Applying the lens of intersectionality to UK equal opportunities and diversity policies

Incorporating the social differentiations of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief, and age into UK equal opportunities and diversity legislation involved creating a new single equality body for Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales). This paper assesses the efficacy of an Equality and Diversity Mainstreaming approach established in Northern Ireland (NI) for this new agency. It also stresses the potential value of “intersectionality” to further policy planning and development. It is argued that the combination of the NI model underpinned by the concept of intersectionality could offer a way forward for the new agency where, importantly, the issue of gender remains one of the most important axes of domination. Copyright © 2010 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Glenn Adamson. Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. xi + 219 pp. ISBN 0-262-01207-3, $45.00 (cloth); 0-944110-81, $25.00 (paper).

Brooks Stevens participated in the transformation of the modernsetting of everyday life into a designed environment. Althoughhardly a household name, he influenced the conceptual infrastructureof mid-twentieth-century consumer culture as he worked withproduct manufacturers and communicated his understanding ofAmerican business and consumer product design. In this way,as well as in his design of many consumer products and vehicles,Stevens shaped our world and the way we have moved through it. Industrial     

Gendered reading of the body in the bed

Abstract

This study contributes to studies on domestic material culture and gender. In studying object–person relations, prior scholars have given priority to materialising the ‘object’, paying less attention to the material aspects of the ‘person’. To redress this gap, we draw on recent feminist materialist and affective turns and conceptualise the object–person relation as inherently gendered, embodied and affective. We develop this conceptualisation by analysing the way in which the gendered body interacts with the bed – a domestic material object that is fruitful for a gender analysis. As a result, we offer an extended view of the gendered body that interacts with the material world: one that is biological and cultural, sleeping and waking, and has the capacity to affect and be affected. Our study thereby contributes to gender studies in marketing and consumer research by taking a step forward in materialising both the object and the body.     

Hero shots: involved fathers conquering new discursive territory in consumer culture

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore how visual expressions of culture offer new discursive territory within which consumer cultural ideals can be negotiated on a global scale. Through a critical visual analysis of the revelatory case Swedish Dads, we find hero shots depicting involved fathers where children’s needs and the hermetic confines of the home take center stage, as opposed to the traditional fatherhood ideals portrayed in western contemporary advertising, media, and popular culture. We demonstrate how the Swedish state’s gender ideology was encoded into a communicative event in the form of hero shots and subsequently dispersed by visual consumers as well as political and commercial stakeholders pushing this particular agenda and/or capitalizing on its tendencies. This in such a way that the event conquered new discursive territory fostering new types of consumer cultural negotiations on fatherhood ideals also in other cultural settings.     

Postmodern Paralysis: The Critical Impasse in Feminist Perspectives on Consumers

Critical perspectives on theory play an important and valued role in disciplines across the academy. Feminist perspectives might be expected to be at or near the forefront of critical engagement with consumer behaviour theory, especially given the importance of gender in consumer research. Following a brief upsurge during the 1990s, critical feminist voices have been muted of late. This paper explores some reasons for this. It begins with a brief overview of research on gender and consumer behaviour and how insights from feminist theories and feminist activism began to alter our understanding of gendered consumption. It then discusses how postmodern and postfeminist perspectives have diluted feminism as a critique of gendered consumption. Finally, it argues that a return to materialist feminism would open up possibilities for new and more critical analyses of gendered consumption.     

A conversational approach to consumer vulnerability: performativity,representations, and storytelling

ABSTRACT

This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, which unveils how vulnerability is made through conversations and interactions among actors holding different market power positions. Three types of conversations prove fruitful to pursue a transformative research agenda improving vulnerable consumers’ well-being: (1) performativity, which unpacks agency and finalism in conversations; (2) social representations, which reveal uneven power positions and normativity expressed by participants in a conversation; and (3) storytelling, which reveals alternative and more powerful persuasive mechanisms of conversations framed as stories. Illustration for these types of conversations comes from extensive review of the literature on consumer vulnerability and from a critical consideration of my life-as-researcher with consumers as varied as gays, homeless people, migrants, second-generation immigrants, and subcultures of consumption.     

