Wendy Hein

Mobile phones as an extension of the participant observer's self: reflections on the emergent role of an emergent technology

Purpose – This paper examines the value of mobile phones in ethnographic research, and seeks to demonstrate how this particular technology can support and enhance participant observation.Design/methodology/approach – Reflecting in detail on one researchers experience of incorporating this technological device into an ethnographic study, the paper considers how new observational tools can contribute to research beyond data generation.Findings – The study suggests that the mobile phone can be an extension of the ethnographer and act as a powerful prosthetic, allowing the researcher to translate ethnographic principles into practice.Research limitations/implications – This paper reflects on the uses of a mobile phone in an ethnographic study of young mens consumer experiences. Thus, the discussion focuses on a research site where the mobile phone holds a ubiquitous position. However, there are now more than four billion mobile phones in circulation worldwide, so whilst acknowledging important differences i...

Practising gender: The role of banter in young men’s improvisations of masculine consumer identities

Abstract Although consumer researchers have explored the social, cultural and consumption-related tensions involved in being and becoming masculine, prior research has tended to focus on individual men’s experiences. This paper reviews literature in this area together with theories of gender as performed, performative and social practice. Our ethnographic study of male friendship groups in central Scotland explores the gender processes involved in improvising their masculine consumer identities within and across various social settings and interactions. In particular, through consumption-related banter, they played for and played with their ideas of masculinity, thereby engaging in the practising of gender. The boundaries between ‘safe’ and ‘danger’ zones of consumption varied across social groups and contexts, highlighting the complexity and contingency of contemporary masculinities.

Reframing gender and feminist knowledge construction in marketing and consumer research: missing feminisms and the case of men and masculinities

Abstract Gender has been theorised and studied in many ways and across different disciplines. Although a number of these theorisations have been recognised and adopted in marketing and consumer research, the significance of feminism in knowledge construction has largely remained what we would call ‘unfinished’. Based on a critical reframing of gender research in marketing and consumer research, in dialogue with feminist theory, this article offers theoretical and practical suggestions for how to reinvigorate these research efforts. The analysis highlights dominant theorisations of gender, relating to gender as variable, difference and role; as fundamental difference and structuring; and as cultural and identity constructions. This reframing emphasises various neglected or ‘missing feminisms’, including queer theory; critical race, intersectional and transnational feminisms; material-discursive feminism; and critical studies on men and masculinities. A more detailed discussion of the latter, as a relatively new, growing and politically contentious area, is further developed to highlight more specifically which feminist and gender theories are mainly in use in marketing and consumer research and which are little or not used. In the light of this, it is argued that marketing and related disciplines have thus far largely neglected several key contemporary gender and feminist theorisations, particularly those that centre on gender power relations. The potential impact of these theoretical frames on transdisciplinary studies in marketing and consumer research and research agenda(s) is discussed.

Gender Justice and the Market: A Transformative Consumer Research Perspective

Despite growing awareness of the importance of gender equality in the advancement of global economies, the involvement of marketing and policy in (re)producing and resolving gender injustices remains understudied. This article proposes a transformative consumer research approach to studying gender-related issues. It develops the “transformative gender justice framework” (TGJF), which identifies perspectives from three enfranchisement theories: social and distributive justice, capabilities approach, and recognition theory. By applying a multiparadigmatic analysis, the authors encourage a dialogic and recursive approach so that scholars and policy makers can assess the interactions between structural, agentic, and sociocultural forces that underlie gender injustices. They argue the TGJF is necessary for full comprehension of the complex, systemic, glocalized, institutionalized, and embodied nature of gender injustices, as well as how policy, markets and marketing can both perpetuate and resolve gender injustices. To demonstrate the TGJFs analytical power, the authors apply the framework to one site of gender injustice (i.e., the sex tourism industry), propose applications across additional sites, and discuss questions it raises for future research.

Power logics of consumers’ gendered (in)justices: reading reproductive health interventions through the Transformative Gender Justice Framework

ABSTRACT Global gender asymmetries in marketing and consumer behavior were recently exemplified by the Transformative Gender Justice Framework (TGJF). The TGJF, however, lacks an explicit reference to power – an aspect that becomes apparent when it is used to assess a consumer phenomenology. In this article we augment the TGJF by building out the power logics and by empirically testing it through an assessment of the reproductive market in Uganda. We capture macro-, meso-, and micro-level power asymmetries, and explore how bio-power and control over resources melds with local gender relations and agentic practices that (i) leave social marketing efforts misaligned with embodied realities, and (ii) result in dichotomies and tensions in the reproductive health market as the North–South strive to define the modern-traditional, medical-pleasurable, and women-men nature of contraceptives.