Search results

This study is a radical interactionist analysis of family conflict. Drawing on both a negotiated order perspective and Athen's theory of complex dominative encounters, this study analyzes the role that domination plays in conflicts among intimates. As the family engages in repeated conflicts over roles, the family also engages in negotiations over the family order, what role each party should play, interpretations of past events, and plans for the future. These conflicts take place against a backdrop of patriarchy that asymmetrically distributes power in the family to determine the family order. The data from this study come from a content analysis of mothers with substance use problems as depicted in the reality television show Intervention. The conflicts in these families reveal that these families develop a grinding family order in which families engaged in repeated conflict but also continued to operate as and identify as a family. These conflicts are shaped by and reinforce patriarchal expectations that mothers are central to family operation. The intervention at the end of each episode offered an opportunity for the family to engage in a concerted campaign to try to force the mother into treatment and reestablish the family order.

Knowledge of how social movements move, diffuse, and expand collective action events is central to movement scholarship and activist practice. Our purpose is to extend sociological knowledge about how movements (sometimes) diffuse and amplify insurgent actions, that is, how movements move. We extend movement diffusion theory by drawing a conceptual analogue with military theory and practice applied to the case of the organized and highly disciplined nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We emphasize emplacement in a base-mission extension model whereby a movement base is built in a community establishing a social movement school for inculcating discipline and performative training in cadre who engage in insurgent operations extended from that base to outlying events and campaigns. Our data are drawn from secondary sources and semi-structured interviews conducted with participants of the Nashville civil rights movement. The analytic strategy employs a variant of the “extended case method,” where extension is constituted by movement agents following paths from base to outlying campaigns or events. Evidence shows that the Nashville movement established an exemplary local movement base that led to important changes in that city but also spawned traveling movement cadre who moved movement actions in an extensive series of pathways linking the Nashville base to events and campaigns across the southern theater of the civil rights movement. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications.

The purpose of this study is to understand the nature of children’s consumer competence and the role that parents play in its development.

A total of 15 parent/children dyads provided a novel and participatory approach. Children were accompanied to their local supermarket to conduct a grocery shop for their families and asked to explain the reasons for each consumption choice. Parents were interviewed separately to discuss their role in the development of their children’s consumer competence. Both sets of responses were analysed thematically to identify commonalities.

The research identified four themes comprising children’s consumer competence: decision-making; advertising, brands and promotion; financial awareness and shopping knowledge. The themes are the result of an intentional process of parental socialization that enable children to move from simple to complex and contingent shopping scripts as an essential stage in the development of their consumer competence.

Although the study comprised a mixed sample of participants, its small size prevents extrapolation of the results to inform wider conclusions. It should also be noted that the influence of social desirability bias needs to be acknowledged.

Results show that children are highly aware of the competing demands of individual and family needs and able to make the consumption decisions necessary to meet them. These decisions are underpinned by parental values and attitudes that are explicit in the socialization of their children’s consumption. The authors define children’s consumption competence as the ability to make informed, independent, contingent, complex and values-based consumption decisions.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

This paper aims to understand how fashion-based social enterprises (FSEs) navigate the marketing communications of fashion products alongside those of their social mission. The authors use the theoretical lens of Consumer culture theory, Collin Campbell’s “Romantic ethic” and the work of Eva Illouz to explore how FSEs weave the emotional appeals of fashion consumption with those of contributing to a greater social cause. The melding of these theoretical approaches to consumer behaviour enables a thorough analysis of FSE marketing strategies.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 founders, marketing directors and managers of FSEs. Open-ended questions were used, and key themes were established through inductive analysis.

The findings show that FSEs use a form of brand storytelling in their marketing communications; they view their social mission as a unique selling point; FSEs could further incorporate product quality/aesthetic value into brand storytelling; and they could sharpen brand storytelling by further engaging with the positive emotional responses they elicit from consumers.

This research has both theoretical and practical implications in that FSEs that focus on explicit altruistic messaging at the expense of aesthetic hedonism may limit their appeal to mainstream fashion consumers. Accordingly, a promising approach may be to effectively incorporate and link the positive emotional responses of both altruistic and aesthetic value. This approach could similarly apply to other areas of social enterprise retail marketing, particularly for those seeking to attract consumers beyond ethical shoppers.

This study draws parallels between the Major and Johnson eras to reclaim a discursive space beyond the media and political battlefields to examine long-term systemic failure of government PR.

As part of a wider study into government communications from 1979 to date, this paper draws on evidence from government archives from the 1990s, as well as contemporary accounts, official documents, media accounts, memoirs and biographies, to examine the PR record of two Conservative administrations divided by three decades.

News management during the Major premiership is worth serious scrutiny, not just as an interlude between two media-friendly Prime Ministers, Thatcher and Blair, but in comparison to Boris Johnson's struggle to contain the news narrative between 2019 and 2022. Both administrations experienced terminal reputational crises during their closing years but their means of managing the news were counter-productive and damaging to public trust (65).

Does this failure in public communication illustrate a systemic dysfunction in government-media relations and, if so, what is the role of government PR in these circumstances?

This article uses a comparison between fixed and moving variables associated with two very different administrations to identify the causes of ongoing systemic failure in government communication.

Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

Synthetic advertising, which involves creating or modifying ads through artificial intelligence (AI) technology, has recently transformed the field of media and advertising. Despite its emerging importance, our understanding of consumer perceptions in this context is limited. This study is one of the first to explore the impact of synthetic advertising on consumer behavior.

Across two between-subject experimental studies, using coffee shop customers in the USA, we tested how, why and when awareness of falsity in AI-generated corporate social responsibility (CSR) ads affects online brand engagement.

In Study 1, awareness of falsity in AI-generated CSR ads negatively impacts online brand engagement, with perceived sincerity mediating this relationship. Additionally, a higher level of CSR authenticity mitigates the negative effect of awareness of falsity on online brand engagement. CSR authenticity does not moderate the mediation effect of perceived sincerity in the relationship between awareness of falsity and online brand engagement. In Study 2, the relationship between awareness of falsity and online brand engagement is moderated by brand familiarity. Importantly, perceived sincerity only mediates this effect for unfamiliar brands, not familiar ones.

This study provides key insights for managers using AI to promote CSR initiatives. While AI can save time and budget, it may lead to negative consumer reactions due to perceptions of insincerity. To mitigate this, companies should focus on enhancing the authenticity of their CSR efforts and humanizing AI-generated ads. Additionally, established brands should be cautious of reduced consumer engagement with AI-generated content, while unfamiliar brands can benefit by emphasizing sincerity in their messaging.

This paper is one of the first studies that discuss how, why and when awareness of falsity in AI-generated corporate social responsibility ads affects online brand engagement.