Gendered market subjectivity: autonomy,privilege, and emotional subjectivity in normalizing post-socialist neoliberal ideology

ABSTRACT

Most prior studies of marketplace ideology foreground consumer agency as identity co-creation or opposition to ideology. In this research, I consider how the logics of the dwindling state and global neoliberalism discursively form consent in post-socialist Zagreb, Croatia. I use recollections and small group discussions to compare women’s class and generationally based experiences of the daily family meal and work, during Yugoslav exceptionalism and privatization. Changing social relations normalize the gendered subjectivity of neoliberalism in post-socialist Zagreb, characterized by autonomy, the privilege of the younger generation, and the emotional subjectivity of anxiety and loss. Linking consumer experiences to the changing role of the state and market ideologies contributes to scholarship on globalization, gender, the socio-historic patterning of consumption, and marketplace ideology, by demonstrating that changes in ideology and state disrupt and replicate privilege to create new, gendered market subjectivities and social inequalities, normalized through changing everyday social relations.     

The Future Perfect Declined: Utopian Studies and Consumer Research

This interpretive study introduces the field of utopian studies and explores its relevance in re-conceptualising certain aspects of consumer research. Making reference to a longitudinal study carried out in a festival marketplace, this paper illustrates how the concept of utopia can yield rich insights into the consumer imagination in such an environment. It shows that utopianism is not just associated with impossible imaginings but rather that it has a crucial critical function enabling us to engage with and question reality. In particular, this critique was manifested in three major themes that emerged from the findings: consumer perceptions of the over-commercialisation of high street shopping; their fears over a loss of identity; and a nostalgic yearning for a return to tradition. The paper concludes by relocating the utopian impulse in the practices of everyday life, discussing how consumers may inscribe meanings into a space, meanings that were neither intended nor predicted by marketing management.     

Taboo in consumption: Social structure,gender and sustainable menstrual products

Although consumption taboos are prevalent in everyday life, consumer research interest in the topic remains scant and focuses mostly on taboo products. This research moves by focusing on taboo persons and explores how barriers are presented in consumption choices for such individuals. A qualitative research design was used in the study and in‐depth interviews were conducted with 31 women from middle and upper income classes who showed an inclination to purchase sustainable menstrual products (SMPs). This study analyses how the intimate and private consumption of SMPs gets transformed into a complex socially embedded consumption choice. The study explores how and why a social structure steeped in symbolic violence towards menstruating women constrains the consumption of SMPs. Disillusioned by patriarchal subordination, the women preferred to respect boundaries and maintain stability in their life. Despite their socialization and engagement in several sustainable consumption decisions prior to the consideration of SMPs, these women exhibited a lack of agency as they could not transgress orthodox gender boundaries even as their choice reinforced prevailing social inequalities. They sought to conform to the gendered habitus instead of engaging in an act of defiance. This act of self‐restraint, however, results in tensions as the women try to legitimize a consumption choice which is inconsistent with their attitude towards sustainable consumption. The study discusses the consequences of the new restrictions faced by the women as they reframe concerns about the environment and justify their choice.     

The intersection of entrepreneurship and selling: An interdisciplinary review,framework, and future research agenda

Selling is integral to entrepreneurship, yet it has rarely been a focal topic of analysis for entrepreneurship scholars. To address this, we undertake a broad-ranging systematic literature review of research that in some way explores selling within entrepreneurial contexts. We inductively develop a framework that orders extant research into selling antecedents, activities, contexts, and outcomes. Then, drawing on these entrepreneurship-selling intersections, we suggest opportunity theory can be extended by integrating critical insights from selling literatures. In particular, we address ego-centric views of entrepreneurship which prioritize entrepreneurial agency, and advocate for the incorporation of customer agency into synchronized processes of opportunity identification, refinement, and exploitation. The article concludes that a promising avenue for future theory development resides in the study of situated sales interactions, which can serve as an empirical vista to the underexplored entrepreneur-customer nexus.     

Purchase power: An examination of consumption as voting

Abstract

There has been a reported increase in political activity through the marketplace in the form of ‘consumer votes’. The use of marketplace votes by consumers to address their concerns about societal issues is a phenomenon that has growing relevance for firms, since they are often affected by such consumer citizenship. Therefore, this paper aims to enhance our conceptual understanding of the consumer voting phenomenon. It explores marketplace power relations and the constraints and enabling mechanisms they may pose to consumers seeking change through consumer voting. Consumer voting practices, consumer sovereignty discourses, and power tensions in marketplace encounters are examined in relation to Foucault's notions of power, technologies of the self, and governmentality. Foucault provides a critical lens to illuminate the potential for consumer resistance, an approach that so far has been somewhat neglected by the extant marketing and consumer research literature.     

