Policy‐related implementational fluidity in subsistence marketplaces

This paper sheds light on policy‐related implementational fluidity—a context‐dependent adaptation of policies—adopted by policy implementers to address heterogeneous needs of subsistence consumer‐merchants (SCMs). In subsistence research, despite the emphasis on bottom‐up policymaking, implementational fluidity persists because of institutional and sociocultural factors that hinder policy implementers’ from effectively and accurately implementing the policies. To enrich the current bottom‐up policy process, this paper shares insights from an ethnographic study of Fijian market traders and marketplace personnel (policy implementers) and shares insights on how implementational fluidity manifests in subsistence marketplaces. Analysis reveals the interplay amongst sociohistorical context, marketplace relational dynamics and policies leading to policy adjustments and re‐negotiation by marketplace personnel and perceived injustices amongst the SCMs. The paper provides policy recommendations and practice ideas for subsistence researchers and policy practitioners to examine policy implementation gaps and the role of policy implementers in subsistence marketplaces.     

The iconicity of celebrity and the spiritual impulse

Celebrity has a powerful material presence in contemporary consumer culture but its surface aesthetic resonates with the promise of deeper meanings. This Marketplace Icon contribution speculates on the iconicity of celebrity from a spiritual perspective. The social value or authenticity of contemporary celebrity, and the social processes through which it emerges, are matters of debate amongst researchers and competing approaches include field theory, functionalism, and anthropologically inflected accounts of the latent need for ritual, myth and spiritual fulfillment evinced by celebrity “worship.” We focus on the latter area as a partial explanation of the phenomenon whereby so many consumers seem so enchanted by images of, and stories about, individuals with whom they, or we, often have little in common. We speculate that the powerful presence of celebrity in Western consumer culture to some extent reflects and exploits a latent need for myths of redemption through the iconic character of many, though by no means all, manifestations of celebrity consumption.     

All consuming surveillance: surveillance as marketplace icon

With consumers and their activities routinely visible through online, mobile and social media, to both their peers and to corporations, this article examines surveillance as a marketplace icon. Surveillance is central to the construction of consumers and markets. Many contemporary marketing practices are surveillant as they rely on the collection, analysis and application of consumer data to place advertising, define market segments and to nudge consumer behaviours. Consumer surveillance is also an enactment of corporate power, attempting to align individual preferences with corporate goals. The historical origins of surveillance and the emergence of the surveillance–industrial–entertainment complex are explored, which highlights how surveillance, as well as a process for defining markets is also an object of consumption. The future sees a huge struggle for consumer data between two great centres of surveillance power – the state and the corporation – as they battle over data use for national security.     

Joint oligopsony-oligopoly in the U.S. leaf tobacco market, 1924–39

The leaf tobacco marketplace is highly organized. Prior to 1940, the few large tobacco companies controlled that organization explicitly. The question is whether this organization set oligopsonistic leaf prices or minimized production and transaction costs. A model of joint oligopsonyoligopoly shows that pricing of cigarettes and leaf tobacco was unified: oligopolistic cigarette pricing was sufficient to curtail both cigarette production and leaf purchases. The companies could just bid in the market for the leaf necessary for that cigarette production rate.Prima facie, the organization was not for oligopsony coordination. The implied econometric model of pricing fits observed behavior well.Malcolm Boyd, Dennis Carlton, John Garen, Stephen Karlson, Li Way Lee, An-loh Lin, Robert Miller, Stephen Spurr and the referee have given me thoughtful, perceptive and useful comments. I am pleased to acknowledge their involvement without implicating them in whatever errors remain.     

The impact of market freedom on the adoption of third-party electronic marketplaces: A fuzzy AHP analysis

Electronic-marketplace (EM) is an innovative model for interfirm transactions that are undertaken via the Internet. However, in view of higher investment costs and other associated risks, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), instead of establishing their own EMs, turn to adopt third-party-hosted EMs. In literature, most relevant studies to the adoption of the third-party-hosted EM were conducted on the research contexts of free market. Industries under the protection of government policies may have limited degree of market freedom, different from industries without these protection policies. Thus, this study intends to compare the decision choice of EM adoption between industries with various degree of market freedom. The decision choice of EM adoption consisted of many strategic factors that were constructed in terms of a three-layer hierarchical structure proposed in this paper. A fuzzy analytic hierarchical process (Fuzzy AHP) was utilized to estimate the relative importance of these individual strategic factors involved in the decision-making process of adopting third-party EMs. The research findings indicated there were some similarities and differences in the decision choice between the two industries of interest. The variety of market freedom can account for the differences in the decision choice of EM adoption. In addition to enhancing our understanding of the EM adoption decision of participative companies, the research findings also provide insightful information to third-party EM providers so that they may improve the effectiveness and efficiency of resource allocation.     

