John T. Lang

Sound and the City: Noise in Restaurant Critics' Reviews

Abstract Are expert aesthetic judgments of restaurants shaped by sound and music? Although sound is an important design element in built spaces devoted to consumerism, such as restaurants, it is a typically overlooked aesthetic structure. This project analyzes how widely read and influential food writing help the general public define the acceptable repertoire of music and sound in restaurants. I draw on a sample of restaurant reviews that appear in the LexisNexis archives of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times from January 1, 1998, until December 31, 2010. Specifically, I examine 1,208 reviews written by thirteen reviewers in the San Francisco Chronicle and 598 reviews written by four reviewers in the New York Times. I connect critics evaluations of sound in fine-dining establishments to the emplacement of those practices within New York City and San Francisco. By doing so, this project explores how place-based background aesthetics mediate expert opinion and facilitate consumption in the city.

It must be great being a female pedophile!: The nature of public perceptions about female teacher sex offenders

Although female sex offenders have received increased scholarly attention in recent years, and have also gained widespread media attention, minimal research has focused specifically on public perceptions of their behavior. This study explores the nature of public perceptions of a group of offenders on which the media often focus—female teachers who assault adolescent male students—by examining reader comments posted on five Huffington Post articles published from November 2010 to November 2013. Using a thematic coding methodology to analyze over 900 online comments, we found that most comments recognize a current double standard in the sentencing process for female teacher sex offenders compared to their male counterparts. Comments also rely on traditional sexual scripts and/or gender role expectations to either acknowledge or deny a victim’s presence. Contrary to existing research that examined public perceptions and found that more punitive attitudes were expressed toward male sex offenders, these results suggest that the public believes in equality in sentencing for all sex offenders, regardless of gender. These results also confirm prior studies that find that the public perceives adolescent male victims of rape by older women “lucky.”

Pluralistic Ignorance in Virtually Assembled Peers The Case of World of Warcraft

This article presents a study of pluralistic ignorance situated within the virtual community of guilds in World of Warcraft (WoW). Pluralistic ignorance is a mistaken perception of social norms that overwhelms personal attitudes and leads to behavior contrary to an actor’s attitude, and it has never been studied in the context of a virtual world. We analyze the presence of pluralistic ignorance in WoW guilds with the use of a sample of 195 players who responded to an Internet-based survey and 15 focus group participants. Findings show that pluralistic ignorance has a demonstrably lower presence in that community of WoW players than in a physical world equivalent, suggesting a higher tendency in that community toward consistency between private attitudes and public behavior. Factors uncovered that explain this difference include anonymity, safety of the Internet as social medium, and a hypersalience of identity in the WoW player community.

Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in ArgentinaSoybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina, by LapegnaPablo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 227 pp.

view data presented that the authors obtained a surprising degree of honesty from relatively unguarded public-sector workers. But illustrating that even the most public of public-sector workplaces encounters a high degree of gatekeeping, some levels of access—and some interview topics—proved elusive or controversial. A union-organizing campaign within the Central Park Conservancy and suspicion about the authors’ intentions eventually led to the Parks Department instructing its employees to refrain from speaking with Krinsky and Simonet. But even with such obstacles, the authors marshal an impressive amount of qualitative data, enabling them to speak with great authority about the political, social, and organizational structure of parks-as-workplaces. The work is also strong theoretically. The chapters are organized around theoretically informed topics including labor markets, urban governance, and political economy. The authors’ focus is not so much on building new theory per se, but rather dialing macrolevel processes like neoliberalization and economic segmentation down to the micro level. The result is a book that is both highly intellectual and eminently readable. Researchers who work in these fields will find many moments of insight in the rich ethnographic data that Krinsky and Simonet so nicely analyze within their broader theoretical framing. In sum, Krinsky and Simonet’s Who Cleans the Park? is an important sociological work that should be read by scholars interested in urban governance, the changing dynamics of work, parks and public space, and New York City politics. Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina, by Pablo Lapegna. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 227 pp.

27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780190215149.

27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780190215149.

The question of 'alternatives' within food and drink markets and marketing: introduction to the special issue

Food and drinkmarkets are situated at the intersection of the global and local, the economic and cultural and the political and personal. The rise of alternative food and drink markets has emerged in response to the deficiencies of current market practices. This growth can be attributed not just to a desire for better quality food, but for different market relations, which can provide a more authentic and meaningful experience to consumers than straightforward economic exchange. Therefore, alternative food and drink markets provide fertile ground for exploring important questions for marketing theory and practice, in particular issues relating to sustainable and ethical marketing. The Journal of Marketing Management has previously focussed attention on these issues, as one of the first marketing journals to dedicate a special issue to greenmarketing (McEachern & Carrigan, 2012; Special Issue 14(6), 1998). The journal has also provided a forum for exploring the ethical dynamics of consumer behaviour (Gregory-Smith, Smith, & Winklhofer, 2013; Hoek, Roling, & Holdsworth, 2013), the challenge of marketing sustainability (Rettie, Burchell, & Riley, 2012; Thøgersen & Zhou, 2012) and understanding consumers’ perceptions of local and organic food (Gad Mohsen & Dacko, 2013; McEachern, Warnaby, Carrigan, & Szmigin, 2010). Nevertheless, exploration of alternative food and drink markets has predominantly flourished outside of the marketing field (see Goodman, Maye, & Holloway, 2010; Hinrichs, 2003; Holloway et al., 2007; Ricketts Hein, Ilbery, & Kneafsey, 2006; Schnell, 2013). The consumption of food via conventional markets and the contemporary food system plays a significant role in shaping a wide range of social and environmental problems, pointing to alternative markets as a key practical space for effecting change. The organic movement, for instance, arose in response to human and environmental health concerns associated with industrial agriculture (Conford, 2001). The growth in the production and sale of organic produce is seemingly reflective of its success as an alternativemarket, likewise the now almost ubiquitous presence of fair trade coffee (see Johnston, this issue). Despite their potential to reshape market and production practices (Raynolds, 2000), both of these ‘alternatives’ have been subject to critique. Thematerial practices and conceptual vagueness of so-called ‘alternative markets’ have been questioned by food scholars, and consumers remain sceptical of the meaning and value of alternative labels (Eden, Bear, & Walker, 2008). The availability of a wide range of organic produce in most major supermarkets would seem to undermine claims to alterity, and the work of Julie Guthman has laid bare the realities of organic production and consumption in the US (Guthman, 2000, 2003, 2004). Pratt’s characterisation (2007, p. 287) of organic fruit and vegetables – ‘produced on large estates, using intensive methods and migrant wage-labour,... trucked across the continent and mostly sold in supermarkets’ – is hardly descriptive of what might be considered an alternative market. While the organic movement may have started out with more progressive ‘alternative’ aims, these have been watered down through its absorption into the JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT, 2017 VOL. 33, NOS. 7–8, 495–501 https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2017.1328906