品牌性别如何影响品牌时尚——一个跨行业多品牌实证研究

可从品牌管理语境审视社会学、文化学领域关于时尚与性别关系的规范性价值判断,引入消费者性别和品牌类别两个调节变量,借鉴荣格原型梦验证方法,利用多行业、多类别品牌调查数据考查时尚品牌性别气质。结果发现,时尚在所有品牌特征变量中表现最为鲜明,具有原型特征和意义;品牌女性和中性气质对品牌时尚性的正向影响远高于品牌男性气质的影响,消费者生理性别对此无调节效应,消费者气质性别仅对品牌女性和男性气质有较弱调节效应,对品牌中性气质无调节效应,显示了品牌性别对品牌时尚作用模式的稳定性;品牌类别调节效应显著,与新品牌相比,老字号时尚性较弱,且受品牌女性和男性气质影响较大,品牌中性气质同样不受调节,因此老字号提升时尚感宜弱化其传统、严肃的男性历史印象,增加品牌女性和中性气质。性别气质的复杂性、生物进化的雌性选择理论可以解释这一商业现象的生物和社会学基础,即为何品牌女性和中性气质对品牌时尚性的影响高于品牌男性气质。这为品牌时尚管理提供了一个性别视角,即营造时尚不仅要在品牌图形、字体、发音、代言人等可见层面进行性别调整,更要全面发挥和协同女性智慧,而这不仅需要女性管理者更多参与,而且需要男性管理者借鉴吸收女性智慧和思维。     

Investigating gender differences in consumers’ experience of guilt: A comparative study

The literature of guilt in the context of consumer behavior is notably limited. It is particularly limited with respect to examining gender differences across nations. Existing studies have only evaluated gender differences, in terms of consumer guilt, in the United States. In addition, those studies evaluated gender differences in specific consumption situations such as consumer boycotting and food consumption. Thus, they do not give a comprehensive understanding of gender variations in consumer guilt. Notably, gender differences with regard to consumer guilt were shown to be limited in countries other than the United States. These studies provided contradictory results to established findings in social psychology. In view of this, by using quantitative techniques, numerous consumption settings, and samples from two distinct countries, this study provides a holistic assessment of gender differences in consumer guilt across nations. The findings indicate that gender differences, with respect to consumer guilt, are predominately present in individualistic countries and notably absent in collectivist countries. Hence, marketers should consider gender as an influential variable when devising guilt related strategies in individualistic countries. In contrast, marketers may reconsider allocating resources, with respect to gender related marketing strategies, in collectivist countries.     

Children as vulnerable consumers: a first conceptualisation

ABSTRACT

Understandings of consumer vulnerability remain contentious and despite recent developments, models remain unsuitable when applied to children. Taxonomic models, and those favouring a ‘state’- or ‘class’-based approach have been replaced by those attempting to tackle both individual and structural antecedents. However, these are still overly individualistic and fail to progress from an artificial view that these dimensions work separately and independently. In contrast, the new sociology of childhood conceptualises childhood as a hybridised, fluid combination of structure and agency. This paper introduces this approach, new to the consumer vulnerability field, and proposes that it has considerable implications for the way that children’s consumer vulnerability is theorised and researched, and for the formulation of policy.     

Gender identity and brand incongruence: when in doubt,pursue masculinity

Gender identity is the extent to which an individual identifies with masculine or feminine personality traits. Sex roles in Western societies continue to evolve, so this research examines the developing relationship between gender identity and consumer responses to gendered branding. Grounded in self-congruency theory [Sirgy, M. J. (1982). Self-concept in consumer behavior: A critical review. Journal of Consumer Research, 9, 287–300], the present research reports an experiment that supports a congruence relationship between gender identity and brand response. Masculine consumers prefer masculine brands. The results also show incongruent brand rejection where masculine consumers react negatively to feminine brands although feminine consumers are more accepting of masculine brands. Further, the results suggest that gender identity is a more effective dimension for customer segmentation than biological sex. Overall, the results suggest that masculine brands are more effective than other gendered brand profiles for masculine, feminine, and androgynous consumers.     

