How brand communities emerge: The Beamish conversion experience

Abstract

This paper explores the processes contributing to the genesis of a brand community. This ethnographic study focuses on the Beamish brand community. The Beamish beer product is a niche brand only available consistently in the locality of Cork city, Ireland. Evidence from this study shows that a collective conversion experience is foundational to the emergence of this brand community. Following this initial conversion experience, the brand community attempts to maintain the transcendent experience through practices of sacralisation maintenance. Sacralisation is maintained through the playful rituals and virtual play the community members enact. The mutual willingness of the converted to participate in these various forms of playful rituals has been a key role in the reification of the Beamish brand community. Finally, suggestions are made as to how brand management should best approach the initial attempts at brand-community formation.     

Advertising effectiveness from a consumer perspective

Communication effectiveness research is moving away from investigations of advertising’s forms, content and the degree and type of consumer involvement, to a greater focus on the process of reception and the social and cultural roles that advertising plays in society and in individual lives. This shift in emphasis has been influenced by communication and media studies, which have prioritised the psychological, social and cultural contexts within which consumers relate to commercial information and the roles that advertising media play in their lives. The focus on the ‘receiver’ as the key actor in the advertising communication process has also coincided with increasing interest in consumer culture theory, brand communities and the new service dominant logic of marketing. This paper provides a useful perspective from which to view contemporary developments in advertising effectiveness research, and has important implications for future studies.     

Free in the mountains or home in the vineyard: Institutional changes in agriculture and negotiating between contract farm labour and valuable fungi collection in Tibet

This paper evaluates how Tibetan farming communities choose between two methods of livelihood production: working as labourers on vineyard land they have leased to a French winery or collecting valuable fungi. I argue new transnational land and labour management, as part of institutional rearrangements in land tenure, are leading to significant changes with mixed benefits for rural farming communities. These communities respond by seasonally seeking freedom from capitalist labour and returning to communal forms of income production based around community land tenure and common‐pool resources. Although villagers have become contracted labour, they choose to escape this new agricultural work in the mountains, collecting fungi together as a community. The common‐pool land on which fungi are collected is also managed for access in a specific way by and for the community. Contrary to agricultural labour for the winery, fungi collection creates a chance for people to interact once again more as a cohesive community as they once did in their fields by collecting a commodity from land controlled by the community. The disembedding of one section of the economy has thus in a way reinforced the embeddedness of social relations in another as a coping mechanism for the former.     

And no birds sing—reviving the romance with international entrepreneurship

This article contributes to the emerging debate over the nature and future directions of international entrepreneurship (IE). Our study extends the research of Jones et al. (2011) through a ‘review of the reviews’ of IE studies as well as a census of the articles published in the Journal of International Entrepreneurship (JIEn) between its inception in 2003 and the beginning of 2012. The results suggest relatively few studies focus on the nexus of international business and entrepreneurship (e.g. by investigating how innovative and entrepreneurial firms can internationalise rapidly). Although definitions of IE and INVs have become more ‘entrepreneurial’ over time, there has been a limited critique of the INV definitions of Oviatt and McDougall. We propose an updated definition of IE research that includes three elements that have been under-researched but which could help revive IE as a fruitful area of study: (1) clarification of the links between innovation, entrepreneurship and internationalisation, (2) greater emphasis on the nexus of international entrepreneurship and (3) a better understanding of the dynamic aspects of international new venture development, including networking, organizational life cycles and business model development.     

Individual homelessness: Entries,exits, and policy

Homelessness is part of the lives of many people. But almost no one is homeless for all or most of his or her life. The median shelter homeless spell is well under a month, and even “chronic homelessness” officially entails spells of a year or so. I model homelessness as part of people’s lives in a dynamic stochastic framework in continuous time. I can explain many empirical regularities with a parsimonious model: for instance, why the last addresses of homeless people are concentrated in a few low-rent neighborhoods, why homeless entries are hard to predict, why recidivism is common and past homelessness is a good predictor of future homelessness, why some groups recidivate more often than others, why the hazard rate for shelter exit is single-peaked, why effective homelessness prevention programs do not alter the average length of homeless spells. I also examine policy. The optimal homelessness prevention program is Pigouvian and starkly simple. With an optimal prevention program in place, optimal shelter quality maximizes a simple and intuitive expression, and insurance programs always raise social welfare. Most of the previous economics literature about homelessness has been static, but most literature about homelessness outside economics has been dynamic. This paper tries to bring the two strands of literature closer together.     

Asset allocation when guarding against catastrophic losses: a comparison between the structure variable and joint probability methods

We apply a bivariate approach to the asset allocation problem for investors seeking to minimize the probability of large losses. It involves modelling the tails of joint distributions using techniques motivated by extreme value theory. We compare results with a corresponding univariate approach using simulated and financial data. Through an examination of a simulated and real financial data set we show that the estimated risks using the bivariate and univariate approaches are in close agreement for a wide range of losses and allocations. This is important since the bivariate approach is significantly more computationally expensive. We therefore suggest that the univariate approach be used for the typical level of loss that an investor may want to guard against. This univariate approach is effective even if there are more than two assets. The software written in support of this work is available on demand and we describe its use in the appendix.     

Do Homeless Shelter Conditions Determine Shelter Population? The Case of the Dinkins Deluge

We study why families enter and leave homeless shelters. After 2 years of decline, the number of homeless families in New York City's shelter system began rising again in summer 1990 and continued to rise until it hit an all-time record high in summer 1993. The conventional wisdom is that a flood of new families were attracted into shelters by the Dinkins administration's aggressive policy of placing homeless families into subsidized housing. We test the conventional wisdom and reject it. Better prospects of subsidized housing increase flows into the shelter system, but this effect is not nearly large enough to offset the first order shelter effect—taking families out of the shelters reduces the number of families in them. Why did the shelter population grow after Spring 1990? A major part of the reason is that the city responded to conventional wisdom and slowed placement into subsidized housing. Other major factors were the 1990–92 recession, falling real welfare benefits and more NYCHA applications, and greater use of more attractive Tier II shelters instead of hotels.     

Thriving on Turbulence

Although there is widespread evidence of links between market orientation and company performance, there is debate over whether the market environment moderates the market orientation-performance relationship. Until now empirical evidence has been limited to the USA, UK and Ghana. This study is based on a large multi-industry sample of firms from New Zealand, a more turbulent country-economy. The results show that although environment can have a direct (and often negative) effect on performance, it can also have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between market orientation and performance. This suggests that more market-oriented firms may actually thrive in more turbulent environments.