Normative Violence in Domestic Service: A Study of Exploitation,Status, and Grievability

Journal of Business Ethics - This paper contributes to business ethics by focusing on consumption that is characterized by normative violence. By drawing on the work of Judith Butler this study of...     

Competitive and Cooperative Behavior in Embedded Markets: Developing an Institutional Perspective on Bazaars

In an ethnographic study of a retail setting, we examine relationships among competitors. We find that competitors often emphasize various forms of cooperation, and we describe socio-economic behaviors that illustrate how cooperation transcends or mediates competition among retailers. Retailers selectively cooperate and compete for customers in ways that alter our understandings of concepts such as loyalty and market stability, and practices such as marketing communications and pricing. We highlight the significance of these institutional practices and the role they play in forming and maintaining community in a bazaar.     

Curry

Marketplace icons are often markers of transnational transactions engendered by commercialization and dominance of the West. Curry as a marketplace icon helps to identify these constituents of iconicity. This article briefly examines the historical roots of curry or spicy Indian food and its implication in the project of colonialism. Curry as a signifier of Indian food was invented in British colonial narratives and shaped by commercial interests and racial prejudices. Because of the way forces of colonization and commercialization create international circulation of goods and ideas through globalization, curry as a marketplace icon signifies hegemony and global hierarchies that shape ideas of consumption and markets.     

The precarity of respectable consumption: normalising sexual violence against women

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon feminist scholarship, this study offers insights into how respectable consumption exacerbates precarity and contributes to normalisation of sexual violence in Delhi, India. It helps to uncover androcentricity of respect that has been under-examined in marketing theory. This research identifies androcentric discourse of izzat or respect as a key discursive apparatus that enframes sexual violence against women. In this discourse, women are carriers of family traditions and respect or honour. Moreover, norms of consumption get situated within discourse of izzat and alterity is created from women who do not follow these norms. Such women, labelled as unrespectable, live under conditions of heightened precarity and are blamed for the sexual violence they face. Therefore, this work offers insights into normalisation of sexual violence that have not been understood in marketing theory.     

Underdeveloped Other in country-of-origin theory and practices

Consumers and marketers employ extant sociocultural discourses to give meaning to the products they consume or sell. In this paper, we present data and analyses that illustrate the manner by which American consumers and marketers draw upon one such sociocultural discourse, development, in the context of “craft” objects. Beyond the focus on discourse, however, our intent is to apply a post-development perspective to the Otherness inherent in country-of-origin (COO) theory and practices. We critique the COO framework and see it as a ramification of, and further creator of, economic difference and hierarchy.     

Consuming postcolonial shopping malls

Abstract

Through a naturalistic inquiry, we interpret shopping malls in India as post-colonial sites in which young consumers deploy the West in an attempt to transform their Third World identities. Shopping malls in former colonies represent a post-colonial hybridity that offers consumers the illusion of being Western, modern, and developed. Moreover, consumption of post-colonial retail arenas is characterised as a masquerade through which young consumers attempt to disguise or temporarily transcend their Third World realities. This interpretation helps us to offer insights into transitioning retail servicescapes of the Third World, which in turn helps to improve extant understanding of consumer identity and global consumer culture.