Fashion consumers and fashion problem recognition style

Consumer spending over the life span of today's 18‐ to 25‐year‐old emerging adults will reach into the $10 trillion range. Emerging adults are a powerful force in shaping demand for consumer products. The problem recognition styles associated with emerging adults can help marketers understand this group of consumers and provide insight into what kinds of products, services, and messages will appeal to them as lifelong consumers. The purpose of this study was to examine differences between men and women and among fashion consumer groups in fashion problem recognition style. Participants were a convenience sample of emerging adult consumers from one Midwestern university in the US, 136 men and 158 women who completed the Measure of Fashion Innovativeness and Opinion Leadership, Fashion Problem Recognition Style Scale, and provided demographic information. Both fashion followers and men reflected a need‐based approach to problem recognition. Both fashion change agents and women reflected a want‐based approach to problem recognition. Male fashion followers differed from all other groups in indicating a need‐based approach to problem recognition. This study built on previous work by examining differences in problem recognition style owing to fashion consumer group and gender. The basic premise behind problem recognition style was validated; that is, actual state (need‐based) vs. ideal state (want‐based) approaches to fashion problem recognition did relate to fashion consumer group membership and gender.     

To B2C or Not to B2C. Some Reflections on the Regulation of Unfair Commercial Practices from a Polish Perspective

The article addresses the issue of whether EU consumer law and national implementing laws require the distinction between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) relationships. The Polish experiences with the implementation of the Unfair Commercial Practice Directive supply this well-known discussion with new arguments. In Poland, the near copy–paste implementation of this directive was done in nearly timely fashion. The outcome, however, is far from being nearly unproblematic, as the new act is disconnected from the old system in a simplistic way. Subsequently, the institutional choice for enforcement creates both an inconsistency with EU law and enforcement deficiencies that undermine the directive's policy aimed at achieving a high level of consumer protection. Notwithstanding the imperfect Polish law-making and law enforcement, a success story may have been unlikely in any event. While in its inception it was announced as a consumer law instrument, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive operates in a field dominated by competitors. Therefore, the correct transposition of this peculiar directive into national law, as well as its application, was and still is a challenging task. It is questionable if it is feasible at all. Ultimately, the tangible incoherencies and the existing desynchronization of protection against unfair commercial practices, both at the EU and national level, raise fundamental questions not only about the necessity of separate B2C and B2B regulations but also about the interplay between the laws of the EU and the Member States, in particular the new Member States, and about the way they mutually affect and interfere with each other.     

Judith Butler on performativity and precarity: exploratory thoughts on gender and violence in India

Abstract

We turn to the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler for insight into how gender performativity (acting and actions restricted by gender norms) affects identity and thus individual agency. Gender performativity underlies the prevailing conceptualisation of women in India as being lesser. We anticipated that the extreme divide between wealth and poverty and higher and lower castes would affect women’s vulnerability. Yet, while lower class/caste women are undeniably at greater risk of sexual assault, even women of higher social status similarly embody ‘precarity’: a life lived without predictability, and thus without security. While structural changes have encouraged increased agentic performativity among women in India, a culture of condoned sexual violence is nonetheless an ongoing and horrifying reality.     

Entrepreneurial Leadership,Patriarchy, Gender,and Identity in the Arab World: Lebanon in Focus

In this paper, we apply insights from poststructuralist feminist theory to contribute to entrepreneurial leadership. By drawing on 21 individual narratives with Lebanese women entrepreneurs, we explore how they determine their status as entrepreneurial leaders and establish their entrepreneurial identities. Although the factors of gender, sociocultural values, and agency can be counteractive, it is agency that creates space for entrepreneurship for women and provides them a means to navigate structural inequalities. The entrepreneurs in this study engage in compliance, disregard, and defiance strategies to expand the boundaries of what is socially permissible for women and to strengthen their identities. This research contributes to studies on entrepreneurial leadership and aids in the development of theory by demonstrating how Arab women construct entrepreneurial leadership, agency, and identity at the juncture of patriarchy, sociocultural values, and gender ideologies.