t read this; or, who cares what the hell anti‐consumption is, anyways?

Taylor and Francis GCMC_A_479213.sgm 10.1080/10253861003786918 Consumption, Markets and Culture 25-3866 (pri t)/147 -223X (online) Original rticle 2 10 & Francis 3 30 0 00September 2 10 Michae Lee msw.l e@au kland.ac.nz It’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller’s list. – Abbie Hoffman, referring to the ironic success of his countercultural monograph, Steal This Book (Haber 1971)

Magical Thinking and Consumer Coping

Magical thinking is often regarded as a cognitive distortion, whereby consumers irrationally invoke mystical, supernatural forces to cope with stressful situations. Adopting a culture-based theoretical lens, this article examines magical thinking as an integral element of contemporary consumer society, a cultural practice of meaning negotiation that works to restore the experience of interconnectedness when this experience has been broken. The analysis of interview and blog narratives of consumers attempting to lose weight reveals how they adopt practices imbued with magical thinking in the form of creative persuasion, retribution, and efficient causality. Magical thinking allows participants to construct a space of uncertainty and ambiguity that transforms impossibilities into possibilities, thus sustaining their hope in the pursuit of goals. In so doing, consumers demonstrate a chimerical agency where they creatively blur fantasy and reality to cope with cultural expectations of control.

The evolution of consumer well‐being

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the historical origins of consumer well‐being as well as the factors that shaped its evolution.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a review of original publications that highlight classic views of consumer well‐being, including schools of thought on functionalism, management, buyer‐behavior, macromarketing, and consumer activism.Findings – There has been a tendency to understand consumer well‐being as a function of economic‐based choice, where a “more‐is‐better” ideology has motivated much of the extant literature on the topic.Originality/value – Integrating literature from the twentieth century demonstrates that perspectives on consumer well‐being have been influenced by forces beyond the classic economic model. The paper speculates that incorporating more community‐oriented and contextually‐bound criteria into the understanding of consumer well‐being may yield new research insights.

How Philip Kotler has helped to shape the field of marketing

Purpose – Philip Kotler is one of the pioneers who has contributed to the broadening of academic inquiry in the field of marketing. He has had a significant role in shaping how marketing is taught to and practised by students and managers of marketing. By examining the personal and macroenvironmental influences that have come to shape his work, this paper seeks to explore how Philip Kotler has achieved such influence in the field of marketing.Design/methodology/approach – The research was driven by a desire to understand the context in which Kotler developed his work, including the personal influences on his life as well as the macroenvironmental forces within which his work has emerged. To this end, the reseaerch employed qualitative techniques to analyze a number of data sources including depth interviews with Philip Kotler and nine of his colleagues, participant observation at Kotlers 75th birthday celebration hosted by the Kellogg School, a review of marketing textbooks, and a review of relevant lite...

Stakeholder Marketing and the Organizational Field: The Role of Institutional Capital and Ideological Framing

This article adopts an institutional-based perspective to stakeholder marketing. This perspective directs attention to an organizational field level of analysis in which an organizations environment is punctuated by trigger events that prompt the assemblage of a particular mix of stakeholders. A thematic, interpretive, and longitudinal analysis of more than 2000 articles from 45 years of grocery retail trade journals reveals that the ensuing stakeholder dynamics that constitute an organizational field serve to afford or deny the marketer vital cultural, social, and economic capital. In turn, the capital possessed by or denied to the marketer influences the ideological frame the marketer may use in coming to terms with how to interact with stakeholders. Importantly, the authors find that strategic and institutional factors interpenetrate, presenting important implications for how stakeholder marketing should be understood.

How Marketers can ‘Do Well While Doing Good’: The Institutional Theory Framework

An emerging area of interest in the marketing literature is the study of marketing actions with a social dimension. Underlying this literature is a fundamental reconceptualization of the organization as not only an economic agent, but also an agent of environmental and social change. There are two objectives of this presentation. First, institutional theory is presented in a marketing context to provide a theoretical framework that explains why marketers should integrate pro-social activity with traditional economic-oriented strategies. A theory of the firm provides the conceptual underpinnings that help to guide the development of marketing by providing the theoretical and research traditions within a particular domain of research. Institutional theory is presented as a theory of the firm that provides the potential underpinnings of this emerging domain of marketing thought. The second objective is to present the range of pro-social marketing strategies — or “institutional orientation strategies” — from the institutional theory perspective.