上市公司各利益群体的nash均衡与重构

多年来,我国股市乱象丛生,这与我国股市有效性差和利益关系失衡有很大关系,也是监管不到位和群体利益协调措施不当产生的后果。为了建立公平有效的资本市场,使投资者、上市公司等各利益群体回归理性,诚实守信,实现多方共赢,共同维护健康均衡的资本市场是当务之急。     

Copyright: a systemic marketplace icon

This article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon because of the breadth of its effects on market operations. Copyright determines how intellectual property rights for creative work are allocated between the different actors involved in production and consumption, and must balance the civic priority of public access to creative work with the market-driven principle of rewarding private interests for their effort. This duality tends to polarise opinion about its implementation by rights holders, because very different ideological assumptions underpin civic and market objectives. Copyright discourses reveal how these ideological struggles play out among interested parties, who use the concept of copyright to make arguments about how markets should be structured, how creative work should be exchanged, and how consumers should behave. In the process, copyright is constructed, explained, branded and promoted as an object to which market actors must orient themselves if they wish to conduct themselves appropriately, and as a rationale for material changes to market structures. At the same time, copyright discourses reveal the implications of copyright, which invoke both the market and democracy, for the quality of democracy, the circulation of creativity, and the availability of public knowledge, and help explain why ideological struggles over copyright are so difficult to resolve.     

Royalty: marketplace icons

The term “royalty” connotes people who either occupy the role of monarchs in society, or who are related to these figures by blood or marriage. Although many royal houses around the world occupy a symbolic/ceremonial rather than a political role, royalty and the “human brands” royal families contain remain important sources of aspirational and conspicuous consumption. In this essay, we focus on how the British Royal Family Brand (BRFB; Otnes, Cele C. and Pauline Maclaran. 2015. Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.) has remained the most visible and impactful royal variant in the world, even as its economic and political influence, and that of Britain, has waned. We discuss the influence of the BRFB in fueling consumption practices pertaining to commemorative purchasing and collecting, heritage management, perpetuating mass and social media narratives, supporting and perpetuating brands, and spawning and maintaining touristic trends. We observe that successful royal influence is due in part to the ability to leverage key universal narratives (e.g. the triumph of the underdog) and to tap into consumers’ desires to vicariously or actively engage with lifestyles typically accessible only to people who occupy the highest social stratum in their respective cultures. We discuss the implications of royalty on consumer culture, and suggest areas of future research.     

Money: communicative functions of payment and price

ABSTRACT

Money is rich in semiotic potential and its capacity to express social identity and collectivity is well established. This essay explores a range of communicative functions of money, focusing in particular on the ways in which payments and prices may serve as cultural signals. It asks how the communicative significance of money might change as a result of the introduction of new types of currency, payment systems and pricing techniques, and suggests that such developments are likely to involve revisiting two key tensions: between state or corporate power on the one hand, and individual autonomy and privacy on the other; and between money’s power to generate collectivity and its power to divide and exclude.     

Kynecting the Dots: How Kentucky’s Willingness to Loosen the Reins Sparked a Health Insurance Enrollment Race in the Bluegrass State

The development of health insurance exchanges within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation is one of the hottest health policy issues of this decade. With the surprise enrollment success of Kentucky’s exchange called “Kynect,” the influence of how marketing and branding have contributed to the embrace of the policy has garnered interest from scholars and practitioners alike. Driven by the utilization of in-depth interviews, this study found that Kynect’s success was aided by three emergent themes: frequent communication between the outsourced marketing firm, Doe-Anderson, and relevant stakeholders; the willingness to delegate all marketing and branding control to Doe-Anderson; and a multiparty commitment to developing and executing a campaign that would simultaneously adhere to public values and accentuate a feeling of localness to constituents across the state. The paper contributes to existing literature by providing an inside look at how a government can find marketing success against historical odds.