Melea Press

Constraints on Sustainable Energy Consumption: Market System and Public Policy Challenges and Opportunities

The purpose of this essay is to identify factors that constrain customers’ ability to engage in sustainable energy consumption, conceived of as a consumption practice that reduces the moral hazards associated with fossil fuel overconsumption. The authors outline some marketing policy and consumer research issues related to the market system and identify four constraints to sustainable energy consumption: policies and regulation, product accessibility and availability, pricing, and customer knowledge. This topic is important because of changes in the macro context of energy consumption—namely, the growing recognition of a fundamentally resource-constrained environment and the increased salience of various global commons effects to customers. The authors conclude with directions for further research.

How Does Organizational Identification Form? A Consumer Behavior Perspective

This article takes a consumer behavior perspective to investigate how constituents come to identify with organizations. Using longitudinal and cross-sectional interview data collected in two contexts (one consumer and one employee), the data illustrate that constituents engage with two conduits, one formal and one informal. These conduits provide opportunities for sensegiving, which features normative elements particular to an organization, and sensemaking, an integrative process in which productive consumption plays a key role. Three paths (epiphany, emulation, and exploration) leading from these conduits to identification are defined and explored. Second, this article reveals dynamic consequences of identification for both customer and employee constituents, including changes in their consumer values and behaviors extending beyond organizational concerns. Finally, this article defends the merit of softening hard conceptual distinctions drawn between consumers and employees, as the findings show that identification forms in parallel fashion with similar outcomes across a consumer-to-firm and an employee-to-firm context.

Legitimating community supported agriculture through American pastoralist ideology

We use a socio-historical lens to look at how Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs) have gained legitimacy as a market form. In this article, we question the countercultural conception of CSAs, especially given their rapid growth over the past 25 years. We contend that placing CSA within a larger frame of reference that incorporates American pastoral values and connects CSA to the history of American pastoralism helps account for how CSA has gained legitimacy with mainstream users. We show that American pastoralism provides a link between 19th century agrarian ideals, 1950s suburbia, 1970s counter-cultural communards, and today’s CSAs. In showing the ubiquity and chameleon like character of American pastoralist ideology, we suggest that it is an important example of a cultural imaginary, which is inducing change in food markets in the United States and at the same time masking certain cultural contradictions. We propose that the development of the Internet as a channel of communication has aided in building legitimacy for this market form by promoting both more personal commercial communications and the possibility of de-massification of communications. Thus, CSAs’ web presence reinforces egalitarian principles and the perception of shared community that are central ingredients of pastoralist ideology.

Ideological Challenges to Changing Strategic Orientation in Commodity Agriculture

Why do some firms not change their strategic orientation despite economic incentives to do so? Most current literature on changing strategic orientations has focused on an antecedents and outcomes approach to business orientations. Intimated, but rarely addressed, are the notions that (1) strategic orientations may be thought of as ideologies and (2) such ideologies are likely to contend with each other. Taking such a perspective may be helpful in discussing why it is challenging to transition to more sustainable strategic orientations even in the presence of financial incentives to do so. In assessing the transition to organic production and marketing in a commodity agriculture context, the authors find that contending ideologies restrict its adoption. In addition, they suggest that strategic orientations are not adopted or contested solely within firms but also among them. The authors find that ideological contestation among firms in this context takes the form of a marketplace drama between a chemical, productionist orientation and an organic orientation in which protagonists mobilize several forms of legitimacy.

Narrative Transparency: Adopting a Rhetorical Stance

Abstract In this paper, we look at how alternative marketing organisations communicate transparency in a climate of generalised risk and scepticism. We contrast the traditional numeric approach to transparency, which involves auditing and third-party certifications; with an alternative approach that we call narrative transparency. Central to narrative transparency is an emphasis on stake-holder dialogue and an invitation to stake-holders to play the role of auditor. This article illustrates how alternative marketing organisations engage in rhetorical tactics central to a narrative approach, to communicate transparency to their stakeholders. These rhetorical tactics include persona, allegory, consumer sovereignty and enlightenment. Community supported agriculture programmes from across the United States are the context for this study. Findings enrich discussions about best practices for transparency and communications. The central contribution is identification of a narrative approach to transparency, the rhetorical techniques such an approach employs, and an explanation of why an alternative approach to transparency reporting emerges.

Tillage practices and identity formation in High Plains farming

In this article, the authors examine the ideological tensions of organic and chemical farmers in the High Plains. They show that the identity of these farmers is created and maintained through competing systems of tillage and the ideologies that support them, which also shape the agricultural landscape. Specifically, they compare conservation tillage wedded to ‘modern’ ideologies of scientific farming with conventional tillage newly linked to beliefs about both organic and traditional farming, and examine how farmers use these different forms of tillage to create their identities. Roadside farming, recognition and denunciation of other farmers’ practices, and recognition and justification of their own contribute to identity formation. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of how identity is formed through day-to-day activities in the material world. The plow creates divisions in the High Plains community between organic farmers who continue to rely on this implement in their material engagement with the land and the chemical farmers who distance their practices from the plow as they distinguish themselves as stewards of the soil.